In our pages: a review of Jodi Picoult's 'Sing You Home'

In Tuesday's Los Angeles Times, we review bestselling author Jodi Picoult's 18th novel, "Sing You Home." Reviewer Susan Salter Reynolds writes:

The closer she gets to real life, real people, real problems, the better the novel. In a country as polarized as ours, for a Democrat as active as Picoult (who gives a lot of money to various causes and institutions) it's not always easy to make, say, the anti-abortion activist, the anti-gay-marriage minister or the school board bureaucrat banning books into sympathetic characters. But the writer must try. For without the insight into the motives and convictions of characters on both sides of an issue, the novel will fall flat.

When the novel opens, Zoe and Max have just had yet another miscarriage. The cost of in vitro fertilization has used up their savings (they are not wealthy), and the emotional strain of Zoe's determination and desire to force her body into motherhood has finally overwhelmed Max, who struggles with alcoholism and low self-esteem.

There are questions of sexuality, fertility, tradition and parenthood; the characters, facing difficult choices, engage in a legal tussle. "We may read about these issues in the paper every day," Salter Reynolds writes, "but we cannot know (unless we have lived through them) what it means to have one's life contorted by them." Read the rest of the review here. 

-- Carolyn Kellogg

David L. Ulin reviews 'The Information'

James Gleick writes about science and technology and has twice been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. In his latest book, "The Information," he posits that the information age is nothing new -- in fact, it goes back to Homer and Socrates.

"For Gleick, information has always been our medium; since cave dwellers painted the first animal forms on their walls, we have existed in two parallel universes, the biosphere and the infosphere," David L. Ulin writes in our review. Ulin continues:

"We are the species," he observes, "that named itself Homo sapiens, the one who knows — and then, after reflection, amended that to Homo sapiens sapiens." Our self-consciousness, in other words — our awareness of our awareness — resides at the heart of our incessant need to process and to know. Over the course of human culture, there have been a number of significant transformations, beginning with the alphabet, which Gleick calls "a founding technology of information. The telephone, the fax machine, the calculator, and, ultimately, the computer are only the latest innovations devised for saving, manipulating and communicating knowledge." It is his idea that all these technologies exist as part of a continuum, with each developing from the last.

The key to such an argument is perspective, which is often in short supply when it comes to the information culture, with its tendency to inspire either paeans or jeremiads. Gleick, however, is too smart for that; he's all about the forest, not the trees.

Read the rest of The Times' review of "The Information" here.

James Gleick will come to the Zocalo Public Square reading series Tuesday; it's being held at the Petersen Automotive Museum. The event, which is free, begins at 7:30 p.m. Parking is $8.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: British Telecom wires in January 2011. Credit: Luke MacGregor / Reuters

 

In our pages: the Jessica Mitford biography 'Irrepressible'

Before there were Kardashians, before there were Hiltons, there were the Mitford sisters. The wealthy British socialites dominated headlines in the early part of the 20th century with their beauty, wit and sometimes scandalous politics -- Diana and Unity were fascists, Jessica was a communist. Pamela was the quiet one, Nancy wrote sharp-tongued novels, and Deborah, the youngest and last surviving, is said to still guard their legacy.

In a new biography, "Irrepressible: The Life and Times of Jessica Mitford," Leslie Brody looks at Jessica, who went first to Spain during its Civil War and then to America, where she became a well-connected journalist, publishing the bestselling "The American Way of Death" in 1963. Liz Brown has our review:

There's much ground to cover, and Brody squeezes a lot in: hobnobbing with New Deal power mongers; Romilly's death while flying an air raid over Germany and Jessica's subsequent grief; her work in the federal Office of Price Administration, where she meets labor lawyer Robert Treuhaft and does some of her first undercover work; reconciliations with her sisters; her move to Oakland and marriage to Treuhaft; joining the Communist Party, emerging as a doyenne of progressive politics and rollicking parties; and, of course, the investigative juggernaut that struck fear into morticians all over the country.

Imagine an Anglo Elaine Stritch crossed with Zelig. Witty and hard-living (vodka after her morning coffee, Jack Daniel's in the evening), Mitford was somehow everywhere: House Un-American Activities Committee hearings, the Rosenbergs' trial, following the Freedom Riders in Montgomery, Ala., Black Panther benefits. But unlike Zelig, she was no wallflower.

