Irving Wallace (1916–1990)

Irving Wallace's novel The Fan Club was quite successful when it was published in 1974, spending nearly six months on the NYT best seller list and serving as the basis for a movie project that never got to the shooting stage. Like most popular novels of its period, it has since fallen into obscurity. It is a "thriller" about the abduction, rape, ransom, and rescue of a sex-symbol movie star. I read a portion of it in the 1980s and I came back to read the whole thing more than thirty years show more later.

Rather than a single psychopathic villain (cf. Straub's Hellfire Club), the story offers a misfit team of perpetrators. This feature seems to be an indictment of masculine pack dynamics: the group is morally less than the sum of its parts, while operationally greater than them. This notion is bolstered by fact that the most practically capable and ethically depraved of the four culprits has a military background, having participated in atrocities as an American soldier in Viet Nam.

The four "fan club" malefactors are repeatedly identified by their roles, rather than proper names--first for purposes of concealment in the journal kept by their organizer, and then in the mental indexing performed by their captive victim. These roles--the Club President i.e. "Dreamer," Accountant i.e. "Milquetoast," Insurance Person i.e. "Salesman," and Mechanic i.e. "Evil One"--seem to suggest an allegorical reading, where the diverse character types of the four could represent larger social functions, or even psychological components (e.g. self, super-ego, ego, and id).

Except for some passages from the notebooks of the Dreamer-instigator, the novel is told in an omniscient third-person voice, but using an assortment of characters for perspective orientation. For the most part, focus alternates between the fan club members on the one hand and their captive on the other, with all of the post-abduction rapes and assaults emphasizing her perspective. She does survive the ordeal, and it seems clear that she would not have done so without her own resourcefulness and personal agency.

By making his President/Dreamer character a writer, Wallace invites suspicion of an element of self-portraiture in this eventually declared anti-hero. This protagonist treats the predatory fan club as an "experiment" in the real-world manifestation of fantasy. Are we supposed to congratulate Wallace on having chosen to write a fiction rather than carrying out the sort of criminal acts about which he wrote? The decision here to leave the Dreamer at large and unrehabilitated may have been intended as a horror-style coda to signal the persistence of evil. But given the extent to which the entire novel might be construed as rape-as-entertainment, it does come off disturbingly as "no comeuppance!"--especially in today's interpretive climate. While I do not myself insist on moral justice in fictional narrative, Emma Bovary this fellow is not.

In any case, I do think the book was more interesting than the only other Wallace novel I've read, the later Celestial Bed, which shares some of its preoccupations--even signaling them in the title, which featured as an invocation (with the same historical referent) in The Fan Club. show less

The first "Book of Lists" became an instant favourite of mine when I first read it, back in the dim, dark ages of the 1980s. At the time I was too young to understand many of the people or events referenced but "The Book of Lists" fired my desire to know what the hell these people were talking about and so helped me become the uncrowned King of obscure trivia.

Even if great wads of cash fell out of the book the first time I opened it, nothing could match the impact the first "Book of Lists" show more had on me, so naturally no. 3 was going to pale in comparison. Of course, this should not take away from "The Book of Lists 3", because where else could you find, for example, a list of "14 persons who suffered from severe depression", followed immediately by "Rating 36 home-grown vegetables"? show less

This work, published in 1964, is about the surprising accession of a black man to the office of the presidency of the United States after the unexpected deaths of the president, the vice-president and the Speaker of the House of Representatives. In 1964, this would have been an amazing event, as the book demonstrates. I don't even remember (I was too young) if there were any black Americans in Congress at that time (John Lewis? not yet?). Now that we have had a black president who was show more popular enough to be elected to 2 terms in office, I suppose I must ask, as mentioned in the other review, whether this book is still relevant. I think the answer is unequivocally yes. "Bypassing" the color barrier with Barack Obama was certainly momentous, but we must acknowledge that Barack Obama was somehow able to relate to people of all races and nationalities possibly because of his experiences in a biracial family and maybe also because he was/is extremely charismatic and intelligent. However he still faced issues regarding his skin color — remember that some people claimed he wasn't American — and the color barrier still exists in our society.

Having said this, I only gave this book 3 1/2 stars because it took so long to get to the interesting points. By slowly and solidly building the backgrounds of the characters and the story, it took a lot of patience to get to the part where conflicts and matters of race were injected into the daily running of the country and caused so much difficulty for President Dilman. Nevertheless, by the time I finished the book, I found that I liked it very much. The question that needs to be asked on a regular basis is: how do our black brethren in this country feel about our white countrymen? And vice versa? Sadly, there is still so much racial violence. Can we ever become a colorblind society? What will it take to reach that goal? The outcome in the book is not perfect and it does not suggest that much progress will be made by having the first black president (at least in the 1960s) but the story gives us hope and suggests the value of all victories — large and small — towards that goal. show less

I read "The intimate sex lives of famous people" for the first time many years ago now, when the youth I possessed was particularly calloused and my knowledge of sex somewhat limited.

One can imagine the shock I felt then to read of things like Havelock Ellis being a urination voyeur, James Boswell's weird fixation on trees and coprophilia (I looked this up in a dictionary and got the surprise of my life).

"The intimate sex lives of famous people" consists of short biographies of over one show more hundred famous people from history, ranging from Tsar Alexander II of Russia to Emile Zola, with attention given to whatever fetishes or peculiarities each figure enjoyed (for Alexander it was his collection of erotica, while Zola was a polygamist). The authors attempt to show that without knowledge of the sex lives of the famous, how can we fully understand their public actions. Well, it certainly gave me a more rounded understanding of some famous people.

In decades since "The intimate sex lives of famous people" was first released, sex as a topic for discussion has become more open and so the contents of the book feels less risque, and in fact sound quite conservative compared to the tell-all stories of today's celebs.

My favourite biography would have to be of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who had a spanking fetish, was into exposing himself in public (which led to him being attacked by a posse of broomstick carrying women), who fell in lust with inanimate objects (much to the consternation of the owners of such objects) and "Sex became so painful for him that he gave it up entirely for the last twenty-three years of his life, returning to masturbation."

I wholeheartedly recommend this book to anyone curious enough to want to know what famous people got up to in their spare time. show less