Ethan Canin's new novel, "America America," is getting attention from newspaper book reviews across the country. Everyone says that it's grand in scope and ambition, which tempts comparison to other grand, ambitious novels.
Both the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Washington Post compare it to Robert Penn Warren's classic "All the King's Men." Like the earlier novel, "America America" follows a charming but flawed politician from the narrative perspective of a younger aide/journalist.
That young aide is brought into this circle of power and politics by a wealthy patriarch, a man with both riches and a sense of noblesse oblige. That character prompted the LA Times reviewer to make comparisons to "The Great Gatsby;" the Chicago Tribune went with another F. Scott Fitzgerald work, "The Last Tycoon."
The reviewers aren't entirely in accord with how successful the book is; some note that, despite its achievements, there are some structural problems (for the most extreme critique in this department, see the New York Times.)
The one things that everyone agreed upon is that there is a real-life corollary to the politician in "America America": a liberal senator with Presidential ambitions that are hampered by a tragic accident. If you can't guess who that might be, here's the answer.
In tomorrow's Book Review, Sarah Weinman reviews "Black and White," a new novel by Lewis Shiner. The book deals with some weighty issues, including a terminally ill parent, a murder and urban planning. In a post on John Scalzi's blog, Shiner focuses on the latter, writing about freeways:
When I started researching my new book, "Black & White,"
I hadn’t thought that much about freeways...."Black & White"is
about a North Carolina neighborhood called Hayti, once the most
prosperous black community in the South. During the 1960s, Hayti was
bulldozed to make room for the Durham Freeway, leading to a new
industrial development called Research Triangle Park. The money to do
it came in large part from the federal urban renewal program. All told,
urban renewal wiped out 150 neighborhoods like Hayti, and virtually all
of the displaced residents were African-American. Freeways were often
the excuse for the demolition....
The dream of the Interstate Highway System was to end traffic congestion forever. With the advantage of hindsight, [writer Tom] Lewis [in "Divided Highways"]makes it clear that the dream never had a chance. Once a highway is
built, new homes, stores, and workplaces will naturally spring up in
proximity. With more destinations now in reach of the freeway, traffic
grows to fill all available lanes. Expand the number of lanes and more
cars show up to choke them as well.
And the cycle grows more
vicious by the day. With more and more destinations accessible only by
freeway, cars become even more indispensable. Longer trips mean more
fuel consumption, more pollution. With highways getting all the money
and railroads proportionately starving, trucks take over all the
freight transportation. More pollution, more wear and tear on the
roads, more congestion.
And, eventually, the price of gas goes up to $4 a gallon (or here in LA, $4.73 per gallon). Which makes the real-world exploitation of the Interstate Highway System awfully pricey.
This makes me glad that a couple of years ago, a guy left Venice, CA in a convertible (I think a vintage Mustang) and drove to NYC with a time-lapse camera attached. Enjoy the result, a 4-minute cross-country drive, no gas required.
This weekend marks the first annual Sunset Strip Music Festival; many classic venues, including the Whiskey a Go Go, are hosting dozens of rock bands. But with sponsors that include Virgin America, Ticketmaster, Vitaminwater and this paper's own Metromix, it's clear this isn't the Doors' Sunset Strip anymore.
For five nights in November 1966, teenagers and police clashed on the Sunset Strip; the 2007 book "Riot on Sunset Strip: Rock 'n' Roll's Last Stand in Hollywood" tells the whole story. Only the last chapters focus on the riot itself -- most of the book provides a deep, detailed picture of the Southern California music scene in the mid-1960s, connecting the visual arts with TV and surf culture.
Author Dominic Priore's encyclopedic knowledge, it seems, encompasses everything from the origin of every garage rock band with a local hit to the industry's most powerful producers. He keeps it all tidy though, and the narrative that emerges is surprisingly detailed and informed for what appears, on the surface, to be a big pretty picture book.
It is also a big pretty picture book. More about that after the jump.
Arthur magazine, left; at right, Loren Coleman with one of the artifacts from the International Cryptozoology Museum.
Arthur magazine is in trouble. The not-quite-6-year-old free magazine has suffered a series of financial challenges, which culminated in editor Jay Babcock buying out his partner about a year ago. (Full disclosure: I've known Jay since we were both DJs at pirate radio station KBLT.)
Arthur is about music and politics, but that doesn't go far enough to describe its edginess. It is about independent music that gets little radio airplay, like alt-folk and contemporary psychedelia, and its politics are of the leftist, peacenik variety. Its columnists include media theorist Douglas Rushkoff and Sonic Youth guitarist Thurston Moore; writers Trinie Dalton and Brian Evenson have contributed. With a penchant for challenging the (political or musical) status quo, it's quite a bit different from the glossy magazines found on newsstands.
This difference may be part of the problem. A magazine that's saying something no others are saying and covering music others don't cover might be hard for advertisers -- upon whom it relies -- to wrap their heads around. It's not unlike the problem faced by Loren Coleman of the International Cryptozoology Museum -- he's doing something that the big guys just don't get.
Unfortunately for Coleman, the "big guys" are at the Internal Revenue Service.
Naturalist John Muir is the focus of a feature in this month's Smithsonian magazine. The man who championed protecting natural spaces — especially in what is now Yosemite National Park — was born in Scotland, moved as a boy to Wisconsin and later hiked from Kentucky to south Florida; there, he got sick and headed to California to recuperate. Once he found the wilds of Northern California in 1868, he was smitten. He climbed rocks, cursed the sharp hooves of sheep that tore up wildflowers and even snuck President Teddy Roosevelt away from his handlers and into the backcountry for three nights of camping.
