What I'm Reading/Watching

David Simon (creator of The Wire) had a six-episode miniseries that finished last Sunday.  Show Me  a Hero is about the city of Yonkers' response to the court mandated low income housing and the underlying racial tensions this brings to the surface.  It stars Oscar Isaac as councilman/mayor Nick Wasicsko, and has a great cast including Catherine Keener and Alfred Molina.

I also picked up a copy of Harlan Ellison's screenplay for I, Robot.  Those of you only familiar with the 2004 SF/Action/Converse Commercial may not know that Harlan Ellison wrote the original screenplay, which is itself highly regarded as a SF work.  Ellison got into a fight with a studio exec who was giving him notes despite not having read the script and Ellison claims to have "laid hands on" the exec.  Anyway, Ellison was kicked of the project. Later, Irvin Kershner (director of The Empire Strikes Back) was tapped to direct it, and agreed on the condition that Ellison be brought back to the project.  Anyway, the original script is pretty darn great.  It's a bit dated, but only in the sense that it reflects being written in the late 1970s.  

1974: Centennial by James Michener

The Author:

James Michener (1907-1997) has already appeared on this blog for 1965's The Source.  Michere was adopted by a Quaker from Doylestown, Pennsylvania.  He later attended Swarthmore college, studying English and Psychology, graduating with honors in 1929.  After spending a couple abroad, Michener returned to Pennsylvania to teach high school English.  In 1935, he married his first wife, Patti Koon, then earned his Masters and taught briefly at Harvard before becoming an editor for Macmillan Publishers.   

Michener served in the South Pacific during WWII.  His experiences there provided the basis for his first novel, Tales of the South Pacific (1947), which won the Pulitzer for fiction in 1948 and was adapted by Rodgers and Hammerstein for the stage, under the title South Pacific.  In 1948, Michener divorced Koon and married Vange Nord.  Michener appeared in the top 10 annual bestsellers list fifteen times between 1951 and 1992, taking the top spot four times.  In 1955, he divorced Nord and married Mari Sabusawa.  In 1977, Michener received the Presidential Medal of Freedom.   He died of kidney failure in 1997. 

The Book:

Length: 1086 pages

Genre/Subject: Historical Fiction/The American Midwest

Centennial is about the eponymous fictional small town in Colorado.  The first part tells us the framing device: a major magazine is doing a piece on the typical American small town, and they've asked a historian to do his own investigation for the purposes of fact checking.  As such, each chapter ends with a note to the editors, clearing up any possibly incorrect or speculative historical elements of the preceding chapter.  In true Michener fashion, this story of a small town doesn't start with the town's naming in 1876, or the history of the Native Americans living in the area before that, or even with the dinosaurs that roamed the Earth millions of years ago.  Michener starts the story of Centennial, Colorado with the formation of the Earth's crust.     

This is one of my issues with Michener, and it's largely a matter of personal taste.  After a brief introduction to the concept of the book, he spends over a hundred pages on geology and evolutionary biology.  Do we really need what is essentially a short story depicting the life of a particular buffalo living hundreds of thousands of years before its species had contact with humans?  On the one hand, horses, buffalo, beavers (and, yes, even the giant Diplodocus), and the unique landscape of the area are of great importance to the history of the area and the story itself, but is this too much? I'm a big fan of going on tangents, but you have the tangent before you have the thing it's tangential to.   

In my review of Hailey's Wheels, I compared Hailey, Michener, and Uris. During my research for that post, I came across a review from The New Republic which I think holds true to Michener as well.

     [His] most devoted readers, one senses, are the sort who don't read novels except those 

     certified as “informative” and “educational”; whose highest praise for the novels they really 

     cherish is that they are “very educational.”

While today we tend to think of historical fiction as factually dubious at best (thanks, Dan Brown), people like Michener treated the genre as a means to popularize history.  Being informative was at least as important as being entertaining, and the goal was to give you as complete an understanding of the subject as possible. Personally, I've always been of the opinion that if I want to read a book about history, I'd pick up a history book.  This isn't to say that novels can't be informative or have a significant non-fiction component (cf. In Cold Blood).  The problem is that an attempt to tell us everything can weigh the work down.  But once again, the historical meandering just isn't the kind of thing I like, and there's no accounting for taste.

