Doddsie, who put propriety above everything else, had never forgotten nor forgiven Elias Renthal's reverberating fart on his exit from the Butterfield nearly eight years earlier, after he had been kicked out of the hallowed establishment by Laurance Van Degan, Lil Altemus's brother, whose reputation in the financial world Elias had sullied. (190)

You know: those people.

Dominick Dunne's Too Much Money is obviously terrible, and also really fantastic, just like his Vanity Fair columns back in the day. The plot is taken so directly from real life, it's a wonder he bothered to change the names, and as usual, Dunne makes an appearance as "Gus Bailey," his (barely) alter(ed) ego, mired in a slander lawsuit over his remarks about (totally not) Gary Condit and concerned that (definitely not) Lily Safra is having him followed by Mossad agents. The other subplots involve the customary thinly disguised cast of over-financed and under-employed characters, who have nothing to do but remarry, buy neckties, go to or give luncheons where the flowers cost forty thousand dollars, and bite one another's backs — and, as in Dunne's non-fiction writing, the prose does little to distinguish, well, anything, starting with itself. Paragraphs frequently devolve into the novelistic equivalent of catalog captions (for the number of mentions their men's livery gets, Turnbull & Asser presumably paid Dunne's entire advance); incidents and appositives get repeated so often, the reader might wonder if it's a send-up:

[Elias Renthal] loathed Gus. He was still livid that Gus had put on a television show about Elias's case just at the time Elias was getting ready to leave prison, bringing the whole thing up again, after most people had forgotten about it after Elias's seven years of incarceration, or so Elias liked to believe. (182-3)

Yes, we know Renthal is livid about that — because Dunne mentions it as an aside in almost every scene in which Renthal and Gus Bailey share a room. Maybe he'd be less livid if the author trusted us to remember a descriptor he's already used 163 times? It's so consistent and so stilted that, for the first hundred pages, it seemed almost intentional; it reminded me of the way Homer began so many chapters of The Odyssey with "rosy-fingered Dawn," or Angela Chase calling Jordan Catalano "Jordan Catalano." But those references were overtaken by a déjà vu, a memory of Bret Easton Ellis having to explain that the label-whore mix-tape chapters of American Psycho were a parody.

But I also remember thinking that Ellis needn't have bothered — that the affectless shallowness was fascinating on its own merits, and didn't have to comment on anything. Dunne's writing was compelling, if not exactly "good," in a similar way; his unironic attention to fabrics and flowers and the relative standing of second wives let him turn sticky gossip, unimportant/self-important one-percenter probz, into ripping yarns. Did we need to know that much about Lily Safra, any of us working folk? Of course not. But it's kind of amazing that Dunne could make us care, to an extent, and that Dunne used Too Much Money to put a beyond-the-grave thumb in her eye.

The book is a super-fast read, soapy and snarky and populated by characters who, incredibly, use words like "miffed" and "besotted" in conversation with their servants. The dependably self-aggrandizing and clonky prose is helped by the fact that the prose is not even a little bit of the point, and you have to respect Dunne for "doing him" until the end. If nothing else, an evening with Too Much Money will fill you with relief — that you have too little money to care about the social sorrows of the super-rich.

Institutions are a strange mix of the mass and the individual. They abstract. They behave according to a set of rules that substitute both for individual judgments and for the emotional responses that occur whenever individuals interact. The act of creating an institution dehumanizes it, creates an arbitrary barrier between individuals. (299)

I haven't quite finished the book, and the passage above is one reason why I might choose not to continue. The deeper the reader gets into The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History, the harder author John M. Barry tries with the literary devices, and the more he strains to ensure that it's his prose that's epic, not just the subject. The repetition of "there was no time" on pp. 317-8 (and "this was still influenza, only influenza" prior to that) that aims to create an incantation of sorts, but merely slows down the narrative; the quotations that seem shoehorned in to little purpose (Eliot, p. 303); the goosing of facts with italics or "poetical" descriptors…these devices, unnecessary to hold the interest, begin to wear actively after a hundred or so pages, through which we have already sat patiently, waiting for the biographies of every scientist involved to be brought to bear. I appreciate the laying of that groundwork, in theory, but in practice, once people start dropping dead, you need to find the point and get to it with a quickness. A large part of what still fascinates us about the flu epidemic is the rapidity of its spread and destruction; the narrative should reflect that rapidity as best it can.

