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.
Feb 152011
On Thursday I went to LACMA to see Steve Martin talk about art. Dave Hickey, his interlocutor, had a hard time keeping up — but who can share a stage with Steve Martin? I wrote about it for Jacket Copy, and then the piece appeared in Saturday’s paper. Here’s how it starts:
If the events of a certain November 2010 night in New York City hung over LACMA Thursday, they did so not as a dark cloud, but as a punching bag.
The occasion: Steve Martin — actor, director, banjo player, author — in conversation with noted art critic Dave Hickey. The subject: Steve Martin’s book “An Object of Beauty,” and, by extension its subject, art and the art world. The rub: a similar conversation at New York’s 92nd Street Y in November did not go well, to the extent that a note was delivered to Martin’s interlocutor on stage asking, essentially, that they stop talking about art so much.
“It made New Yorkers look really bad,” said Jillian Spence, sitting in the front row at LACMA before Thursday’s conversation began. She’d come to get a copy of Martin’s book signed for her father, a big fan who is very ill; when she was a child, they listened to his comedy records together. A New Yorker herself with a tangible accent, she is a member of the 92nd Street Y — “an active, embarrassed member” who said people should expect Martin to talk about his book — “or you shouldn’t be here.”
The sold-out audience at LACMA knew what to expect, and included comedic luminaries Martin Mull, Ricky Jay, Eric Idle and Carl Reiner. The event, part of the 15-year-old peripatetic Writers Bloc author conversation series, was introduced by the organization’s Andrea Grossman. “We in Los Angeles want to hear Steve Martin talk about art!” she said to a round of applause.
There’s more here. I even cornered the oh-my-god-so-cool Carl Reiner and asked him what he thought.
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.
Oct 142010
Yesterday I wrote about the National Book Award finalists for the LA Times.
The day before that, I wrote about the Man Booker Prize for the LA Times.
Now, I’m out of coffee. Why do these things start so early?
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.
Jun 172010
For the last five years, David Ulin has been books editor of the LA Times, but that’s going to change. Today he announced that he’ll become the paper’s new full-time book critic, moving into that role once a new book editor takes over.
Who will that be? I don’t know.
I hope it’s someone who cares about criticism, about the fascinating changes in publishing, about LA’s community of readers and writers and about new media, in both its narrative potential and the wonderful changes it is bringing to book culture.
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.