He also wrote like a fiend.
Most of Muir's writings — which appeared, predominantly, in magazines — are in the public domain. The Sierra Club has put many of them online, in HTML format, with the original illustrations (in other words, no PDF downloads). But if you prefer book form, there have been reprints, and in 1997 the Library of America published "John Muir: Nature Writings," a weighty 928 pages. Here's a taste from "The Yosemite," originally published in 1912:
But no temple made with hands can compare with Yosemite. Every rock in its walls seems to glow with life. Some lean back in majestic repose; others, absolutely sheer or nearly so for thousands of feet, advance beyond their companions in thoughtful attitudes, giving welcome to storms and calms alike, seemingly aware, yet heedless, of everything going on about them. Awful in stern, immovable majesty, how softly these rocks are adorned, and how fine and reassuring the company they keep: their feet among beautiful groves and meadows, their brows in the sky, a thousand flowers leaning confidently against their feet, bathed in floods of water, floods of light....
If that's not to your taste, a selection of books about Muir are after the jump.
It is not uncommon to hear an author talk about Amazon rankings. Amazon is one of the few places to get a sense of how a book is doing in real time — the elaborate, drawn-out process of getting sales numbers from bookstores and back to authors is (to say the least) Byzantine.
Despite its specialization — Amazon counts only its own sales, after all — the immediacy of these rankings can be addictive. I've heard authors talk about tracking their status against other books or trying to gauge exactly how many places a single sale might raise their rank. It can get a bit obsessive.
Not that there's anything wrong with that. In fact, it's such a common temptation that someone has built a Web application, Booklert, that obsessively checks Amazon rankings for you. The forward-thinking folks at if:book describe the tool this way:
I get a picture of Booklert as a time-saving tool for hypercompetitive and stat-obsessed writers, or possibly as a kind of masochistic entertainment for publishers morbidly addicted to seeing their industry flounder.
The truly obsessed author can even get Booklert updates via twitter. But sometimes, maybe, it's better to look away. if:book continues:
perhaps I'm being uncharitable... Booklert — or something similar — could be used to create personalized bestseller lists, adding a layer of market data to the work of trusted reviewers and curators.
I like the idea of personalized bestseller lists. But integrating them in a way that's useful would depend on who signs up for Booklert and how good the social networking tools are. Does someone who tracks books on personal finance, for example, really care about the interests of a cookbook lover?
Hmm... if they did, that could be interesting. The risks here are very low — Booklert is free.
The good thing about living in a big, wonderful city like Los Angeles is that you can be sure that big, wonderful writers like David Sedaris will come through town. The bad thing is that there's no guarantee you'll get to see them.
Sedaris is visiting Vroman's Bookstore this Sunday at 5 p.m. on his book tour to promote "When You Are Engulfed in Flames." I'd be tempted to whine about all the restrictions placed on attending — if I'd gotten one of the free tickets, that is. But what's the use? The Sedaris reading is "sold out."
How do bookstore appearances sell out? Do guys in yellow security jackets guard the door? (They just might.)
Vroman's, a big wonderful bookstore, has tried to make it up to the ticketless masses by allowing anybody who can't get into the reading to join the signing line (also ticketed) and by posting a podcast interview with the author. It's a bit salt-in-the-wound, but still, it's there and it's free.
There is another way to see David Sedaris ... after the jump.
Reviewing Patti Smith's new book of poetry "Auguries of Innocence" on Sunday, David L. Ulin called the author/singer the visionary poet-mother of rock-n-roll. Here she is, in 1976, beginning poetically with her song "Horses" and then rocking it, segueing into "Hey Joe."
The clip is from "Old Gray Whistle Test," a longtime BBC TV show.
... at least not to award-winning sci-fi writer and astrophysicist Gregory Benford ("Timescape," "If the Stars Are Gods," "The Sunborn").
When the UC Irvine professor and his (uncredited) coauthor, biologist Elisabeth Malartre, were researching their bestselling 1999 novel, "The Martian Race," they were "fairly certain" that ice eventually would be found on Mars, especially near the poles.
"Since 1999, NASA has found caves (large, identified from orbit) and plenty of signs of recent fluid flows down slopes, from momentary melting," Benford wrote in an e-mail after NASA announced that the substance uncovered by the Phoenix lander was most probably ice.
The before and after images -- of white stuff uncovered in a trench dug by Phoenix's robotic claw that disappears over a few days -- are spectacular in their simplicity. They underscore, for me at least, the Red Planet's grip on the human imagination. Why is that?
This is more than just a lovely piece of 19th century jewelry. It's a memorial to Jane Austen — look closely to see the faint outline of a grave with her name on it at the lower right. And it's (probably) crafted (probably) of Jane Austen's own hair.
At an auction last week, the locket was bought by an anonymous bidder for $9,478.
The buyer could have been almost anyone — 191 years after her death, Austen has plenty of enthusiastic fans. The Jane Austen Society of North America counts 4,000 members; maybe it was one of them. Or perhaps it was someone with a high profile. An Austen blogger posits it might have been J.K. Rowling, who once said that Austen was her favorite writer. The author of the "Harry Potter" series certainly could drop 4,800 pounds on a trinket without denting her budget.
According to most accounts, hair jewelry was popularized during Queen Victoria's extended period of mourning. But the practice of weaving or twisting the hair of a loved one into complex designs, like the one above, goes back several hundred years (the 2004 book "Mourning and Art Jewelry" has all the details). It was not considered creepy to trim the hair from a corpse — as was done in Austen's case — in order to wear it close to one's heart.
