The Saturday Morning Post (No. 27)

This time around we have a book that you are almost certainly know part of, but likely have never read. Parts of the book were adopted into a movie that became a seasonal favorite. Indeed, I can remember a time when the movie ran on TV back to back for 24 hours on Christmas eve & day. However, it was chopped up into 5 minute sections to fit in all the commercials, making it nearly impossible to enjoy. The book it it is base on is a lot more obscure, but shouldn't be since it is a masterpiece of humor. Let's get to it... 

My reviewer criteria. I like light, entertaining novels. I like smaller scale stories rather than epics. I like character focused novels featuring pleasant characters, with a minimum number of unpleasant ones. I greatly value clever and witty writing. I like first person, or close third person narratives. I dislike a lot of "head jumping" between POVs and flashbacks. I want a story, not a puzzle. While I am not opposed to violence, I dislike gore for the sake of gore. I find long and elaborate fight, action, and battle sequences tedious. Plot holes and things that happen for the convenience of the author annoy me. And I fear I'm a born critic in that I don't mind pointing out what I don't like in a story. However, I lay no claim to be the final arbitrator of style and taste, you need to decide for yourself what you like or dislike in a book.

Your opinions are always welcome. Comment below.

IN GOD WE TRUST, All Others Pay Cash by Jean Shepherd   A

The movie is 1983's A Christmas Story and the book it draws its story from this book. The book is a semi-fictional account of Jean Shepherd's youth and teen years growing up in depression era Hohman Indiana. Jean Shepherd was late night radio DJ, writer, and screenwriter. Many of stories in this book, and his other three similar books, were written to read on his late night radio show in New York city. The premise of this book is the semi-fictional Ralphie, now grown up and living in New York city, returns to Hohman to write for a magazine, "The Return Of The Native To The Indiana Mill Town". His first stop upon arrival is the bar of his old friend Flick's dad, which Flick now runs. They get to reminiscing which gives the reader a series of several dozen short tales about growing up in Hohman in the 1930's, interspersed with a few interludes of "Ralph's" present day life.

Shepherd co-wrote the screen play for the movie A Christmas Story, and did the voice over narration for it. The movie weaves various episodes from the book into its Christmas setting. The main Christmas story in the book concerns the Official Red Ryder Range Model Air Rifle that Ralphie wants for Christmas. Other episodes are adopted from different time periods which are folded into the movie as well, such as the fight with the bully, and the "major prize" his father wins from that orange soda company.

The book vividly evokes life in the grim and grimy steel mill and oil refinery city of Hohman, just to the east of Chicago where "the natives had been idle so long that they no longer even considered themselves out of work. Work had ceased to exist, so how could you be out of it?" He tells his stories with a great deal of humor and exaggeration, which nevertheless recreates a very real time and place in America.

The movie was set in 1940, and I was born ten years later and grew up in Milwaukee, a hour or so north of Chicago, so neither the book or movie exactly describes my life. Any yet, in 1950's were close enough to the '20's & 40's in some ways, that his description of life resonates with me, and adds to the humor and charm of this book. I wonder if how younger readers would find this book?

Humor is a tricky thing. Something one person finds hilarious, another just shake their head. So it is hard to say if you would find this book as funny as I do. I will leave it up to you by ending this review with two small section, selected more or less at random form a longer story that describes a night  Ralphie spent fishing with his dad on northern Indiana lake.

"Naturally, fishing is different in Indiana. The muddy lakes, about May, when the sun starts beating down on them, would begin to simmer and bubble quietly around the edges. These lakes are not fed by springs or streams. I don’t know what feeds them. Maybe seepage. Nothing but weeds and truck axles, on the bottoms; flat, low, muddy banks, surrounded by cottonwood trees, cattails, smelly marshes and old dumps. Archetypal dumps. Dumps gravitate to Indiana lakes like flies to a hog killing. Way down at the end where the water is shallow and soupy are the old cars and the ashes, busted refrigerators, oil drums, old corsets, and God knows what else.

At the other end of the lake is the Roller Rink. There’s always a Roller Rink. You can hear that old electric organ going, playing “Heartaches,” and you can hear the sound of the roller skates;

Shhhhhh...sssshhhhhhh….ssssssshhhhhhhhhhhh…."

As for fishing; 

"Crappies are a special breed of Midwestern fish, create by God for the express purpose of surviving in waters that would kill a bubonic-plague bacillus. They have never been know to fight, or even faintly struggle. I guess when're a crappie, you figure it's no use anyway. One thing is as bad as the another. They're just down there in the soup. No one quite knows what they eat, if anything, but everyone is fishing for them. At two in the morning.

Each boat contains a minimum of nine guys and fourteen cases of beer. And once in a while, in the darkness, is heard the sound of a buy falling over backward into the slime: SSSSGKUNK

"Oh! Ah! Help, help! A piteous cry in the darkness. Another voice;

"Hey, for God's sake, Charlie's fallen in again! Grab the oar!"

And then it slowly dies down. Charlie is hauled out of the goo and is lying on the bottom of the boat, urping up dead lizards and Atlas Prager. Peace reigns again."

Scenes from the movie A Christmas Story;