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One novelist leaves the scene, another arrives

RIP Robert Stone, one of the great American writers of the Vietnam generation. And hello Smith Henderson, who may or may not turn out to have a great career, but is, on the basis of one book, definitely the real deal.

Fourth of July Creek came out last summer, but only made its way into my hands recently. The Times review placed it in the vein of Cormac McCarthy, but despite the writers sharing a few tics - baroque violence, getting a bit carried away with poesy - it's not the best comparison. Fourth of July Creek is big and serious and excessive in the way of a certain kind of 1960s and '70s novel, such as Stone's Hall of Mirrors and Dog Soldiers or Ken Kesey's Sometimes a Great Notion. Like those books and many others of their era, it's a wide-screen, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink vision of a troubled America, seen through the lens of one sympathetic, formerly idealistic, deeply fucked-up guy.

Henderson's novel takes place in 1980, and while there are reasons for that, it could be set today with very little adjustment. Pete Snow is a 31-year-old social worker in remote Tenmile, Montana. He's hard-drinking and depressive, but so would you be if you were the sole representative of the state department of family services in a vast swath of mountain country with rich veins of domestic, alcohol and drug abuse, not to mention unemployment and poverty and isolation. Guns and dangerous dogs are everywhere. Pete has seen some stuff. He has problems of his own too; his father's an asshole, his wife's divorcing him and his teenage daughter hates them all. Also, his brother is a petty crook who beats up his parole officer and splits town, leaving Pete on the receiving end of the young lawman's escalating grudge.

Things get novelistic when Pete takes charge of 11-year-old Benjamin Pearl, who wanders into a local schoolyard one day...for the first time. He has grown up in the woods, a frontier child in a land with no more frontiers. Despairing of the "solutions" he can offer, Pete returns Ben to his father, who turns out to be a survivalist/hermit/visionary/lunatic - an all-American guy, in other words. Jeremiah Pearl is legendary in these parts, especially among the sort of folks who think our paper currency is part of the New World Order, Israel's rise a harbinger of the looming End Times. He keeps his family living off the grid and isn't afraid to aim his rifle at anyone who has a problem with that. But the two men form a wary friendship, Pete at first telling himself that he's simply doing what's best for the boy, keeping the lines of communication open, handing father and son canned food and new clothes. But amid his own miseries, there's something in Pearl's clarity of outlook that appeals to him.

Anyone who's read one of Henderson's forebears knows all this will come to violent grief. And the tensions never lessen much even through 480 pages of Pete's misadventures. These include a new romance and numerous road trips around the western two-thirds of the country in search of his now runaway 14-year-old daughter, whose troubling story we dip into as a kind of counterpoint. Henderson seems to be trying to show us everything that has gone wrong with the West. As with the Stone and Kesey books there are personal and political showdowns, public melees and bedroom struggles, a bit of mourning, an ocean of booze. Drink and drugs and exhaustion and the sheer vastness of the wilderness lead to surreal extremes.

The book shares its flaws with its predecessors, too. Henderson leaves nothing out. Every thread is followed up a box canyon or down a mountainside, into a fever and tremors. There are a couple of episodes, particularly a gratuitous bit of horror involving a downed power line in the wilderness, that seem intended to drive away the casual reader, anyone whose sympathy for Pete is imperfect.

The central mystery of the Pearl family is solved with brilliance, and a ghost-town showdown brings the plot's threads together in tragic perfection. That doesn't stop Henderson from going on to a final destination for Jeremiah and Ben that's less than convincing. The novel is an exhausting and occasionally infuriating trip, but it drags you so far into Pete's world that you'll be days hiking out. And isn't that what a big novel is supposed to do?

Dystopian homesick blues

Things been running to the apocalyptic of late, from the elections and global warming to Ebola and The Walking Dead. So perhaps it's no surprise that my to-read list brought me two ballyhooed dystopian novels back-to-back, Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel and California by Edan Lepucki. (I'm also working my way through the Last Policeman trilogy by Ben H. Winters, but that's another post.)