At the same auction, a first edition of Austen's "Sense and Sensibility" sold for 30,000 pounds (almost $60,000). Six years ago, a "Pride and Prejudice" first edition sold for $62,000. The hair jewelry might have been a bargain after all.
Darin Strauss, author of "Chang and Eng" and "The Real McCoy," has a new not-historical novel, "More Than It Hurts You." What it's about, exactly, varies depending on who's telling you about it.
The Chicago Tribune details the plot, which begins with two young parents, Josh and Dori ("a Jewish Yuppie Everycouple"), bringing their child to the emergency room. The boy's condition worsens at the hospital; his illness is troubling and mysterious. The Tribune reviewer reveals that mystery (I won't), writing that the suspense comes from whether the "self-deluding and ultimately none-too-admirable Josh" will figure it out.
The Washington Post seems to have read a very different novel: The review asserts that "Strauss has packed this gripping story with the whole radio dial of divisive, hot-button issues." Race is high on the list. The doctor who treats the boy is African American — not that any character is racist per se, but "all the good liberals who populate this novel are constantly agonizing about race." Other issues are class, sexuality and cynicism about American culture.
Angelenos can decide for themselves whether the book is more domestic mystery or issue-laden thriller; Strauss reads at Vroman's in Pasadena Tuesday evening. He's also blogging about his book tour for Newsweek; his book is serious, he explains, but his blog is light and entertaining.
The film version of "Get Smart," starring Steve Carell, opens today. This kind of revisiting can often bring attention back to the original. Will that extend to the "Get Smart" books?
The campy '60s TV series featuring a not-at-all smart secret agent did not originally derive from some heavy, intellectual novel. (It was written and created by Mel Brooks.) But it was popular enough to spawn nine paperbacks, with such titles as "Max Smart Loses Control," "The Spy Who Went Out to the Cold" and "Sorry, Chief ... ." The new movie has yet to spark any price inflation — the books can be bought on EBay for less than $10.
But Smart-obilia didn't stop there. Eight "Get Smart" comics — which, according to one collector, "had absolutely no relationship to the show in terms of content or continuity" — were published in 1966-67. Those in good condition are worth more than the paperbacks because some of the artwork was done by Steve Ditko, co-creator of Marvel's "Spider-Man" and "Doctor Strange" comics.
I can't guess about the literary value of either line, but the covers sure are snazzy.
Richard's comments about the next installment of "Nobody Move" seem like a perfect place to wrap up phase one of our conversation, and look ahead to phase two.
So nobody move -- we'll be back next month to discuss the second part of Denis Johnson's serial novel, and to see where the story goes from here.
On this question of suspense: I once did a novel of 175,000 words and felt pretty pleased with myself, stamina-wise, until I went back to "Bleak House" and realized that Dickens had written closer to a million, building a huge cathedral of a novel in a way that, according to his biographers Peter Ackroyd and Edgar Johnson, was only semi-planned.
It really blows your mind. Dickens set up and juggled multiple storylines to sustain suspense over such length. Carolyn rightly made the point that he was in the habit of introducing new characters almost out of the blue to keep things going. He just heaved them in and tossed them into the story blaze, especially in the early novels, the baggy monsters "Pickwick Papers" and "Martin Chuzzlewit." At that stage in his career, he was all about entertainment and excitement, whether of language or incident, about making it happen on the page, and giving his audience the same sort of instant bang that we, as viewers, as readers, increasingly demand these days, as David said a couple of days ago.
I don't get the feeling that Johnson is slumming it here, just being aware of his audience, as Dickens needed to be. The reader of Playboy just doesn't have the same commitment to Denis Johnson as does the purchaser of Denis Johnson novels. Johnson is too much the pro to be doing this off the cuff. I'd guess that he's got this plotted out reasonably carefully, with all the big cliffhangers already in mind. At the same time, he's enough of a purist to let the spontaneous moments occur -- like the guy's hat floating away on the wind. The next chunk will be the tricky one, though, and we'll start to get the sense of how good this thing might be.
Richard Rayner
Photo credit: Dickens' desk and chair, Associated Press/Christie's
David's take on the immediacy of contemporary culture made me realize that I may have become addicted to instant narrative gratification. I love the magazine One Story because it's just one story, to be read and finished, neat and quick. On the Internet, don't ask me to click through 10 pages of self-absorbed prose — if it doesn't grab me early on, see ya, I'm out.
Getting just Part 1 (of four) of "Nobody Move" is a tease. We DO have to wait a whole month before we get the next piece. We DO have to save space in our spilling-over brainpans for Denis Johnson's characters and plot twists. It's unfair. It's painful. It's frustrating.
And then I realize: It's seduction.
When I hunted down my copy of Johnson's "Tree of Smoke," it was there in all its hefty glory, an elaborate, enormous work, and if I could just keep my eyes open and brain sharp long enough, I could consume it all in one sitting. Now I see there is something of a marvelous torture in the delayed gratification of a serial. I can't possibly get it all at once, and that brings on a craving that's missing when I can just turn the page to get to the next chapter.
Finally, this puts the setting in some perspective for me. Like Susan, I've been a bit squeamish about having to read this in Playboy. But of all the nudie magazines, an exasperated male friend pointed out, Playboy is the least smutty. It doesn't run fetish or hard-core porn photos. Instead, it's full of mostly naked women and totally naked women smiling willingly for the camera. It's the tease of porn mags. Instead of raunch, Playboy is, in its own way, about seduction. Which is why a serial there is starting to make sense.
