Book Review: Demons in the Spring by Joe Meno (2008)

Demons in the Spring by Joe Meno was a finalist for the Story Prize thanks to this short story collection.  The judges noted,

“In lesser hands, these unconventional forms and outlandish leaps of imagination would feel like empty concepts, but Meno fills each of these stories to the brim with heart. There is true emotion hiding behind every trick mirror, and it comes across in spades. As I finished each story, I found myself looking forward to the next, wondering what Meno would surprise me with…what sets this collection apart, and moved me the most, was that his characters consistently choose hope over despair…and proves, as in his story, ‘The Architecture of the Moon,’ that human connection can be the small light used to illuminate a great darkness.”

This covers Meno pretty well—he’s a Romantic writer, willing to bend the rules and let people turn into clouds or the moon to stop working.  He does “brim with heart,” but shows the burdens that such a life can bring, as he does in the story “Oceanland”.

In that story, which is a quirky re-casting of the Prodigal Son, Barry plays the older CPA brother who has always followed the rules in life.  His younger brother Jack is a guitar hero who gets high and opens the family’s marine attraction when the feeling is right.  But the father has seen fit to let Jack run the show and Barry must suffer beneath his ineptitude.

At one point Barry’s wife diagnoses the problem: “You have to figure out how to be happy in a world that isn’t as good as you think it should be.” It’s a brilliant line that also could apply to Jonathan in Meno’s most recent effort, The Great Perhaps.

Siblings are an interesting theme in this collection.  The story “The Unabomber and My Brother” traces the life of the narrator’s brother Alan against the life of Ted Kaczynski.  It has a broad scope with quick passages of time as Alan gradually self-destructs.  It culminates in the moral dilemma: will the narrator betray his own brother as Kaczynski’s did and take him to a home for help.

Another story that deals with sibling betrayal is “Get Well, Seymour!” where the narrator is supposed to defend his sister against a name caller.  But he is smitten by the girl and chooses his own self-interest over his sister.

Other standout stories:

• “The Sound Before the End of the World”:  We see Ron’s life gradually fall apart. One by one his wife and kids abandon him, and all he has to rely on is the KISS army, a group dedicated to all things KISS.  They meet in full costume and Ron even once threatens his daughter’s date that he could kill him and the coroner would cover for him because both are in the KISS army.  Meno deftly shows the depth of Ron’s fall when he learns that KISS drummer has left.  The simple detail reveals the “end of the world” has come for Ron.
• “People are Becoming Clouds”: As the title suggests, John’s wife Eleanor becomes a cloud, often at inconvenient moments.  It’s funny and terribly sad at the same time.  Eventually Meno lands another perfect line: “Would I still love my wife so badly if she wasn’t so impossible to claim?”  And the final three paragraphs of this story are pitch perfect.

Other Meno works:

• The Great Perhaps
• Hairstyles of the Damned
• The Boy Detective Fails

 

Book Review: Zeitoun by Dave Eggers (2009)

In Zeitoun Dave Eggers explores the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans through the eyes of the Zeitoun family, sort of like the way his novel What is the What looked at the Lost Boys and their saga.  Unlike that novel, Eggers chooses non-fiction here, and it works much better.  Where What is the What sometimes got bogged down in the present and never really blurred the line of fact of fiction, Zeitoun hums along briskly sweeping readers up in an incredible story.

In the notes following the story, Eggers recalls how his group Voice of Witness was gathering oral histories of Katrina and that Zeitoun participated. Eggers saw more to this story and he was right.

The book’s opening section occurs days before Katrina arrives, chronicling the typical, hectic life of the Zeitoun family who run a renovation business and own a variety of properties in New Orleans. Eggers establishes the back story of Zeitoun, his wife Kathy¸ and their children.  This is the slowest part of the book, but the foundation laid here helps account for the payoff in section three.

Section two focuses on the hurricane’s arrival. Kathy leaves town with the kids but Zeitoun stays in order to take care of their properties and to help staunch any damage to their home. He is one of those who inexplicably ignore all of the mandatory evacuations, but in Eggers’s hands the decision seems logical and sane.

This section is exciting as Zeitoun canoes around the town helping those left stranded, including some dogs he becomes attached to. But as time goes on, it becomes apparent that Zeitoun is ill-prepared to stay as long as the storm will require and chaos begins to descend on the city.  Again, Eggers does a good job of showing the ambiguity of the source of the chaos—is it local looters or is it guns-for-hire by the government who don’t know or understand the local culture?