Due to it's popularity, NBC made Centennial into a twelve-part miniseries in 1979, starring Raymond Burr and Barbara Carrera, as well as Andy Griffith and pre-James Bond Timothy Dalton. 

Like I've said, Michener goes to great lengths to be as historically accurate as possible.  If you like historical fiction and very long books, Michener would be a good fit.

Bestselling Novels of 1974:

1. Centennial by James Michener

2. Watership Down by Richard Adams

3. Jaws by Peter Benchley

4. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John le Carré

5. Something Happened by Joseph Heller

6. The Dogs of War by Frederick Forsyth

7. The Pirate by Harold Robbins

8. I Heard the Owl Call My Name by Margaret Craven

9. The Seven-Per-Cent Solution by Nicholas Meyer

10. The Fan Club by Irving Wallace

Also Published in 1974:

The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum by Heinrich Böll

Enderby's End by Anthony Burgess

Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said by Philip K. Dick

Fear of Flying by Erica Jong

The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin

Sources:

Maloff, Saul. "Troubadour of Free Enterprise." The New Republic 165.17 (23 Oct. 1971): 21-22. 

     Rpt. in Literature Resource Center. Detroit: Gale, 2014. Literature Resource Center. Web.

Michener, James. Centennial. 1974. New York: Fawcett Crest, 1989.

1971: Wheels by Arthur Hailey

The Author:

Arthur Hailey (1920-2004) has appeared once on this list already, for 1968's bestselling-novel, Airport.  Born in England, Hailey dropped out of high school due to financial stress, later joining the Royal Air Force during World War II.  In 1947, he moved to Canada and later gained dual citizenship.  

He went on to have a long and successful career in film, television, and publishing, appearing on the top ten annual bestsellers list five times and taking the number one spot twice.

The Book:

Wheels is to the automobile industry what Airport is to aviation.  While there are many subplots, dealing with everything from race to the artist's dilemma, the real protagonist is the automobile industry itself, in all its flawed grandeur.  Overall, it sees the auto industry on the verge of bigger and better things, while still calling it out on its failings (e.g. unethical salesman, management issues, etc.).  

While Wheels certainly benefited from Hailey's previous successes, its popularity can be delved into more.  I find Hailey similar to Michener and Uris, even though the latter are historical fiction writers.  All three have plenty of character subplots, but their stories are not about the characters.  Michener writes about the land, Uris about political and social climates, and Hailey about industries.  Perhaps one reason I find Hailey so dry is that he's trying to be educational.  People like Hailey, Michener, and Uris used fiction to illustrate their extensive research.  So the question is why did this type of novel become popular at this point in time, that is to say, the late 60s-ealry 70s?  As soon as I asked myself that, I remembered David Foster Wallace's idea of the "vocational travelogue":

"'Vocational Travelogue' is a shorthand way of acknowledging that for a long time one reason people used to read fiction was for a kind of imaginative tourism to places and cultures that they'd never really get to see...modern tech has also created such extreme vocational specialization that today few people are in a position to know much about any professional field other than their own; and thus that a certain amount of fiction's 'touristic' function now consists in giving readers dramatized access to the nuts and bolts of different professional disciplines and specialties."

In 1978, Wheels was adapted into a miniseries starring Rock Hudson:

This is the best image I could find

As far as Hailey goes, you know what you're going to get.  If you are interested in the auto industry of the late 60s and early 70s, Wheels is for you.  Otherwise, you can skip it.




Bestselling novels of 1971:

1. Wheels by Arthur Hailey
2. The Exorcist by William Blatty
3. The Passions of the Mind by Irving Stone
4. The Day of the Jackal by Frederick Forsyth
5. The Betsy by Harold Robbins
6. Message from Malaga by Helen MacInnes
7. The Winds of War by Herman Wouk
8. The Drifters by James Michener
9. The Other by Tom Tryon
10. Rabbit Redux by John Updike

Also Published in 1971:

Post Office by Charles Bukowski
Grendel by John Gardner
Being There by Jerzy Kosinski
August 1914 by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn


Sources:

• Hailey, Arthur. Wheels. Garden City, N.Y: Doubleday, 1971. Print.

Wallace, David Foster. "Rhetoric and the Math Melodrama." Science 22 December 2000: pages 
     2263-2267. Web.