Book Review: The Marrow Thieves, by Cherie Dimaline (2017)

Cover of The Marrow Thieves, by Cherie Dimaline, 2017.

Author Cherie Dimaline, with several stacks of The Marrow Thieves.

It’s either the best possible time or the worst possible time to read a dystopian novel. Cherie Dimaline’s 2017 young adult novel The Marrow Thieves was the main selection for the city of Saint Paul’s 2020 Read Brave program. The theme of Read Brave this year was climate change—the other selection was Climate Justice, by Mary Robinson, which I reviewed here. 

The Marrow Thieves is set in Canada in a future that has been ravaged by climate change. For some reason, white people have stopped dreaming, while Native Americans still retain the ability to dream. As you can imagine, this had led to the Native Americans being hunted down and captured. The novel, written in the first person, follows 16-year-old Francis, nicknamed “Frenchie,” as he runs from the authorities and encounters a rag-tag collection of Natives who are traveling north, always on the run.

The Marrow Thieves is a quick, engaging read, and Dimaline does an excellent job of giving the uncertainty of the character’s lives a visceral impact. Dimaline is a member of the Georgian Bay Metis Community, and The Marrow Thieves is her fifth book and first young adult novel. According to Dimaline’s website, she is working on the sequel to The Marrow Thieves.

Book Review: The Making of This Side of Paradise, by James L.W. West III (1983)

The Making of This Side of Paradise, by James L.W. West III, 1983.

The original dust jacket for This Side of Paradise, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, published on March 26, 1920.

Professor James L.W. West III

When F. Scott Fitzgerald’s first novel, This Side of Paradise, was published on March 26, 1920, it launched the literary career of one of the greatest American authors of the 20^th century. Fitzgerald’s fame and influence continue to grow, 100 years after his first novel appeared. The latest manifestation of Fitzgerald’s lasting fame is Nick Farriella’s parody “This Side of Paradise: A Letter from F. Scott Fitzgerald, Quarantined in the South of France.” Published by McSweeney’s on March 13, 2020, Farriella’s parody has become a big hit, with many people thinking it was an actual letter from Fitzgerald. 

If you’re a Fitzgerald buff who wants to learn more about how This Side of Paradise was written, then the book for you is James L.W. West III’s The Making of This Side of Paradise, published in 1983. West has gone on to become the editor of the Cambridge Edition of the Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald, a scholarly series that was finally completed in 2019. 

West’s study of the manuscripts of This Side of Paradise, including an earlier version that Fitzgerald titled The Romantic Egotist, shed important light on Fitzgerald’s writing and editing techniques. Fitzgerald wrote his first draft of The Romantic Egotist quickly while he was in Army training camp from November 1917 to February 1918. Stationed at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, the commanding officer of Fitzgerald’s platoon was a young West Point graduate named Dwight Eisenhower. 

The Romantic Egotist was written in the first person, narrated by Stephen Palms. West writes, “Stephen’s narrative is so painfully open and naïve that it is difficult to read without a curious discomfort, at once effective and annoying.” (p.25) Stephen also addresses the reader directly, writing about the narrative that he is constructing; no doubt this was a sign of Fitzgerald’s haste to complete the manuscript. 

As rushed as Fitzgerald might have been, West notes that incidents in The Romantic Egotist manuscript will continue to reappear, in highly reworked form, in Fitzgerald’s later fiction. There’s even an account of Stephen’s train ride home from prep school to Minnesota that was the germ for a beautiful passage in The Great Gatsby, in which Nick Carraway waxes rhapsodic about a similar train ride. Fitzgerald was ruthless in mining his own life for all the material he could. 

