Archive for the 'book reviews' Category

On The Lovers

paperhaus June 20th, 2010

The Bosphorus in Turkey at sunset

The Bosphorus in Turkey at sunset

My review of Vendela Vida’s new novel The Lovers is in today’s LA Times. It’s set in Turkey, and follows Yvonne, a 53 year-old widow. While it’s a sleek read, I didn’t love it. Here’s why:

Yvonne is the only part of the book with complexity, while everything she encounters in Turkey is surface. This may be a smart novelist’s trick, using an exotic location as an emotional map. But it also makes the book feel like it could have been set in Trenton or Detroit or Coalinga — any place both a desolate landscape and a refuge of renewal. Instead, what we get is an uncomfortable act of novelistic imperialism: the exotic land, its sites manipulated to reflect the disarranged emotional life of the American tourist, all without a sense of the place having its own history, its own cultural life — and its own tragedies.

And, for now, I think I’ll leave it at that.

Nothing happened: a review

paperhaus April 20th, 2010

Jake Silverstein, the editor of the award-winning Texas Monthly and a contributing editor at Harper’s, has published his first book, Nothing Happened and Then It Did. Opening with his early days as a somewhat hapless reporter for a newspaper in Marfa, Texas, Silverstein’s eight chapters alternate between real and imagined, mucking up that closely-guarded line between fiction and reality. I reviewed it in Sunday’s LA Times:

Between writing about city council meetings, ranches and drought, he did a lot of driving. His stories are as much about the people and places he comes to know as they are about where his mind takes him along the way.

Sun and solitude and desert roads led to hallucinatory leaps. Thinking he’s discovered a way to find Ambrose Bierce, Silverstein starts asking locals where they’ve seen the Devil. Later, following the La Carrera Panamericana car race, he turns up a history of crashes so bloody it makes “Death Race 2000″ look like “Mary Poppins.” These stories, so extraordinary and surreal, could not possibly be true. But they are.

Perhaps it was their strangeness that gave Silverstein the idea to fill out the book with fictions. It’s an unusual, counterintuitive move.

In recent years, the fluid boundary between fact and fiction has displaced more than one writer. There was James Frey, whose exaggerated sins set him on Oprah’s couch, apologizing. Or Stephen Glass and Jayson Blair, of the New Republic and the New York Times, respectively, who were caught making things up instead of reporting — both lost their jobs. Such incidents suggest a rumbling cultural anxiety about truth and fiction, as explored in the new book “Reality Hunger” by David Shields.

Silverstein addresses the issue head on. “I do not wish to deceive by passing off fiction as fact, as so many have done” he writes in the preface, “only to permit the real to mingle with the imagined, as it does in the deserted labyrinth of the mind.”

I’m currently fascinated by the fiction-reality trespassers and was delighted to read Silverstein’s book. It turns out he had previous published all the nonfiction pieces (in Harper’s); the fiction pieces are written around them, providing a glue and arc. I think it’s a fine approach, but a unique one. Now I’m curious how the next trespasser will see the lay of the land.

Caroline Blackwood’s stories: crazy good

paperhaus March 26th, 2010

I knew nothing of Caroline Blackwood before I picked up her new collection, Never Breathe a Word. And wow! What a fantastic writer of short fiction. “Fantastic” as in brutally bleak, an emotional wasteland. My review ran in last Sunday’s LA Times.

Blackwood died more than a decade ago, after being married to two of the 20th century’s great artists: painter Lucien Freud, first, and poet Robert Lowell third (second was a composer, who never achieved the same kind of greatness). She was an heir to the Guinness fortune and was quite beautiful. If our current crop of heiress-beauty-celebrities had a fraction of her depth, our pop culture world would be a more interesting place.

Oh, I’m the book critic

paperhaus February 12th, 2010

Jennifer Weiner just called me a book critic, and she didn’t mean it in a nice way.

Weiner, of course, is the author of a heap of books, including Good in Bed & In Her Shoes, and a lively advocate for popular fiction. She thought I was shitting on Jackie Collins when I tweeted “Jackie Collins, serving up sexy Hollywood trash! Oh, YAWN.” Her reply was swift: “Book critic being snotty, dismissive to popular commercial writer? I see your yawn + raise you a coma.”

Well, she hadn’t clicked on the link, to this Jacket Copy post — it’s about how Collins’ stock-in-trade — shockingly sexy tales of Hollywood! — has been usurped by sources of more immediate gratification: TMZ, Perez Hilton, you know. Seems to me like there isn’t much of a place for 400-page trashy Hollywood novels anymore. Collins has a new book, Poor Little Bitch Girl, that treads a mashup of Heidi Fleiss and Paris Hilton and more and… feels very tired.

What shocked me, though, wasn’t anything about Jackie Collins — it was that Jennifer Weiner was calling me a book critic. As if I was one of those shadow bogeymen of haute culture, a gatekeeper. Me? But… and I think of all the ways that I have been outside the gates. Oh, so many. Oh, for so long. Take today: I am totally wearing the wrong shoes.