I'm not the only one reading in the field of doom. Station Eleven is a National Book Award nominee, and California got a big boost when Stephen Colbert pimped it to support publisher Hachette in its fight with Amazon.

I'm glad I read Station Eleven before picking up Janet Maslin's unusually wrong-headed review. I'm also glad I read it before California, which might have put me off the whole genre for a while.

Superficially, the two books have a lot in common. Each pits its heroes and heroines against a cultish group that has turned to atavistic violence. They share that and a lot of other genre tropes with The Walking Dead and the modern giant of the end-of-the-world genre, Stephen King's The Stand. But neither one fits comfortably on the horror shelf.

The novel that Station Eleven most reminded me of is, in fact, Jennifer Egan's acclaimed A Visit from the Goon Squad, which despite a few futuristic touches was essentially a straight literary novel. Both play with time and the contrasting viewpoints of a web of interconnected characters. Both are about what you hold onto over the years, connections made and lost, the human version of the butterfly effect. If anything, Station Eleven seems a little less jaded than Egan's book, maybe because it's about the end of the world and not something really terrible like the music business.

(NOTE: SPOILERS AHEAD.)

Station Eleven starts out as a middle-aged actor named Arthur Leander collapses while playing King Lear in Toronto, artificial snow falling down around him. A few folks gather in the lobby bar after he's been carted away, not knowing that his death is the least of the night's tragedies. Maslin chose the right lines to quote: Of all of them at the bar that night, the bartender was the one who survived the longest. He died three weeks later on the road out of the city.

Something called the Georgia flu has entered Toronto that same night, and not only the city but the world as we know it will be nearly wiped out. Mandel does deliver some action scenes as her characters cope with the catastrophe, but they're spread out through an otherwise almost delicate book that flashes forward and back from that night.

The bulk of the narrative takes place perhaps twenty years after the flu's arrival, when Kirsten, once a child actress in Leander's Lear, has become a leading light of the Traveling Symphony, a ragtag group that brings performances of  Beethoven and Shakespeare to the scattered villages of the dystopian future. It sounds precious and it is, a bit. But there's something here of that final aria in The Goldfinch as well, a genuine sense of the importance of art to people trying hard to retain their souls. This is reflected in Kirsten's obsession with a comic book series about a lost world, which turns out to have been drawn mainly as a hobby by the first of Leander's three wives. Also tangled in the story are Jeevan, a papparazzo turned aspiring paramedic who tried to revive Leander on stage, and a variety of other characters, some of whom end up living at a midwestern airport where they were stranded by the flu, as if Walter Kirn's Up in the Air ended badly.

The novel's pulpier scenes include a few showdowns on the road with baddies dispatched by gun and arrow a la Walking Dead. But what's haunting here arrives without violence, such as a dying woman's last night on a Pacific beach, staring at the lights of a ghost fleet a few miles offshore. When you turn the final page of this poignant and surprisingly lovely novel, you'll know something has happened to you.

California, on the other hand, makes considerably less of its tale of hardy survivors, at slightly greater length. Cal and Frida have repaired to the Golden State's wilderness after society's collapse amid freaky weather and other vaguely described malfunctions. (The freaky weather doesn't follow them to the woods, oddly enough.) Despite their mellow, back-to-the-land 1970s-ish lifestyle, with sex as their main recreation, Cal and Frida's existence is fraught with loneliness and peril, which Lepucki sketches convincingly. Finally they venture to join a nearby commune hidden behind a Maginot Line of mysterious, giant, spiky sculptures.

The big reveal: The commune's leader is Micah, Frida's long-lost brother and Cal's college buddy, believed to have died as a suicide bomber back in the contentious days when the world was falling apart. His welcome is, mmm, complicated. This is one of those spooky villages where everyone knows something they're not talking about, and the smiling man at the podium has dark secrets. Cal and Frida have a secret too - she's preggo, and that could be a problem in the community, which is mysteriously free of children. Needless to say, shit eventually goes sideways.

