Dave's Fiction Warehouse

Maybe John McCain is being totally altruistic in his decision to suspend his presidential campaign so he can concentrate on fast-tracking the $700 billion Wall Street bailout. Maybe he really thinks the bailout will save us from a depression, and that it won't get passed if he and his opponent are not in Washington scrambling for mike time. I am a simple man, with little understanding of high finance or Beltway politics, so I'll give him the benefit of the doubt. I mean, it's not going to break my heart to miss out on a few days worth of cheesy political ads. But trying to pull out of this debate with Obama -- that's a little harder sell. McCain's people have tried to cast the debate as a frivolous campaign event in a time of national crisis. Right. We've got better things to do than judge the qualifications of the two men would be commander in chief for the next four years. These men belong in Washington, damn it, so they can help throw cash at those who, in a ...

American political campaigns are all about celebrity. The essential objective is to become more famous than one's opponent in a short amount of time. You do this with sly commercials, and pithy put-downs, and three-word mantras chanted by supporters, and, if you're lucky, by sheer personal attractiveness. That's why I first thought the not-so-attractive John McCain had made a shrewd choice by picking Sarah Palin as his running mate: She's a great-looking woman with a wonderful smile. And if there's a single tenet upon which all Americans can agree, it's that great-looking people rule, particularly if they smile wonderfully. But there's another tenet: Smart-sounding people also rule. Sometimes they rule even more -- say, after eight years of a president who has trouble putting a sentence together. Barack Obama's defining advantage has always been that he sounds very smart, even when his oratory soars into ephemeral realms and does not quite cohere. Hey, a...

I've been reading My Antonia , Willa Cather's 1918 novel about growing up on the Nebraska prairie. It's a beautiful book, poignant and uplifting, full of characters who reflect the truth of life in all its joy and pain. It's also an instructive portrait of the time in America when explicit toil was required for mere survival, never mind success. I've been reading it against the background noise of Wall Street's collapse, men and women on CNN droning gravely about the consequences of greed, and the need to ensure that the greediest of all do not, in the end, go broke. It's a complex issue. It takes someone like Yale business student David Bledin, writing an op-ed for the Washington Post, to put a human face on the unfolding tragedy. You think you have it tough; think what it's like for Masters of the Universe-in-training who now rue the rigors involved in chasing a seven-figure salary: "... once I could afford to splurge on a Zagat-rated "$$$...

Well, the Coen Brothers are back. Burn After Reading returns to the sardonic and sophisticated dark comedy I missed in last year's No Country for Old Men . I'd say it ranks close to my personal Coen favorites, The Big Lebowski and Fargo . In fact, it borrows quite a bit from Fargo , generally in a couple of graphic deaths, and specifically in a scene involving a hatchet. The plot borrows from Lebowski , with its use of a highly dubious MacGuffin -- some CIA files -- to send a cast of highly self-absorbed characters careening into each other in unexpected ways. You've seen the TV ads, so I don't need to mention how good the cast is. Personally, I think Brad Pitt's role as a bumbling gym trainer is drawn a bit too broadly, but I won't quibble. You've got to hand it to him for taking that sort of a role. John Malkovich has a character he was born to play. The writing elsewhere is absolutely precise, and absolutely funny. Dave Bob says four stars, even as he a...

A few more thoughts about audio books: When listening to books set in Britain, a narrator with a British accent is just the thing. I recently checked out Ngaio Marsh's Last Ditch from the State Library of Kansas , and the last couple of nights I've been listening to the stories of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. I've read all the Sherlock Holmes stories many times, of course, but hearing them narrated in the stage-trained British voice of Edward Hartwicke added a certain dimension of drama and humor. Same with Last Ditch . Narrator Nadia May is not just reading the book; she's performing it. So it's quite true what an earlier commenter noted: When selecting audio books, the narrator is just as important as the author. Let's just say you wouldn't want Joan Rivers reading Anna Karenina . I still have problems with audiobooks: I still tend to fall asleep before making the conscious decision to shut off the player. And with my non-iPod player, there's still no way ...

I've been slow to embrace Mad Men , AMC's drama about ad executives in the early 60s, but I think I'm ready now. I loved the scene in last night's episode where anti-protagonist Don Draper drains his beer and casually hurls the non-recyclable can across the park. And seconds later, when his wife Betty cleans up the family picnic by simply lifting the blanket and letting the litter tumble to the grass. In a couple of minutes, that scene captured the spirit of the age better than 40 pages of dialogue: it was the American way to use it up and move on, preferably in a '62 Coupe De Ville. For me, the charm of this series is not the stories so much as the period detail. I was around 10 years old when people were driving cars the size of PT boats and tossing their trash out the window, but I vividly remember it was a time when that sort of thing was acceptable. I remember when every adult worthy of the title smoked a pack a day, when those Maidenform bra commercials were s...