I first read Denis Johnson's "Angels" when I was in graduate school in Amherst, Mass., the novel having been loaned to me by someone housesitting for an older professor. I was only 23 and blown away. I knew all those people in "Angels," though I wished I hadn't grown up with them, and I was stunned that someone had written a novel so deeply immersed inside their heads.
So reading this first installment of "Nobody Move" is strange because, once again, we're completely immersed, and it's a good thing. Since I've been reading a lot of noir lately — my favorite being that of Ross Macdonald, Walter Mosley and now Raymond Chandler, because of Judith Freeman's fine nonfiction book about him — this was perfect.
And it's so damn funny. The dialogue is funny, perfect just like Chandler's. The details are hilarious — the log motel and the restaurants and the river.
But I agree with several things Carolyn and David have pointed out. First, why can't we see the scene where Luntz shoots Gambol? Why would Gambol have been on that kind of ride and let him put the gun in the glove compartment in the first place? (Again, I wish I didn't know people like this, or rides like this.) If Gambol's supposed to be too tired to do it right, I'd like to know.
Second, the whole serialization thing is strange. I love the way the headline trumpets On Deadline! Publishing History Begins Now.
But not really, given Dickens and Hardy and so many others, including the recent novels serialized in the New York Times Magazine.
Anyway, a month will pass, and I'll read again passionately, because I love Johnson and his style and his inimitable humor, which is beyond black and into some other netherworldly shade. But I probably will have to keep this story around.
Which brings me to Richard's comment about his son wanting the magazine. Yeah, only I live in a house with three feminist teenage girls, all of whom are taller than me. All very beautiful. All of whom gave me the most dubious, deadly looks when I mentioned that inside the FedEx envelope was Playboy. "I tell my grad students some of the best fiction in history has been published in Playboy," I said. "We just read a T.C. Boyle story in class that was originally in here."
They gave me the classic teenage answer. "Why?" Deadpan.
When I showed the cover to them (one is a college girl who reads Details, Esquire and about 10 other magazines and whose favorite magazine in the world is GQ), they all said quizzically, "People still read that?"
I cut the story out and threw the rest of the pages away, mostly because the cartoons were so bad. But I can't wait to see what happens with Anita. She's way better than a cartoon.
I think Carolyn’s point about tension is a key one — especially given the immediacy of contemporary culture, where we’re used to stories being wrapped up in 22 or 48 minutes, and a serial can unfold almost in real time on the Web. Here, we’re looking at a 19th century lag time, a month between installments, which begs the question of how to keep a reader’s mind engaged. Often, I can’t remember what I did last week, let alone a month ago, and I wonder whether, when the second installment of “Nobody Move” comes out in mid-July, I’ll have to go back and re-read this installment just to get back up to speed.
I suspect I will, which raises another set of issues, since the story Johnson seems intent to tell may not bear up under repeated re-readings. How does an author maintain tension across the real time divide of monthly installments? What does that mean for the narrative?
On a related front, I also wonder — as per Richard’s comments about the set-up — just how far in advance Johnson has things planned. From a reader’s perspective, 10,000 words a month is a snail’s pace, but for a writer (especially a writer as complex and intentional as Johnson), it’s a power sprint. Does he know what’s coming? Is he throwing things into the story just to provide himself with challenges? How will the narrative change from month to month?
Thinking about this, you really begin to appreciate the achievement of a writer like Dickens, who unfolded his novels over a year and a half. For me, this is part of the draw of such a project — the sheer tightrope walking nature of it — but I’m very curious about how it functions from the writer’s perspective, how uncertainty (and deadline pressure) seeds the work.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Eleanor in 1904, the summer before they were married.
By the year 1921, Franklin Roosevelt had fathered six children with his wife Eleanor; he'd also been involved with Lucy Mercer, Eleanor's secretary. Upon discovering his dalliance, Eleanor had, it is said, banned him from her bed -- forever. What's more, he'd lost the use of his legs. All of which makes him an odd candidate for a revisited sexual history, but that is, in part, what Joseph Persico has created in his new book "Franklin and Lucy: President Roosevelt, Mrs. Rutherford, and the Other Remarkable Women in His Life."
Some reviewers find this unseemly. Like David Greenberg, who wrote in the New York Times Book Review last week:
Everyone likes a bit of gossip now and then, but Persico’s relentlessness is disconcerting. He pursues questions about when and with whom Roosevelt went to bed with the same solemnity that other historians take to the question of when and with whom he decided to go to war.
Yet the Chicago Tribune had a different take on the relevance of sexuality to our understanding of historical figures like Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Sunday's review by Susan Ware states:
Integrating the stories of public accomplishments with the daily routines of private lives leads to a fuller understanding of male and female personages alike.
It's not that the two reviewers disagree -- each indicates that the intimate overshadows the public a shade too much. But when the Greenberg review emphasizes that " 'Franklin and Lucy' may be able to make the dubious claim of being as complete a record as we have of the president’s sexual history," while crying "too much information," it presents an incomplete picture of what the book is trying to do. Ware's review is more sympathetic toward the project, showing that the book spends much time on the "other women" of the title, including FDR's mother and his daughter Anna (nothing prurient there).
Can a president's sex life inform our understanding of his decisions? Or is it all just TMI?
I wasn't sure what to expect of a serial hard-boiled noir in Playboy from Denis Johnson, but it wasn't a guy in a checkered vest singing barbershop. Lutz starts out as an anti-noir character, the kind of nebbish Bogart played at so well in the bookstore in "The Big Sleep." But of course, Bogart was still Philip Marlowe behind the facade, and similarly, Luntz isn't a putz underneath, at least not a wimpy one. We don't see the scene where he shoots the much-bigger Gambol — an interesting omission, evoked only by the wonderful passage Richard cites — but we wind up convinced that he's got the guts to take action.