Apparently Lepucki's book wasn't expected to do much before the Colbert endorsement. A Times feature says California "was assigned to an editor with almost no experience." It shows. Someone with a sharper scalpel might have cut away all the flashbacks about Micah and Cal's days at college and the blather about the mysterious group of prankster/terrorists Micah blew himself up for. These sections are vague and portentious and unconvincing, without much impact on the narrative. I suspect there's a lean, action-oriented version of Frida and Cal's story buried in here that didn't require so much backstory or even a previous connection to Micah. But unlike so many fictional proprietors of post-apocalyptic refuges, Lepucki was unwilling or unable to kill her darlings.

As it is, I had mostly lost interest in Cal and Frida's fate by the time they made it to one of the novel's fortified  "Communities," a clichéd Stepford-esque haven for the wealthy where they will be able to have their baby in peace and suburban contentment, as long as they don't ask too many questions. Give me the Traveling Symphony any day.

A few, no, a lot of words about Tana French

Not since the 1980s-'90s heyday of Ruth Rendell have I been as eager, time after time, for the arrival of a new book by a female crime writer as I am for each one by Tana French. Whether it's sexism or simply the type of stories they write, I tend to gravitate to hard-edged male writers like Ian Rankin or Michael Connelly. But French is the real deal, with a tag team of cops on her fictional Dublin Murder Squad stepping forward one at a time to take the lead in cases - and books - that are always different. She really switches it up from book to book, and does so again in the new one, her fifth, The Secret Place.

(Obligatory spoiler alert. Don't read ahead if you don't want to know stuff.)

There's no need for me to beat the drum for this Irish crime writer. She won the Edgar Award for her first, In The Woods, in 2007. That novel was a pulse-pounder about Detective Rob Ryan, who used his middle name to hide a secret; as a child, he was one of three boys who disappeared in a headline-making case, and the only one who came back. When a girl is killed in the same patch of forest where the boys vanished, solving the case becomes an agonizing struggle for Ryan. The girl's killer is caught by the end of the novel, but French leaves the detective's childhood mystery unresolved - with an ambiguous hint that the culprit was supernatural.

Ryan's near breakdown shattered his relationship with his female partner, Cassie Maddox. In French's next book, The Likeness, Maddox steps forward into the shoes of a dead girl who looked just like her, keeping her "alive" to try to  find out which of her creepy group of post-collegiate housemates killed her. Many detected a resemblance to Donna Tartt's The Secret History here, and I saw maybe a little Daphne DuMaurier too. Lotsa atmosphere around that big ol' country house, but maybe the thread of suspense got pulled a little thin.

Maddox's undercover supervisor in The Likeness was the tough, funny, duplicitous Det. Frank Mackie, who became the protagonist (and a suspect) in French's next, Faithful Place. Her most straightforward cop novel, it explores the brutal emotional realities of Mackie's youth in a literal dead-end neighborhood in a poor part of Dublin. The discovery of a long-missing suitcase suggests that Mackie's high-school girlfriend did not run away to England after all, as he thought, but was murdered instead. Mackie was and is a fascinating character, like a nastier, less trustworthy version of Rankin's grumpy Edinburgh hero, John Rebus. The only problem for me was that I guessed the real murderer on about page 50, strictly by plot math. But if The Likeness raised some questions about French, Faithful Place put them to rest. A lot of people say it remains her best.

The investigating officer on that case, a thorn in Mackie's side named Scorcher Kennedy, became the lead character in Broken Harbor, set in one of many unfinished housing developments left around Dublin by the collapse of the Irish economic boom. French brilliantly evoked the creepy atmosphere in this sad ghost suburb on the coastal plain, and her cops faced an absolutely insane crime scene. Was a family slaughtered by something from outside their walls, or a madness within?

