2010 PUMPKIN BEER ROUNDUP

In case you're wondering, pumpkin beer is legit.  Fruit-flavored beers don't have the best reputation, and usually for good reason.  They're often just generic ales with syrup added after the brewing process, instead of fermenting the fruit itself — frankly, some of them could pass as soda.  With the exception of lambics (a great style that bucks this trend), beer was rarely made with fruit until recently.  Yet pumpkin ale has been around for hundreds of years.  In Colonial times, American brewers couldn't afford to ship expensive ingredients overseas from England, so they used what they had around.  And what did they have?  Well, aside from apples (hard cider is perhaps the most patriotic of all beverages) they had pumpkins, the greatest of all vegetables (they are vegetables, right?)  Pumpkins, it so happens, work really well in beer, blending well with the natural bitterness of hops, and adding a unique flavor that doesn't overpower the beer or end up tasting like chemicals.  And thus the two greatest things in the world were paired, creating one of the most potentially delicious substances of all time.

GREAT:
Pumking - Southern Tier (NY)
The Great Pumpkin - Elysian  (WA)
Despite all my enthusiasm for pumpkin beer as a style, I don't think it's been perfected by most modern brewers.  Only since the mid-2000's has the style become popular, and though just about every micro has a pumpkin beer of their own now, many of them just aren't that great, or original.  Southern Tier and Elysian provide the exceptions: two wildly unique pumpkin beers with no rivals.  Despite the large number of beers on this list, no others come remotely close to these two, either in taste, style or sheer perfection.  And yet, each is completely different from the other, proving that there's more than one perfect pumpkin beer recipe — the sign of a truly worthwhile style.  I hope to see more beers compete with these two in years to come, but for now, they are without question among the best beers in the world, of any style.

GOOD:
Imperial Pumpkin Ale - Weyerbacher (PA)
Smashed Pumpkin - Shipyard (ME)
Night Owl Pumpkin - Elysian (WA)
Fisherman's Pumpkin Stout - Cape Ann Brewing Company (MA)
Punkin' Ale - Dogfish Head (DE)
A few steps down from "Great", these are still solid beers — better than many of other styles, and certainly better than most other pumpkins.  They all earn extra points for uniqueness.  Weyerbacher's entry is like a sweet brown(sugar) ale, smooth and rich with spices, simply tastier than most.  Shipyard's special, rare pumpkin (they have another, inferior entry on the list) is lighter in mouthfeel but also high in ABV, and has an interesting, earthy vegetable profile, like a chunk of raw pumpkin, somewhat similar to Night Owl, the second Elysian beer here (and nowhere near as good as their first, The Great Pumpkin). Cape Ann makes the only pumpkin stout that I've ever seen, and as you might guess, the stout taste overwhelms the pumpkin, but nonetheless makes for a very smooth, tasty beer, similar to a milk stout with a more complex profile. Dogfish Head, generally one the best breweries in America, came up with one of the first pumpkin beers in the microbrew movement.  Possibly as a result, their try is surprisingly tame for a Dogfish and not strong in pumpkin flavor — basically a brown ale with some funky caramelized flavoring.  It's nonetheless a delicious and unique beer.

AVERAGE:
Pumpkin Ale - Blue Point (NY)
Pumpkin Brewster - Sixpoint (NY)
Leaf Pile Ale - Greenport Harbor (NY)
Saranac Pumpkin Ale - The Matt Brewing Company (NY)
Pumpkin Ale - Captain Lawrence (NY)
Will Stevens' Pumpkin Ale - Wolaver's / Otter Creek (VT) 
Pumpkin Cider - Woodchuck Hard Cider (VT) 


With any style, an "average" is going to be established eventually, a standard for the style that most breweries will tend to work around.  It's already happened with pumpkin beer — a good sign for its establishment as a mainstream style, I suppose, but rather disappointing when you're trying to find something interesting to drink.  I have to assume a bit of it is laziness, as all the better pumpkin beers are rarer and pricier, whereas these beers are more easily found, often populating grocery store sixpack aisles.  The taste of this "average" is generally not strong in pumpkin flavor, and at this level, many breweries barely use any actual pumpkin in the making of their beer, resorting instead to cheap "fall" spices that give a vaguely pumpkin pie-like flavor. Blue Point and Sixpoint have new entries for 2010, and rise a bit above the rest; certainly, they're worthwhile beers to have on any occasion, even if they aren't particularly unique.  Saranac Pumpkin is a personal favorite of mine for its strong vanilla aftertaste, but once again, the pumpkin flavor is not very prominent. Woodchuck's is of course a cider, not a beer, but still deserving of placement on the list.  The pumpkin flavor is barely noticeable, adding more to the smooth, crisp mouthfeel than anything else, but it's an excellent fall drink.

