In Saturday’s LA Times, I reviewed Benjamin Black’s A Death in Summer. My byline also appeared with a print version of this interview with author Patrick deWitt — whose novel The Sisters Brothers is one of my favorites this year — about writing the screenplay of the movie Terri.
Jul 112011
Jul 082011
I don’t think I can come up with all the work I’ve done since February.
Recently, I’ve reviewed for the LA Times: The Kid by Sapphire, Bright’s Passage by Josh Ritter, The Beginners by Rebecca Wolff, Embassytown by China Mieville and State of Wonder by Ann Patchett.
Also at the LA Times: I talked to Simon Pegg about his memoir Nerd Do Well and wrote about The Last Bookstore in its grand new/old digs in downtown LA. I very frequently blog at Jacket Copy.
One of my favorite books of the year is Patrick DeWitt’s
I Tweet here.
I Tumbl here.
I’ll be back soon.
In today’s LA Times, I review Damon Galgut’s In a Strange Room, beginning:
The traveler at the center of Damon Galgut’s new novel “In a Strange Room,” a finalist for this year’s Man Booker Prize, is walking down a remote road in Greece when he sees a stranger in the distance. As the road dips and bends, the two draw closer, mirror images of one another. They meet, then continue in opposite directions, but will meet again.
The stranger, dressed all in black, is a handsome German named Reiner. As easy as it is to get a handle on him — self-possessed, focused, a little vain — the first traveler is harder to pin down. We don’t know his history, nor even his name — just that he’s a young man who’s been to a half-dozen countries in half as many months, “traveling around,” he says, “just looking.”
This is his story, and the story bears a resemblance to the author’s. Galgut eventually reveals that his character, like him, is named Damon and from South Africa; more interestingly, he occasionally moves from the distancing “he” to the personal “I,” quietly seeding his fiction with (what seems like) his truth. Early on, he writes, “He sits on the edge of a raised stone floor and stares out unseeingly into the hills around him and now he is thinking of things that happened in the past. Looking back at him through time, I remember him remembering, and I am more present in the scene than he was. But memory has its own distances, in part he is me entirely, in part he is a stranger I am watching.”
This shifting point of view, the overlap of the Damon in the book with the Damon we are meant to understand is the author, gives the book an interesting, Geoff Dyer-like resonance. This paired with the novel’s stripped-down language make me understand why it was a finalist for the Booker. It’s far better than the Washington Post would have you believe.
In the November/December issue of the Columbia Journalism Review, I look at Blur: How to Know What’s True In the Age of Information Overload by Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel, two newspaper veterans. Unfortunately, the book doesn’t live up to its promise.
The authors seek to answer two questions. First: How can consumers decide which news sources to trust in the current media landscape? And second: What is the role of the traditional press now, and in the future? What they deliver instead is a comprehensive overview of journalism history, with an eye toward technological evolution, along with contemporary guidelines for reporters and editors.
Oct 122010
In Sunday’s LA Times, I reviewed David Sedaris’ Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk.
Somewhere, David Sedaris is giggling.
His new collection of short stories — of mice and chipmunks and dogs, of cats and chickens — appear to be fables, but they’re not exactly. Because, he says, fables have morals; what he’s created is a “modest bestiary,” where lessons might not be learned, and a critter meeting a bloody end might not deserve such a cruel fate. And there’s Ian Falconer, creator of the bestselling Olivia books for children, drawing pictures of it all.
These cute woodland creatures, rendered so Olivia-like, with chance and disaster and ill intentions lurking in the margins – well, it could be a bit unsettling. Or just as easily, it’s wickedly funny.
Jun 202010
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.
Apr 202010
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.
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.
Jan 142010
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.
