Woom-pah woom-pah woom-pah (Gates of Eden - Ethan Coen)

Member Name: spoonfacer

Product:	Gates of Eden - Ethan Coen
Date:	13/11/01 (36 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Sly, Cheeky, Coenology

Disadvantages: Stagey

Whilst the Coen brothers' films can, according to your fancy, be praised or damned as a triumph of style over narrative, this small, imperfectly-formed but ultimately entertaining collection of stories from Ethan Coen never overemphasises easy style and never falls into drab dusty throwback storytelling, etch-a-sketch impressionistic artiness or the stoopid balls-for-brains certainty that afflicts the more often-viewed corners of the twisted guggenheim edifice of american literature ( :-/ sorry about that sentence..it was half-price down the local lit-crit superstore on my Ars Longa card...i couldn't resist..it came with free air freshener....)

With some obvious echoes of the films, and many scriptwriter stylings, the book trips along happily through the kind of bleak American nightmares (in dayglo pyjamas) that those familiar with the films have come to know and deal with in their own way. As a book, it is difficult to judge, because, as a book, the feel of the words is so obviously wise-guy CoBro that the films can, will, must intrude. The camera angles are there clear and unwritten, the music swells mildly in that knowing fashion, the images of bemusement, Jewish opera, beautifully shot all-American failure all pass by, and the end result is to make me smile and laugh out loud on the bus (a real bus, not your 'I laughed out loud on the bus five times' Evening Standard reviewers' convention ((ES convention- horrible thought...conference of Satan's pawns))

Now where were we...oh yes..the stories themselves are all short and the scene shifts from Minneapolis to somewhere in Minnesota to a small town near St Paul to...oooh maybe California for a bit and then back to Minnesota. Our heroes and heroines and villains and bystanders all talk in that strange scripted demotic that passes for authentic American in the literary world, and perhaps the real world. Nobody in these stories is remotely real, but they talk and walk in the
kind of oddly mannered way that caricatures realness and allows us to the map our inner states onto paper thin...erm...paper.

So we have:
Slumming clever-boy boxers who can't box, finding themselves out of their depth as hired muscle.
Smallest scale gangsters.
Private eyes with radio-script lives.
Families who wake up knowing they don't know each other.
Wide eyed Jewish summer camps.
Talentless mobsters.
Cruel weights and measures department cowboys.
Lost relatives.
All-American domestic murderers who don't know why they did it, and don't know who to tell.

I find the sheer lack of direction of the characters, the bemused response of shmucks who things happen to, and who never learn, very appealing. There's something about the way the stories drift off in to twenty terrible years in a sentence that locks in to my pessimistic, but still laughing until there's nothing left to laugh about, world-view.

The key to enjoying these stories is to turn off any expectation of Coen-brothers stylistic fireworks and in-depth characterisation, and to throw in your lot with the child-safe firecracker super-real dialogue. The creeping grime in the corners of the frames forms stains that spell 'FAILURE FAILURE FAILURE. The smallness (and awful crawling shame) of it all is sometimes more Mike Leigh than Coen brothers, but still very entertaining:

"He used his meager prison savings to open a two-chair barbershop on the fringes of downtown. He put a sign in the window: NO HIPPIES. He had a few steady customers, mostly elderly. Business was not good. In 1967 he took down NO HIPPIES and put up a new sign: UNISEX HAIRSTYLES. It fooled no-one, and business remained slow."

The book is always (very) entertaining, and (very) occasionally moving. The tale of the father with his two sons stuck in the middle of America, ill-matched, bemused, unconnected captures a familiar feel
ing well, and gave me one of those see-the-world-with-new-eyes knockbacks that I read books for.

So there it is...not terribly profound...always entertaining...quite stylish....made me smile.

Summary: