STFU

Ha, gotcha! Actually the subject line is completely pertinent and completely Wolfe, ala An Evil Guest. Does anyone have any idea why Wolfe bothers to have the cop that meets Cassie in the soda/ice cream shop tell the girl working there to "Shut the fuck up." I mean, it was so jarring and so un Wolfe-ish, that I did a double take and then started laughing my ass off. It really is pretty funny, but does anyone think there's a reason for it that furthers the story? Don Doggerel www.don-doggett.blogspot.com

The cop is not a Wolfean hero, he is a bend-the-rules sort of cop who has been called on out of the blue to pay back a favor and is annoyed. However, on that note, who killed the hapless doorman who was sent to lure her out to talk to.. whoever it was... in the alley?

It has been growing on me, how clever this novel is. On the surface, it is not only a pulp novel, it is a bad pulp novel, with a poor editing job: why the author and editor can't even keep the address of the heroine straight. People are mentioned, killed, forgotten. It is easy to see someone who doesn't know Wolfe saying 'Eh! The author can't even be bothered to keep a bit of consistency? Onto the trash heap with it!'. .

And other people, who do know Wolfe, getting into increasingly stranger contortions to try and explain away such apparent inconsistencies. Mo # ~ # ~ # WolfeWiki now at: http://www.wolfewiki.com/pmwiki/

Now that's an observation that makes me really want to read the book. From the discussion here, I first thought it might be silly intertextual fun, then got a growing impression of deeper currents. But this is great. Is Wolfe imitating a dead or dying storytelling mode right down to its well-known flaws? And has he always done this?

My take is that the Baskin Robbins girl is also in on whatever charade is going on. My related question is: Why is the ice cream girl so keen to tell Cassie how much she hates her? ---H

Doggerel www.don-doggett.blogspot.com

Yeah, but he appears again several times, but this sort of raw vulgarity is nowhere to be seen, nowhere else in the novel, and nowhere in any of Wolfe's other works that I've read. I'm a big fan of tactical vulgarity in fiction but it was really jarring here, and I can't imagine it was done just to show this guy is a "tough as nails" detective. Don

Doggerel www.don-doggett.blogspot.com

I forgot it was a Baskin Robbins. That was one of the things that made it so funny when I first read it. As for your question, I thought she hated Cassie because she's a teenager, the ice cream shop is empty and about to close, and Cassie walks in and orders and makes herself at home. Don

The cop works for/with the BATF, Wolfe hates the BATF, so he writes the cop as a complete bastard?

Tom

OK, but at the same time in his later appearances he also seems more polite. Possibly because he's in more control of the situation, rather than possibly having been called up in the middle of the night to do some (seemingly unnecessarily) convoluted task.

Cassie: "I wish we could be friends." B-R girl: "I've got three friends...Rita, Amber, and Christabelle." - p28 There's been a bit of discussion about the "loose ends" in AEG, but I think it's possible to read these loose ends as extra-textual allusions that align with the story. First things first, why does Wolfe set a scene at a Baskin-Robbins? Does it have something to do with the company's 31 flavors? Maybe it's an allusion to Messier 31, the Andromeda galaxy. Second, why mention these three friends? Maybe they have something in common that pertains to Wolfe's plan for AEG. Working backwards from least to most obscure -- 'Christabelle' suggests Coleridge's long poem with a similar name, "Christabel." The key aspect of this poem is the way Coleridge explores the character's perception of reality between waking and dreaming. Similar theme with the second name, 'Amber'. The name suggests Roger Zelazny's Amber series of books and stories. This may be a subtle hint at Wolfe's method, the idea of one True World and an infinite number of shadow worlds, alterable "at will" by an adept. If we continue along the same theme of altered perceptions, the name 'Rita' suggests the character of Rita/Camilla in David Lynch's "Mulholland Drive." Cassie shares some interesting aspects with one of the actresses in this film, including responsibility for the death of at least one of the other characters. [I haven't figured out a tie-in for B-R girl's reference to Rita's little brother.] Finally, at the end of this page we get the detective--"The man who entered was both tall and wide, nearing middle age." And departs B-R with a jarring finger-point: "You stfu." I wonder whether this is an allusion to John Goodman. Size and shape and age match, and Goodman comically utters "STFU, Donnie" in The Big Lebowski, but he plays a detective in a couple of movies. Specifically, One Night at McCool's has a few parallels with AEG--especially the animal magnetism of the actress Jewel--and this may explain why Wolfe puts the detective's words on the page.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rita_of_Cascia The saint's life seems thematically relevant to AEG: Her love turns a bad man into a good one. What's this about R's little brother in AEG? I don't have the book on me here. -Matt

Matt Keeley asks:

------------------ B-R Girl: I like everyone of them fifty times more than you. Even Christabelle. Cassie : Puts me in my place. Got a spoon? B-R Girl: I even like Rita's little brother better than you. - AEG p28 ------------------ If those names were rattled off by B-R Girl because they have some connection to the rest of the AEG story, we'd expect to be able to identify a Rita with a little brother who has a similar tie-in to AEG as the other names. None comes to mind, which may mean I'm off-target with one or all of the suggestions I've made. Still, there's a Mulholland Drive quality to AEG. It seems like every time Cassie awakens, 'reality' has mutated.