But it’s true, I have to admit, that I write book reviews. I’ll be on the board of the National Book Critics Circle, starting in March. And I love writing about books, in a way that’s thoughtful, and even smart.

And I suppose that makes me a book critic.

And I think I’m OK with that.

Zoinks! Deadlines! Gadgets!

paperhaus January 14th, 2010

Sometimes when navigating a flurry of deadlines, which are totally uninteresting, the work appeas, which is interesting, with any luck. The latest: for Flavorwire, my review of Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not a Gadget.

If you are not a gadget, what are you? Jaron Lanier would have you be a person, but he warns that Web 2.0 is pushing us away from personhood in ways that we haven’t really examined. Actually, he might have you be a cephalopod, because he finds octopi mesmerizing, but that enthusiasm only appears at the end of You Are Not a Gadget, his first book.

It is something of a reckoning. Lanier turns a philosopher’s eye to our everyday online tools. What do they say about us? How have they come to inhabit and inhibit the way we imagine ourselves? Who do our new systems reward? Is the Internet all that, really?

I really like that Lanier, the father of virtual reality, is a brilliant programmer who makes his case without making a straightforward linear argument. He hops from idea to idea, which is frutrating in places, but ultimately serves to force the reader to engage with his ideas dynamically, having space to think of counterarguments or make connections.

And now: coffee. Plus another deadline.

Total Oblivion

paperhaus January 1st, 2010

My review of Alan DeNiro’s Total Oblivion, More or Less appears in today’s LA Times. Here’s how it starts.

Macy Palmer would be living the life of a normal Midwestern 16-year-old girl, if only the Scythians hadn’t driven her family from their Minnesota home. Or perhaps the blame lies with the spreading plague, or the rival Imperial army — it’s hard to say.

Exactly who or what is the cause for the chaos in “Total Oblivion, More or Less” is not as important as how it reshapes Macy’s world. She’s a smarter-than-average teenager with a mildly dysfunctional family. Her flirtatious older sister, Sophia, plans to skip traditional college and become a midwife, not exactly the path their father, an astronomy professor, might have chosen. Her younger brother, Ciaran, enrolled in classes for troubled children, has a sinister intelligence. Her mother drifts through days, particularly after discovering that she’s pregnant again.

Hello, 2010!

In praise of living on the cheap

paperhaus December 24th, 2009

Possum Living was published in the late 70s as a sassy guide to anti-consumerist living. Mostly ideology-free — unless you count a cheerful curmudgeonliness as an ideology — the book, written by the pseudonymous 18 year-old Dolly Freed, has just been reissued by Tin House. And I wrote about it for Boldtype/Flavorpill yesterday:

Dolly’s practical lessons are presented with an irresistible wiseass grin: “We usually leave on the head, tail and fins for the simple reason that the fish looks nicer that way; and it means less work,” she writes. “Also, many fish have considerable amounts of meat in their heads — just like some people.”

Dolly lived with her father on a half-acre lot in suburban Philadelphia off just $5,000 a year, which was perplexingly cheap enough in her day to get her on the Merv Griffin Show. Her dad earned the little cash they needed doing odd jobs during winter, but the book is about everything else it took to live like possums: the gardening, the scrimping and shortcuts, the “merrily gurgling” home still.

What’s remarkable is how prescient, or smart, or just plain no-nonsense Freed’s advice was, because so much makes sense today. Not only do they ditch their car and ride bikes instead, but she warns against getting overly expensive bicycles — see ya, fixies — that might get stolen. Like my neighbors, she uses her yard as a vegetable garden, which she plans carefully (she explains how). She grows herbs and preserves the extras in vinegar. She makes pickling sound simple, cooks over an open fire when she can, buys clothes at Goodwill, and has plenty of time left over for playing chess on the porch.

Some of the projects are harder to imagine adopting. She and her father purchase wheat, soybeans, and potatoes in bulk from a feed store — there are still feed stores around, it turns out, but how many of us will make the time to clean and grind our own wheat? Freed made moonshine with a pressure cooker, some copper pipe, and rubber tubing, assembling the pieces with dough. OK, that’s inventive, but would it be so terrible to buy a gasket or two? Winemaking is easier in the final stages — once you put it all together, you just let it ferment — but even with Freed’s fruit-and-sugar measures supplied, calculating it all gets pretty complicated.

But the real challenge is the bunnies.

This is where Freed is awesome in her punk rockness: like a band that knows it will offend, she puts the hardest track right up front. She raises chickens and bunnies; the chickens provide eggs. The bunnies? They provide meat.

There’s more (more!) and I swear, even if the byline bears the editor’s name, it was written by me. And now I’ve got to hop offline to buy some bunnies soil to see if I can get a garden going.