Now comes The Secret Place, which finds a minor cop character from Faithful Place, Detective Stephen Moran, receiving a visit from Frank Mackie's now-teenaged daughter. She has found the photo of a murdered boy on a bulletin board at her exclusive little boarding school, with letters cut out to spell I know who killed him. The murder of Chris Harper happened a year ago, on the school grounds. Moran brings the card to the primary investigator on the case, Antoinette Conway, and she lets him tag along for the day. If they get a solve, maybe he'll finally make the murder squad, unless working with the unpopular Conway ruins his reputation with the old boy network.

And here's what French does different here - the entire investigation takes place in a single marathon day of interrogations and sleuthing at the school. Closely observed chapters about the detectives at work there, their subtle strategizing as they questions certain girls over and over, alternate with flashbacks to times before the murder, seen from the girls' point of view. And each of those flashbacks begins with a date-specific warning of the approaching crime: Chris Harper has three months, eleven days and seventeen hours to live...

It's a fascinating and risky two-track strategy to create suspense, and it must have been brutal to keep track of the two timelines. There are, mainly, eight suspects in the murder - Holly Mackey and her three close friends, plus a quartet of mean girls who bully them. These 15- and 16-year-olds are driven, intelligent, clever, sneaky and duplicitious, but also scared, naive, too often dreamy. They're conscious of the power of their sexuality but not always in control of it, especially when Chris and his friends from the boys' school down the road are around. It's a volatile mix and creates difficulty and hazard for the two detectives, all the more so when Mackey himself shows up to watch over his daughter's interrogation.

French is after something very specific and ethereal through these girls, a picture of that time in adolescence when your life is like a dramatic novel you're writing and you'll do anything for your friends - more so when you realize this time will soon come to an end. She chases it in long, sometimes mystical and often beautiful scenes as the girls push each others' buttons and roam the school's grounds illicitly at night. It's a little bit of that DuMaurier romanticism again, updated for 2000s adolescents. But there is also, daringly, I think, a touch of magical realism here, as the girls find a power in themselves to shatter a light bulb or turn a key. It may be intended as realism as their interpretation of events in a time of hysteria. Either way, fans of the gritty Faithful Place may find it a bit much, which is why I give French credit for having the courage to change it up from book to book and follow her muse.

The downside to The Secret Place is that the actual investigation hinges on so many tiny details it's Agatha Christie-esque, with three different lookalike cell phones getting passed around in a complex timetable. But this is all just a big MacGuffin to what she's really writing about, the love and madness of teen friendship and the sacrifice of growing up. Plenty of gorgeous writing here, and I can hardly wait to see what French does next.

'The Goldfinch' won't leave me alone

It's true. I've been procrastinating about this post for weeks, but Donna Tartt's decade-in-the-making, nearly 800-page third novel has that kind of power. Even if "The Goldfinch" isn't a masterpiece, as my friend Rob Weir says it might be, it's a real novel by the fullest definition, immersive and affecting and thought-provoking. There are themes and characters you'll find yourself thinking about - and, apparently, blogging about - weeks later. (Spoilers ahead.)

With the Marathon coming up, I should note that book's inciting incident is a vividly rendered terrorist bombing. In Manhattan, Theo Decker, 13, and his mother duck into the Met to get out of the rain. They go their separate ways in the galleries, Theo covertly pursuing another peek at a pretty red-haired girl. Then a massive explosion leaves him dazed but alive in a Bosch-ian hellscape that his brain can barely process; this is a bravura set piece by Tartt. Frightened and confused, Theo eludes first responders and leaves the museum with an old man's last words ringing in his ears, carrying an artistic treasure under his coat.

The painting is a very real one that Tartt has appropriated: "The Goldfinch" by Carel Fabritius, a protege of Rembrandt who died in a huge gunpowder explosion in Delft in 1654. Most of his works were destroyed too; "The Goldfinch" is one of the few that remains. Tartt obviously chose the painting in part for the power of this backstory, but the image itself is incredibly evocative, with the beautiful bird chained to its perch in the light, stoic.

