Way past due

Recently we told you about BOOKGASM's list of the nine most annoying people we always see at the bookstore, which proved to be a bit controversial.

Now, BOOKGASM contributor Louis Fowler lets loose with a list of the five people who make him hate the public library system. Yes, it's written in jest. No, not everyone realizes that.

But, hey, it's not all vinegar over at BOOKGASM this week, as witnessed by reviews of Jeffrey Ford's THE SHADOW YEAR, G.M. Ford's NAMELESS NIGHT, Richard Matheson's BUTTON, BUTTON, The New York Post's HEADLESS BODY IN TOPLESS BAR, Gary K. Wolf's SPACE VULTURE, Rayo Casablanca's 6 SICK HIPSTERS, Robert Bloch's Hard Case Crime twosome SPIDER WEB / SHOOTING STAR and more.

Don't get me started ... oh, too late

Forget all the reasoning behind these "woe is me" stories about the pains of the publishing industry, that suggest it's hurting because of the lack of a HARRY POTTER-like blockbuster or the splintering of entertainment options. No, I think the real reason behind the booksellers' declining fortunes is due to the people who crap in their public bathrooms. And who sit on the floor in the sci-fi section. And who go there to "study."

They're all part of the nine most annoying people I always see at the bookstore, and it's high time they be called out.

Elsewhere at Bookgasm this week, reviews of books instead of people, including Declan Hughes' THE COLOR OF BLOOD, Laurie R. King's TOUCHSTONE, Steve Hockensmith's THE BLACK DOVE, Dan Fesperman THE AMATEUR SPY, an indie horror anthology called DARK DISTORTIONS, DC Comics' second SHOWCASE collection of THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD BATMAN TEAM-UPS, and many more – all of which you can find at your local bookstore, albeit as part of a now-dog-eared stack some mooch left in the café area.

Ain't that a kick in the _____ ______?

Not long after I started BOOKGASM, I noticed something peculiar that kept popping up in every other thriller or mystery that I read, and I don't mean the obligatory inclination between the male and female leads to proclaim their undying love within two days of meeting one another. No, I mean the term "solar plexus."

Is there a fight scene in the novel you're reading? Odds are, someone's going to take it right in the solar plexus. Not the stomach, not the groin, but the solar plexus. Of all the dozens of places it really, really hurts to get hit on your body, this is the go-to spot, apparently. These two words are so omnipresent that I began writing down every instance of it I came across.

Now my list-in-progress has been revealed as the "Solar Plexus Watch." The sheer number of its instances is amazing, in both books good and bad, from authors talented and otherwise. Don't believe me? The proof speaks otherwise. Most even read interchangeably.

While we weren't busy counting up clichés, we also managed to take in some books, including Christa Faust's MONEY SHOT, Rudy Rucker's POSTSINGULAR and Dan Koeppel's BANANA: THE FATE OF THE FRUIT THAT CHANGED THE WORLD, among others.

Tired of year-end lists yet? Tough!

You won't find any novels about the hopelessly impoverished or victims of Iranian rape on my best-books-of-2007 list. Not that those don't have their place in the world, but when I grab a book at the end of a long, hard day, I grab one to escape – not to compound my stress.

No, you'll find the likes of Joe Hill's 20TH CENTURY GHOSTS and Richard Aleas' SONGS OF INNOCENCE. Deal with it. (Plus, David Michaelis' SCHULZ AND PEANUTS is on there, too – is that important enough?)

It's just one of several year-end wrap-ups we ran last week o'er at BOOKGASM, including the best sci-fi books, 16 books we're looking forward to in '08 (advance warning to snobs: SPEED RACER manga is on there) and the all-important, tongue-in-cheek excerpts from reviews we never got around to writing.

That said, welcome, Mr. New Year. Should old acquaintance be forgot? If you're still hungover, it's not even an issue.

Just be-Cos, that's why

Over at BOOKGASM, we're an opinionated lot, sharing our two cents on the important issues that affect the world populace ... like, why doesn't Bill Cosby's new book COME ON PEOPLE have a comma in the title?

