The Monkey King's Used Primate Emporium and Book Reviews

previous - next - random review

Richard Russo, �Mohawk�

Started July 15 � Finished July 20, 2004; 419 pages. Posted 21 September 2004

Sigh.

Well, after reading Nobody�s Fool and loving it as much as I did, I guess I shouldn�t be surprised that when I finally got around to reading another novel by him, I didn�t care for it nearly as much.

But man, I really wanted to.

Okay, Danny and The Girlfriend read the book for Nobody�s Fool, and Scott saw the movie. So what I say about this will make sense to those three. Sorry to everybody else. You should read more. Or at least see more films.

Mohawk has a cast of characters, most of them slightly eccentric, living in a small town in New York. The majority of inter-workings between these characters occur at the local diner. Among the recurring characters there is a shy, awkward boy, an idiot man-child, a semi-dumb cop, a frisky, sprightly old lady, and an older gentleman who spends the majority of his time trying to remain fiercely independent, who eventually has to admit he needs help from the rest of the town.

Does this sound familiar to you three?

In the same way that Nobody�s Fool followed a slice-of-life style of format without ever reaching a central point, so does this book. But Mohawk is Russo�s first novel, and in the same way that Evil Dead 2 is a reworking of the first film with a bigger budget, I think the same thing happened here. Maybe I�m wrong. Maybe every Russo book consists of a small New York town filled with eccentrics who don�t really do anything.

If it were as skillfully done as Nobody�s Fool, I wouldn�t mind. But the scenes painted here weren�t nearly as endearing or as interesting, and I couldn�t get past the similarities between the two books. Worse, Russo is a very visual writer, so visual that when faced with the familiarity factor, I was positive that I had seen this story unfurled in some film. I checked various databases to see if was indeed made into a movie, and came up with nothing. I still don�t believe that I�m wrong. It�s just not important enough to me to prove myself right.

But speaking of familiarity factors, I got the tickets to Hawaii last week. Anybody who has read this consistently for the past two and a half years knows that something always goes wrong when I get tickets to Hawaii. In 2002 it was a name misspelling on a ticket that kept me in an airport for 24 hours. Last year, the computer at work decided to change my dates for my flight for no discernable reason.

Time for things to go wrong again.

My sister, in an act of unexpected coolness, has decided to get married. Not that getting married in itself is cool, but she has decided to get married on September 11. I asked her if she would get a two-tiered cake.

She�s not that cool.

But she also is going on a month-long honeymoon, and my father has volunteered to come down from Hawaii and housesit for her while she is gone. In the meantime, he decided that he�s tired of the isolation of Kawa�i and turned in the paperwork to transfer to move to new accommodations on Oahu.

I used to live in Oahu. Frankly, I�m glad that he�s moving there, as that means when I decide to visit, there will actually be things that I can do at night besides read a buttload of books. But Oahu is basically a big tourist city. I found it to be like San Francisco, only warmer and surrounded by water. It�s a big touristy claptrap of an island. Kaua�i, on the other hand, is what you expect when you think about Hawai�i.

Huge unspoiled sections of mountains AND beaches. Trees and foliage everywhere. Long stretches of road where there are no houses or buildings, and places where you can go and see not another person for hours. Total seclusion.

And for all the times that I�ve visited, I�ve never been laid in Hawai�i.

This needs to change.

So my girlfriend and I just finished editing a textbook and workbook for an instructor at De Anza. We just got a check for $500 each. If I�m gonna bring a girlfriend to Hawai�i, I�m going to take her to Kaua�i. I called my dad to see if this was feasible.

My father sounded reluctant, as he had everything packed away and was ready to move at a moment�s notice. He had been approved for the move, and was now only waiting for a place to open up that he could take over. This would most likely happen before he got back form house sitting for my sister. If we were going to make it to Kaua�i one last time, we would need to come before the wedding. He knew about how I felt about the two islands, and finally said that I should find tickets, and find them quickly.

Within two weeks we had our tickets and I called him back. I told him we were coming on the 24th of August, but because of the Labor Day holiday, the only tickets we could get that were reasonable priced had us staying until September 9th.

�Oh,� he said. �Well, I got a place in Oahu. I�m supposed to move there on the 25th.�

Oh, goddamn it.

We had already purchased the tickets, for when I waited just one day between a price quote and actually purchasing the tickets for a different time period, the price soared up $100 for each ticket.

�Well,� I said, �we can get a tent, I suppose, and camp for the time we�re there, I guess.�

�You could,� he replied, �but we just had hurricane season, and we had one. Everything is pretty wet right now.�

Oh, goddamn it.

We�ve worked out a plan of sorts. We�re showing up on the 24th. He�s going to pick us up from the airport in another rent-a-wreck. On the day we get there, we�re supposed to hit up the department of parks and recreation and get permits to camp. The next day, we�ll drop my father off at the airport, whereupon he�ll move permanently to Oahu. His rent is paid through the 1st, so we�re going to squat in his empty apartment until then. From there, we�ll go from campsite to campsite, as each one will only let you stay for a maximum of three to four days. We�ll also hit up the only hostel on the island in between, so that we can get actual showers.

It�ll be a little dicey, especially as the last car didn�t have any locks that worked. But I don�t care. I�m going back to Kaua�i one last time. I�m going to swim with the turtles. I�m going read on the sandy warm beaches. And I�m going to have sex on the beach.

And I�m not talking about the drink.


Rating: Worth working in a used bookstore and getting for cheap.

previous - next - random review