Brody has clearly done her research, culling from Mitford's own books and letters, as well as those of her sisters and other Mitford studies. She has interviewed the writer's acquaintances, friends and children. The glimpses of the muckraker that come from Mitford's own writing display a candor, verve and, at times, gentleness.

Mitford died in 1996 at the age of 78. Read the complete review of "Irrepressible" here.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

In our pages: 'Driven West' reviewed

In "Driven West: Andrew Jackson and the Trail of Tears to the Civil War," historian A.J. Langguth looks at the removal of Native America tribes from their lands. The account is "unfocused yet scarifying," Wendy Smith writes in our review.

[C]onflict between the federal and state governments over Indian policy involved opposing principles whose collision ultimately led to the Civil War. It's grimly ironic that Jackson, so opposed to Southern states' assertion of the right to nullify federal laws that he threatened to hang South Carolina's John C. Calhoun for treason, colluded with their defiance of the Supreme Court in the case of the Cherokees. He was willing to let the states have their way when it suited his purposes.

Despairingly aware that the government had no intention of enforcing court decisions in their favor, some Cherokee leaders concluded it was wisest to accept removal as inevitable and cut the best deal they could. In 1835, a faction signed the Treaty of New Echota, which promised $5 million to the tribe in recompense for their Southern lands, new territory west of the Mississippi and subsidies to make the move. The majority of the tribe, Langguth makes clear, rejected the treaty and resisted to the end. Forcibly removed from Georgia by the Army in 1838, the Cherokees "saw their houses stripped bare and set on fire," writes Langguth.

In 2009, Congress apologized "for the many instances of violence, maltreatment and neglect inflicted on Native Peoples by citizens of the United States." The apology, Smith notes, "is as inadequate to its terrible subject as is this well-intentioned but undisciplined book."

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Following 'The Instructions': Chris Barton's 100-odd page report

“The Instructions” is big. Like, “Maybe e-readers aren’t so bad,” big, at least when it comes to portability. At three pounds and 1,030 pages, it’s no easy companion for the bus, airplane or even a local cafe, where carrying this book under your arm is akin to being the guy at the beach with a parrot on your shoulder. This is a book that not only demands attention, but perhaps its own carrying case.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Big, chunky novels are naturally alluring, and aided by the same fetishistic design eye that McSweeney’s shows with its quarterly journal, “The Instructions” is doubly so with its gold-dusted rising/falling child figures on the cover (it comes in red, blue and gray). It draws you in on sight, kind of like how some people probably view Mt. Whitney.

But the inevitable question is, will the trip be worth it? Given the math involved, the first 100-odd pages probably isn’t a fair sample of “The Instructions,” Adam Levin’s first novel, but realistically it’s enough to build an impression -- one would hope, anyway. Crossing 1,000 pages is relatively common in sci-fi and fantasy novels, where building new worlds requires serious real estate. But it’s a notable stretch elsewhere these days, unless you’re getting into the knotty structural dance of David Foster Wallace (who Levin is compared with right on the back cover).

Levin clearly wants to build a new world with narrator Gurion ben-Judah Maccabee, a precocious 10-year-old (is there any other kind in literature these days?) sentenced to a last-resort disciplinary wing at a Chicago-area private school. With Gurion and his classmates bantering beyond their years with a witty if not entirely coherent slang (“kenobi" for  “wise,” “chomsky” for ... foolish, maybe?), “The Instructions” seems set in some strange parallel universe, albeit one that includes disorientingly real references to Mike Tyson and Larry David.

The book hinges on Gurion’s troubles with religion, where his questioning of faith in Torah study got him bounced around various schools in the first place. Like the Coen Brothers’ “A Serious Man,” Levin’s exploration of Judaism and untranslated dips into Hebrew isn’t always easy to approach, but in the early going it offers a similarly interesting view of the culture for those unfamiliar with the faith.

The core issue for the reader, however, is Gurion’s tendency toward tangents. With multiple pages devoted to his OCD-level consideration of how to best shoot out a clock with a handmade “penny gun” -- only pages removed from detailed instructions on making said penny gun -- “The Instructions” is set deep inside this 10-year-old’s head. Though its early nods toward Gurion’s charismatic pull among classmates hints toward the book’s assumed climax (the back cover references his leading a revolution), the question is ultimately one of commitment. Is it worth following Gurion over four meticulously documented days in his life while approximately three other novels that could fit in its page-count sit on your shelf?

