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Film Features Film/TV

Accepted

The curriculum for the filmmakers of the new high school-to-college comedy Accepted includes the venerable “Great Films” of the genre — Animal House, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and Risky Business, along with newer models such as Rushmore and Old School. Those films are all successful comedies, and, in mimicking them, Accepted is funny too. But Accepted distills the formula of the earlier films to such a degree that it isn’t much more than the Cliff’s Notes version of the classics.

The plot is high-concept for the lowest common denominator: When a group of graduating high school seniors don’t get accepted to college, they form their own and pawn it off as the real thing to avoid their parents’ wrath. When hundreds of other underachievers apply and are accepted (automatically, via a technical snafu), a real, albeit nontraditional, school is born.

Justin Long stars as the brains behind the plan, Bartleby Gaines. Long’s comedic turn in Accepted emulates Vince Vaughn — right down to Vaughn’s patented wink and smile — to such an extent that it would make Rich Little blush. Long also occasionally throws in a dash of Matthew Broderick’s Ferris Bueller, but Gaines isn’t as cool or charming as Bueller or any of Vaughn’s memorable roles. His overall, fundamental lack of popularity doesn’t make him endearing so much as pathetic.

The primary villain in the film is traditional college academics, and Accepted scores some hits, primarily during spitting diatribes from the fake college’s fake dean, played by stand-up comedian Lewis Black. Black’s inclusion inches the film toward being worthy of its genre predecessors. But the filmmakers can’t resist rip-off, and they show themselves ignorant of one of the things their hated traditional colleges teach in Economics 101: the law of diminishing marginal utility.

Opens Friday, August 18th, multiple locations

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100 To Go

For many sports fans, there are two times of the year: football season and waiting for football season to start.

On Friday, August 11th, it won’t be football season yet. But, by God, it’s about as close as is possible for University of Memphis fans until their September 3rd date against Ole Miss in Oxford. On August 11th, the Highland Hundred, the official football booster group for the Tigers, will be having their annual Kickoff banquet at the U of M Holiday Inn.

Tiger head coach Tommy West will be there to present his views on the 2006 season, and he will be joined by his assistant-coach staff. At Kickoff banquets in years past, West has introduced his class of incoming freshman to the Highland Hundred. This year’s freshmen include offensive lineman Will Truitt from Briarcrest, tight end Charlie Bryant of Collierville’s First Assembly Christian School, and prized-recruit, quarterback Matt Malouf from Oxford.

Social hour will begin at 6 p.m., and dinner will be served at 7 p.m., and the school’s pep band and cheerleaders will be on hand to pump up the Highland Hundred. The event is open to the public, so join the die-hard Tiger fans and help support Coach West’s campaign to lead his crew of hoped-for Rebel razers to victory.

Highland Hundred Kickoff Banquet at the U of M Holiday Inn, 6 p.m., Friday, August 11th, $15. For more information,

go to www.highlandhundred.com.

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Politics Politics Feature

Nightwatch: Keeping Vigil at the Election Commission

For at least a few hours Thursday night, 157 Poplar was the
epicenter of the Shelby County political universe. That’s the address of the
Election Commission, and it was here that candidates, supporters, and members of
the media massed to get the election results as they were made available.

At  7 p.m., as polling precincts closed throughout the
county, the decently sized crowd seemed tense, waiting for results to begin to
trickle in. Two supporters of judicial candidate Regina Newman commented that
they didn’t have fingernails left to chew on. Supporters of other campaigns made
similar jokes to downplay their nervousness. Members of the press paced the
halls anxiously trying to glean any information.

At 740 p.m. came an announcement of further delay: There
were reportedly still some lines in precincts across the county, and results
were being held back to avoid affecting the votes of those still waiting in
line.

That announcement amped up an  already edgy room. 

Relief came shortly after 8 p.m., when the unofficial
absentee and early-voting results were released. As workers for the election
commission passed out the 38 pages of results reports, the crowd massed, then as
individuals got theirs,  broke like a wave, dispersing across the building to
peruse the results. People rifled through pages, flipped open their cell phones,
and starting making their good news/bad news calls to points across the county..
Press representatives were simultaneously doing the same. The diaspora of
information was quick, and within minutes TV stations began showing the results.
Everybody wad advised that, for bettered or for worse, these were “just the
early-voting results.”

