Scrimshaw excerpt

The following is an excerpt from my forthcoming fourth novel, Scrimshaw. It's an adaptation of a song by Nashville-based songwriter Pete Holland.

Scrimshaw will be available for purchase in paperback and Kindle formats via Amazon.com next Tuesday, November 12th.

Click-clack.  Click-clack.  Click-clack. 

            The steadfast iambic rhythm of wheels skittering over steel rails, more like a human heartbeat than the pace of a machine driven by wood and coal, rods and pistons and steam. Some would no doubt argue that the railroad is more akin to the pulse of the United States than its denizens are even aware, with its heart located somewhere around Omaha, the miles and miles of Union and Central Pacific tracks snaking in all directions, carrying passengers and cargo and pumping its collective blood to every corner of the country.

Leaving Iowa behind and chugging through Nebraska signals that your odyssey is nearly halfway finished. You’ve never been this far west in your life, and with every hour you move farther from Massachusetts and everything you’ve ever known, and closer to California and everything you’ve ever feared. You’ve buried questions like How will I find her? and Will she remember me? deep in your subconscious. You don’t want to know the answers, anyway. 

            So you stare out the glass-paneled windows as the miles roll away, the American Middle West shattering all your previously-held expectations—Iowa wasn’t nearly as flat and featureless as you envisioned, not the perfectly smooth ocean on the calmest and least windy of days. Instead, you bear witness to sweeping, rolling hills, brown and green waves pitching back and forth in the near distance, threatening to toss the train from the rails and drown its passengers in a dizzying sea of swaying cornfields.

            It’s been three days since you bid goodbye to New Bedford and the Atlantic Ocean. Three full days of clicking and clacking as you’ve limped the aisles, wondering dutifully where the other passengers were headed, wondering if they pondered your destination, your reason for sliding your last 45 dollars through the window in Council Bluffs for the privilege of riding in the belly of this steam-powered beast another day to Cheyenne, two more to Ogden, and two more after that to San Francisco.

            When you awaken after drowsing in your seat, you pat your breast pocket fitfully, ensuring the letter remains safe and sound, close to your heart at all times. You’ve managed to keep the knife a guarded secret, but a few times every day you remove the scrimshaw from your pants pocket and run your weathered fingers and thumbs over the intricate carvings, your carvings, all that remains of the life that the Atlantic swallowed and New Bedford all but forgot. The whale bone remains a token, a talisman (it could be called a good luck charm if it had brought any good fortune whatsoever), something to hold onto through your travels.

            You’ve been on a train only once before, back in the summer of ’61, on your way to Philadelphia, mere weeks after enlisting to help cement the blockade and Scott’s Anaconda Plan. The train ride was a novelty then, the fastest way to move troops south to Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia. Now, as you travel deeper and deeper into the thickening American night, you grip the scrimshaw a little tighter, triple-check your pocket for the letter and close your eyes as a deep sigh rattles through your 70-year-old bones. 

            Click-clack.

The Great Gatsby review

“Even Gatsby could happen,” Nick Carraway says while riding into New York with the title character, and it’s true—even Gatsby could happen, and it almost does.

Baz Luhrmann has essentially made two movies: the first half showcases the Moulin Rouge­ director’s flair for the ostentatious and the gaudy (much like Jay Gatsby himself), and the second half which favors substance over style. You can practically feel the raucous and rowdy party scenes pulsing with life and energy, but that spirit (and, for the most part, the ‘20s-meets-2000s soundtrack) is absent from the latter half, which simply needs to move through the rest of the plot, leaving pivotal characters like Henry Gatz noticeably absent.

To say that this incarnation of Gatsby is the best filmed adaptation isn’t saying much, as the three that preceded it were marred by taking too many liberties with the source material (’49), horrendous casting (with the exception of Robert Redford, ’74) and all-around flatness (with the exception of Paul Rudd, ’00). Leonardo DiCaprio excels as Gatsby in all his Brooks Brothers glory, and Tobey Maguire surprises as the wide-eyed Nick. The real-life buddies carry the emotional weight of the film, as Carey Mulligan’s Daisy isn’t given much to do besides bat her eyelashes and weep into shirts. Joel Edgerton gives Tom Buchanan the earnest toughness that the character demands, but needs to lose the John Waters moustache in order to be taken seriously (if Tom can be taken seriously; after all, he is the polo player).

Luhrmann’s device for establishing first-person narration will prove anathema to Gatsby purists (no spoilers), mostly because it’s unnecessary; plenty of films feature voice-over narration that doesn’t need explaining. Yes, the character of Nick is at times very much an outsider-looking-in like Fitzgerald, but Nick’s writer persona in this film is wholly unnecessary and the framing device feels artificial at best, a cop out at worst.

That said, there are subtle touches that nod knowingly to the faithful. To wit: the Old West décor of Gatsby’s study harks back to his mentor Dan Cody’s heritage as the “pioneer debauchee”; also, Daisy’s line about Gatsby resembling the cool-looking man in the shirt advertisement is given slightly more weight when we see an Arrow Shirts ad in Times Square featuring a man who looks strikingly like Gatsby. They’re both nice acknowledgments of Fitzgerald’s fully-realized world of the novel.

All told, it’s a good film and a solid adaptation. Some of Fitzgerald’s language gets lost in translation, and it’s questionable whether lines like “I can’t describe to you how surprised I was to find out I loved her, old sport” were meant to be uttered aloud or simply allowed to live on the page. If and when the novel is made into a film again, it’d be interesting to see how someone like Ang Lee (Brokeback Mountain, Sense & Sensibility) or Joe Wright (Atonement, Anna Karenina) would handle it. Less pomp and circumstance, likely, but perhaps that’s exactly what Gatsby demands.