When Lladro Attacks

Thank god for the British obsession with class and socioeconomic status, because it's the one thing that keeps John Fowles' The Collector from being scarier than you really want it to be.

I mean — and it could just be me — but it can be a teensy-weensy bit difficult to gear yourself up to read a story about a butterfly-collecting pervo-weirdo named Frederick who kidnaps a young art student, Miranda, and imprisons her in his basement. Truth be told, I tend to prefer stories where precocious young girls get raped by men dressed as birds. But the premise of The Collector is a little creepy.

Thankfully, there's a handy indictment of middle class British values ca. the early 1960s that makes it easier to see this bitch get chloroformed. And by "bitch getting chloroformed" I mean "chloroformed bitch" in the sense that the character of Miranda functions as an allegorical stand-in for middle class artistic aspiration and generalized professional-managerial banality. (See, I, unlike some people, can differentiate between an actual human and a mere allegorical one; when allegories are outlawed, only outlaws will use allegories.) That's at least part of what made the story easier to stomach — over and over Fowles' characters dance around the topic of class and who has it and who can't buy it, even after winning the lottery, as Frederick the Collector does.

There's some Big Idea about art in Collector that also makes it easy to stomach the creepiness — Frederick collects butterflies and likes photography, pursuits Miranda believes suck the life out of their subjects (with entomology, literally sucking the life out of the subject) — unlike painting or whatever she does. So there's some kind of thing going on there with that. What all this stuff — the class stuff and the art stuff — really succeeds at is undercutting the aspects of the book that the back cover trumpets: Its utility as a "psychological thriller," a "horror story" or a "haunting" book.

That said, however, Fowles is really good at keeping a reader a little bit off balance and queasy. In my experience, kidnappings — especially ones involving crazy people — generally go badly. And until the story's end, you keep hoping that these generally sensible people can pull back from the brink and reintegrate themselves in polite society — which itself is kind of a ridiculous, funny premise — like you want these nice, upstanding, good British people to pull away from craven, hideous sin and return to a world of clotted cream and baps, or some other really cute sounding word for foodstuffs.

There's a moment that captures this idea perfectly — I can't find it quickly enough — where Miranda tries reasoning with her captor that everything could be cool, that everyone can pack up and go home, everything could return to normal and no one would be the wiser if he just let her go then. It's funny and very British sounding and yet when you're reading it, you really, really want Frederick to take her up on the offer and let her go. That part is done really well.

I am getting ready to spoil an ending, at least as far as the suspenseful part of this book is concerned, so be warned . . . anyway, another part I liked about The Collector is how snooty Miranda is written, and how at the end there's a snide little coda where Frederick discovers his next "guest," and she is just a shopgirl — which is to say, in my mind, that Frederick never appreciated Miranda's great talent and culture, perhaps because it was only there in Miranda's mind; we assume she's a real "la-di-la" lady (as Frederick sneered at one point) but we only think so because she tells us so in her journal entries. It's smart that way.

Spencer, who chose The Collector, says that he read it for ninth grade English class. I think I read Nectar in a Sieve in ninth grade English class. Which is to say, Who teaches this book in ninth grade? (Well, here's a plug for teaching it in high school).

Other than that, George Paston was the actual pen name of an actual writer but I have no idea what it all means.

Also — I suppose I should add that this next part deserves a spoiler alert — Jen was wondering if you could really die after a month of no light. I had no idea, but I definitely worried for Miranda while she was stuck in the basement. I Googled it and it seemed like a remote possibility. It's not good, that's for sure, allegory or no.

Respectfully, I Say To Thee, I Enjoyed What I Was Reading

Now I don't particularly get into memoirs and I'd really have to rack my mind to remember how many I've ever read, period (OK, fine, I exaggerate: the Mötley Crüe multi-memoir The Dirt is one of the most entertaining things I've ever read), but Nile Rodgers' Le Freak: An Upside Down Story of Family, Disco, and Destiny was pretty good, and in retrospect, there are good reasons why it was good.