Theo soldiers on after the bombing, stoic too, or just shut down, especially after the crushing revelation that his mother is not going to meet him at home, as he hoped. She has died at the museum. After too many hours on his own, the authorities find him, and he is taken in by a friend's screwed-up Park Avenue family. Eventually he ends up in the custody of his long-absent, alcoholic father, a grifter and gambler with a girlfriend from hell and a house in a spooky Las Vegas subdivision that has become a foreclosure ghost town. There Theo meets Boris, another latchkey kid, son of a Russian mobster (well, maybe; Boris already knows better than to put all his cards on the table). Boris introduces Theo to the sometimes pleasurable oblivion of booze and drugs, and to new ways of looking at the world, including as a criminal land of opportunity.

Through it all, Theo keeps the painting, stashing it away wherever he lands, rationalizing his continued possession of it while rarely looking at it. Is it a talisman of his survival on that awful day? A sort of compensation for his suffering, a karmic One Fund settlement? Or is it his link to the lost beauty of a world in which his mother was alive? Or a very valuable ball and chain that could land him in desperate trouble were it discovered?

All of those things and more, as it turns out. Tartt utterly convinces us of psychological rightness of Theo keeping "The Goldfinch," without ever pinning down his motivation too neatly. And the constant presence of the fragile painting – usually just offstage, and often in jeopardy – is also a great narrative trick for keeping us hooked. 

Besides the book's length, everyone seems to comment on Tartt's Dickensian plotting - as many readers have noted, Boris is a sort of Artful Dodger - and the author has a whopping, long-fuse surprise or two up her sleeve. Some of her moves take hundreds of pages to pay off. There's a skip forward in time in the middle of the book, when Theo moves back to New York as a young adult, bringing both the painting and a drug habit with him. He joins the furniture business started by the old man who died on the museum floor, run by his partner, the kindly Hobie. The red-haired girl and the Park Avenue family and even Boris return to Theo's life. But there is a reckoning to come, several of them in fact.

Caveats? Shining a light into every other corner of Theo's life, Tartt seems oddly elusive about sex. It's almost tangential in her otherwise probing vision. (In this, "The Goldfinch" compares unfavorably to another very long novel about a troubled adolescent, Mona Simpson's "Anywhere But Here.") Perhaps it is too late a time on the planet to hope for Dickensian closure in life, but I felt Theo's contacts with Pippa, the red-haired girl, deserved more of an ending, since she's the light he badly wants to see at the end of his life's lonely tunnel. I'm not expecting a happy ending, mind you, but their storyline simply lacks dramatic arc. She's not interested in him that way, and she won't take his expensive present. The end. Well. There is another woman in Theo's life, and when the by-then-racing plot takes him away from their big society wedding near the end of the book, he's numb to it for reasons including all those pills he's taking. But there seems to be very little fallout from his absence otherwise, which is odd.

I almost had the feeling that Tartt didn't want to share Theo with a wife or girlfriend, preferring to spend long hours alone with him in the furniture workshop (that's where I would have started cutting pages, btw) as he gobbles Vicodin and obsesses. But an author's intense bond with her character is hardly something to complain about, and perhaps these are quibbles. This is an intimate portrait of a troubled life shaped by fate and loss. It ranks with Simpson's book and also with John Le Carre's lonely "A Perfect Spy." When Theo was desperate and alone at night in a rented room in Europe, I worried Tartt's book would end the same way as Le Carre's...

What arguably sets "The Goldfinch" on an even higher shelf is Theo's transcendent soliloquoy in the last dozen or so pages, pondering art and time and mortality in highly personal terms, finding meaning in all that has transpired. To echo what Clea Simon wrote in her excellent essay about both book and painting, this is a novel that I sat up late at night rushing to get to the end, only to find I wished I had taken more time. Finishing it felt like a loss.

Tyler-era 'American Idol' roman a clef? A little pitchy.

