Customer Reviews

Jack London in Paradise: A Novel

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I'm a Jack London fan. This novel held my interest from beginning to end, and I found it a fascinating evocation of his life and times. It thought it was well-written. I had two problems with it. The first is that the storyline doesn't satisfy. Perhaps the great compliment I can pay Malmont is to say that it is a fault he shares with Jack London himself, who is at his best in his short stories. The second is the problem one always has with fictionalized biography: what's true and what isn't? Now, personally, I have always felt that it would be dramatically right if Jack had burned down Wolf House himself, one day when the White Logic was on him, so it pleased me when he does so in the book. But one still wishes for an afterword detailing what parts of the novel have a legitimate biographical basis and which are the author's imagination. I fear I might be absorbing misleading facts along with the colorful depiction of time, place, and personality.

How I so much wanted to love this book. I plowed through it, hoping that it would do justice to the life of such a great man! But it was not meant to be. I was hoping that the author would create a story larger than life, as Charles Gorham did for Honore Balzac in his novel "Wine of Life." "Wine of Life," a novel about Balzac, enlivened the life of Balzac to the point that one could almost believe that the author may have been the reincarnation of Balzac himself. But no, alas, this novel of Jack London was a dismal failure.

Paul Malmont's first book, The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril, was a throwback pulp romp filled with pulse-quickening adventure and an unlikely history lesson on early genre writers. With his new book, Malmont shifts gears and gives us a beautifully written fictional account of the last days of Jack London, a writer who has long been hard to pin-down by critics. We begin by looking through the eyes of Jack's associate, a womanizing film mogul who's hit the wall. The second part of the book shifts to concentrate on Jack and his relationships with his wife as well as his adopted locale and culture, Hawaii. Malmont's account of the relationship between Jack and his wife is nuanced and complicated and I think stands out as the strong point in a very good story. The settings and descriptions of Jack's take on Hawaii and its people are absolutely haunting. I found myself caught up in this man's world well beyond what I expected when I picked up the book for a quick read. Anyone who wants to get into the head of one of America's arguably greatest and definitely most controversial writers should pick this book up.

If you were a fan of The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril then there's a lot to love here as well. At it's core both novels transcend their pulp trappings and become literature in their own right by virtue of their explorations of masculine American myth-making. There's also an attractive self-awareness and post-modern "meta" element in that each novel is a writer writing about writers.

Jack London in Paradise is an open love-letter to one of America's first literary giants (warts and all), the birth of Hollywood (warts and all), and perhaps surprisingly Hawaii (truth and fiction) as well. Malmont's skill as a visual writer is apparent throughout the book whether he's describing gorgeous vistas, people changed by success and failure, or deeply romantic scenes intersecting nautical chaos and the flicker of film. This is cinema on the page. Read it. Watch it.

Malmont gives us another historically rich adventure after his first runaway hit "The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril." In this second effort, Malmont digs into his characters - particularly Jack London, a writer we know best through his novels, but about whom I personally knew little about. London apparently spent a lot of time in Hawaii and the novel unfolds in this unique natural setting - many of my favorite passages brought out the inherent mystique that these islands hold for anyone who has been lucky enough to visit them. It's particularly nice to see Malmont growing into a more mature writer as his comfort with delving into his characters becomes evident. I'm personally attracted to novels with active plots as well as moments of introspection from the characters and Malmont seems to be carving out territory for himself in this regard. I'm looking forward to seeing what Malmont writes next.

Parts adventure, history, romance, mystery, drama, and travelogue, 'Jack London in Paradise' is a beautiful and sweeping novel. Malmont has cleverly constructed his work of fiction, drawing us in by slowly revealing his larger-than-life characters' intricate motivations through a backdrop of action and exotic locales. We become immersed in the their triumphs and tragedies, which are considerable to say the least. The richness of Malmont's historical detail and cinematic storytelling is irresistible and unforgettable.

This novel has been reviewed in USA Today and by newspaper critics from Indianapolis to Los Angeles, and it was a great comfort to me to find that I am not alone in my opinion that this novel sucks since the prior Amazon reviewers' praise this novel so much, it's as if they're reading a completely different text -- or perhaps are merely trying to spare their friend the tears that eventually will be shed when everyone comes to know this novel as a real stinker and time-waster.

The novel starts off with Hobart Bosworth, a character in real life as well as in fiction. He wants to make another movie from a Jack London story, as he has in the past, but he needs to get Jack London's agreement to write a story that will serve as a basis for the movie. Bosworth encounters failure, after failure, after failure in just trying to meet Jack London again. These failure-series take up the first third of the novel.

By the middle of the novel, nothing much has really happened, i.e., after reading 215 pages. Then suddenly Jack London is introduced and we're off with a new character. Hobart Bosworth doesn't come back until the author decides he needs another plot point. Meanwhile, we learn about Jack London in Hawaii (this is Paradise from the title), the history of Hawaii, the current state of Hawaii, London's interest in Jungian psychotherapy, his wife's present concerns for the state of London's health.

Do you want to learn more? Frankly, I didn't. Without much thought or struggle, London decides to write that story for Hobart, but he then goes fishing, goes diving, talks with his friends who are natives of Hawaii, seems to be falling sick mysteriously . .. . Where's the plot? What's the point of all of these tableaus? It's clear that Paul Malmont (not Mamon, as one newspaper critic named him) researched Jack London's life thoroughly, perhaps even enviously, but his research spreads across the pages as -- just research. The novel lacks living characters -- with one exception, London's wife, Charmian.

None of the critics who have reviewed this novel has ever addressed the end of the novel. I doubt they got that far. I couldn't myself force myself to keep reading fake dialogue ("Hobart laughed so hard he nearly spilled his drink and then he threw his arm around Jack and did spill a little. 'Finally!' he cried."), phony dialogue ("'Got an extra one of those?', Hobart asked [referring to a fishing pole], making both him and Charmian laugh.", stilted dialogue, more travelogue descriptions (seemingly for a brochure or for another Michener-like novel), more fictionalized interior divagations from the mind of Jack London (which made London seem, frighteningly, like a nutter). Enough!

This novel doesn't know where it's going; it doesn't know who it is supposed to be concerned about. Hawaii? Charmian, the wife? Hobart? London? (Don't say "All of the above," because to pull that off, making four characters main characters, a balance between drama and situation would have to have been made, and by the middle of the novel, the average reader knows she passed that station or possibility a long while back. Besides this novel has no drama.)