Alas, mixed in with compelling details like the parents begging local officials to put their son's body in a bulk-size macaroni box, and tantalizing mentions of the federal government's utter failure to respond (this area of investigation may come together later in the book; so far, it's organized in a front-loaded fashion that doesn't suit its place in the story), there's p. 219's episode of Someone's Been Reading Too Much Whitman.

Many of the dead were more boys than men, eighteen years old, nineteen years old, twenty years old, twenty-one years old, boys filled with their lithe youth and sly smiles.

…Um, what? Look, maybe Barry is an accomplished poet elsewhere in his writing life, but regardless, it's not what we picked up this book for. "Many of the dead were more boys than men, just 18 or 19 years old." Done. Next graf.

With all of that said, three things, the first being that once I noticed the purpling of the prose, I couldn't stop noticing it, but it may not bother other people, and if you haven't started the book yet, I don't think you should let my nitpickery stop you, because (second thing) in spite of the overwriting, it's exhaustively researched, and a fascinating story regardless of how it's told. And third, I am sympathetic to the tendency to overshare information in which one has immersed oneself; a number of friends have asked how my day is going, and found themselves ankles-deep in a torrent of non-essential historical arcana about Pomeranians. Barry's editor could perhaps have gripped the reins a bit tighter, but s/he may not have wanted to get in the way of details like, for example, how the flu epidemic was leveraged into anti-German sentiment.

Did anyone else find certain locutions bothersome, or did you not even notice them? What did you think of the structure of the book — did it take too long to get to the main portion of the epidemic, or were you fine with the pacing? Discuss.

(cue "I don't see what's so great about it" jokes)

Hey, remember everything that ISN'T the Oscars Death Race? Me neither! Awesome! …I'm so sorry about the protracted service interruption, guys. I've missed you, and all the fun things we used to do together, like collaborate on advice, make fun of Booker, admit to bygone crushes, and make up words. Let's hang out and read about millions of people dying. It'll be just like old times. But with more sputum.

Our next read-along book is John M. Barry's The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History. It's available in paperback, Kindle, and audio editions.

Thanks so much for your patience, and I'll open a comments thread Monday 12 March.

Plagues and Bible-thumpers hang on from our last poll, plus the Fug Girls, VJs, and a brick of a book about Nixon and Carter. Pick us out a good one!

William Poundstone is pretty good with a low-pH zinger. In Bigger Secrets, a book I've reread a hundred times thanks primarily to Poundstone's "…seriously?" prose, he gives this account of Scientology's handling of Hubbard's death:

Finally in 1986, the Scientology organization conceded that Hubbard was permanently indisposed. The word death was studiously avoided, but we were given to understand that Hubbard "no longer had need of the encumbrance of the physical identity we have known as L. Ron Hubbard," in the words of Scientology President Heber Jentzsch. (60-61)

So far, Inside Scientology is offering a similar experience: the sense, in prose, of a chef uncovering a dish, then standing back from it silently while it steams.

As I may have mentioned elsewhere, I'm listening to the book, so the experience is a bit different — starting with the fact that I consume it primarily in the car, so all the eye-rolling I do at L. Ron Hubbard's made-up words and kookoopants conceptions of our collective past (…a…mollusk? world? REALLY, NUTBAR?!), and Scientologists' credulity thereof, has nearly sent me off the road several times.