It's kind of embarrassing to admit, but we've watched a few episodes of "American Idol" this season. Because ice dancing. And everything else was reruns.

Eventually I went to the to-read list instead and grabbed the Kindle edition of "Elimination Night," the "American Idol" roman a clef written by Anonymous, who was clearly a staffer of some kind on the show during Season 11, when the judging panel included Massachusetts' own Steven Tyler alongside Jennifer Lopez. That was the last time we really tuned in "Idol" in my house, drawn by the car-crash, you-just-have-to-look possibilities of a show with, well, Steve Tyler and Jennifer Lopez.

The book, published a year ago, tries to be caustic and funny about the backstage scene at the show it calls "Project Icon." It makes fun of former judge Simon Cowell's nipples (he's Nigel Crowther) and host Ryan Seacrest's relentless careerism (he's Wayne Shoreline, aka Hostbot 9000). Lopez becomes the gazillionaire homegirl Bibi Vasquez, with a lethal ego and her tits and ass insured for $100 million (apiece, I think).

Aerosmith's Tyler here becomes Joey Lovecraft of the currently-on-hiatus band Honeyload. The band split after Joey took a symbolic - there's no good way to say this - dump during a concert and then fell off the stage, understandably annoying guitarist Blade Morgan. (Joe Perry, come on down!) Joey joins the "American Icon" judging panel because he "wanted to get Honeyload back together. Or, more accurately, he wanted Blade Morgan to beg him to return as lead singer."

Anonymous actually does a pretty good job broad-brushing the asinine-but-entertaining side of Tyler's public persona. When someone asks Joey how he'd feel about J-Lo Bibi joining him at the judges' table, Joey says, "As long as I have a face, Bibi Vasquez will always - always - have a place to sit." That's our Steve Joey!

I actually felt bad for Randy Jackson, who is portrayed here as a lonely, fat white boy named JD Coolz (nee Jason Dee) who grew up in a black neighborhood in Bakersfield, taught himself to play bass and "became a fixture in the weed-smoking rooms of all the major recording studios." Now he "moved slow, wore a lot of jewelry, communicated only in fist bumps and monosyllabic slang," manifesting "a Great Dane-like lovability." Ouch.

To be frank, though, as you've probably gathered by now, "Primary Colors" this isn't. The book's satire is broad and slapdash. Joey Lovecraft jumps out of an airplane apparently without a parachute just to make a point. Twice. And the story's narrator, an assistant producer named Sasha, has nothing to add, storywise.

Fact is, "American Idol" and its personalities are pretty much beyond parody, as is the entire modern reality TV/celebrity-industrial complex. Even the great Carl Hiaasen fell short in his attempt to mount an attack on its Britney Spears/Lindsay Lohan flank in "Star Island." "Elimination Night's" essential superfluity is revealed by fact that, at least according to the first few pages of my Google search, no one has ever exposed the author and gotten them fired from the show. Working there is, clearly, its own special kind of hell.

At the moment, though, the book is only $2 in Amazon's Kindle store, if you're interested.

Speak now, and later

As noted below, I'll be joining Bill Steelman of Essex Heritage at the mic for First Friday at the Custom House Maritime Museum in Newburyport on April 5. That's a member event (although you can join that night and still get in on the buffet and drinks). But everyone is invited when I'll be on a panel at the Newburyport Literary Festival on April 27. Ghlee Woodworth and I will talking about Newburyport walking trails, local history, the byway and so forth at 11 a.m. at the Newburyport Art Association. And best of all, it's free! And I'll be the speaker at the Lynn Museum's annual membership meeting in May. In each case I'll be selling and singing the Byway Guide for interested parties.

Eddie Coyle at the end

Only one show left, Sunday at 7:30pm, for "The Friends of Eddie Coyle" at Oberon. I've written about the theatrical adaptation of this Boston crime classic by Bill Doncaster a few times over the past year, including attending its first reading more than a year ago in the back room of the Burren. Thursday night I finally got to see the full version at Oberon - I brought my dad, who took me to the movie back in 1972, and we scarfed beers and burgers over at Charlie's  Kitchen first to get in the old-school mood.