This sets up section three, where Zeitoun finds himself detained on suspicions of looting and sent to a Guantanamo Bay-type facility. That he is of Syrian descent and a Muslim suddenly matters and the book takes on a new dimension as Zeitoun’s future is, for the first time, held in someone else’s hands.

Eggers masterfully connects the dots between September 11 and the post-Katrina round-ups, showing how FEMA and Homeland Security worked together to prevent random terrorism but in the process wrecked the lives of good people like the Zeitouns.  Their story is a tragedy, one of many, and Eggers gives voice to them all through this one incident.

The book gives resources to learn more about the various elements of this story, and more info. can be found here:

• The Zeitoun Foundation
• Eggers interview about the book
• Zeitoun interview with Journey into America

 

Book Review: The Great Perhaps by Joe Meno (2009)

The two epigrams for The Great Perhaps by Joe Meno establish the book’s two great themes. First, Kurt Vonnegut: “One of the great American tragedies is to have participated in a just war.”

Set against the backdrop of the Bush/Kerry election season Meno explores the idea of war and conflict by looking at the Casper family.  The father, Jonathan, is obsessed with finding a prehistoric squid. The mother, Madeline, can’t understand why her research pigeons are brutalizing each other. The oldest daughter, Amelia, wants to a make a statement against capitalism with her history project. The youngest, Thisbe, wants God to heal her family. And their grandfather, Henry, is slowly discarding memories one at a time and longs to escape the nursing home.

In an interview with Edan Lepucki at The Millions, Meno said, “What becomes apparent is how lonely they are in each other’s company, because they’re all failing to see how none of those perspectives are mutually exclusive, and how we need all of those ways of understanding to make sense of the complexities of the world.”

Each character is sympathetically rendered, though it’s clear that Meno has no love for the Bushies or for Thisbe’s faith (which is why it’s really the crudest cliché in the book—her prayers are painful and seem more a way to ridicule her than to consider her heart).

Meno said, “I realized the book was about complexity, and the need for it, and how terrified we, as Americans, seemed to have become of anything complicated or uncertain.”

It’s especially through Madeline and Amelia that the frustration with the Iraq war and its presentation to the public that Meno’s voice comes through.

Madeline thinks,
“When did we get so used to always having to fight somebody? When did we get so used to the idea of war? How come no one’s really talking about how terrible this idea really is? How come no one’s asking any questions? And how come there are no protests? How come there’s no rationing? No rubber drives? How did war become such a distant, everyday thing?…How come my own girls aren’t more upset by what’s happening? Why doesn’t it seem more important to anybody? And how come no one’s affected by anything like they used to be?”

This shows why Meno’s so clever—it’s about the war, but it’s also really not about the war.  The war only revealed the bigger questions about our humanity and where we are as a culture today.  Amelia’s frustration with her peers and what happens when she writes a controversial newspaper article help underscore the problem of apathy and the status quo.

Contrast this sort of distance with Henry, Jonathan’s father who helped design the F-4 Phantom, watching a bombing on TV: “…all Henry can do is sit there on his sofa, thousands and thousands of miles away and begin to weep, quietly, regretfully, without surprise. His empty hands reach out toward the absolute distance of the television screen.”

Eventually all of the characters (who are followed in third person limited point of view in rotating chapters) and their conflicts and flaws intersect and are united through cloud imagery.

Meno on the cloud as his symbol of the necessity of war:

“I used a similar image – a cloud – which is also part of the natural world, and is also pretty impossible to avoid. The other thing about the cloud is that it’s amorphous, ever-changing, unclear, which speaks directly to the way all of the characters see the world in which they’re living. To me, that’s what’s necessary or beautiful about the image: they’re the physical manifestation of the idea of uncertainty or complexity.”

And as Meno did in books like The Boy Detective Fails and Hairstyles of the Damned, he effectively captures the lostness of life and the baby steps we take toward redemption when we get far enough gone.

That takes us to the second epigram, from Thornton Wilder: “Where there is an unknowable, there is a promise.”

Each character is driven by an unknowable, and Meno is great at allowing the unexplainable to have space in his worlds.  Whether it’s the cloud that Madeline can’t shake, Thisbe’s flying episodes, or the other-worldly squid that Jonathan chases, we see in their unattainable longings some of our own hopes.  So much so that by the novel’s climax with Henry, we will them to fly.  Perhaps…

 

Book Review: Hairstyles of the Damned by Joe Meno (2004)

Before Joe Meno’s coming of age novel Hairstyles of the Damned begins, the now somewhat famous acknowledgements page reads: “You suck it: Judith Regan. And all you other bad publishing corporations. Be ready, the end is nigh.”  It’s a sort of middle finger to the publishing world that he says won’t publish “riskier material,” and it sets the tone for anti-authority world that the novel inhabits.