I haven't finished it yet — as of this writing, I've gotten to the part where that Jeff guy is trying to dodge the draft by taking over Scientology's graphic-design "org." So far, though, I've been impressed that what the introduction promised — as balanced a look as possible at the history and workings of Scientology — is pretty much delivered, not least because the even-toned presentation makes much of the man and his teachings look that much more ridiculous. (There is one spot where she stops just short of adding an acerbic "…for ONCE" to a sentence about how Hubbard did not write to the FBI to complain about something or other as he had 23,193 times in the past. Heh.) The narrator, Stephen Hoye, has an "I don't make the news, folks; I just report it" delivery that creates smug delight around each variation on the theme of "research failed to substantiate Hubbard's grandiose claims" — of which there are many. Hoye's rendition of the lead-up to the Saturday Evening Post's story on the Church, then Hubbard's childlike reaction to the author's contemptuous hit job (and the snippets from the hit job itself), is immensely entertaining. I also like the patronizing micro-pause he takes before each time he says "LRH." Because: barf.

I admire Hubbard's construction of the organization. He was clearly a megalomaniac, but the explanation of how the special terminology — how words no longer mean what they mean to "suppressive persons" — both makes converts feel special and privileged and effectively estranges them from outsiders is concisely insightful, and Hubbard's ability to capitalize on certain sore spots and anxieties, while not used for good in my opinion, is in fact an "ability." Reitman's refusal to break the authorial wall and wail "THIS IS THE SMURFIEST THING I EVER HEARD — 'A GIANT CLAM,' FOR FUCK'S SAKE" is really quite heroic, as I screamed that very thing to myself in the car last night about ten times and I doubt I could have resisted doing so in Reitman's shoes. (I have also screamed things like "MARRY SOMEONE YOUR OWN AGE, YOU BIGAMOUS DEADBEAT-DAD HOG FART" and "WHY DON'T YOU 'INTREPIDLY EXPLORE' A BEEHIVE, YOU LYING WEIRDO" and "PLEASE LEARN CRITICAL THINKING, NINETEEN-SIXTIES TWENTYSOMETHINGS, JESUS H. CHRIST.")

It's informative, it's obviously meticulously researched, and it's creeping me right out that searching for it on Google pops Scientology's own website up first. Nice SEO, thetans.

What about you guys? How's the writing from a reading (vs. listening) standpoint? Any disgusted muttering occasioned by the word "Dianeticists"? Anyone else giggle at the part where Hubbard is all, "Dear Navy, I wish to inform you that blah blah leaving the state, as surely you will give many shits about my whereabouts at all times," and the Navy was like, "Whatever, dude. Take care"?

Speaking of that, one last snippet from Poundstone on Hubbard's d'oh-stinguished naval career:

Off Oregon, Hubbard's ship engaged what they thought was a Japanese submarine. The navy thinks it was just a log. Hubbard's ship next sailed down the coast and opened fire on Mexico. Since we weren't at war with Mexico, the navy thought this was a dumb idea. Hubbard was discharged for arthritis and bursitis. (60)

Reitman differs in that Hubbard was apparently released because of his ulcers, and also for being a pain in the ass, but still. Hee.

…Discuss!

"Why is magic still a secret in Edmonton? Good PR."

Gayleen Froese's Grayling Cross, the sequel to Froese's supernatural mystery Touch, is "taut, laced with humor" (Quill & Quire) and "a lively novel filled with action, both real and unreal" (Globe and Mail). What better gift for the holidays than a funny, exciting book — or a set of them, even?

Psychic Anna Gareau and public relations expert Collie Kostyna keep things quiet for local magicians and for their biggest client, an underground supernatural society known as the Embassy.

When an investigator arrives in town on the trail of a missing teenage psychic, he hires Anna and Collie to be his liaisons to the local magic community. Troublingly, though, their new client turns out to have a knack for suppressing magic, and the Embassy wastes no time telling Anna and Collie to get him out of town. And when an Embassy employee is found murdered — in a house nobody should have been able to enter, with a weapon that never should have killed him — suspicion naturally falls upon Anna and Collie’s client.