Asks guest editorialist Davis Sweet: "Not COME ON, COMMA, PEOPLE, which might make sense as the title of a rant. For example, COME ON, PEOPLE, STOP BEING MORONS! Instead, we have COME ON PEOPLE, which is a bukkake porn title. ... And here’s the cover, in misty blue with jism-white text and smeary white dribbles across the middle. Bawm-chicka-WOW."

Switching from one bodily fluid to another, we also turned our attention this week to Paul Bibeau's SUNDAYS WITH VLAD, a humorous pop-culture examination of all things Drac: "For the book, Bibeau – a former editor of Maxim, but we won’t hold that against him – immersed himself in vampire culture, resulting in a globetrotting romp that wrings as many laughs out of the subject as it does the willies."

To key off the loose theme we've got going, we called Vincent Verga's heavy, pricey coffee-table book CARTOGRAPHIA: MAPPING CIVILZATIONS as "porn" for map lovers.

Truck on over and you can also read reviews on Mickey Spillane's final crime novel, a Harlan Coben reissue, a three-in-one Gold Medal collection from Stark House Press, plus Josh Conviser's EMPYRE, William Lashner's A KILLER'S KISS and Preston Darby's THE RELUCTANT ASSASSIN. So come on, people!

Burke is Back

Andrew Vachss's latest Burke novel, Terminal, was released yesterday. It's an engrossing read for any Burke fan. The typical cold as dry-ice tone is there. The great capers and over-the-top strategies are there. And Burke's diatribes against the ills of society are there.

The story focuses on a white supremacist whose only recourse against his terminal disease is an expensive treatment in a foreign country. To raise the much needed cash, he enlists Burke into an extortion scheme involving some wealthy members of society and a decades old murder.

But Vachss does something slightly different in this book. He ends on a cliffhanger the likes of which I don't recall happening in his previous work. There's a major threat to Burke's family (his chosen family, not biological family) and you'll have to tune in next time to find out what happens.

GHOST of a chance

Among the content this week at Bookgasm.com was an interview with tie-in writer Greg Cox, he of the recent GHOST RIDER novelization. Part of the conversation went like this:

BOOKGASM: Novelizations are almost like their own genre. In your experience, who's reading them?

COX: I think the readers fall into two categories: the ones who can't wait for the movie to come out and need to know what the movie's about right now, and the ones who can't get enough of the movie and want to experience it in a different format. I've heard from one fan who has already read GHOST RIDER twice!

A possible third category might be people who were confused by the movie and are hoping to find some answers in the novelization. An editor I know likes to joke that the more incoherent the movie, the better the novelization sells. I'm not sure this has ever been proven scientifically.

You can read the rest, as well as a look at three nautical-themed pulp novels and a new DVD of H.P. Lovecraft-inspired short films, plus reviews of Matthew Klein's CON ED, Charlie Huston's NO DOMINION, Richard Laymon's THE BEAST HOUSE, Mel Odom's THE QUEST FOR THE TRILOGY, Marvel Comics' THE CHAMPIONS CLASSIC: VOL. 2, Jeff Mariotte's DC UNIVERSE: TRAIL OF TIME and Russell Andrews' HADES.

An inconvenient goof

It's been a hectic month at Bookgasm, with out-of-town trips and whatnot hampering our ability to meeting Beatrice's strict weekly deadlines. But that's all starting to change now.

Yet just as we get back in the game, we're befuddled by Penguin's decision to send out Al Gore's new youth-adult edition of AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH in huge envelopes about three times the size they needed to be. Irony.

Anyway, over at Bookgasm this week, you'll find reviews of Ted Dekker's SAINT, a SHADOW pulp twofer, Lisa Scottoline's DIRTY BLONDE, a little curiosity called THE BAFFLE BOOK, a stock-car thriller titled HOT LAPS (snicker), Donald Spoto's new JOAN (of Arc) biography, William Dietrich's NAPOLEON'S PYRAMIDS, Robert Liparulo's GERM, Vince Van Patten's THE PICASSO FLOP, a new Playboy literary anthology and many more, none of which will cause our ocean's levels to rise and flood major metropolitan areas.

Read at your own risk!

Can your reading habit result in your own bodily injury, contraction of an unidentified disease or perhaps even death? After visiting what I deem "the world's most dangerous bookstore," I believe so. Some 11 years ago, a friend and I visited a used bookstore in Oklahoma City that was full of such filth that ... well, you just have to see for yourself:

And that's just the checkout area, kids.