A projector was set up in a large jury-summons room, and
for the rest of the night the results were shown on the screen.   As people
began figuring out that this was quicker and easier than scanning the printouts,
the chairs in the jury-summons room began filling up, and all eyes were on the
screen , fixing on its slowly scrolling numbers.

AMONG THE CANDIDATES there Thursday night was city
councilman Myron Lowery, who was up big in his bid for the newly minted Charter
Commission and who ultimately won a seat. Lowery was quick to point out that he
had the most votes of any Charter Commission candidate. He stayed at the
commission long enough to make sure the good news was complete. When he left the
building, he bid the various supporters of other campaigns good luck that
evening and was congratulated in return. Lowery walked out of the room to
applause.

Outside the newly elected Lowery said he was ready to get
to the work of the Charter Commission, particularly on the issues of term limits
for elected officials and staggered terms for council members. He also
mentioned  the possibility of contracting the size of the City Council,
reappraising the powers of the mayor, and prohibiting the sale of Memphis Light,
Gas and Water “without a referendum from the voters.” The Commission should hold
a series of public meetings, he said.

Comparing  his Commission campaign to others he has run,
Lowery said, “I campaigned the same way. It was grass-roots. I did not have one
sign up at any of the early-voting places. I did not have one sign up at any of
the polling places today. Signs don’t win elections. There were too many signs
out here.” Then he was gone.

A LITTLE BIT LATER, Election Commissioner Rich Holden was
talking about the federal agents in Shelby County on election day, saying that
the commission had been informed  by the Department of Justice that there would
be two people from the Civil Rights Division observing the Shelby County
election process, “which is the first time that’s occurred in the State of
Tennessee” Said Holden:. “They picked a dozen precincts that were representative
of what they were looking for, which was criteria they did not inform us of. The
specifics we do not know, but they observed, we did not get any feedback
positive or negative.”

Holden had a significant qualifier. “They didn’t send 40
people. If they thought there were significant problems, they would have sent a
significant quantity of people. They were basically observing our processes and
procedures and making sure everybody was given equal rights.” The commissioner
said he didn’t know if or when a Department of Justice report on the day’s
observations would be forthcoming.

Candidates came and went as the night progressed —
including a briefly appearing Bren Olswanger, former reality-show TV contestant
from The Apprentice and now a first-time political candidate, running for
a General Sessions judgeship. As on The Apprentice, Bren Olswanger was 
bedecked in a dapper bowtie. (As on the show, he lost.)

Another first timer Thursday night was19-year-old  Deangelo
Pegues, a candidate for a seat on the Shelby County Commission.   Looking
composed in a sharp suit, his high school ring glittering in counterpart to his
smile, Pegues maintained an unflagging optimism despite the fact that, with
two-thirds of the precincts in,  he was  trailing Republican opponent Mike
Carpenter 82 percent to 17 percent.

Pegues, who said taxes and crime were his chief concerns, 
speculated that his friends were probably “at the movies, preparing for school,
at the house asleep,  maybe.” 

He stayed upbeat despite the unfavorable numbers. . When
asked what would be next for him if he did, in fact, lose, Pegues was
never-say-die: “Hopefully, I’ll win.” If he did lose, he finally said, he would
work with the commission as a “concerned citizen,” and look for another
opportunity later.

Gale Jones Carson, the well-known local head of the Shelby
County Democrats’ coordinated election campaign, was nearby checking on the
election results. Chatting up Pegues, whom she had not met before. Carson
advised him of the dangers of running   as an independent  in a heavily
Republican area.  Pegues responded: “I wanted to run as an independent to
represent the people and not a specific party.”

Warren Cole, a poll watcher for John Willingham’s mayoral
campaign, was at the commission until late Thursday night, “checking the
numbers, making sure all the precincts that reported [that] there were no
inequities involved.” Concerning the early-voting numbers, Cole said he was
“suspicious” and said he “didn’t feel comfortable with the numbers,” noting the
discrepancy between new, expensive voting machines and the lines that seemed
longer rather than shorter at voting stations. He was troubled by that and the
delays in reporting.

At the time Willingham was trailing by a hefty percentage
to opponent Democrat A C Wharton. “Something just don’t feel right right now,”
Cole said. He suggested that in the coming weeks, he, along with others, would
be looking carefully at the raw election data. Before that, however, he would
“get a little rest in, let my mind rest, my body and soul, then follow up
on my instincts.”

As the clock hand swept toward midnight and as the size of
the once flourishing congregation of people at the election commission gradually
dwindled, both the departees and those still lingering clearly  fighting the
fatigue at the end of another election season, that sounded like good advice.