I'm not sure what purpose the barbershop bit serves, other than to give readers an early misimpression of Luntz, and to stick him in that goofy getup for the violent and seductive scenes that follow. At this point, I find it a little hard to believe that gambler Luntz would join a barbershop group, and I hope there's some narrative payoff. I don't want it just to provide a quirky, Tarantino-like juxtaposition; I want it to make some kind of twisted sense.
Maybe that kind of tension — how can this fit? — is what keeps a reader hooked between serial installments. Sure, we're curious about Gambol's fate, and what will happen between Luntz and Anita, but it's the question of whether the author will pull everything together that keeps us intrigued. Sometimes I wonder whether Dickens threw in a random character every now and then just to keep things interesting, challenging himself to make sense of everything in his allotted space (a mere 18 episodes — 900 pages).
David points out that the dialogue doesn't always work, but I disagree. I love Johnson's characters' crosstalk — often they seem to be in two entirely separate conversations. And it's not like the characters don't notice. "This is starting to sound like one of those messed-up conversations," Anita says to Luntz. As both David and Richard have pointed out, in moments like this, it seems as if Johnson is having some fun.
There’s something odd about the idea, isn’t there? That’s to say, the form of the serial novel doesn’t have the currency it did when Charles Dickens (above, left) and Wilkie Collins (above, right) were banging out monthly installments against a deadline for those magazines that Dickens ran and eventually owned. Such an undertaking has a gimmicky feel, and, in the case of the recent John Banville/Benjamin Black story in the New York Times Magazine, we were faced with a definitely wonky widget.
That said, the combination of Denis Johnson and Playboy feels much more promising. Was he winking in the direction of his own book, "Stars at Noon," when, early on in this first extract, a character says in a bit of dialogue: "Almost noon?" As usual, Johnson takes characters who start at the end of their tethers, a character situation that lends itself naturally toward noir and the pursuit thriller. Which is obviously, I hope, what we’re getting here — Denis Johnson channeling Elmore Leonard, with bits of "The Sopranos" thrown in, and making the gumbo his own.
For me, the thing got going with the scene break from the car so we get the look back at what just happened: "Standing at the pay phone, Jimmy Luntz punched a nine and a one and stopped. He couldn’t hear the dial tone. His ears still rang. That old Colt revolver made a bang that slapped you silly." It’s a lovely piece of writing, delivering a narrative surprise with observational acuity and making us smile besides.
Then there’s the scene where Luntz is trying to tie the tourniquet on the leg of the guy he’s just shot. "With surprising energy, Gambol suddenly tossed away his white hat. The wind caught it, and it sailed a dozen yards into the trees. Then he seemed to lose consciousness." He’s such a good writer. The sex scene at the end was great, and I look forward to seeing what Anita Desilvera gets up to with those Magnums she has stashed in the trunk of her car. Somehow the two main characters, Luntz and Anita, made me think of the kids in "Angels," Johnson’s first novel, now grown up in some spectacularly damaged way. At this point I’m definitely along for the ride — but then the set-up is probably the easiest bit of what Johnson is attempting here.
My 13-year old blinked when he saw me reading Playboy. "Hey, can I borrow that after you?" he said. He said he’d check out Denis Johnson too.
Editor's note: On Friday, Playboy published the first section of Denis Johnson’s “Nobody Move,” a serialized work of fiction that will come out in four parts. Jacket Copy will review “Nobody Move,” installment by installment; below, our take on Part 1.
My wife is appalled at Denis Johnson. “Why Playboy?” she wants to know. She’s referring, of course, to the venue for Johnson’s latest project, “Nobody Move,” a 40,000-word “novel” that the magazine is publishing as a serial in four installments; the first, in the July issue, has just come out.
As for me, I’m more interested in the way “Nobody Move” might help further eclipse the line between mass culture and literature, between the throwaway nature of periodicals and the lasting weight of art. Although serials are not as uncommon as they once were — see Armistead Maupin’s “Tales of the City,” Tom Wolfe’s “The Bonfire of the Vanities,” Stephen King’s “The Green Mile” and Michael Chabon’s “Gentlemen of the Road” — they require novelists who can think like journalists, who can write on deadline, who aren’t afraid to make a mess.
This is cool, exhilarating even, especially in a world in which literary culture is often far too insular, like a form of trivial pursuit. Johnson is one of those rare writers who wants to walk both sides of the line here, to go after a mass readership with work that challenges at every turn. That’s one of the things that attracts me to “Nobody Move,” the idea of Johnson’s bleakly existential vision woven in amid the naked women and advice columns on how to live the good life, as if he were the voice of the collective unconscious — or, more accurately, of the collective id.
Not only that, but “Nobody Move” comes billed as a noir, that darkest of American genres, the literary equivalent of the blues.
Denis Johnson's last book, Tree of Smoke, won the National Book Award. Now, reports the New York Times, his new novel, Nobody Move, will appear in four monthly installments in Playboy, beginning with the July 2008 issue, which hits newsstands today.
Playboy's too smart to make Nobody Move available on its website; the idea is to sell magazines, after all. But if you're interested in what Johnson is up to, we'll have the story covered right here. Over the next four months, I'll be reviewing each installment on Jacket Copy as it comes out. In addition, we'll host a series of discussions about the novel, Johnson's work in general and the fine art of the serial.
So stay tuned. The first review goes live on Monday, with commentary and conversation after that.