One of the main reasons is that Rodgers is perhaps the most famous person you wouldn't recognize. I feel like I'm a fairly literate music fan and you'd still have to cue me about who he is. But if you've ever been to a school dance, wedding or bar or bat mitzvah you totally know his work; the most powerful man in America is able to get not only you and your spouse or squeeze on the dance floor but also three generations of uncles and aunts knocking into you while you're out there.

Who wrote "We Are Family"? This guy. Who wrote that weird song that goes "Awwwwwww Freak Out"? This guy. Who did like all these disco songs you have fully internalized without knowing how? Yup. Whose "Good Times" is like the ur sample for all of hip-hop? Same guy. Then there's like every single gigantic album he produced. David Bowie's Let's Dance, Madonna's Like a Virgin, that boffo-gigantic Diana Ross album that you totally, unaccountably know by heart.

All that and to you he's just a name in block letters underneath the song listing on the tail of a cassette tape J-card. It's kind of crazy. Which is also to say, while the memoir genre is thoroughly ate up, there are some memoirs like this that you're curious to read.

The other great thing about Le Freak is that while Rodgers may be a big enough figure to merit a ghost writer, he doesn't use one, and the effect is awesome — it's polished writing, but not too polished, and there are enough weird parts, rookie flourishes, borderline grammatical mistakes and outright typos to make it feel real. A girlfriend mentioned in the text is revealed as an interpreter in a photo caption in the glossy-paged middle insert. An entire part of the book is titled "Roam If You Want To" after the B-52s song he worked on, yet the B-52s are only mentioned twice in the book, both times in a long list of other artists. I love it. [Taking a moment to Google "ghostwritten autobiographies" . . .] It seems like it's the exception when someone actually writes something him- or herself. That seems sad. Fucking Kennedy.

The other other great thing about Le Freak is that — and I don't know if he's like this in real life, but he definitely comes off this way in his autobiography — Rodgers seems pretty humble about his success. And remember, this isn't success like he opened a successful pizza chainlet success but rather success like he guided pop music for thirty years or so there.

Maybe part of that humble effect is the role of the producer — i.e., subordinate to the performers themselves rather than out in front. There are a few moments in Le Freak where Rodgers admits he felt slighted — when David Bowie found it difficult to mention his contributions in interviews, or when he focused less on Let's Dance and more on his older recordings. It grounds Rodgers (for the reader) and makes him seem sympathetic.

Of course, if you remember Let's Dance — and that was a big album when I was a single-digit-aged youth, so it sticks out in my mind — you might think that it's kind of lesser Bowie. Or at least the preppy-era Bowie was less compelling than Ziggy Stardust. I'm not a Bowie fan (and I definitely wouldn't name my fucking kid after him, that's for sure), but "Suffragette City" compared to "China Girl"? It's no contest. On the one hand you have "Wham bam thank you ma'am!" On the other you have "Just you shut your mouse." Right?

And the Duran Duran remixes — I mean I could take or leave those. "Reflex" is so much lesser than "Hungry Like the Wolf." But take his career as a whole and you soon realize that anyone who makes you dance with your great aunt at a bar mitzvah — year after year after year — will forever and always have scoreboard, case closed.

The other humbling experience in Rodgers' life and career was being at the top of the charts as a disco band, only to see people turn on disco so quickly and thoroughly that for a time there at least the idea of a second act probably seemed absurd. He writes, and I buy it, that there was something disturbing about how mainstream America acted so viciously toward this music played and enjoyed by minorities, gays and associated outsiders. It's a perspective I hadn't appreciated, mostly because I think disco does suck, except that disco is 500 times more organic sounding and catchy and structurally sound than the soulless dance music that came later. As for that second act, he had a pretty good second act, didn't he?

There's a little bit of a Shakespeare in Love feel to the book — which, come to think of it, is of a piece with the book's self-effacing tone — where Rodgers lifts veils and tells stories about the genesis of certain songs. The kernel for that Diana Ross multi-gazillion hit song "Upside Down," for example, was a comment she made to Rodgers and his writing partner when they sat down with her to meet for the first time — like, "What's been going on?" "Well, I just moved to the east coast and things are upside down for me."