Fortunately, some passages cut from The Romantic Egotist didn’t find their way into Fitzgerald’s fiction. Namely, the passage in which Stephen and Eleanor Savage see her fur coat mysteriously move across the room. What made the fur coat move is never explained. As West writes, “This strange episode reinforces the connection in This Side of Paradise between sex and the supernatural.” (p.36) In the finished novel, the main character Amory Blaine sees the devil in a chorus girl’s apartment. Did I mention that Fitzgerald was raised Catholic? Fitzgerald actually revised the moving fur coat episode before ultimately deciding to delete it from This Side of Paradise. 

The Romantic Egotist was sent to the publisher Charles Scribner’s Sons in May 1918. It was rejected, and the only editor at Scribner’s who liked the book was Maxwell Perkins. Perkins wrote Fitzgerald an encouraging rejection letter, and expressly told him to make revisions and resubmit the novel. Fitzgerald did, but the novel was rejected again in October 1918. Perkins went on to become Fitzgerald’s lifelong friend and editor, as well as the editor for two other famous writers of the 1920’s and 1930’s: Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe. You know, no big deal. 

West’s study of the manuscript of This Side of Paradise helps us to understand the inconsistencies in Amory Blaine’s character a bit more. As West notes, the material that presents us with a more cynical Amory is mainly from Fitzgerald’s revision of the novel during July and August of 1919, and the material where Amory seems more innocent and naïve is left over from the manuscript of The Romantic Egotist. 

The chapter titled “Young Irony,” which occurs late in the second book of This Side of Paradise, in which Amory encounters the beautiful atheist Eleanor Savage in the Maryland countryside, was originally from The Romantic Egotist, and took place before Stephen Palms’ senior year at Princeton. As West writes of the chapter: “Amory’s immature, adolescent posturings in the novel therefore seem odd. He is supposedly a twenty-three-year-old graduate of a sophisticated eastern university and a combat veteran of World War I, but he moons over Eleanor, spouts clichés and bad epigrams, and composes mediocre poetry at the dinner table.” (p.70) 

Fitzgerald sent Perkins the manuscript of This Side of Paradise on September 4, 1919. Perkins fought hard for Scribner’s to accept the book in an editorial meeting, saying: “My feeling is that a publisher’s first allegiance is to talent. And if we aren’t going to publish a talent like this, it is a very serious thing.” If Scribner’s was not interested in young authors, “Then we might as well go out of business. If we’re going to turn down the likes of Fitzgerald, I will lose all interest in publishing books.” The vote was a tie, with old Charles Scribner II himself eventually coming down on the side of publishing. (Max Perkins: Editor of Genius, by A. Scott Berg, p.15-6) 

Perkins sent Fitzgerald an acceptance letter dated September 16, 1919, just a week before Fitzgerald’s 23^rd birthday. Unfortunately, in the ensuing six months before the novel was published, it’s clear that a professional proofreader didn’t go near the manuscript. This Side of Paradise was riddled with misspellings, and mistakes like Amory’s hair changing from blond to auburn within a page went unnoticed. In a letter from July 8, 1920, Perkins tells Fitzgerald that the editorial department has been forced to do the proofreading. Perkins writes, “It is purely the mechanical and therefore irksome.” (p.106) So that might explain why a careful proofreading job simply wasn’t done. But still, wasn’t there some freelance proofreader out there who could have helped Maxwell Perkins? 

West counted the number of lists that were made of the errors in This Side of Paradise, and he comes up with 11 different lists covering some 40 or 50 different mistakes! Some of these mistakes were corrected in the 4^th and 7^th printings of This Side of Paradise, but many were not. The unfortunate upshot was that Fitzgerald acquired a reputation as a dim-witted fool who didn’t know how to spell the name of the great pitcher Christy Mathewson—misspelled as “Christie” in the first edition. Fitzgerald was a poor speller, and proper names gave him lots of trouble—Hemingway for example, he often spelled “Hemminway.” But Fitzgerald obviously assumed Scribner’s would make those corrections, as indeed they should have. 