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At Play

The brain works in mysterious ways. Few people know that better than Sharon Dobbins, who experiences the uncommon mechanics of the mind daily.

Sharon Dobbins is a private music teacher in Memphis who specializes in special-needs students. She has helped develop the aural arts of students who have autism, ADHD, dyslexia, emotional disorders, and learning disabilities. For reasons that science has not yet plumbed, people with these mental disadvantages sometimes excel in other ways, such as in the arts. This Sunday, August 6th, there will be a recital of her gifted students at the Clark Opera Memphis Center.

The students in the recital vary in age from kindergarteners to college graduates, and they will perform in genres as wide-ranging as classical, gospel, lieder, pop, Bach, and boogie woogie.

One of Dobbins’ students who will be performing is 6-year-old Caia Smith, diagnosed with optic nerve hypoplasia — a visual impairment caused by underdevelopment of the optic nerve — at four months. Caia’s parents noted that their daughter responded strongly to music, and at the behest of Caia’s kindergarten teacher, Smith was taken on as a student by Dobbins.

The recital is free and open to the public and is a wonderful opportunity to witness the spectacular abilities of the human mind.

Student Music Recital, 4 p.m. Sunday, August 6th, at the Clark Opera Memphis Center

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Tyke tyrant gets comeuppance in Ant Bully.

To express the insecurity and frustration he feels when he’s pushed around by the big kid on the block, a young boy acts aggressively to the insects in his front yard, drowning them with water and crushing them with his shoes. The yard ants decide to preempt any future attacks from the boy, whom they call the Destroyer, so they concoct a plan to invade his territory, capture him, haul him before a military-type tribunal, and try him for crimes against ant-kind, hoping to ultimately execute him.

This all happens in the film The Ant Bully, but, except for the bug business, it sounds curiously like a summary of Saddam Hussein’s last several years. It’s a kid’s film, though, and, unsurprisingly, the tyke tyrant, Lucas, avoids the death sentence and gets taught a few valuable lessons about the sanctity of all life, evolving from villain to hero faster than you can say “fantasy film.”

At first glance, The Ant Bully is derivative of two relatively recent animated-insect movies: Antz and A Bug’s Life (both from 1998). The ants in Bully do look a bit like they did in Antz, and the setting — the tiny, creepy-crawly world — is similar in all three. Unlike those earlier films, though, the Bully critters clearly don’t exist in the “real world.” The occasional nod is made to biological correctness, but Bully‘s anthropomorphic blue-eyed beasties have one thing over their cousins of those other films: They can perform magic.

This is no nature film. Its intent is pure fantasy, and it continually pays homage to the ultimate fantasy film series, Star Wars, littering the narrative with unabashed musical, visual, and storyline quotes. That the movie has a scene in which Paul Giamatti’s character is, basically, the Death Star being attacked by ants riding X-wing-fighter-like wasps is delightfully fun.

Known overactor Nicolas Cage gives voice to the ant Zoc, and though Cage sells his lines with the naked earnestness that he normally exhibits in his films, it’s a positive attribute for an animated kid’s film. Julia Roberts is solid but unmemorable as the ant Hova, and Lily Tomlin is especially impressive as Lucas’ grandmother, Mommo, capturing not just an elderly woman but one whose false teeth keep falling out.

Bully is hamstrung by a limp first half, frequently flat comedy, and tortuous lines of dialogue that are sentimental (of Lucas’ tears, an ant asks, “Is that what humans do when they’re sad?”) or trite kid-speak (“Awesome! Yeah!”). The children in the audience at a recent preview screening even groaned a few times at the dialogue.

The animation is inconsistent, tending toward the cartoonish but with moments of photorealism that make you wish the whole movie looked that good. Most of the action set pieces are well executed, though, and the ant colony looks like it sprang from the mind of H.R. Giger.

Ant Bully may not exist in our world, but the fantasies it offers are pleasant enough: You will believe that a tyrant can right his wicked ways.

The Ant Bully

Opening Friday, July 28th

Multiple Locations

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We Recommend We Recommend

Bling from Below

Peabody Place Museum will be flashing some new bling during the month of August. The museum — which houses year-round the best public collection of Chinese art in the Mid-South — will be exhibiting “Art of the Tomb,” a show featuring many items new to the museum, such as figurines, sculptures, and furnishings, which were discovered in ancient Chinese burials.