SUB-PAR:
Pumpkin Barrel Ale - Fire Island (NY)
Pumpkinhead Ale - Shipyard (ME)
Pumpkin Ale - Buffalo Bill's  (CA)
Pumpkin Ale - Smuttynose (NH)
Post Road Pumpkin Ale - Brooklyn Brewery (NY)
Smiling Pumpkin - Heartland Brewery (NY)
Compared to the entire world of beer out there, none of these are exactly bad beers.  If you see one in a bar and don't have many other options, by all means, give it a try.  But Smuttynose and Brooklyn Brewery unfairly hog grocery store aisles with their sixpacks, crowding out many superior pumpkin beers that just didn't land widespread distribution deals — and that annoys me.  Most of these are very similar to the "standard pumpkin beer recipe" I talked about above, but with a few tweaks that bring out the more unpleasant characteristics of the beer.  If you like bitter, sharper beers (but not as a result of hops, which are barely noticeable) then this may simply be a difference of opinion.  I find the mouthfeel watery and unpleasant and the pumpkin taste almost gimmicky.  Still.  Could be worse.

AVOID:
Harvest Moon Pumpkin Ale - Coors (CO)
Jack's Pumpkin Spice Ale - Anheuser-Busch (MO)
"Worse."  Avoid.  Don't ask questions.  Just walk away.

THE CITY AND THE CITY (BY) CHINA MIEVILLE

Published 2009, 312 pages
Characters: B-
Writing: B
Plot: B+
Pacing: A-
Poignancy: A-

Unfortunately, I don't think any book could ever be as badass as the cover of The City and the City suggests, but China Mieville's intricate, atmospheric mystery gives it a pretty good go.  Though the story is framed around a political murder, and never strays too far from other noirish police procedurals in scope of plot, the setting that steers most of Mieville's novel is unlike anything I've ever read.  With the feel of very dry magic realism and gothic dark fantasy, Mieville's style has been described as a cross between Philip K. Dick, Raymond Chandler and Franz Kafka, and I can't really improve upon that.  That, I hope, should be endorsement enough.

The two cities of the title are Beszél and Ul Qoma, conjoined but separate cities somewhere in Eastern Europe, each essentially its own country.  Parallels to real-life separated cities are obvious, like Berlin during the Cold War, but Mieville pushes well past social commentary and into elaborate mind-game.  Beszél and Ul Qoma — though distinct cities with their own unique cultures, languages and histories — share the same, overlapping physical space.  Rather than divided down the middle, each city is spliced together with the other, necessitating a complicated system so that citizens of one town do not "breach" into the other.  The population learns from birth to "unsee" the other city, memorizing which streets exist in which jurisdiction, what shops belong to their nation, and even which cultural signifiers make citizens of the "other" place practically — though not literally — invisible.  It sounds like an outlandish concept, but there is no magic or fantasy involved, only politics.  Mieville plays it so dry that it's easy to accept this scenario as plausible, even if no government could ever realistically make it work.  For obvious reasons, a good deal of the novel is expository — sort of like Inception, which I seem to be referencing a lot lately, in that both are standard thriller plotlines, easy enough to follow on their own but tied to a complicated central structure.  Those anticipating many layers of strangeness and surrealism beyond the basic pitch will be disappointed, but Mieville is able to extract so much from his premise that it really shouldn't matter.