After all this talk of errors, there’s a doozy on page 118 that escaped the proofreaders of West’s manuscript at the University of Pennsylvania Press: “If one really wants Fitzgerald’s errrors, then one needs a facsimile edition of the manuscript.” Yes, “errrors” with four r’s. Quite humorous, all things considered. 

In his conclusion, West makes a passionate plea for a fully corrected version of This Side of Paradise, as he notes that the 1960 edition of the novel that was still in print in 1983 had many errors. West himself would be the editor for the version of This Side of Paradise that finally corrected all the errors of past editions: the 1996 edition, produced for the Cambridge Edition of the Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald. This version is the basis for the 2003 Scribner trade paperback, which is the version of This Side of Paradise I recommend. 

This Side of Paradise sold about 50,000 copies during its first year and a half in print. It wasn’t one of the top ten best-selling novels of 1920, but it was a book that made a considerable impact. Nearly all the reviews of the novel make it clear that, almost overnight, Fitzgerald had become one of the leading literary voices of a new generation. 

One of the finest tributes to This Side of Paradise was written by John O’Hara, a novelist whose subject matter was similar to Fitzgerald’s own: “A little matter of twenty-five years ago I, along with half a million other men and women between 15 and 30 fell in love with a book. It was the real thing, that love…after the appearance of that book I was excitedly interested in almost anything that was written by F. Scott Fitzgerald; his novels, short stories, and his nonfiction articles…the novel was This Side of Paradise. All he was was our best novelist, one of our best novella-ists, and one of our finest writers of short stories.” (From the Introduction to The Portable F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1945)

Fitzgerald would be amazed to know that 100 years later, his first novel is still being read and enjoyed, now in an edition that comes closer to what he was trying to convey all those years ago when he wrote about Amory Blaine’s voyage of self-discovery.

Book Review: The Complete Chester Gould's Dick Tracy Volume 3: 1935-1936, by Chester Gould (2007)

The cover of The Complete Chester Gould's Dick Tracy Volume 3: 1935-1936, published by IDW Publishing in 2007.

The third volume of Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy, published by IDW Publishing in 2007, takes the comic strip from January of 1935 to July of 1936. Throughout the volume we see Chester Gould experiment with different approaches as he honed his storytelling chops. Gould’s strip follows the titular detective as he battles criminals using his brain, his brawn, and the very latest in scientific advancements. From the very beginning, Dick Tracy was very popular, and very violent. 

As Max Allan Collins writes in the Introduction to Volume 3, Gould “has already started to focus on his primary mode of storytelling: the chase.” Many Dick Tracy storylines focus on the desperate decisions that criminals make as the noose around them tightens. Gould was a master of claustrophobic horror, as villains often get trapped in small physical spaces, mimicking the way in which their moral choices are also shrinking.  

Boris Arson telephones for Chief Yellowpony, March 27, 1935. Pawnee, Oklahoma, was Chester Gould's birthplace, and it gets referenced occasionally in the strip.

Volume 3 finds Gould introducing numerous supporting characters who assist Tracy and his sidekick Pat Patton at various points. Among these characters are: Chief Yellowpony, Toby Townley, Jim Trailer, and Memphis Smith. None of these characters became regulars in the strip, and it might be that Gould was simply trying different things out to see what worked the best. 

Chief Yellowpony and his wife and daughter, March 30, 1935. This is typical of Chief Yellowpony's stereotypical speech patterns.

Chief Yellowpony was a Native American who hailed from Pawnee, Oklahoma, also the hometown of Chester Gould. Chief Yellowpony is a broad stereotype, speaking in choppy sentences of broken English: “Much thanks! Me heap grateful.” Chief Yellowpony is ultimately a good and honorable character, as he helps Dick Tracy and Pat Patton track down Boris and Zora Arson and “Cutie” Diamond, but he is a stereotype, nonetheless.