The objects come from the Tang dynasty (considered the golden age of Chinese civilization) and the Han dynasty (the folks who invented paper and adopted Confucianism as a way of life). They are impressive not only for the beauty and intricacy of their design but for their ability to survive, in some cases, thousands of years.

The museum was founded by Belz Enterprises CEO Jack Belz and his wife Marilyn, and its presence is a boon of no small measure for Memphis, particularly since the Wonders series has been discontinued. The Peabody Place Museum is a like a Wonders exhibit too, on a smaller scale but still able to take your breath away.

“Art of the Tomb,” beginning August 1st, Tuesday-Friday 10 a.m.-5:30 p.m., Saturday and Sunday, noon to 5 p.m., 119 South Main. Call 523-2787 for information.

Categories
Music Record Reviews

“God’s Tattoos” by William Lee Ellis

God’s Tattoos

William Lee Ellis

(Yellow Dog)

God’s Tattoos finds William Lee Ellis expanding the definitions of his music. On his last two albums, The Full Catastrophe and Conqueroo, Ellis — former music columnist for The Commercial Appeal — joyfully combined the blues, bluegrass, rockabilly, classical guitar, doo-wop, country, gospel, swing, and jug band. The result, a Southern-cum-Americana-at-large gumbo, avoided ever sounding derivative, one reason being that so many of his songs are originals. So strong is the identity of this sound that, in time, it can simply be defined as William Lee Ellis music.

In God’s Tattoos, Ellis retains that sound, but he branches into forms he hasn’t yet recorded — the rumba “God’s Tattoos” and the straightforward rock of “Search My Heart” — or hasn’t yet recorded this unmistakably — the rock ballad “Perfect Ones Who Break.” The supporting cast also has gone from guest-spot musicians to, on some tracks, a full-fledged backing band. His previous albums’ percussion accompaniment has usually been of the washboard variety. But on tracks such as “Snakes in My Garden” and “Search My Heart” he has for-real drumming by Paul Taylor. The other musicians include Amy LaVere, Reba Russell, Jim Dickinson, Rick Steff, Andy Cohen, and the Masqueraders.

God’s Tattoos is Ellis at his authentic best. “Authentic” is sometimes a euphemism for unlistenable, but that’s not the case with this album. It’s an authentic work, documenting man and his struggle to find bliss in a world bound by pain (a recurring theme in Ellis’ music). And without compromising that authenticity, it’s thoroughly accessible.

Arguably the best track on the album is “When Leadbelly Walked the River Like Christ,” an instrumental made, according to the liner notes, “in one take, warts and all, with no overdubs or studio gimmicks.” It evinces both brutal melancholy and defiance against it in one acoustic, E-bow breath.

Recorded at Dickinson’s Zebra Ranch Studio in Coldwater, Mississippi, God’s Tattoos has Ellis more frankly revealed than his previous albums. His sound is now fully contemporary. It’s still as informed by the past as ever, but now the past evoked is more explicitly Ellis’ own. God’s Tattoos is Ellis’ best album yet. — Greg Akers

Grade: A

William Lee Ellis plays a CD-release party for God’s Tattoos Friday, July 28th, at the Church of the Holy Communion at 4645 Walnut Grove. Admission is $10.

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Bluffing

WEVL FM-90 is one of Memphis’ best institutions: an independent station, listener-supported, staffed mostly by volunteers. And they put on one of Memphis’ best music events: Blues on the Bluff. WEVL’s 18th annual Blues on the Bluff fund-raiser is this Saturday, with Central BBQ on hand to sell the delectables they’re famous for and with drink vendors to keep you cool. All proceeds from the night go to the station.

Kicking off the evening musically is the Last Chance Jug Band, exulting in joie de jug as they get their Will Shade and Gus Cannon freak on. Soul follows as the Bo-Keys — fronted by producer, bassist, and film scorer Scott Bomar and backed by his merry band of Stax alum groove-stars — resurrect the sound that kept Memphis on the map. The Burnside Exploration closes out the night with a dose of hill-country blues. The band includes scions of the late north Mississippi blues legend R.L. Burnside, and before the night’s over, they will have turned the bluff into a juke joint.

One thing Blues on the Bluff has over any other local music event is its venue. The concert takes advantage of a stunning vista overlooking the river at the National Ornamental Metal Museum. It’s a unique moment on the Memphis calendar: the river a snake dancing to the rhythms of the region’s sounds, your foot keeping time as the music washes over you.

