No alarms... (Gates of Eden - Ethan Coen)

Member Name: theediscerning

Product:	Gates of Eden - Ethan Coen
Date:	07/12/04 (127 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Some good writing

Disadvantages: Some flat endings

It has to be said that it is no great surprise that the two other reviews of this book here on dooyoo are varying between really quite good and really poor in their verdicts. For the collection looked at is very similar, with some flashes of really great and witty writing, with a lot that rather disappoints.

It is also no great surprise that Ethan Coen managed a book of short stories. Several people have managed to transcend the celebrity book format and written proper literature - Ethan Hawke, Steve Martin (at least twice)... the jury might still be out on Tom Baker, though. Coen and his brother have written several movies, and got Oscar nominations and so on galore for their efforts, which have a standard black humour, fascination with death and violence, and quirky characters galore. These stories heighten that with barely an exception.

What may in fact come as a surprise is that to read the contents of Gates of Eden is to find yourself reading three short radio plays as well - spaced out with just character name, sound effects and dialogue. The first of the three is best - ‘Hector Berlioz, Private Investigator’ (being both title and main character) looks at a disputed will that may be helping out shady moneymen behind a dodgy charity. Also very humorous, and with great read-aloud qualities is the second, which features a whole daisy chain of possibly inept crooks, all with their phones tapped - unaware crims use tapped phones to ring others up and say ‘hear about X? His phone must have been bugged’ and such like, only for the next scene to be two mothers complaining they can’t visit the same baddies where they’re currently in hiding, as they’ve been found out...

To make a good radio-play you’ve got to have a good ear for dialogue, and if proof of the success of that here is needed, then the very first story is the pudding. A great little tale of a Joe Schmoe who is a complete disaster both in the boxing ring and in the world of enemy-crossing gangsters he falls into. Also cyclical, it provides some good lines (“his nose was a spongy thing such as you might use to wash dishes”) and some superbly characterised dialogue with the hoodlum accents coming across perfectly.

If true comedic value should be of interest, ‘Cosa Minapolidan’ may be the highlight. This is the tale of a ‘family’ so small and out-of-sorts they move to Minneapolis (thinking it an American Napoli) and trying to ride a non-existent crime wave. They try and set up a protection racket, with nobody needing any protection from anyone, so they go about shooting the only person in town who would ever conceivably be shot, and leaving no evidence of it being a gangster hit at all. It opens with a trainee having to be taught to act menacing, and continues past a major problem for the gang - they decide they need a homosexual to murder as revenge. But this being such a straight-laced town, there aren’t any they know of, so have to order out...

Breaking away from the sit-com style of that, we have the different styles of story to mention - first and third person. One of the better efforts is in the voice of a record label exec who has been the victim of a most peculiar crime, trying to list to a copper his suspects... and keep the list to one side of A3 by the sound of it... Later on we have the voice of a weights-and-measures enforcement officer, featuring in a very fanciful encounter with a young east Asian lovely, which is not what it seems - again, not a surprise.

What is also not a surprise is that the Coens are Jewish, and this heritage is brought up in several of the stories, which unfortunately are not the best. ‘The Old Country’ wends its way between many events and characters in a friendly anecdote way to get to the crux, a rebellious boy getting his comeuppance and turning into Mister Grade-A Student overnight. At the opposite end of the book, ‘I Killed Phil Shapiro’ has as narrator a man who goes to great lengths to repeat that fact, but refuses to stop with the anecdotage. Vaguely funny it may be, possibly (probably?) based on real-life childhood it may be, but this one particularly features too many Yiddish cultural references for our Goyim ears to understand much of it, unfortunately. Still, oy vey.

Other stories go further to mix small time life into the proceedings, from slightly surreal children and their father on a failed day trip, to a tale of fatal affairs related by a character in a bar who has a surprising knowledge of the attributes of the women concerned. Okay, the former has more recognisable detail, but the merits of the stories here are the comedic details, the mix of wacky characters and their brilliantly-put across verbal tics and accents, and the bizarre ways crimes like taking your wife’s head off and so on mix with common or garden people.

There are demerits as well, which brings us on to further non-surprises. There are too many examples of the ends of stories not being up to the scratch of the rest - the one with the Japanese femme fatale being the guiltiest culprit. As the author has experience of taking sometimes slight material and making a whole film out of it, he should have taken a step back from several of these, and crafted a better ending. The book is not very long as it is, most of the stories 20 pages if that, and many deserve a fuller cycle of beginning, middle and end. We’re set up with a good situation, and drift into not much really, too often.

It also has to be said sometimes the humour falls flat, but never to make a story unreadable. (You might want to skip one or two for foul language and violent events, but that’s up to you...) Never does the book smack of being a vanity exercise, unless you take to the autobiographical bits, which are some of the least entertaining, less well than this reader.

Still, on flicking through the volume for this review, it was surprising how many of the stories were memorable for some reason or other. Yet from early on in reading the rating was stuck to a three star review. It seems the stories offer many an entertaining premise, and at their best some great characterisation and writing, but a lot is quite take-it-or-leave-it - which harks back to the balance mentioned at the top.

The hardback of this came out in 1998, the paperback soon after. You should be able to find a copy with little effort. It would help if you were a Coen fan, though, but if you aren’t it should not put you off too much. A private eye who has one ear bitten off, then loses his hearing in the other in mental sympathy is not something you read about every day.

What will depend on your devotion to the C brothers though will be on how long this book lasts on your shelves. You get fourteen tales, and several are very good, but the feeling was that there was no urge to keep the book once it was read. You’d probably buy it more eagerly if you were a Coen fan, and also keep hold of it with more avidity if their films inflate your lilo.

As for theed, well he likes several of the films, and really liked some of the writing and detail here, and didn’t find anything to particularly *not* enjoy, but the book won’t be kept. He is happy to recommend the reading of the book though, with as much eagerness as three stars can muster, but that is in considering reading it. In buying it, 2 stars and no recommendation for purchase.

These Gates of Eden, then, should be opened for all, but not bought.

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