While the physical appeal of “The Instructions” is tough to shake, so are its obvious challenges. Gurion sounds about as much like a 10-year-old as the average English professor, and a later scene referenced in this Chicago Tribune story about Levin devoting 30 pages to Gurion opening a door may well work in context but from here sounds exactly like the sort of indulgence that leads to brick-shaped novels. 

Still, I can imagine checking in with “The Instructions” in a sort of reading material adultery over the next few months. Levin is clearly out to make a statement, and the kind of ambition shown here isn’t easy to dismiss. Who knows what the view is like after scaling this mountaintop? And, more to the point, would that view still look the same from a height of 600 pages after all?

-- Chris Barton

James Ellroy: All about Mom

In today's pages, Tim Rutten reviews James Ellroy's new memoir, "The Hilliker Curse." The mystery writer's mother, Jean Hilliker, was slain in El Monte when he was 10; that unsolved crime has motivated much of his writing, including his breakthrough novel "The Black Dahlia." Rutten writes:

Ellroy has been drinking from that cup of Oedipal guilt, rage and obsession ever since. It's made for a fascinating body of fiction and compellingly written, but emotionally tedious, memoirs. In "My Dark Places," he recounts his mother's murder and his own subsequent attempts not only to come to terms with it, but also to solve it. "The Hilliker Curse" — the title incorporates her maiden name — is an account of her death's influence on his relationships with women, including two marriages that ended in divorce and the feverishly described liaison in which he's now engaged. What to make of it all is a bit of a muddle.

As a writer, Ellroy is never less than entertaining, even when his manic side is at its most grating. As a memoirist, he's a complicated case.

Read the complete review here.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: James Ellroy in 2009. Credit: Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times

Jonathan Franzen's 'Freedom,' reviewed by David L. Ulin

Jonathan Franzen's "Freedom" hits shelves at the end of the month, but reviews are cropping up all over the place. Ours, by David L. Ulin, appears in print Friday; it's online now.

Jonathan Franzen begins his fourth novel, "Freedom," with an extended set piece introducing Walter and Patty Berglund, urban homesteaders who, back in the 1980s, moved to the crumbling core of St. Paul, Minn., and became "the young pioneers of Ramsey Hill." It's an interesting choice since, as Franzen makes clear from the book's first sentence, the Berglunds have abandoned the Twin Cities for Washington, D.C., and "mean nothing to St. Paul now." Still, their memory, or their influence, lingers like an afterimage: the perfect couple that somehow wasn't, whose love was shattered by some ineradicable taint. As the chapter unfurls, Franzen draws in broad strokes the terms of their unraveling, which in all the large and small ways resembles the unraveling of the culture that surrounds them, culminating in "the great national tragedy" of Sept. 11.

Franzen pulls it off -- as he pulls off nearly everything in this rich and nuanced novel -- because for all that it appears to be their book, "Freedom" is more than just the story of the Berglunds' fall. Instead, they are the tip of the iceberg, a filter through which to explore the unresolved tensions, the messiness of emotion, of love and longing, that possesses even the most willfully ordinary of lives.

Franzen has been working on this book, on and off, ever since the 2001 release his previous novel, "The Corrections," which won the National Book Award.  Does "Freedom" measure up? Read the rest of Ulin's review of Jonathan Franzen's "Freedom"  to find out.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

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Archive review: David Foster Wallace's 'Infinite Jest'

On Friday, we posted Ron Currie Jr.'s remembrance of reading "Infinite Jest" by David Foster Wallace. Now acknowledged to be a seminal work of postmodern literature, and the thing that turned many Wallace readers into devotees, "Infinite Jest" arrived in 1996 to some puzzlement. A 1,079-page book from an author who had published one novel, a book of short stories and assorted nonfiction, "Infinite Jest" was at the very least ambitious. Exactly how it was perceived at the time can be seen in this February 1996 review by David Kipen, who went on to be the book editor at the San Francisco Chronicle and literature director at the National Endowment for the Arts. It is reproduced here with his permission.

Terminal Entertainment

David Foster Wallace's behemoth novel projects our addiction to passive consumerism into a frenetic future

INFINITE JEST, By David Foster Wallace (Little, Brown and Co.; $29.95; 1,079 pp.)

By David Kipen, David Kipen is a copy editor at Variety

It takes a special kind of nerve to write a book with roughly the mass of a medicine ball and then end it so abruptly and unsatisfactorily that the poor reader perversely finds himself wishing it longer. But David Foster Wallace's coda disappoints only because the preceding 3-1/2 inches of "Infinite Jest" have succeeded so well at projecting a world of brain-scalding complexity.