Toby Townley was a cute blonde girl with big eyes. She’s a nice girl, but unfortunately her boyfriend was a bank teller who eventually “borrowed” some of the bank’s money to bet on horse races. Toby’s storyline takes up much of the summer of 1935, as she is wrongly convicted of murder, and the strip follows her to prison, where she’s blinded during a prison riot. Toby’s storyline is one of the few times in Dick Tracy when we see someone falsely convicted of a crime. (Of course, Tracy is able to prove Toby’s innocence and get her released from jail.) 

Toby may have been intended to serve as a love interest for Tracy’s sidekick Pat Patton, as it’s Pat who finds the specialist that cures her blindness. Toby and Pat go to a movie together, but that’s as far as things go. It’s curious Gould didn’t keep Toby around as a girlfriend for Pat, although maybe it would have been too much for the strip to have two long-suffering girlfriends of detectives. I also find it odd that Gould never fleshed out Pat Patton’s home life, especially given Gould’s interest in comedy—Pat was always the comedic figure during the early years of the strip, and Gould surely could have found some comedy in Patton dating Toby. Many years later, after Gould had retired from the strip, Pat and Toby reconnected and were married in 1982. 

Mobster Cut Famon, January 23, 1936. Famon was based on Al Capone, and had just finished serving a sentence for tax evasion.

Jim Trailer was a “G-Man,” 1930’s slang for government agent, who first assisted Tracy during the Cut Famon case. Trailer made sporadic appearances in the strip until 1940. Like many other characters, he returned to the strip after Chester Gould’s 1977 retirement. 

And then there’s Memphis Smith. Memphis is gangster Lips Manlis’ valet. Memphis is firmly in the Stepin Fetchit tradition of African American servants. Even by 1936 standards, he’s a terrible example of the worst racial stereotypes. Memphis’ chief personality characteristic is his cowardice, he speaks in a stereotypical dialect straight out of Amos ’n’ Andy and he frequently punctuates his speech with “yowsah.” In short, Memphis Smith is just the worst. Thankfully, Chester Gould had sense enough to drop Memphis fairly quickly. 

And speaking of African American characters in Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy, the unfortunate truth is that there simply aren’t very many. Memphis Smith is the most prominent African American character that Chester Gould ever put into Dick Tracy. The only major African American character in the strip, female detective Lee Ebony, was introduced in 1980, after Gould no longer wrote or drew it. To my knowledge, Chester Gould never had Dick Tracy taking on an African American criminal. The positive spin on that is Gould didn’t create African American villains who were crude stereotypes. The negative spin is that Gould didn’t include African Americans at all in his fictional universe—even as bystanders, innocent victims, police officers, etc. Gould’s blind spot towards African Americans is especially jarring since the unnamed city where Dick Tracy works shares many similarities with Chicago.  

Chester Gould always felt that he was competing not only against other comic strips, but also against the news headlines of the day. In Volume 3 Gould is working from real life: Boris Arson’s escape from prison with a gun carved from a potato echoes John Dillinger’s escape with a wooden gun, Cut Famon is meant to be Al Capone, and the photo that Zora Arson and “Cutie” Diamond pose for echoes the famous snapshot of Bonnie and Clyde. During the gangster era of the 1930’s, Gould had more than enough real-life material to pick from. Dick Tracy always reflected its era, but perhaps never more so than in the early days of the strip. 

Dick Tracy has some words of wisdom for the Mayor of Homeville, November 13, 1935.

The major stories in Volume 3 are all quite different from each other. Boris Arson and his sister Zora embark on the type of chase that will become a Dick Tracy classic. This is straight-forward action comics at its finest. Then we have Toby Townley’s storyline, which occupies much of the summer of 1935, and is a more melodramatic tale of an innocent caught up in circumstances beyond her control. Toby’s storyline might have been an attempt by Gould to interest female readers in the strip. Towards the end of 1935, Tracy gets an offer to serve as chief of police for the small town of Homeville. He gets a leave of absence from Chief Brandon and goes off to clean up the corrupt small town. It’s an interesting interlude, and it finds Tracy getting enmeshed in small town politics as he battles mobster Cut Famon. After that, it’s on to the “Hotel Murders,” a rare example of a whodunit in Dick Tracy. That case introduces us to Lips Manlis, and although Manlis is innocent of the murders, he plays a large role in the strip for months to follow as Tracy convinces him to go straight. 