While Meno’s The Boy Detective Fails looks at growing up in a backwards kind of way, through the eyes of a grown up just released from an institution a la Rip Van Winkle, this novel is immersed in the teen culture of Chicago in 1990.  More specifically, Meno targets some misfits, Brian and Gretchen and their acquaintances, who identify with their mix tapes and music.  If it sounds like High Fidelity, it’s not.  Nick Hornby was writing more about arrested adolescence and getting over the hump of adulthood.  Meno targets Brian’s junior year when his parents are on the outs, his dad is sleeping in the basement, and everything else in the world is in flux.

Then we watch as Brian evolves, and this is Meno’s genius.  He’s able to show how going from listening to The Smiths to The Misfits marks a major shift in Brian’s life.  He’s able to make a scene where Brian decides to shave Brian Bosworth stripes into his head climactic.  Meno gets the concrete details right; he understands that the random, angsty actions of youth are born out of inner confusion and he lets it  happen perfectly awkwardly as life happens.  He doesn’t force psychological turning points, but lets the bigness of the problems and questions overwhelm.

The voice of Brian as narrator works.  At times the “like’s” are grating, and at times the f-word is overdone.  But the voice is authentic and not a Holden Caulfield imitation.  Quite the opposite, really.  Where Caulfield is cynical and self-righteous, Brian is geeky and too self-deprecating.  We root for him.  All he wants is to belong, and most of the scenes in the book are united in that theme–we see people isolated and the resulting behaviors that range from violence to others to self-sabotage.

The novel is structured anecdotally over the course of the year with no true plotline other than Brian’s friendship with Gretchen, which is a memorable one.  Some of the funnier parts are the artifacts that Meno includes, like Brian’s mix tape lists, his class notes, and note from Mike about making out with girls.  Meno also utilizes a double-voice structure in two or three spots for fun effect.

Like Boy Detective Fails, this book knows how to walk the fine line of having something to say and not taking itself too seriously.

In the end, Meno gets a lot right.  And looking at his comments for Regan from five years ago, it’s fair to say that he was right about that, too.

 

Book Review: The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown (2009)

It’s hard to know where to begin talking about a Dan Brown book.  There is the onslaught of PR that comes before the book’s release (secured by video camera and guards), the bizarre guesswork about the release date (9/15/09), and the people convinced he is just wrong, about so much:

• Literary offenses:  Tom Chivers and The Telegraph spotlight Dan Brown’s “20 worst sentences”
• Cultural offenses: Slate’s David Plotz writes that Brown gets everything “awesomely wrong” about the nation’s capital
• Historical offenses: The Telegraph rakes Brown over the coals with “50 factual errors”

This is not to mention religious offenses, certain to come from various Christian or Masonic groups, the two groups primarily dealt with in this novel.

So, the Brown book has to be taken for what it is rather than what it isn’t.  It’s a “thriller” in genre and so should be judged accordingly.  And this is why the book just isn’t as good as The DaVinci Code or Angels and Demons.

The Lost Symbol follows Robert Langdon as he tries to unpuzzle where the Masons have hidden The Lost Word that will unlock the wisdom of the ages.  The problem this novel has is that Brown has really limited the scope—we follow Langdon and his adversary, we follow one CIA security officer and one researcher.  The bigger web that this secret society casts is never as fully actualized as the conspiracies in his other novels. 

The stakes just don’t seem very high—at one point it could be boiled to this: Langdon must prevent a video clip from being uploaded to YouTube. 

Part of this has to do with Brown’s apparent love for the Masons and all they represent—he goes out of his way to build understanding for their rituals and worldviews.

The novel’s basic philosophical premise seems to be that Masons are the good guys, a group dedicated to protecting ancient wisdom that allows us to each become gods.  Brown’s fawns over their open-minded pluralism and sees in them an answer to reconciling all faiths—Christian, Buddhist, Islam, Jewish, etc.  These are all merely pointing to the same end, a God who would empower each of us.  To get there, Brown liberally quotes various leaders from each group out of context to highlight peripheral similarities in language.  Never mind group’s claims to exclusivity or simple ways the various contradict one another.