Was he involved in murder? And what is his relationship to a northern Alberta ghost town called Grayling Cross?

Two lucky Tomato Nation readers could win your very own copies of the first book, Touch — just leave an interested comment on this entry (with a valid email address), and you're in the running! (Note: winners have been selected as of 12/7 — thanks so much for your interest!)

To jump right into Grayling Cross, read the first chapter online right here (free!). To purchase the book, click here.

On this episode of the Tomato Nation Read-Along: Inside Scientology: The Story of America's Most Secretive Religion, by Janet Reitman. It's available in print and Kindle formats, as well as on audio, which is how I'll be "reading" it.

I don't foresee any spoilers in the traditional sense, so I'll likely open the discussion thread early next week and let people chat at their own pace, unless anyone objects. Enjoy!

It's that time again, boys and girls. We've got two books about religion from the last poll, plus a bunch of other goodies to choose from; celebrate Election Day by voting for our next book!

I know it's not Tim's way to dish bitchy dirt — except that 1) he has an obligation to dish it because he obviously has access to the best and most comprehensive Project Runway dirt there is, and 2) he's done it before. Not bitchily, because it's Tim, but if you've watched the show long enough and you know the rhythms of Tim's speech well enough, you know what he's saying, DANIEL VOSOVIC. (NB: No doubt Daniel V. has grown up and pulled it together in the meantime, but when Mo Ryan's interview first ran…scandal!)

So, I wanted the book to have a bit more of that — more behind-the-scenes intel on, say, Wendy Pepper, or the sometimes mysterious workings of the judging. But Tim is such a sweetheart, even on the page, that I ended up not minding. He and his co-author, Ada Calhoun, did a great job capturing the way he speaks and his particular emphases; I could hear him in my ear as I read. (Tim on Crocs: "I can't imagine a more aesthetically offensive item of footwear than Crocs. That little strap! I shudder.")

Tim also puts things so elegantly that I dog-eared or notated a bunch of pages. "If you can't be gracious, don't spend time together" is one mot I underlined (just after a fairly revealing anecdote about Martha and Alexis Stewart). Here's another:

Some people think of dressing up or being polite as a burden. They think having to wear a tie or use the right fork or send a thank-you card is a kind of shackle. To these people I say: Getting out of bed is a shackle. If you feel that way, stay in it! Invest in a hospital gurney and wheel yourself around on it when you need to go out.

Dear Sir: Thank YOU. Love, Sarah.

All in all, I really enjoyed it; it was like getting to meet him. It took no time at all to read, and I did glean some good gossip about Paul Lynde.

What did you guys think? How does it compare to his other, more fashion-based book? Did you want more gossip about Santino or Christian? Will you save your copy or sell it on Half.com?

By the time I turned twenty, I had come to despise Zelda Fitzgerald. It was no fault of hers. I knew nothing about her, really, except that she had married F. Scott and lost her mind, but Zelda had come in for championing by that sorest of college nemeses — the Pitilessly Resentful Sophomore.

The PRS interrogated texts, it seemed, based primarily on whether their authors might have found more fun in life than she (a safe bet) — incorrect, wasteful, exploitive fun with absinthe and pretty girls they hadn't married, after which someone somewhere might have cried. The PRS always "interrogated" texts. Merely to read a poem or a novel without lying in wait for its offenses, to discuss it without swerving towards tears, to admire a turn of phrase and not indict its author in the next breath was for blinkered collaborators. The PRS would turn her blinding light on the canon and await the shivering confessions of Hawthorne and Hemingway, because every dick move ever perpetrated by a man in the Norton oppressed her personally.

