Läckberg/Cockburn/TheFollowing

Today I read the next 100 pages of Camilla Läckberg’s The Ice Princess. Läckberg’s decision to make her protagonist, Erica Falck, not only a writer, but a writer of biographies of Swedish women writers, accomplishes several things at once. First, when Erica decides to write a novel based on the life of Alex, her murdered childhood friend, the decision makes sense given both her interest and experience in the psychological biographies of women and her desire to try a different, more ‘creative,’ kind of writing. Erica feels some concern about using Alex’s tragedy as raw material for her work, but Läckberg does not explore this theme in any detail. Similarly, although a writer protagonist in a crime novel who is writing a narrative inspired by a crime could have been the basis for an interestingly self-reflective meditation on what it means to narrativize violence, Läckberg is not really interested in pursuing this theme, either. Instead, I think the common denominator between the two types of writing that Erica does, and one of Läckberg’s main subjects in this book, is what it means to be Swedish. The types of (international) political intrigues that dominate the work of Mankell and Larsson are notably absent from this book and I would say that this fact brings Läckberg closer to Sjöwall and Wahlöö, but Läckberg is not really interested in anatomizing the whole of Swedish society from top to bottom. Instead, she concentrates on the lives of women and men in a small Swedish town and finds more than enough in this seemingly limited canvas to engage her.

I also read the first fifty pages of Alexander Cockburn’s final book, A Colossal Wreck: A Road Trip Through Political Scandal, Corruption, and American Culture, published in 2013, and which he completed just before his death in 2012. It’s an untidy book in many ways, being a compendium of both previously published and unpublished material in the form of journal entries, all of which convey Cockburn’s thoughts about American culture from the years 1995 to 2012. But the untidiness is not a problem, for two reasons. First, what seems like untidiness is really a reflection both of Cockburn’s restless intelligence and his interest in a vast array of types of American culture, including everything from the trashiest to the most recondite. Second, the untidiness of the book is held together by the very strong sense the reader gets of Cockburn’s voice, which is simultaneously irreverent, impatient, angry, cynical, and often very funny. What comes across most strongly in the first section of the book, which deals with the mid-1990s, is Cockburn’s prescience. The Clintons did not fool him for a minute and he recognized immediately, for example, how eager Bill Clinton was to deregulate the financial industry. And his remarks on Hilary Clinton, who he portrays as a successor to the social-worker liberalism embodied by Beatrice Webb, contain much food for thought. What shame he’s no longer around to offer his thoughts about Clinton’s presidential run. I imagine that he would be withering. http://www.versobooks.com/books/1468-a-colossal-wreck

At the moment when Joe Carroll escapes from prison for the second time and joins his followers (who we now learn number in the dozens, most of whom have been recruited by ‘Roderick,’ Carroll’s right-hand man and principle disciple), two things become clear. First, the show has given up any pretense of plausibility whatsoever. Second, a huge gap has opened up between the resources at Carroll’s disposal and what he plans to do with those resources. On the plausibility issue, I’m aware of the fact that well-written police procedurals may have ruined the television crime drama genre for me forever. I no longer find it as easy as I once did to suspend the amount of disbelief necessary for me to enjoy, or even tolerate, a show like ‘The Following.’ Be that as it may, the bigger problem is the fact that Joe Carroll has amassed a large cult following possessed of seemingly limitless material and human resources for a single purpose: to punish Ryan Hardy and Carroll’s ex-wife Claire for having an affair. Really? One yearns for the Bond villains of old for whom nothing less than world domination would do. The chasm between Carroll’s resources and his petty ambitions is becoming increasingly laughable.