Now I don't know how you go from that innocent comment to the coke-blubber-blabber staccato of "Respectfully, I say to thee, I'm aware that you're cheating but no one makes me feel like you do," but I suppose that's the magic of songwriting. Speaking of which, that line always made me laugh — at some point in America cheating went from being a nuisance to a dealbreaker, and apparently that happened sometime after Diana Ross' "Upside Down" was released (1980). Were that line written today, I think it might have to be updated to something along the lines of, "Respectfully, I say to thee, you smell like a hobo, but no one makes me feel like you do"; women have higher standards for guys who are able to deliver much less than they used to; bathing semi-regularly is at least a start.

The song "Le Freak" — you know it, it goes something along the lines of, "AWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW, FREAK OUT!!" — has a good story, too. The original lyric, written after getting turned away when trying to see Grace Jones play at Studio 54, was "Awwww, fuck off — fuck Studio 54 — fuck off." Thirty years later, we have Cee Lo.

I always say that I know I shouldn't read something thinking it could be a movie, but this could be a great period piece; Rodgers the character has seen most of rock and roll music history firsthand; I suppose the music rights would be prohibitive though. I read later that he wants to do a musical version. Maybe, but a movie would be better.

Another impressive thing, I should add, is the amount of cocaine that once existed in the world. According to the book, Rodgers used it until 1994 (!), when the Sugarhill Gang finally caught up to him and he found himself with nary a machete in sight with which to defend himself. It makes it difficult to look at the pictures in the inserted section without assuming that everyone has been up for hours snorting coke. There's also a confusing caption in a picture featuring Jaye Davidson.

But ultimately, I think the very best thing about Le Freak is the bombshell it drops in the waning paragraphs of the epilogue. Talk about "burying ledes" — things are humming along great and you feel pretty good about the world until Rodgers reveals he has cancer, and not just any cancer but an unnamed aggressive form of cancer (which I later Googled was prostate cancer and apparently he's now cancer free). A lesser writer would have started with this tidbit, or foreshadowed it, or something grotesque and impertinent. Not Rodgers, which is, again, part of what makes Le Freak so refreshing to read.

Sometimes Being Overweight Can Also Lead To Knee Problems

The other day I either meant to say and forgot or hadn't yet mulled over the idea that the "big idea" in Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl is that modern lives (or recently modern, or at least in the last ten years) are so mediated that — do I need a spoiler alert here? I'll try not to have to — the, uh, main character makes the surprising and somewhat unbelievable decision that the, uh, trying not to use a pronoun, main character decides that this person can't live without the other person.

If you look at the characters that inhabit Gone you realize that they all interact in the story through the mediated world — from the groupie using the cable show to get 15 minutes of fame to the former magazine writer protagonist to the side characters who are on Facebook. Flynn makes a point of circling back to these details and in the end (and this is a spoiler), it only makes sense that the logical end of the story is to create a reality television show. There's some stuff in the end about spinning and controlling narratives that makes sense in retrospect this way.

As a sort of aside, it's funny that even in the definition of "cipher" they use the sentence "She was nothing more than a cipher" — I think that's the only way I've ever heard the word used! Specifically, the "nothing more than a" construction . . .

Something I really did forget to mention was that it was a smart move on Flynn's part to make the characters writers. This is something Meg Wolitzer does really well (in my opinion) in The Wife: A Novel. As an aside, I wonder if the colonic appendage of "A Novel" in titles is ever done sincerely or if it's always supposed to sound ironically pretentious and ridiculous. Anyway, (and this is also a spoiler — a real one this time) by making her first-person protagonist a writer, Wolitzer lets herself indulge in fun perceptive writing; Flynn does the same — it's a great strategy because writers seem to default to "writing really perceptive fun prose" and so often it sounds fucking asinine to have, say, a nine-year-old protagonist spout wonderfully perceptive ideas about the world. Maybe it's a personal failing of mine, but I find it absurd, reprehensible, vile and several other outsized, inappropriate terms when characters are, uh, ciphers for a pretentious writer's "wonderfully big ideas." Might as well go with your strengths and just make your characters writers. Call spades spades and whatnot.

Also, one more thing I forgot — and this came to me while washing dishes and I just spaced — was that I really wanted to title the original post "If You Seek Amy." If I wrote headlines in the Book Review section, this is what I would have chosen.