Blues on the Bluff, at the National Ornamental Metal Museum, Saturday, July 22nd, 6:30 p.m., $15

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Water Logged

The most basic question heading into M. Night Shyamalan’s newest film, Lady in the Water, is if the filmmaker would rebound from the mistakes he made in his last one, The Village, and return to the relative glories of the preceding three — Signs, Unbreakable, and The Sixth Sense. Those three were triumphs of theme-faithful plot, atmosphere, and impeccably clever storytelling, respectively. The Village was a failure for many reasons, most notably because it failed to understand the principle that the monsters should always be real.

Lady in the Water takes care of the monster question early in the film. Yes, this time the monsters are real. Unfortunately, though it corrects that mistake, it makes many new ones — some of which are spectacularly awful.

Unlike Shyamalan’s other films, Lady announces the truth of its plot very early on: Once upon a time man was at peace and co-existed with some sea nymphs in a kind of Atlantean bliss. But man decided he liked possessions too much, so he spurned happiness (and the sea nymphs) for the opportunity to have it all. Flash forward thousands of years and wars later to present-day Philadelphia, where man is in desperate need of salvation. So the sea nymphs re-establish contact to help man save himself. And that’s not to even mention the monsters that try to foil the sea nymphs’ beneficent plans. (This is all in the first three minutes of the movie.)

Bryce Dallas Howard plays the titular sea nymph. Her casting is the only stroke of perfection in the film. The actress has an otherworldly, alien beauty, her skin and blankly crystal eyes as pale and sterile as the porcelain tile of a bathroom floor (though maybe I make that association because she spends so much time in the movie sitting on one).

Paul Giamatti — once again playing a schlub — leads as Cleveland Heep, the building superintendent in the apartment complex that the “lady in the water” has been sent to save. Giamatti’s presence here — along with other noted “good” actors such as Jeffrey Wright and Bob Balaban — makes one wonder if Shyamalan required that the cast sign on without reading the script.

Lady in the Water seems to be an answer movie to the critics of The Village. Just as much as it is about sea nymphs and Cleveland Heep, Lady is about examining and deconstructing the mechanics of how a fictional story is created, built, evolved, and resolved. Because Lady in the Water isn’t just about the fantastical creatures that populate the movie, but also about the fairy tales and bedtime stories from which they spring, Shyamalan can break down his own writing process, comment on it, and make it transparent for the audience to see. He literally has the characters discuss the “plot” of the fairy tale that they come to realize they are living and try to determine how best to shepherd the story to a happy ending.

Shyamalan tells the audience the rules of this bedtime story as the film progresses, and they seem to develop organically, almost as if, yes, he’s making it up as he’s going along, like he’s telling a bedtime story to the audience. Here’s one bad thing about his premise: Successful bedtime stories are ones where you’re asleep by the time the storyteller gets to the end. No matter how ridiculous the contrivances of plot are, you usually aren’t awake to see them exposed by the finale. Lady is successful in this one way: I did wish I was asleep by the end.

The metafiction of Lady is not without precedent. Recently, Adaptation treaded in these waters too. But it got away with it because it poked fun at itself, to the point where it giddily had the greatest descent into cliché in film history. Unlike Adaptation, Lady does take itself seriously. It too descends into cliché, and it too calls attention to that fact, but it drowns because of its eagerness for moral weight.

Coming out of Lady in the Water, there’s a new question: Where does Shyamalan go from here? Perhaps he should steal one of his own storytelling devices, spring a gotcha moment, and work in a completely unexpected genre or style. He has proven in his films that he can fool some of the people some of the time, but he needs to learn that he can’t fool all of the people all of the time.

Lady in the Water

Opening Friday, July 21st

Multiple locations

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Book Features Books

Burke’s Law

Let’s get this straight:

Detective Dave Robicheaux of the Iberia Parish (Louisiana) Sheriff’s Department is back — again. He’s middle-aged and off Jim Beam, but he’s still got a mean streak, and his wife, a former nun, is a saint who’s great in the sack. She keeps Robicheaux’s mean streak in check, but his blood is boiling. It’s summer 2005.