Actor Sean Connery will launch his autobiography "Being A Scot" in August at the Edinburgh Book Festival. Festival director Catherine Lockerbie told Canada's CBC that "this book has gone through more permutations than James Bond has had shaken-not-stirred martinis: different co-writers, different publishers." The memoir, she continued, will include Connery's thoughts on "many aspects of Scottish culture and life, including sport, architecture and, of course, the gothic tendency in Scots literature."
While Connery is best remembered for his turn as the high-living super-spy James Bond, he's also been bookish on film. Notably, in "The Name of the Rose," the adaptation of Umberto Eco's novel, Connery played William of Baskerville, a literate monk who tries to save a precious library from burning.
But Connery has had a penchant for literary adaptations for his entire career. In 1961, he was in TV versions of both "Macbeth" and "Anna Karenina." Later Connery literary projects "The Hunt for Red October," "The Longest Day," "Marnie," "Murder on the Orient Express," "A Bridge Too Far," "A Fine Madness," "Shalako," "The Russia House," "The Molly Maguires," "The Anderson Tapes," "The First Great Train Robbery," "A Good Man in Africa," "Wrong is Right," "Family Business," "Just Cause," and "Rising Sun" were all adapted from books; "The Hill" and "The Offence," from plays; "The Man Who Would Be King" from a Rudyard Kipling story; and "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" from a comic book. That's around 80% of his body of work, a hyper-literary run.
And James Bond, despite his filmic success, started out the hero of the novels by Ian Fleming.
Not all dinner parties turn out like you'd hope — that's the premise of "Dinner Party Disasters: True Stories of Culinary Catastrophe," a new book from Annaliese (formerly Mrs. George) Soros and contributor Abigail Stokes. According to its publisher, the book includes menus, "hilarious" narratives of disaster and helpful tips (e.g., how to put out fires and mend broken furniture). And it may need a sequel.
At a recent Connecticut dinner party to celebrate the book and its authors, two of the 22 guests were talking politics; one supported Obama, the other McCain. By the time the entrees hit the table, the two decided that words weren't enough and resorted to fisticuffs. Publisher's Weekly reports that the "kitchen staff came to the rescue and separated the two men." (Note to self: If dinner conversation might get heated, make sure to have a kitchen staff.)
You'd think these Connecticut Brahmin would know how to discuss politics without resorting to violence. Maybe it's just been too long since they have consulted Emily Post's Etiquette, which says we should look for common ground, try changing the subject to something entirely different and, whatever we do, "Don’t battle it out right there in the living room."
This week the editors of the Book Review published summer reading suggestions. Here are the books for June, augmented with links to the reviews (and it'll be updated with further links when the other reviews are published). Find a nice place outdoors to get reading.
America America: A Novel Ethan Canin During the Nixon
era, a working-class boy's involvement with a powerful upstate New York
family and a rising senator reveals the heights and depths of ambition
in a novel of epic scope.
The Eaves of Heaven: A Life in Three Wars by Andrew X. Pham A
son's harrowing yet radiant account of his wealthy Vietnamese father's
struggle to survive the Japanese invasion of World War II, the French
occupation of Indochina and a Viet Cong "reeducation camp."
The Garden of Last Days: A Novel by Andre Dubus III From the author of "House of Sand and Fog," a pre-Sept. 11 novel -- set in Florida and involving a Saudi jihadist and an exotic dancer at the Puma Club for Men.
Mustang: The Saga of the Wild Horse in the American West by Deanne Stillman This
majestic tale traces the horse's evolution and die out in the Americas,
its return with the conquistadors and its spread throughout the West in
herds of wild mustangs whose existence is threatened today.
The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal by Gore Vidal, edited by Jay Parini Two dozen of Vidal's best, wittiest and most coruscating critiques, culled from half a century of mind-bending work.
Skyscrapers of the Midwest by Joshua W. Cotter A boy struggles with identity, death, puberty, religion and human communication in this beautiful collection of coming-of-age stories in graphic novel format.
Slumberland: A Novel by Paul Beatty A young, disaffected DJ from Los Angeles goes on a wild search in Berlin for a jazzman who may or may not be his double. (read an excerpt from the novel)
The Spies of Warsaw: A Novel by Alan Furst A new spy novel by a master of the genre, describing the cat-and-mouse games on the European Continent preceding the outbreak of World War II.
When You Are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris The piercingly witty humorist takes us from the French countryside to a mobile home in North Carolina and on to Tokyo (where he tries to quit smoking), in his sixth collection of essays on the big and little absurdities of life.
I'm a fan of Kessinger Publishing. The company is one of the keepers of all those esoteric titles on Egyptian magic and Rosicrucianism that you'd never expect to find unless you happened to be browsing the shelves at Dan Brown's house. When you order a book from this company, you get a reproduction of the text as it originally appeared--not a new version cleaned up and reformatted in a modern typeface. Sometimes there are smudges and even missing pages, but I prefer this the way friends of mine like to read well-thumbed thrift store copies of their favorite authors instead of brand-new copies. It doesn't matter if you order "A Primer of Natal Astrology" or Wilkie Collins' "Alicia Warlock" — all of Kessinger's books arrive at your door in that same awful, mustard-yellow packaging.
OK, so you get the idea that this publisher is about 100 miles away from the mainstream, right? And yet, the Associated Press reports that the publisher has enjoyed an unexpected surge in sales thanks to ... yes, you are reading this correctly ... the movie "Sex and the City." The character of Carrie Bradshaw is seen reading the book "Love Letters From Great Men," and, quicker than you can say "product placement," audience-goers scoured the Internet for this book, which is fictional, and found instead a 1920s book published by Kessinger: "Love Letters From Great Men and Women: From the Eighteenth Century to the Present Day." As of this afternoon, that 80-year-old book ranks at No. 129 on Amazon.com.