Dominick Dunne: does he come out of the closet in his last book?

paperhaus December 14th, 2009

When Dominick Dunne died in August of this year, he was in the last stages of editing his novel Too Much Money, out this week.

What’s interesting about the book isn’t its prose, which is execrable, or its story, which is ripped-from-the-headlines-of-rich-people-you-don’t-care-about. It’s that Dunne, who was two months shy of his 84th birthday, comes out of the closet in it.

Sort of. More precisely, he pushes his alter-ego Gus Bailey out, in this admission.

“Probably true, whatever you’ve heard,” Gus added as casually as he could.

“Heard?” Peter inquired.

“Oh you know, that I’m deep within the closet. . . . Well, maybe I am . . . in the closet. So what. . . . I feel quite relieved having said it. I’m beyond 80, you know. Mustn’t have any more secrets. Can’t die with a secret, you know.”

Dunne, who was long rumored to be gay, told the Times of London he was a “closeted bisexual celibate” in February. In the book, Gus, too, says he’s celibate. What’s sad is that a man who trafficked in gossip and rumor still felt that being gay was something to be hidden, a secret he should keep up until his 80s. Or maybe it’s not sad — maybe he finally felt like it was OK to come out (or have Gus come out).

I attended a big chunk of the first Phil Spector trial, and Dunne was there every day. I didn’t talk to him much — he was always surrounded by court groupies — although he was friendly, more friendly than a few of the web correspondents who shared the back row with me, where those of us with laptops were allowed. Near the end of the trial, the jurors were taken to Spector’s house in Alhambra for a walkthrough; only one member of the media was allowed, and we all decided on Linda Deutsch, the 40-year veteran of the AP. The photo above was taken by Steven Mikulan, then of the LA Weekly, as we all sat around waiting for the tour to finish. It was the most I talked to Dunne. We didn’t talk about sexuality — we talked about Connecticut.

I really liked him, but man, his book Too Much Money is awful. But maybe it’s good that he got something off his Gus’s chest. My review is in today’s LA Times.

revisting the NY Times book review

paperhaus December 13th, 2009

It’s been a long time since I read the NY Times book review. Chalk it up to business and professional disinterest — I never have enough time to read everything I’m supposed to, and most of what I read feeds what I might write about for Jacket Copy at the LA Times. But I can’t spend my Jacket Copy days writing about the NY Times, so I’ve been giving it a pass. Until today.

I’m so glad I did. Because Tom Bissell’s review of Season of Ash by Jorge Volpi is not to be missed. After explaining, “What it is not: surprising, involving or at all interesting. What it lacks: any occasions of arresting language or appreciable drama,” and elaborating on its other faults, Bissell writes, “That more or less ends the laudatory portion of this review.”

The negativity seems, from the review, well-deserved — but it’s the deadpan delivery that kills me.

But hey, aside from a big, promising yet not-great work in translation, I have to wonder: where’d the fiction go?

I never wrote for Kirkus, but these guys did

paperhaus December 11th, 2009

Yesterday, Nielsen announced that it would shutter several publications, including the review-o-matic Kirus, Kirkus, for its willingness to go negative.

I never wrote for Kirkus, and as I haven’t published a book, I haven’t feared its cold, cold advance publication stare. But it was interesting to read what some reviewers experienced.

Mark Athitakis: Though the editors there knew my general interests, I didn’t get a vote on what was sent to me to review. In short, it wasn’t a job for reviewers who cared only about books they felt pretty certain they’d like. Which speaks to the most contentious and, I think, admirable aspect of the magazine—that Kirkus‘ reviews were more negative than positive. Conventional wisdom argues that this is because the reviews were written by large passels of smug know-nothings who used their anonymity as a blunt instrument. I prefer to think Kirkus served an uncomfortable truth—most books are mediocre.

Jonathan Taylor in the Stranger: From mountains of galleys that loomed all around her office, my editor took care to pluck out some interesting obscure books that otherwise would have been, or probably still were, destined to pass largely unnoticed. Most of the books were boring–kind of all right or sort of bad–in either case hard to do justice to in less than 300 words. It gave me great pleasure, though, to craft just what I wanted to say about the really bad ones and the really good ones.

All wrote anonymously, all wrote short, pithy reviews — less than 350 words — and all tended to express their opinions boldly. Perhaps that was the consolation they got for writing cheap. In some ways — cheap/fast/short — it reminds me of CMJ’s reviews; I wrote a couple when I began writing about music, because I wanted the clips. Not having much of a say as to what landed in my mailbox (this was in the era of CDs) meant I had to work hard, sometimes, to hear the music on its own terms and not my own.

Taylor takes on the question of reviewer impartiality. “For me, it’s like a massive crush, almost literally: I stopped writing reviews because my interest in books has led me quite naturally into a position of a ‘conflict of interest’ with regard to the literature I love the most.” But I’m not sure that’s entirely true — I think it’s possible to remain in love with literature and review it. At least, it’s still possible for me.

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