I doubt the store is even there anymore (and I'm afraid to check), but you can read all about our life-threatening adventure over at Bookgasm, in full, grisly, porno-strewn detail.

And there were also reviews this week at our site, including Lincoln Child's DEEP STORM, Megan Abbott's THE SONG IS YOU, Jeffrey Thomas' PUNKTOWN, the tough-to-spell Perri O'Shaugnessy's SINISTER SHORTS and Dean Koontz's BROTHER ODD, among others. None of them will cause you to break a hip.

Icepocalypse now

Here in Oklahoma City – and most of the state as well – we've spent all weekend under a state-of-emergency-level ice storm. I'm kind of partial to bad weather, because it gives me a good excuse to not go anywhere, thereby (at least in theory) freeing up time I can use to read. Yesterday the postman (proving that "neither rain nor snow" adage true) dropped off an Amazon box on our front porch, but the two-foot ice drift literally had frozen our front door shut. I had to scale the backyard fence (which also wouldn't open) just to get around the house to get to it.

As expected, it contained lots of reading goodness, soon to be covered at Bookgasm. In the meantime, here are a few things we covered last week (and the week before that); just click those links for the full monty.

•  NEXT by Michael Crichton – "What makes Crichton's latest so interesting is not how he works in real-life politics behind the issues of stem-cell research and gene patenting, but how the novel is structured. Rather than telling one story, he tells about half a dozen, with chapters alternating between the threads. Imagine TRAFFIC, then replace 'drugs' with 'DNA,' and you have NEXT."

• BIG CITY, BAD BLOOD by Sean Chercover – "As of right now, I can safely say this title will be one of my top 10 books of 2007, and the year just started. Trust me. Chercover gives the crime genre a much-needed kick in the ass with – finally – a totally hard-boiled detective in the vein of the masters of the past, be they James M. Cain, Cornell Woolrich or even Mickey Spillane."

• HANNIBAL RISING by Thomas Harris – "Overfamiliarity: It's for that reason critics have taken RISING to task as something of a cash-in – a sure thing for Harris' coffers. Perhaps they have a point, in that Harris' bibliography amounts to five books in 30 years, with all but one – his debut, BLACK SUNDAY – dealing with Lecter. Maybe it's time for him to stretch and use his talents to come up with something as fresh and exciting as his first two or three times at bat, especially since he takes so many years between books. Is HANNIBAL RISING scary? No. Is it essential? No. Is it entertaining? Most of it, yes. It's an unnecessary but pleasantly diverting prequel; as literature, its edible equivalent may be some jelly beans with a nice Cherry Coke, but I can't deny my sweet tooth."

• MORE TWISTED: COLLECTED STORIES: VOL. II by Jeffery Deaver – "Despite his incessant need to remind readers that he's a huge fan of the soap opera ALL MY CHILDREN, Jeffery Deaver is one of the greats when it comes to the modern short-form mystery. As demonstrated time and again in 2003's TWISTED, his first collection of short stories, he harbors an uncanny ability to pose a riddle, lead you like a leashed dog to see things one way, only to yank you the other way in the final few paragraphs, sometimes leaving you flat-out amazed at the artistry in the deception. For me, his novels don't carry the same impact."

• SHOWCASE PRESENTS SHAZAM!: VOLUME 1 – "Who is this for? Is it Superman-lite for younger readers? Or is it tongue-in-cheek parody for the older, jaded ones? The answer: Who cares? With SHAZAM! being unlike anything else at the time, it's a must. ... There's a chimp in his own Captain Marvel suit, wreaking havoc in a TV studio. A crook dressed head to toe in old newspapers. Best of all, there's the bald, bespectacled Dr. Sivana pelting the Marvel Family with a 'badness' ray. 'Quick,' Captain Marvel tells Mary Marvel and Captain Marvel Jr., 'think good thoughts!' Their responses are 'Apple pie!,' 'Christmas!' and 'Motherhood!' Yes, Virginia, SHAZAM! seeks the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval. It gets mine, too."