One of the few bigbuzzbooks at BEA was Roberto Bolaño's "2666." It is big -- more than 900 pages -- and it's a rapid follow-up to "The Savage Detectives," which won much praise last year. Although I did pick up an advance copy at Book Expo America, "2666" is not due in stores until November, so it doesn't make much sense to taunt you with its contents.
But I can point you to Triple Canopy, a Web-based art and literary magazine, which has a translation of a speech Bolaño gave in Caracas when he accepted the Rómulo Gallegos prize in 1999. In the speech, which meanders and digresses -- and discusses digression -- the novelist talks about writing and soccer, about Cervantes and the number 11, about arms and letters and of confusions of place and language.
It's all the same to me if people say I'm Chilean, even though some Chilean colleagues prefer to see me as Mexican, or if they call me Mexican, though some Mexican colleagues prefer to call me Spanish, or even disappeared in combat. And in fact it's all the same to me if I'm considered a Spaniard, even if some Spanish colleagues hit the ceiling and start proclaiming I'm from Venezuela, born in Caracas or in Bogotá, which doesn’t bother me much, quite the contrary, in fact.
What's true is that I am Chilean, and I am also a lot of other things. And having arrived at this point, I must abandon Jarry and Bolivar and try to remember the writer who said that the homeland of a writer is his tongue. I don't remember his name. Perhaps it was a writer who wrote in Spanish. Perhaps it was a writer who wrote in English or French. A writer's homeland, he said, is his tongue. It sounds a little demagogic, but I agree with him completely, and I know that sometimes there is no recourse left us but to get a little demagogic, just like sometimes there is no recourse left us but to dance a bolero under the light of streetlamps or a red moon.
When I came across Hayden's Ferry Review, the literary magazine from Arizona State University, its latest cover stopped me cold. The photo (by Bill Durgin), of a human torso posed headless, limbless and nude, was gorgeous and deeply disturbing — fitting for an issue on The Grotesque.
Hayden's Ferry Review has chosen to offer little of its content online. What can be accessed in this issue are a few photos and a handful of PDFs: a story by Stephen Tuttle and several poems. The audio of Shamim Azad reading poetry in Bengali is rather lovely, but otherwise, the website is a bit of a tease.
Front Porch Journal, from the Texas State University MFA program, is exactly the opposite. It's all online — no print version — and in addition to the expected new fiction and nonfiction and poetry, it makes the most of its mutimedia-ness. The current issue (No. 7) includes video of Mary Gaitskill reading from her work-in-progress. About summer: "You stand in line at the post office, smelling the other people in line, and sensing that the shapes of things are bleeding slightly in the heat."
Subscriptions to Hayden's Ferry Review are available for $14 a year. Front Porch Journal, as long as you've got an Internet connection, is free.
Chuck Palahniuk's bad-boy books are received by an avid fan base; visitors to his website are invited to join "the cult" of Chuck. Nine years after the film version of "Fight Club," he still draws capacity crowds — in Minneapolis last month, 350 people packed in for a reading of his new novel, "Snuff." That book is currently on the N.Y. Times bestseller list even as his previous one, "Rant," is a paperback bestseller at the L.A. Times.
Of course, popularity is no guarantee of critical acclaim. And Palahniuk is pushing literary boundaries, if not buttons, with "Snuff," which tells the story of an aging porn star trying to break the record for copulations on camera — she's got 600 men lined up, and one or more may want to kill her. (At readings, Palahniuk gives away autographed blow-up dolls — autographed where, exactly, is NSFW.)
Remarkably, many critics have looked past his role as "gross-out cartographer of the modern male id" (Washington Post) and found "a writer who is unafraid to flay open our cultural DNA" (Los Angeles Times). The San Francisco Chronicle said that Palahniuk creates "the folktales and mythologies of our time, the stories that people a hundred years from now will read to correctly understand who we were."
That's some praise — but not everyone wants to see themselves reflected in Palahniuk's mirror. "What the hell is going on?" the NY Times lamented in a review of "Snuff" this weekend. "Not only has America tried to ruin the rest of the world with its wars, its financial meltdown and its stupid stupid food, it has allowed its own literary culture to implode.... Whatever point Palahniuk meant to make seems to have been lost in a self-induced miasma of meaninglessness."
This seems to be more than just a generational difference of opinion. L.A. Times reviewer Tod Goldberg is in his 30s, and Lily Burana, whose review for the Washington Post almost jumps up and down with glee, is too (judging by her '80s punk bona-fides). These two are certainly old enough to critically judge Palahniuk's work. The difference seems to be that these reviews, like the one in the San Francisco Chronicle, took "Snuff" on its own terms. They didn't expect it to be Twain.
But at the N.Y. Times, Lucy Ellmann is preoccupied with America's cultural decay; she's dismayed by Stephen King and John Grisham and their "props," corpses and corn chips. In that environment, what chance do John Updike or Jane Smiley have — let alone a button-pushing, gross-out novelist like Palahniuk?
I’ve got a few days of vacation planned and some of it will include lazy hours of uninterrupted reading -- I hope! What to take along?
I consulted our excellent list of recommended summer releases, and jotted down a few musts (Alan Furst’s latest, "The Spies of Warsaw" gets a boffo review from Jonathan Shapiro in The Times).