The setting is easily malleable enough to provide its own twists and turns, and therefore a great deal of the narrative is spent establishing the nature of Beszél and Ul Qoma.  Mieville is clever enough to make these the focus of the book — really, its main characters — without ever going off on tangents, or driving his story into the absurd.  Unfortunately, his other characters are never quite as strong, and the structure of the story prevents them from developing much beyond their occupational roles.  This is not to say that the characters are unbelievable or poorly written — they are bland and not particularly deep, but in the way that many real people are bland and not particularly deep, and their actions are always well-scripted and fully convincing.  If The City and the City suffers from one chief weakness, it is that the ending fails to impress after the steady brilliance building up to it.  The conclusion simply lacks the imagination of everything preceding it — many of the red herrings tossed out along the way might have led to a more interesting ending, and the final showdown requires so much exposition as it's unfolding that any tension or suspense is lost.  I had hoped Mieville might have taken the metaphor inherent in his setting a bit further, or add more layers to the many he had already concocted, but the climax is true to the grounded tone the rest of the novel takes.  Mieville has defended this arc as a sort of anti-fantasy — after being given a glimpse of potential, a hint that the book could expand into entirely new worlds, the narrative instead dips down and touches ground again, adhering to the boundaries of reality.  Even if you, like me, are frustrated by this less-exciting turn, The City and the City is still one of the more adventurous, interesting novels to come along in years.

THE THIEVES OF MANHATTAN (BY) ADAM LANGER

Published 2010, 253 pages
Characters: C-
Writing: B-
Plot: B
Pacing: A-
Poignancy: B-

I suppose I should just accept that comedic books, especially satires, aren't really my thing. I mean, I enjoy comedy — who doesn't? — and I like the concept of satire, I like the depth and precision a book can wield, and everything else that should make me appreciate comedic books.  But it's happened a lot lately: I'll read a book, conclude that it was cute enough, but ultimately a bit flimsy and forgettable.  Wondering what the book was missing, I'll look at other reviews and notice everyone calling it "laugh out loud funny," or whatever, and realize — oh, this book was supposed to be comedy?  It's not that I thought the jokes didn't work. If forced, I'm not sure I would be able to point out what was even meant to be funny.  Which is not to say that The Thieves of Manhattan a bad book.  I enjoyed it well enough as goofy, lightweight satire that sort of missed the mark but was pleasant to read.  I guess I'm just not the market for goofy, lightweight satire.

Thieves is the story of an aspiring memoirist, Ian Minot.  He lives in a world where the publishing industry publishes only outlandish memoirs — at least that's the impression I got, given every character's bizarrely dismissive attitude toward fiction; but then again, maybe this was part of some broad satirical statement, and maybe the fact that the satire was so difficult to pinpoint was part of the problem.  Ian interacts with loud, generic morons and struggles to find a publisher for his work, until a strange man informs him of a scheme to hookwink the publishing industry. With extremely little effort, they hoodwink the publishing industry.  Who knew it was so easy to achieve rampant success!  Of course, shenanigans ensue.

I think the problem for me is the tone such novels take.  Thieves is a satire attacking memoir writers, liars and greedy editors, with a bit of a metafictional bent, which for obvious reasons intrigued me on paper.  But satire in novels always seems to end up so broad and goofy, whether it's the raunchy randomness of Palahniuk or the slice-of-wacky-life essays of Sedaris.  And there's a good reason such writers adopt a lightweight tone and zippy prose: they want to make you laugh, and if the prose is feisty enough to begin with, you'll already be in the mood when the jokes land.  If they land.  If there are jokes to begin with.  The satire in Thieves is so broad and cartoonish that I'm guessing the tone was the joke; that the reader's understanding of the publishing industry is meant to be filled in, a self-provided punchline.  But the characters are all too ridiculous, the situations too contrived, the repercussions cliched and silly.  Langer gets a few good jabs in, of course, but jokes about the publishing industry more or less write themselves.  One main character is meant to satirize James Frey and other such writers who have published "memoirs" full of outlandish, impossible-sounding drama.  The character is as generic as a character could possibly be, a loud, crass thug who ends every sentence with "yo", even if that sentence is a written blurb advertising another book.  There is no context or background for his success, but it's meant to seem ludicrous — as if just making the improbable happen in a fictional novel will somehow prove a point.  Another character can't get published because his mystery thriller novel isn't "true."  Okay, satirizing the industry for latching onto bullshit memoirs, that I get.  But a novel that sounds awfully like Da Vinci Code can't get published because it didn't really happen?  Because a thriller novel wasn't a memoir?  Seriously?

Whatever Langer had to say about the publishing industry gets lost in a haze of conflicting messages and unbelievable behavior.  The tone remains cute even when the action picks up, and there are plenty of in-jokes to make sure that literary types understand that this one is for them.  But cute is all it really is.  If that's your thing, this is a good book for you.  It's enjoyable, it's silly, it reads fast.  I'm just not altogether sure what the point was.