Wallace has given us a meditation on addiction -- the addiction of a tennis prodigy to organic narcotics, of a paroled second-story man to inorganic ones, of the terrorist to his cause, the couch potato to mindless pleasures and, ultimately, the unkickable addiction of readers to all those old storytelling conventions Wallace gleefully blows up like a rotten kid cherry-bombing an electric train.

The biggest addiction may be Wallace's own to writing, a habit so consuming that the only way for him to shake it is with an abrupt, cold-turkey ending. Luckily, "Infinite Jest" has a second serve to fall back on -- its authentically hysterical, drink-milk-at-your peril humor.

Here's Wallace doing a high-school tennis announcer whose "quest for synonyms for beat and got beat by is never-ending and serious and a continual source of irritation to his friends: "Lamont Chu disemboweled Charles Pospisilova 6-3, 6-2; Peter Beak spread Ville Dillard on a cracker like some sort of hors d'oeuvre and bit down 6-4, 7-6. . . . Diane Bridget Boone drove a hot thin spike into the right eye of Aimee Middleton-Law 6-3, 6-3. . . . Felicity Zweig went absolutely SACPOP on P.W.'s Kiki Pfefferblit 7-6, 6-1, while Gretchen Holt made PW's Tammi Taylor-Bing sorry her parents were ever in the same room together 6-0, 6-3. . . ."

This is comic overkill of the foremost possible water, the sort of stuff good for reading aloud to one's more indulgent friends ("Wait, just one more!"), taking care to leave out expressions like "SACPOP," which Wallace doesn't see fit to explain until 100 pages later in a slapstick set-piece so funny you forgive him immediately. The tennis passage is also symptomatic of another of Wallace's bad habits, namely, too many characters too quickly introduced and never adequately differentiated -- not a bad metaphor for the whole high-school experience, but also a hallmark of the fat book.

"Infinite Jest" should find a kind posterity in just about any near future except the one where it takes place, sometime early in the next century. Books don't count for much in Wallace's dystopia, the only one mentioned being a copy of William James' "Varieties of Religious Experience" long since hollowed out as a stash box.

Just how early in the next century this all is can't be pinned down, as the Gregorian calendar has long since made way for Subsidized Time, which takes the concept of commercial sponsorship to its logical terminus by rechristening AD 2001 or 2020 or whatever year it is as the Year of the Perdue Wonderchicken, the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment, etc. This tactic is mysterious at first, a scream when Wallace lets you in on the joke and kind of a pain after a while. Mercifully, he starts abbreviating them . . . then changes his mind and goes right back to spelling them out.

The novel begins with Hal Incandenza, tennis prodigy antihero, suffering a mysterious seizure during an Arizona college interview early in the Year of Glad, as in trash bags. We then flash back to the rigorously regimented Enfield Tennis Academy near Boston, Hal's and our home off and on for the bulk of the book. E.T.A. is the brainchild of Hal's late father, J.O., a man of high and wide attainments, last but not least of them committing suicide by artfully cutting a large hole into the door of a microwave oven, inserting his head and letting it rip.

J.O.'s place on campus and in Hal's mother's bed has fallen to a shady relation, giving rise to the suspicion, reinforced by the book's title, that what we've really signed on for is some hyper-modern pastiche of "Hamlet." This holds water as far as it goes, which is until Wallace starts cross-cutting between the academy and its Enfield neighbor, a dilapidated halfway house for dipso- and other maniacs. At this point, a fresh scenario pokes its head out of the verbal thicket: "Hamlet" is just a red herring and Wallace is really concocting a sort of elephantine variation on "Entropy," Thomas Pynchon's classic short story of contrasted chaos and regimentation.

Wallace's earlier novel, "The Broom of the System," has already elicited cries of "Pynchonesque!" from diverse quarters; some of them, to be sure, using the adjective in its usual sense, i.e., as reviewer's code for "I didn't finish it," others so besotted with Pynchon that they see his scat everywhere, but a few finding genuine similarities. Both men do share a head for science, a stomach for gross-out humor, a great ear and a soft spot for the word "maffick," but of the two, Wallace definitely has the lower opinion of sloth.