For me, Lips Manlis always conjures up an image of Paul Sorvino playing him in the 1990 movie Dick Tracy. Specifically, I think of the scene where he’s noisily slurping down oysters. In the comic strip, it’s never made very clear what exactly Lips Manlis does, or has done. Manlis is questioned in the hotel murders, but he’s not the guilty party. When Tracy questions Manlis again two months later, Tracy suddenly gets the notion that Manlis should go straight. 

Dick Tracy waxes philosophic to Pat Patton, May 16, 1936.

It's an interesting plot twist, and Tracy raises some fascinating questions about human nature, and how we perceive people. As Tracy says to Pat Patton in the May 16, 1936 strip: “Did it ever occur to you that maybe a gangster wouldn’t be a gangster if he was treated like an ordinary human?” But because we don’t really know much about Lips Manlis, it’s hard to be very invested in his rehabilitation. And Manlis’ desire to go straight happens so quickly, it doesn’t have much drama in it. The guy just tried to blow up Tracy in an elevator, and now Tracy thinks he can go straight? The storyline is an interesting contrast to the later Dick Tracy strips of the 1960’s and 1970’s, where Gould was often critical of the judicial process, and the whole “innocent until proven guilty” thing. 

Dick Tracy spreads the good word to Lips Manlis, May 20, 1936. Despite Tracy's "reborn" phrase, he's actually not talking about religion.

Tracy gives Manlis a new name, calling him “Bob Honor.” And while Manlis’ rehabilitation might seem like a lame beginning to a new storyline, it does introduce us to his girlfriend, Mimi, who will wreak havoc and chaos in the strip throughout the summer of 1936, spanning Volumes 3 and 4. Ultimately, Mimi proves to be a more interesting villain than Manlis ever was. 

Bob Honor gets harsh with his ex-flame Mimi, June 4, 1936.

When Mimi finds Lips at his new job as a watchman at a warehouse, he pretends he doesn’t know her and sends her packing with this cruel parting shot: “I’ll give you two seconds to haul your fat face down the street—before I call a wagon and turn you over to the dicks.” That’s just harsh. But Mimi proves the adage, “hell hath no fury like a woman scorned,” as she makes it clear she’ll stop at nothing until she gets Lips back. Mimi even causes a fiery car crash, in which her left hand is crushed. As Volume 3 ends, Mimi learns from an underworld doctor that her hand is infected and will have to be amputated. She blithely says, “Then amputate.” This is not a woman to mess with. 

There are some odd moments in Volume 3. Like when Tracy inexplicably tells Tess Trueheart’s kidnappers that he knows where they are and sends Toby Townley in to be the intermediary. It’s just a plot device to have her demonstrate that she’s on the side of the law. But realistically, it makes no sense. Tracy could have taken the kidnappers by surprise, but he chooses not to. 

Tracy, in disguise as Boyle, gets offered drugs by Cut Famon, January 25, 1936. Boy, you could really show a lot of stuff in the comics back in the day!

Another weird plot point that seemingly comes out of nowhere is when, at the end of the Cut Famon storyline, Tess reveals that she’s been dressing as a man and driving an oil truck in order to learn some clues. We never find out what those clues are. This plot device allows Tess and Junior to participate in the final ambush of Famon, but it’s quite odd. Also random: the time when Tracy, in disguise as a member of Famon’s gang, shoots up with a drug, presumably an amphetamine, at the urging of Famon before a robbery. Huh. 

Volume 3 of Dick Tracy is an excellent example of the strip’s combination of engaging villains, scientific policework, and thrilling action sequences.