I found this sort of dispositional sourness posing as feminism so annoying that I developed actual, dermatological symptoms in response — fierce itching under my watch strap or between my shoulder blades that I could only relieve by arguing, say, that Milton had created the first great villain in modern English literature, along with most of the Latinate words we still use today, at night, in his head, in the darkness he lived in at all times, waiting for his transcriptionist to arrive and take dictation in the morning, so if once upon a foggy day he got a beej from the school-age girl who brought the eggs and cream, why don't we let his ledger balance? I didn't consider Hemingway an attractive interpersonal prospect either, but since he didn't cheat on us and he shot himself in the head and the last chapter of A Farewell to Arms is a perfect egg thrown into a soundless chasm, could we agree to leave it at that? Or do I have to take a position I don't actually agree with in defense of the short stories with the damn elephants until the preceptor uses her Birkenstock as a gavel?

One of the PRS's favorite stalking horses: the idea — never offered as such, but rather as black-letter crit law — that F. Scott Fitzgerald had stolen all his best work from his fanciful young bride, then hounded her into the bughouse to cover his tracks. I naturally dismissed it out of hand, since it came from the PRS, and besides, what had he gotten for his trouble? Gatsby did only all right, and Fitzgerald set seriously about drowning himself and it took 15 years. Before anyone even invented pantyhose, he paid, and died, so just please, please, shut up.

Wait. The "beautiful fool" is Zelda's. The beautiful fool is us. It's complicated.

Sometimes Madness Is Wisdom: Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald: A Marriage keeps an even tone throughout most of the book, but sides with Zelda on the matter, as it should — Scott did steal from her. He did it openly, at first, when it didn't occur to her to mind, when she considered it par for the course as the great writer's wife. Later, when she did mind, he kept doing it, but turned it on her, made it out like she was stealing from him by withholding. The manipulation is revolting — but it didn't create Zelda's schizophrenia, and it didn't create Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald could sketch a period from his childhood like so:

He begins to remember many things, a filthy vacant lot, the haunt of dead cats, a hair-raising buck-board, the little girl whose father was in prison for telling lies, a Rabelaisian incident with Jack Butler, a blow with a baseball bat from the same boy — son of an Army officer — which left a scar that will shine always in the middle of his forehead." (39)

He didn't need Zelda to do this, or for the green light or poor dead Myrtle. But he saw that she could do it too, that someone else could draw the world in two strokes that way. "The marshmallow odor of the Biltmore" is a phrasing of hers — gorgeous. Perfect. To explain what I think she means, I would need four grafs. In her autobiographical novel, Save Me the Waltz — which her husband "edited" and functionally ruined, then talked shit about for years — she says of her protagonist that she "wants to be told what she is like, being too young to know that she is like nothing at all." She described a mental hospital in one letter as looking "as if it was constructed to hide bits of Italian marble from the public." Yes. What? Yes.

Scott found her ways of putting things fascinating, and useful; I disapprove strongly of the denouement, which lasted about 50 times as long as the rest of their story — but I admire his taste in theft. And how fluky that two people with the same matchless gift for giving you the world in two strokes should get married to each other. This is what the book illuminates, as well as investigating how, or if, the Fitzgeralds created and/or destroyed each other.

It's a solid narrative, written well by Kendall Taylor, who lived with the material a long time. (I've just started Milford's Zelda, which is quite good too and pushes the quotes harder.) It touches on Fitzgerald's fundamental distance from his characters, from people, that he could sum up and judge environments quickly but that that detachment (and, it's strongly suggested, his inability to stay sober enough to remember most interactions) kept him from feeling much for them. It touches on the hopelessness of Zelda's treatment at that time, before pharmaceuticals could manage her disease. It glances on and then quickly away from their deaths, as if the fire and drink that consumed them were only incidental. Taylor could have explored those things more fully, but there is a frantic sadness to their lives, singly and together, that only either of the Fitzgeralds could have summed up — two aches shouting past one another.

Scott found [Gertrude] Stein fascinating, but Zelda detested being relegated to a tea table at the back of the room with [Alice B.] Toklas, and recalled the atmosphere as so smoky and mysterious that "a young poet vomited out of sheer emotion." (146)

That. Yes. I wish I hadn't despised Zelda for so long; it seems we'd have gotten along fine. And the PRS too, perhaps. It was complicated.