But after establishing them as good the job becomes more difficult to make us care why their secrets get out.  If they’re so good and have such logical explanations for all activities, what is there to fear?

The pacing, like his other works, is brisk as it rotates points of view.  The symbolic puzzles are here as well, intertwined with historical DC venues.  But the book lacks the heart and ambition the other two had. 

If you like mysteries or puzzle-based books, look at The Boy Detective Fails by Joe Meno.  It has complex, round characters and personalizes some of the bigger questions that Brown dodges.

Additional Dan Brown oddities:

• A making of the book, literally the way they made the book.
• Good Morning America’s interview, who spent time searching some of the sites referenced in the book
• Brown’s own willingness to feed the fire with “bizarre facts” and a “symbol quest”
• Slate has a (satirical) interactive Dan Brown sequel generator

 

Book Review: The Boy Detective Fails by Joe Meno (2006)

In The Boy Detective Fails by Joe Meno, the boy detective is Billy Argo, supernaturally gifted to solve crimes.  It’s a blessing and a curse.  It sounds like a kid’s story, and in many ways it is.  Meno includes secret clues, a decoder thingy in the jacket flap, and a variety of spooks (secret codes are here). But the real mystery is how Meno makes adults feel like kids reading it, but elevates the stories of the kids to the place where it’s all of our stories—fear and hope, loneliness and love.

Argo’s story is sad. He has this special gift, but his sister commits suicide and he lands in an institution to recover. He works as a hair replacement salesman, which Meno manages to tie into the book’s larger themes.

The book’s tone reminds me of Tony Earley’s works Jim the Boy and The Bluest Star—both writers look unflinchingly at youth and the real questions and anxieties raised by the uncertainties of age. Both writers are honest about the bigness of the problems of youth.

In other ways there are good connections to fictional characters like Jonathan Safran Foer’s Oskar Schell or Jonathan Wray’s Lowboy.  Like Schell, Argo is funny, unpretentious, and is experiencing a self-imposed isolation because of his loss. Their shared question is whether it’s worth it to risk being hurt for the rewards love offers. Billy, who can solve any riddle, admits, “Love is one of the questions I do not even know how to begin to answer” (189).  Later the masked woman Margaret spells out the problem of love—“The world must come to understand that love is chaos” (207).  This chaos results in fear and risk, shown when Oskar visits the shrink toward the end of Extremely Loud.

Like Lowboy, he blurs the lines of reality and bends genre in unexpected ways.

Part of the novel’s background is that forces of evil have conspired (at a funny conference, showing Meno’s satirical skills at work) to rid the world of buildings that don’t have right angles.  In that Meno finds metaphor:  “We live in a town that is disappearing, and worse, like the buildings, our hope is gone and we are no longer surprised by anything” (35).  This loss of hope underpins Billy’s predicament—without his sister Caroline he longer believes.  He feels that evil has won.

“It is the strain of walking around the world…and not knowing who might want to destroy you, who might like to fill your heart with poison, who might rob you and stab you, who might stand above you in the dark with a tarantula. In the end, it is the invisibility of those who might really hate you that makes him so sad” (114).

Meno depicts the problem of evil literally and uses it to launch into more metaphysical questions.  The klepto Penny Maple: “Do you think there’s any way for people to stop themselves from doing bad things?” (218).  It’s a simple and heart-breaking question: can people change?  If so, why can’t I seem to?  Both Penny and Billy are stuck.  In Caroline’s last diary entry she asks “how can anyone in the world believe in good anymore?” (256).

One of the novel’s best passages seems to let Meno’s voice come through to answer this question:

“Why is mystery so terrifying to us as adults? Is it because our worlds have become worlds of routine and safety and order the older we’ve grown? Is it because we have learned the answer to everything and that answer is that there is never a secret passageway, a hidden treasure, or a note written in code to save us from our darkest moments? Why are we struggling so hard against believing there is a world we don’t know? Is it more frightening to accept our lives as they are than it is to entertain a fantasy of hope” (129-130).

As much as anything this novel seeks to surprise, to renew the mystery of reading, to take the expected and wrinkle it.  By the time Meno urges readers to write their names in the book it would take a true cynic to stay the pen.

House Theater of Chicago short film of Boy Detective:

 

Book Review: Woodsburner by John Pipkin (2009)

John Pipkin’s debut novel, Woodsburner, is built on the intriguing historical event of Henry David Thoreau accidentally setting fire to 300 acres of Concord woods in 1844. Though one of the novel’s main characters is Thoreau, it is actually the lives of other townspeople who take center stage and really steal the show.