Robicheaux’s buddy Dallas Klein, who was gunned down in Florida years ago, has a grown daughter named Trish who’s out to avenge her father’s death. She’s ripping off Gulf Coast casinos owned by Whitey Bruxal, a Miami bookie, who, Trish thinks, had Klein whacked. Bruxal is in business with Bellerophon (“Bello”) Lujan, a violent man whose wealth is “ill-gotten.” Lujan’s son, Tony, is a college kid who had a thing for a girl named Yvonne Darbonne, but then Yvonne got doped up and gang-raped and then she shot herself. (Her father, Cesaire Darbonne, is shell-shocked — and then some.) But Tony … he secretly has a crush on his frat brother Slim Bruxal, Whitey’s son, until he (Tony) ends up murdered. D.A. Lonnie Marceaux, with an eye on political office (this is the kind of race case that could win him the governorship), thinks Monarch Little, a black drug dealer, killed Tony, but Robicheaux isn’t convinced. He’s pissed: at FBI agent Betsy Mossbacher, who bosses her way into the investigation of a casino laundering scheme she’s sure Bruxal and Lujan are behind (together with a televangelist named Colin Alridge).

Meanwhile: Robicheaux’s superior is a lesbian sheriff named Helen Soileau, but she’s okay by Robicheaux, who is also investigating the unsolved hit-and-run of a derelict named Crustacean Man (his remains: food for the crawfish in the bayou where his body was dumped). Bello Lujan’s wheel-chaired wife may or may not know something about it. Just as she may or may not know something about dead Yvonne Darbonne. And what of superthug Tommy “Lefty” Lee Raguza? According to a psychiatrist’s report, “Medical science does not provide an adequate vocabulary to describe a man like this.” And what of Clete Purcel, Robicheaux’s longtime fellow lawman and onetime drinking partner? He’s a drunk. He’s also dating Trish Klein.

You got it straight? It’s Pegasus Descending (Simon & Schuster), James Lee Burke’s latest Robicheaux novel — his 15th — and the oaks in Cajun country still stand. The “sweet sewer of Louisiana politics” still stinks. New Orleans, though: It’s a changed town. Robicheaux remembers it as “a Petrarchan sonnet rather than an Elizabethan one, its mind-set more like the medieval world, in the best sense.” (Say what?) City mobsters in the ’70s “were stone killers and corrupt to the core, but they were pragmatists as well as family men [not to mention Petrarchan] and they realized no society remains functional if it doesn’t maintain the appearances of morality.”

Morality, shmorality. New Orleans, summer 2005, is about to become a real changed town. It’s about to get whacked by Katrina.

You, reader, enjoy the fast-paced, preposterous beach read that is Pegasus Descending. Burke knows how to hook his audience. Suspend your disbelief.

Leonard Gill

In the mind of John Dunning and his character Cliff Janeway, a crack detective/book dealer, seeing and touching a wonderful, rare, fine-condition book is like sex: “I moved around the room, taking in the obvious high spots: a run of Milne’s Pooh books, beginning with the first … running on and on through the long series, all in dust jackets, oh my pounding heart, the jackets, it made my scrotum tingle just to touch them.”

This is from Dunning’s new The Bookwoman’s Last Fling (Scribner), his fifth Janeway mystery (which began with 1992’s Booked To Die). The “Bookman” mysteries revolve around publishing houses, rare books, and the antiquarian-book-dealing market. Dunning’s novels are, yes, literate, but their sense of wonder and glee over scarce books in pristine condition makes them accessible to anyone who has ever unreasonably collected, loved, or obsessed over inanimate objects.

In Last Fling, Janeway is hired to catalogue the extensive collection of rare juvenilia owned by an extremely wealthy woman, Candice Geiger. It seems that some of her best books have been stolen and replaced with cheap copies. The catch: Candice died 20 years before.

Most mysteries have as the basis a primary question with a discoverable answer: Whodunit? These mysteries can be very effective, fulfilling the basic human need to know. There’s satisfaction in having reached the end of an investigation.

Dunning’s mysteries, and in particular The Bookwoman’s Last Fling, aren’t about closure. His hero, Janeway, admits as much in the pages: “[Closure] is an old word with a modern meaning that I loathe and never use except in sarcasm.” Last Fling creates and maintains a fundamental inscrutability because its plot doesn’t just turn on the whodunit of the mystery — though that question is part of the plot. It is more interested in understanding a person, which is ultimately an impossible endeavor.

For Janeway to find out the “who” and “how” to the puzzle, he must try to comprehend the woman at the center of it, Candice Geiger. Even as he discovers answers to the facts of her existence and death, the true nature of and motivations for her decades-old actions remain out of reach. It is inherently impossible to ever know another person to a satisfying degree. Dunning’s recognition of this truth elevates a standard mystery into an astute musing on human folly.

Greg Akers