The Thin Red Line

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One Sunday afternoon I was working at the check in desk.   One of the reference librarians handed me her return materials, including Free For All, which she heartily recommended.   ‘It’s a hoot’, she said.

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My two days off passed quickly if not productively. I did go to the dentist yesterday, for the first time in Years. My teeth need a Lot of work, but I am glad to have at least started on it. (My next of many appointments to come is on the 21st.) And the dentist did give me a scrip for Vicodin, which definitely helps. Ron did do a load of laundry yesterday, though not the big catch up of lotsa laundry I had planned. And maybe tomorrow I will manage to go get the haircut that was the other thing on my agenda.

After reading and blogging about the history of Moon Pies last week, this book caught my eye while shelving in New Fiction. Moon Pies and Movie Stars is a comic novel set in the 1970’s about Ruby Kinkade, a widow in Devine, Texas (pop 847) who runs the local bowling alley and is raising her daughter Violet’s two children after Violet mysteriously disappeared four years ago. One day Violet is spotted in a television commercial and Ruby and her sister Loralva set off in a Winnebago with Violet’s mother-in-law and the kids on a trek to Hollywood to find Violet.

The writing is at times quite funny, though the pacing is a bit off and the book seems to drag at times. There is a very time-warp feeling in the 1970’s details, and the Texas parochialism of the characters and their reactions to California is by turns amusing and off-putting. After waiting in line and appearing on The Price Is Right, where Loralva charms Bob Barker and the producers and ends up winning a new car, they do finally manage to find Violet and are disappointed that she has no interest in them or the children she left behind. In the end, I found myself thinking the book was in fact much like a Moon Pie– almost sickly sweet, but very little substance. Not recommended.

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When I started blogging I had said I was only going to write about new releases here. I realized a bit later that I meant new releases as libraries define them (we may consider a book "new" for up to two years at PCLS). But lately I have found myself reading a number of older books and realized that I have in fact been writing about a number of older titles and decided to explicitly abandon the new releases plan and just write about whatever I happen to be reading, which in this case is a novel from the 1980’s that I recently rediscovered.

The librarians have classified Metzger’s Dog as a mystery, but it isn’t really. When I was a bookstore clerk back in the 80’s we considered it general fiction, and while it has some elements of a thriller it really doesn’t fall into any sub-genre. A group of former mercenaries in Los Angeles learn that a pound of cocaine is being kept in a research lab at UCLA and set out to steal it. While doing so they serendipitously manage to steal a box of papers from another office, which happens to belong to a social science researcher who has done significant work for the CIA in "psyops". After selling the cocaine back to the dealer from whom the police had seized it in the first place, the gang gets around to reading the papers and slowly comes to realize what they have.

So their next step is to try to sell the papers back to the CIA. Much madness ensues and the book is at times laugh out loud funny. At one point, after the spooks have unsuccessfully tried to pull a double cross the gang decides to implement one of the plans to demonstrate they mean business. Carefully following the stolen script they sabotage a key phone company installation and stage spectacular collisions at 17 key freeway choke points, wrecking havoc in el lay. In the end, after a change of management at Langley the spooks cough up the money, the head mercenary marries his girl and the new CIA director and his wife attend the wedding.

I was disappointed that I really didn’t enjoy this book re-reading it in 2007 near as much as I had the first time around in 1980-something. Partly it’s that phones, airports and so much else have changed to the point that few of the exploits described could be pulled off today. Also, I think that my tastes have evolved a great deal over a quarter of a century and this book did not age well for me.

(Hoping to hear today about the job I interviewed for on Wednesday and looking forward to my Friday & Sunday weekend = working a full day in Eatonville Saturday.)

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