The play was everything I expected, with its network of conspiratorial conversations staged all around Oberon and sometimes overlapping as the web of circumstance tightens around the characters. I don't review plays I write about, but this was dark fun. Special nod to Rick Park as the bartender/ex-con Dillon, whose seemingly genial, reasonable exterior is gradually revealed as a disguise. Peter Darrigo is also effectively real as a familiar kind of cranky, self-aggrandizing, working-class Masshole; it's just that Jimmy Scalise's gig involves guns and banks instead of power tools or paint brushes.

I'm still debating the depiction of Coyle himself by Doncaster, director Maria Silvaggi and actor Paulo Branco. Mind you, they deliver on their artistic intent - I'm just not sure I share their interpretation 100%. Sure, the movie's performance by Robert Mitchum gave the character more gravitas than author George V. Higgins may have intended, but the Coyle they give us in the play is a total mook.

Overall, this is a compelling restaging of the tale, and last I heard, there were only a couple of handfuls of tickets left for the final performance, at 866-811-4111 or cluboberon.com.

WELDER is iPad crack for word nerds

Actually it's W.E.L.D.E.R., if you want to get technical about it, which stands for Word Examination Laboratory for Dynamic Extraction and Reassessment. It's an iPhone and iPad game debuted this month by Ayopa Games and Highline Games, a startup from some of the Rockstar NYC people. And it has been the largest single time-suck in my life for about three weeks now. Gameplay combines elements of Scrabble, Tetris and an old-school Jumble. And the touch-screen interface is so well-designed that it's just about impossible to put down. All the uncool kids are doing it.

When you start playing, you face a 64-tile board, much like Scrabble, only it's filled with random letters and a few blank tiles. Tap one letter, then another, and they swap places. The idea is to move them around to make a four-letter or longer word, generally using as few swaps as possible. Double-tap a blank tile and a virtual keyboard appears so you can chose a letter to fill it.

In the first round, it's only adjacent tiles that you can swap, but in subsequent rounds more complicated parlays are available. Each word you make disappears from the board, and random letters slide down to fill in, sometimes forming words on their own, like a Webster's pachinko machine.

Each round you get only so many swaps to make so many words, and the more creative you are in your choices, using rarer letters, the higher you score. More scoring buys you more swaps...

Non-word people are glazing over about now. But what's really addicting about this game - what's making it spread like wildfire, at least among my Bay State tribe - is the interface. The skin is a subtle mid-century Cold War modern, with peeling paint and big red and green buttons, like a word game in a missile silo. Here and there are touches of steampunk, like the brass-framed ticker scoring your words across the bottom of the game board. (Tap a word there, and you get a definition.)

And the sound design features two tracks. While you're thinking, there's an ominous ambient hiss and flutter, like the sound of slow decay in that missile silo or on early first-person shooter games. Feedback arrives as a clanging, dinging clamor when you make a word, reminiscent of the doors and gates sliding down on the opening credits of "Get Smart" or "MST3K." Over all the sense is of being a cog in a machine, combined with a meaningless Pavlovian payout each time you score. Why this is so appealing, I can't say. The sounds also annoy the crap out of anyone in the room with you, which may or may not be desirable.

The game's only real flaw is the dictionary, which misses some obvious words and includes others, while mostly  skipping swears that would really come in handy sometimes. But they're taking dictionary suggestions at [email protected]

Last I looked, WELDER was $1.99 on the App Store, but it's sometimes discounted to 99 cents. My phone is an Android so I can't say how it would play on that smaller screen, but on iPad it's an addictive joy. I'm stuck on Level 8 at the moment, and my wife greeted the news that I'd scored 670 for PURRS thanks to bonus tiles with the same kind of cheerful but not actually excited "awesome" that she gives when I call her in to see a sports highlight on the news. But by then I was already on to the next word...