The novel circulates among a variety of third person perspectives, each linked together by their observations of the oncoming fire.  In real time the novel spans less than a day, but with each new character Pipkin brings their history and back story to bear, allowing him to look at the big question of what role fate and chance plays in a man’s life.

When Thoreau reflects on his brother’s death, he says, “It is clear to him that one man’s death erases not only that man’s possibilities but all the possibilities that might have ensued from those, like the wake of a boat slicing through waves that might otherwise have reached the shore. Every man lives among the deaths of all who came before” (174).

It’s this interconnectedness that Pipkin shows, whether through bookseller Eliott Calvert selling pencils made by Thoreau’s father or selling books to Emma, Oddmund Hus’s secret love. Oddmund is the best character, one deserving of an entire book.  He is Thoreau before Thoreau is, living alone in the woods before his love for Emma leads him to take work with her husband so he can be nearby.  His arrival to America is stunning and tragic, and his story is what Pipkin is really about—the various people who came to America to start over and get away from some Old World, whether literal, internal, or figurative.  In the end, Thoreau mistakenly calls him Young America, and Oddmund’s transformation, spurred by the fire, does give hope.

The novel also follows the creepy preacher man Caleb Dowdy, who sort of imitates Jonathan Edwards through a 21^st century lens that tends to mock such views.  His visitation by Anezka and Zalenka is haunting.

And Calvert’s story is also an American one—rather than religion he represents the tension between art and commerce as a struggling playwright and bookstore owner.  It’s hard not read some of today’s bookselling woes into his plight, as Calvert eventually decides to add a coffeehouse to his business since books alone can’t keep his wife in the lifestyle she demands.

Thoreau himself is the least interesting, perhaps because Pipkin limited himself to historical events in that case.  But he overthinks, sometimes arriving at pithy aphorisms in unrealistic ways.  He is flawed and earnest, though, so somewhat forgivable.

The book was also recently nominated for the First Novel Prize from the Center for Fiction.

• Boston Globe review
• CS Monitor review
• NYT review

Pipkin interview:

 

Book lists and prize lists

The Millions is compiling a list of the millennium’s best fiction so far–they are through #11 today

Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize list (winner Nov. 9)

The Man Booker short list (England et al) is out (including Coetzee’s newest)–prize to be announced October 6; the site hosts interviews with each author

The 2009 Giller Prize long list (Canada)  is out (short list Oct 6, winner Nov. 10); author videos available at the prize site; shadow jury here

MacArthur genius grant winners

Random post: Dan Brown by the numbers at Media Bistro

 

Book Review: Now and Then by Frederick Buechner (1983)

In 1983 Frederick Buechner was arguably at the height of his literary career—two years removed from a Pulitzer nomination for the visionary Godric, one year removed from his NYT-lauded memoir The Sacred Journey, and his chronicles of Leo Bebb’s adventures were still fresh. It’s refreshing when looking back the second of his memoirs, Now and Then, to glimpse the humanity that Buechner wore so humbly and openly.

The book details his life from his decision to enter seminary (and briefly halt a promising writing career) to what was then the present.  He primarily focuses on some of his time teaching religion at Exeter and some of the sources for his popular novels.

Rather than an exhaustive, self-aggrandizing approach, Buechner offers only 100 pages, noting that sometimes it’s the rare moment that seems insignificant at the time that turns out to be most significant.  So the book is structured around such remembrances.

In 1982 writer Reynolds Price wrote, “Spiritual autobiography in general has suffered from too much spirituality and too little biography (Augustine’s ”Confessions,” for instance, confess far too little and sermonize too much); it is Buechner’s big strength that he is so lucidly particular.”

Buechner tosses off gentle, economical wisdoms in poetic observations:

• “I have always believed it is not so much their subjects that the great teachers teach as it is themselves” (12).
• On why love in Christianity is different than love in Buddhism: “…pain is so much a part of the love that the love would be vastly diminished, unrecognizable, without it” (56).
• On a former professor: “His faith was not a seamless garment but a ragged garment with the seams showing, the tears showing, a garment he clutched about him like a man in a storm” (16).

He also takes on some theological issues, like the differences between Christianity and Buddhism and the honest approach to God that some like Camus and Sartre and Kierkegaard took though he differs with their take.