This emerges from a third thread in "Infinite Jest," one that puts it beyond the realm of homage to either Shakespeare or Pynchon. Hal's father, during his avant-garde filmmaker phase, has somehow made a movie so enjoyable as to be 100% lethal. All viewers unfortunate enough to catch even a snippet of this mortally popular production (it's called "Infinite Jest") at once live only to see it again and again, lapsing into a persistent vegetative state from which only drool-drowning will ever deliver them. All copies have now gone missing, and the post-NAFTA Organization of North American Nations (O.N.A.N.) is ineptly racing to find them before they can fall into the Wrong Hands, namely those of a splinter group of legless Quebecois separatists in wheelchairs.

If this starts to sound a mite daffy, it's also deadly serious. Like "1984" and "A Clockwork Orange," both of which he unmistakably invokes, Wallace's critique of a future society whose only grail has become the hangoverless bender, the infinite jest -- the never-ending Year of Glad -- rings so true and contemporary that it's almost passe.

In a way, of course, it is. Lots of people have tilled this ground before, from Neil Postman in "Amusing Ourselves to Death" to 10,000 Maniacs in "Candy Everybody Wants." What keeps it fresh is Wallace's prose style, a compulsively footnoted amalgam of stupendously high-toned vocabulary and gleeful low-comedy diction, coupled with a sense of syntax so elongated that he can seem to go for days without surfacing. At times, he appears determined to end each sentence with a preposition or not at all, with perhaps a slight edge going to not at all. A Wallace sentence finally draws to a close amid reluctance and relief, like a hitting streak. Half the time you'll want to pitch the damn book clear into the next room, with or without benefit of doorway, but the other half you can actually feel your attention span stretching back out to where it belongs.

Then, contrary to the reader's occasional renegade suspicion, it ends. Little gets resolved, least of all a reason for Hal's first-chapter seizure, although at least three good guesses come to mind. Several well-developed characters and one improbably touching romance all come to naught. Pynchonesque, some will say, but with Pynchon, he's playing with the whole idea of narrative closure, not thumbing his nose at you for giving a damn.

Finishing "Infinite Jest," one feels less played with than toyed with. Still, better to be toyed with by a genius than pandered to by some second-rater who'd write a few hundred pages and then give up. And Wallace has a toy box to do Pandora proud.

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Mini review: 'The Private Lives of Birds'

Our mini review of the new nonfiction book "The Private Lives of Birds: A Scientist Reveals the Intricacies of Avian Social Life" by Bridget Stutchbury, published by Walker and Company.

"I am a bird detective," explains Bridget Stutchbury, "revealing the behind-the-scenes details of the social lives of birds to understand why females cheat on their mates, what makes a male attractive, why some pairs divorce, how birds claim a territory...and what all this means not only for our avian friends, but for us as well."

Hey, we’ll take advice from anyone, especially if they can fly. Stutchbury loves her work, voyeuristic as it may seem. She has spent the last 20 years "mounting miniature radio-tracking devices on songbirds so I can study how and why they cheat on their mates." For 20 years she has taken notes and trained her ears to listen for changing moods, angry warnings, communicated needs and signals from species other than her own.

Unlike many scientists, Stutchbury is entirely comfortable using the emotional language of humans to describe bird behavior and even learn from it: "There are many fascinating stories hidden in the melodies of the robin, the flash of orange on the redstart, and the male tanager who feeds his incubating mate."

See more reviews by Susan Salter Reynolds in this Sunday's L.A. Times.

-- Susan Salter Reynolds

Photo: A common nightingale. Credit: hhhalberto via Flickr

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Jon Thurber named Book Review editor

Jon Thurber will leave his position of managing editor, print to become the new Book Review editor of the L.A. Times. The news was announced Monday, and while his exact start date hasn't been announced, I've already begun bugging him with e-mails.

Thurber, a Los Angeles native, has spent 38 years at The Times.  He worked on the Foreign Desk, in features and as obituary editor before overseeing the front page and the A1 desk.

Thurber succeeds David L. Ulin, who after five years as book editor is moving into a new role as book critic.
Thurber says he plans to "build on the great coverage David [Ulin] and Nick [Owchar] have led over the last few years."

What is Thurber currently reading? "Writing Was Everything" by Alfred Kazin, in paper, and "Winnie the Pooh" on his iPad. Up next is "Spies of the Balkans," the new Alan Furst thriller.

Anticipating my next question, Thurber added, "no, I'm not related to James Thurber and, of the two writers, I actually preferred E.B. White."

The memo announcing Jon Thurber's appointment is after the jump.

-- Carolyn Kellogg
twitter.com/paperhaus

Photo: Jon Thurber. Credit: Ricardo DeAratanha / Los Angeles Times