 

Eddie Coyle hits the stage, tickets on sale now

"The Friends of Eddie Coyle" comes to Oberon in Cambridge in December and January, and tickets are on sale now at the production's web site. Playwright Bill Doncaster's adaptation of the Boston crime classic drew an enthusiastic capacity crowd for a reading in the back room at the Burren some months back, with author George V. Higgins' widow in attendance. Higgins is enjoying something of a resurgence now, which also includes an upcoming Brad Pitt movie of "Cogan's Trade" (shot, alas, elsewhere). "Coyle" is, as Doncaster says in the video below, still the one against which "badass Boston crime stories are measured." Director Maria Silvaggi returns along with Paulo Branco as Coyle, Rick Park as Dillon and other cast members. Tickets are $20-$35, and the 11 performances take place between Dec. 8 and Jan. 15. I suggest getting yours now.

Whitey Bulger in jail. Eddie Coyle on stage.

I went to bed early Wednesday night. Before I went downstairs this morning, I picked up my phone to check email and saw a fresh message from playwright Bill Doncaster. “A little overwhelmed by the karma,” he wrote. “When I started this, would never have predicted Higgins' work would be back on the rise, the Bruins would win the cup again, and Whitey would  get pinched. A little surreal.”

 Wait, what? I read it again to make sure he wasn’t joking, then ran to turn on the TV. Sure enough, a couple of days after the start of a new FBI ad campaign, they’d finally caught Whitey Bulger.

Doncaster wrote a stage adaptation of George V. Higgins’ classic 1972 Boston crime novel, “The Friends of Eddie Coyle,” which limns the same Irish-and-Italian mob scene where James “Whitey” Bulger ruled before he went on the run 16 years ago.

“I was more shocked than when they got Bin Laden,” Doncaster said by phone later in the day. “I heard his name and thought, they’re not still reporting on that ad campaign are they? And then I heard the word arrest.”

Doncaster’s play was cheered in a staged reading at the Burren in Davis Square last November, with Higgins’ widow in the audience. And he recently announced that a full production of the play will begin performances Dec. 8-Jan. 15 at the ART’s Oberon venue on the edge of Harvard Square. (Doncaster notes that while Bulger was a Southie phenomenon, the fictional Coyle came from Cambridge's Central Square.)

The play is just one sign of a Higgins resurgence, the biggest being that Brad Pitt spent part of the last few months filming an adaptation of “Cogan’s Trade” in (alas) New Orleans. Doncaster is putting together a non-profit to finance his production and will sart raising money sometime next month. You can go to www.thefriendsofeddiecoyle.com and sign up for email updates.

Doncaster and I had already joked recently about the timing of the Bruins championship. One of the best remembered moments in Peter Yates’ acclaimed “Coyle” movie is when Robert Mitchum, as the drunken hood Coyle, cheers on “Number four! Bobby Orr!” The last Bruins’ Stanley Cup triumph was in… 1972. But the Whitey capture takes karma to a new level.

One of the key characters in “Coyle” is Dillon, a felon who is the silent owner of a bar (like Bulger and Triple O’s), a government informant playing both sides of the street (like Bulger) and, it turns out, a killer (like Bulger). Doncaster said that Higgins, although he’d been a federal prosecutor, always maintained that Dillon was an invention and not based on Bulger.

"I get asked about that pretty frequently,” Doncaster said. “With the similarities…it’s easy to jump to that conclusion.”

In Doncaster’s production, Rick Park plays Dillon. I’d recently asked Doncaster to put me in touch with Park on an unrelated matter, and when he emailed me this morning, his original intent was just to make sure I’d heard from Park.

“Very, very strange,” Doncaster said with a laugh.

Not as spooky as the real thing, though. Doncaster met Bulger “for two seconds” back in the 80s. “My girlfriend at the time lived in the neighborhood. Scary guy, even in a brief meeting.”