But if you’re like me, there are other fine books already on bookstore shelves that I haven’t yet gotten around to yet, novels like the acclaimed "Child 44" by Tom Rob Smith (Grand Central Publishing: 400 pp., $24.99) and "The Plague of Doves" by Louise Erdrich, who, reviewer Brigitte Frase wrote, composes "symphonies filled with a complex wisdom about the strands of darkness and light that make up a human life."
And with the Rockefeller clan recently demanding management changes at Exxon Mobil, I’m intrigued by a March release on the investigative journalist who forced change on the oil giant's predecessor, Standard Oil, "Taking on the Trust: The Epic Battle of Ida Tarbell and John D. Rockefeller" by Steve Weinberg (W.W. Norton: 256 pp., $25.95).
So I've been thinking a lot lately about a foggy concept that I've dubbed The Great Rock And Roll Novel. It started when I re-read Stanley Booth's "The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones."
The book, written and re-written over a period of two decades, details the Stones' arrival in 1969 Los Angeles, following the recording of "Gimme Shelter," after the death of Brian Jones. Writing in the first person, Booth wends his way backwards and forwards in time, corralling images of Keith, Mick and Brian in dingy London bedsits with interviews of their parents and their history as rising rock icons, concluding in the nightmarish Altamont Free Concert (see photo above) where a black audience member, Meredith Hunter, was stabbed to death, and from which the Stones (and Booth) escaped by helicopter.
To read this book is to know as much about Booth himself, as a twenty-something covering the Rolling Stones--his wife left behind in Memphis, his feelings of dread in the face of agent Allen Klein's legal rigamarole, his inevitable touring infidelities--as it is to go behind the scenes of the traveling sideshow that was their progress through the '60s.
Booth's book, however, is not a novel. It trades on a shared knowledge of one famous rock and roll band and the songs they played. If you're not a fan, chances are you've never even heard of it.
For me, the Great Rock and Roll Novel would be broadly defined as a fictive version of what Stanley Booth accomplished.
Tom McCarthy's novel "Remainder" has received the 2008 Believer Book Award. The judges selected it from a short list of 10 excellent, underappreciated novels.
The midwest's largest book fair -- Printers Row -- opens its doors in Chicago this weekend. The LA Times Book Review's David Ulin will be there to interview Andre Dubus III about his new novel "The Garden of Last Days."
The NEA has added four new books to its Big Read library: A selection of Edgar Allen Poe's poetry and short fiction, Louise Erdrich's "Love Medicine," Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried" and Thornton Wilder's "The Bridge of San Luis Rey," plus they're throwing a little love to his play "Our Town."
The academic literary community at The Valve is considering a summer book club: "The Portrait of a Lady," perhaps, or something else by Henry James? Or by W.G. Sebald? Or maybe "Green Grass, Running Water" by Thomas King?
Meanwhile, Oprah's book club has already gotten started with Eckhart Tolle's "A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose," and is conducting online classes starting June 16.
Charles Dickens never got to take an online class; instead of a computer, he worked at a big mahogany desk, which, with its walnut chair, sold at auction this week for $848,000. That's about seven times the original estimate, which proves only that Christie's didn't have great expectations for the sale.
Sonic Youth performing in Italy last year; photo by _endless_ via Flickr.
Today "Goodbye 20th Century," a biography of Sonic Youth by David Browne, is reviewed by David French. It's a strange review, positing that "there was nothing to compare" the band's 1988 record "Daydream Nation" to. The MC5, Brian Eno and Iggy Pop leap to mind, for starters, but perhaps I quibble.
More interesting is the idea that a band might have a biography. Music publicists certainly think so -- the band histories they provide with new music releases are usually called biographies -- but can a band really have its own life? When it comes to Sonic Youth -- a band that has created loud, relentlessly adventurous, complex and challenging rock for more than thirty years -- there must be both a band life and the interwoven lives of its four regular members. Browne warns that this bio has little in the way of lurid sex and drug stories, but there are still individuals making all that noise. And sometimes a little trouble.
Guitar player Lee Ranaldo, a founding member of the band, has been publishing books of poetry and prose for years. This excerpt -- with a bit of rock-n-roll craziness -- is from "Metholated Webs -- 1980-1984."
about 1 am, just returned from rosinante’s pub where we all met after lydia’s performance. where roli got thrown out in what was nearly a drunken brawl; he got too excited and germanicly drunk, wanted to crack a bottle over lyle’s head just to hear the sound of it! they had to come and drag him away, the whole bar watching, bartender in his white apron and roli really wild and screaming “wimps! you’re all wimps!” or “rrrimps!” w his accent. he was half putting on and half serious, at once drunk out of his mind and stone cold sober, completely and totally himself. they threw him out and thom almost got into the fray w some guy looked like kenny rogers who seemed just to be waiting for a chance to jump in. it was an exciting moment, we were brought alive and all focused for a moment on what was happening to this one person. roli let himself go, didn’t give a ... for propriety or self-picture or anything—he wailed with the moment. so as sorry as it was in one way, in another it was a liberation, which is always grand; it was a shedding of veils and an exposé of what lies lurking. bravo! everyone came to attention around him.
Darin Strauss, author of "Chang and Eng" and "The Real McCoy," has a new not-historical novel, "More Than It Hurts You." What it's about, exactly, varies depending on who's telling you about it.
Editor's note: On Friday, Playboy published the first section of Denis Johnson’s “Nobody Move,” a serialized work of fiction that will come out in four parts. Jacket Copy will review “Nobody Move,” installment by installment; below, our take on Part 1.
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When I came across 
Chuck Palahniuk's bad-boy books are received by an avid fan base; visitors to 
Tom McCarthy's novel "Remainder" has received the 