• EPSILON ZETA by Jock Young – "Perhaps a good subtitle for EPSILON ZETA would be THE RULES OF ATTRACTION FOR COMPLETE RETARDS, because that's exactly what this regurgitated novel of the woes of frat life is: one big pity party for a group of spoiled, racist, homophobic white frat boys whose primary interests include date rape, calling each other 'faggot' and constantly lamenting their frat's ne'er-do-well status on campus and with their national board. ... Author Jock Young (what, was Chest Rockhard or Jet Brickfist taken?) has written a completely unneeded and unwanted love letter to fraternity living that might appeal to those types who wistfully remember their days of pissing in the mouth of a freshman pledge."

Believe us, there's much more where that came from, with reviews of new books from James Grippando, Steve Hockensmith, Robert Heinlein/Spider Robinson, Charles Todd and others. Plus, don't miss our savage review of Ron Howard's DA VINCI CODE movie. And, hey, who knew there was an ALL THAT JAZZ novelization? We've got proof.

That was the year that was

Over at BOOKGASM this week, we've been all about the year-end lists and year-in-review stuff.

I think the best novel of the year was Paul Malmont's THE CHINATOWN DEATH CLOUD PERIL. In our original review this summer, we said of the book, "Though exciting and swashbuckling, this is not a banged-out, first-draft, cheap-thrills throwaway. It's a literary tale about two very successful writers who nonetheless operate in a void since their publishers force them to work under pen names. There's a bit of an ongoing struggle of self-identity when you have to hide behind pseudonyms, when the public sees you one way and you feel another entirely. Malmont's moving, lyrical depiction of that struggle just so happens to involve secret codes, curvy psychics, donut chemists, hidden treasure and barrels of toxic nerve gas. Malmont's obvious love for the pulps is equaled by his imagination in storytelling."

And a little more high-minded is our choice for 2006's best non-fiction work, James L. Swanson's MANHUNT: THE 12-DAY CHASE FOR LINCOLN'S KILLER. When we first reviewed it 11 months ago, we said that "with its wide array of colorful characters both good and bad, and (John Wilkes) Booth's every hour accounted for, MANHUNT plays out like a colonial version of 24. It is the most accessible and suspenseful true-to-life tale since Erik Larson's THE DEVIL IN THE WHITE CITY. Beautifully designed and supplemented with period photographs and illustrations, it also certainly stands as the definitive book of its subject. I don't often read history books because I find them so dry, but MANHUNT is alive. It's one to savor."

Indeed it is. Click on over for the rest of our best (and worst) picks, plus the five best sci-fi novels, nine fake books we wish would've been written, Ed Gorman's personal 10 picks, 13 books we never found the time to read in 2006 and 10 we can't wait for 2007 to bring us.

Crimes against photography

The most interesting thing about Jonathan and Faye Kellerman's latest book, CAPITAL CRIMES, is not that the two in-their-own-right bestselling authors are again collaborating for the second time. No, the most interesting thing is their singularly awful back-jacket author photo, which you can see here.

It's not because they're not photogenic – because they are – but that it looks like a bad Photoshop job, as if they weren't photographed at the same time. Certainly it can't be too hard to get a married couple together for a photo shoot, should it? Now, it very well may be the case that they were shot together, but from the flat look of where their arms are supposed to be touching (you have to see the actual book) and the entirely fake-looking drop-shadow effect her arm casts on his shirt, it doesn't look that way. Perhaps someone just went too nuts with the airbrush tool and rendered a real photo rather artificial. It's a mystery.

What this has to do with anything: CAPITAL CRIMES is just one of the many books we covered at BOOKGASM this week. You'll find excerpts below, or you can click the links to read the whole things, free of Photoshop trickery.

• CAPITAL CRIMES by Jonathan and Faye Kellerman – "Following DOUBLE HOMICIDE – Jonathan and Faye Kellerman's 2004 murder-mystery two-in-one set in the cities of Boston and Santa Fe – the married bestselling authors collaborate once more with CAPITAL CRIMES, whose pair of novellas this time take place in Berkeley and Nashville. ... The individual cities aren't just here for show; each story utilizes landmarks and other surroundings that illustrate the setting's deliberateness. May they continue to join forces for several map points to come."