His heart is for taking an honest assessment of the self and for dropping the phony language that sometimes surrounds discussions of faith.  Thankfully, because we beautiful insights like this one:

“…in the long run what is good about religion is playing the way a child plays at being grown up until he finds that being grown up is just another way of playing and thereby starts to grow up himself. Maybe what is good about religion is playing that the Kingdom will come, until—in the joy of your playing, the hope and rhythm and comradeship and poignance and mystery of it—you start see that the playing is itself the first-fruits of the Kingdom’s coming and of God’s presence within us and among us” (73).

Even when Buechner is most blunt, the tone feels like preaching and more like someone trying to help you out. “There is no event so commonplace but that God is present within it, always hiddenly, always leaving you room to recognize him or not to recognize him, but all the more fascinatingly because of that, all the more compellingly and hauntingly…listen to your life…in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace” (87).

Sadly, Buechner’s perch atop the literary world was precarious and short-lived.  He continues to publish, Yellow Leaves released in 2008, and to be studied, but his novels were not recognized again as Godric was.  Beuchner seemed keen to this in the closing pages of Now and Then, noting that his books “never reach as wide a public as I would like—too religious for secular readers, I suspect, and too secular for religious ones” (108). Both crowds would benefit from more  Buechner.

Buechner in 2002 discusses vocation:

 

Book Review: The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexander Dumas (1844)

The Count of Monte Cristo is, as Robert Wilson describes in the Signet Classic Introduction, a melodramatic story full of unlikely and unrealistically fortuitous plot twists. But it’s those plot twists and the way that they satisfy Edmond Dantes’ quest for revenge that allow readers to forgive Dumas and keep coming back to this French classic. If things didn’t work out so neatly for Dantes, if is injustice were not in some way remedied, I’d venture to say that people wouldn’t keep coming back. It is a Romantic adventure in every sense of the word—points of lowest misery and highest ecstasy, overblown dialogue and fantasies between lovers, and an idealistic picture of how the world could be.

Most probably have some idea of the plot—Dantes is falsely imprisoned because of the envy of two friends (one political, one over love interests) on the day he is to be married to his one true love. He languishes for 14 years in prison, and his escape his very exciting. While there a wise old man schools him and points him toward a buried treasure that Dantes uses to build himself a new life as the Count of Monte Cristo. C. Max Magee said, “Dumas’ account of Dantes time in prison is thrilling both for its emotional weight and for the ingenious plans that Dantes and Faria concoct.” Then he proceeds to hunt down the people responsible for his lost life and love and gradually ruin their lives. He does not do it as an action movie of today would, but methodically gets to know the people, their families, and uses their own weaknesses to visit doom upon them.

What’s interesting is the amount of sympathy Dumas creates for Dantes during this quest. In contrast to American Romantics like Melville and Hawthorne, Dumas uses vengeance as a way for Dumas to regain his righteousness. Captain Ahab, on the other hand, is gradually destroyed by his obsession for revenge. Likewise, Roger Chillingworth in The Scarlet Letter is undone by the need for revenge, and his circumstances are not unlike Dantes’.

Chillingworth also loses his lover, though it’s worth noting that they never had the chemistry of Dantes and Mercedes. Still, there is not sympathy for Chillingworth, partially because he is a man of learning and he seems intent on destroying Hester and her lover. But Dantes becomes a man of learning and uses his learning to the same end. Perhaps the primary differences are slight, but they are significant. Dantes was always a Romantic, an idealist, while Chillingworth is depicted as a scientist or psychologist trying to meddle with what nature has made right. Dantes, on the other hand, believes he is God’s tool and is participating in something already predetermined. Author Mark Sarvas puts it this way: “Dantès essentially lets his foes undo themselves – he merely lays temptation in their way, and their natures, deformed by greed, by lust, by ambition, lead them headlong into ruin.”

The other difference is that Chillingworth is completely consumed by revenge, shown in his digression to a fiend incapable of seeing people in their humanity. Dantes goes to this line but Mercedes backs him down from it. He is true to her above and beyond his personal need to exact revenge. Chillingworth, though, has no higher motive because he doesn’t truly love Hester. He seeks to avenge himself while Dantes is willing to bend.

The Shawshank Redemption makes significant nods to Monte Cristo, as Andy Dufresne’s character experiences prison on false grounds. Dufresne, though, has some real internal guilt to work through and he spends time in the role of counselor and educator that Dantes does not.

Trailer from the 2002 adaptation of The Count of Monte Cristo: