David Carkeet

With one foot in farce and the other in realism, Carkeet dissects a modern marriage from a dispassionate but never disinterested viewpoint. Jeremy Cook, a lovelorn Ph.D. linguist, accepts a job with the mysterious Pillow Agency (founder: Roy Pillow), which "embeds" researchers in troubled marriages to try to save them. Cook, armed with only the vaguest instructions, is duly sent to live with a thirty-something couple in St Louis. Are their troubles based in language? Not really, although they seem to have as much trouble communicating as any other couple, and Cook's analyses of their conversation patterns can be surprisingly spot-on. Over the course of a week, the root of their problem is given a name, Cook's own most pressing problem is solved, and things are looking tentatively hopeful for all of them. But the journey there is full of episodes both hilarious and tense.

I doubt I've read a funnier book that wasn't complete nonsense. The stage is set early with Cook's absurd miscommunications with the bizarre Roy Pillow, and Beth Wilson's two-word answer to the boilerplate question "Who usually initiates sex?" almost had me on the floor. Yet while the pace never flagged, it never became wearying, and everything wrapped up at the end in as satisfying a way as a good meal. While I can't agree with Carkeet's analysis of "The Horror" at the bottom of every troubled marriage, I root for the Wilsons, wish Cook the best, and wish I could find more books like this.… (mehr)

The Library of America's newest Mark Twain omnibus included a sketch from this book—an apparently reincarnated Mark Twain visiting the present-day offices of the Mark Twain Papers in California, where his manuscripts are stored—that I found brilliant, so I searched for it. I've read many volumes of Twain, things written for publication and things not, and I have a pretty good feel for his distinctive voice. Carkeet nails it. The parts of "I Been There Before" that are supposed to have been written by Twain—mostly letters—are completely convincing, and their turns of phrases and sly jokes even made me laugh aloud, the way Twain himself so often manages to catch me by surprise.

The plot is interesting, too, as Twain comes to earth in a way that's as much as surprise to him as to anyone else, making his way handily through 1980s America, always one step ahead of (and in some ways behind) the academic investigators trying to track him down. There is an unfortunate subplot about a confidence man who falls in with Twain, then impersonates him, that overshadows the story of Twain himself. Because the story is told at a remove (mostly through the voices of the researchers, and through Twain's letters and sketches, which only give fragments of his experiences), the confusion is amplified and what should be the best parts of the story are obscured. In fact, I was so frustrated by the increasing farce of the impersonation story and by the mental hoops through which the narrative forced me to jump that I put the book down, not far from the end, and didn't pick it up again for over a month.

Twain's private life was always the weakest element of my knowledge of him, so I was fascinated by the light shed on his relationships with his older brother Orion (pronounced OR-i-on; who knew?) and daughters Susy and Jean. Although it was a frustrating reading experience, its high points were very high indeed, and I'd go so far as to call it a must-read for any Twain fanatic.… (mehr)