• BLINDSIGHT by Peter Watts –  "Some readers need this caveat before picking up a Peter Watts book: Watts takes his science really, really seriously. He’s also not concerned with conventional notions of pacing and plot. BLINDSIGHT, his newest, is no exception. ... This sounds really awesome, and it is. But less patient readers won’t think it’s awesome that 80 percent of BLINDSIGHT is setup — exploration and exposition on the lives of the characters and the science behind every single aspect of the world Watts has hypothesized. To this, I say: Finish it! The rewards are worth the investment."

• SHOWCASE PRESENTS THE UNKNOWN SOLIDER: VOLUME 1 –  "With his face in bandages and eyes hiding behind sunglasses, our "man no one knows yet is known by everyone" resembles pretty much every cinematic incarnation of The Invisible Man. But whenever the American war machine has a top-secret assignment for him, he unwraps the Ace, slaps on a mask and goes to work, often paratrooping behind enemy lines in the dead of night. If you're German or Japanese, he hates your ass. Like THE HAUNTED TANK, a little SOLDIER can go a long way. But try any of the upfront stories, written and drawn by the masterful Joe Kubert, because they are the most well-done of the entire collection. Illustrated with flair and told with economy, they fly by."

• WHO'S SORRY NOW? by Jill Churchill – "I’m a little surprised by the lavish praise and awards heaped on mystery author Jill Churchill, writer of both the Jane Jeffry and Grace and Favor series. Her new Grace and Favor book, WHO’S SORRY NOW?, is certainly entertaining enough, but to have The L.A. Times claim that nothing in Agatha Christie comes close to the depth of these books really brings into question the Times’ literary credibility. I mean come on, we’re talking Agatha Christie here, the grand dame of cozy-style mysteries. Churchill isn’t in this league."

As for the rest of our week, come check out our interview with The Playboy Advisor, our look at a new DVD collection of short films based on Edgar Allan Poe and three old CIA spy stories. Plus reviews of a WARHAMMER vampire novel, Jack Ketchum's LADIES' NIGHT, Richard Matheson's TWILIGHT ZONE SCRIPTS and several new comics. Your weekend will be better off for it.

New books peddle sex, drugs 'n' prepubescent astronauts

Last night I went to my 9-year-old son's third-grade Christmas play at his school. (Yeah, it was a "Christmas" play as opposed to a "holiday" one, complete with a nativity scene ending and yet, a tribute to Hanukkah.) What threw me off is that between each of the eight rather elaborate musical numbers, different kids essayed the roles of Grandpa, Grandma and their two grandkids. I was so confused that it really destroyed the play's forward narrative.

My point? These books BOOKGASM covered this week faired much better (clink the links to read the reviews in full):

• ESCAPE FROM EARTH: NEW ADVENTURES IN SPACE edited by Jack Dann and Garder Dozois – "If I only could give one reason why the Science Fiction Book Club rocks, I’d have to go with the exclusive anthologies it cranks out. They’re huge, dense volumes put together by the best editors in the field. ... The theme of ESCAPE FROM EARTH is science-fiction adventures for teenagers, in the vein of Robert Heinlein’s canonical “juvenile” works. That’s a high bar for anyone, and the editors wrangled up, for the most part, an excellent spread for kids of all ages to feast upon. ... SFBC members get a treat for them and their teenagers, and Dann and Dozois have assembled a great, contemporary take on every teenager’s greatest desire: to rise above the mundanity of existence and truly escape, if only for a moment. To adults, it seems hyperbolic, but ESCAPE FROM EARTH can make us all remember when it was all too serious."

• STREET RAISED by Pearce Hansen – "Sometimes you come across a book that is just so raw and natural, you can't help but want to see what happens next, especially when it shows you a side of life few rarely (and thankfully) ever see. This is the case with STREET RAISED, a novel from first-time author Pearce Hansen. Expanding on events in his youth, Hansen writes about the people who fall through the cracks of society, and who will do whatever they have to in order to protect their own and survive every day. ... I've really got to hand it to Pearce for writing a book like this: so visceral, raw and unapologetic. It's such a breath of fresh air for a crime story."

• THE PEDDLER by Richard S. Prather – "Three 6 Mafia was right: It really is hard out here for a pimp. And so discovers Tony Romero, the antihero protagonist of THE PEDDLER. ... One has to wonder if Oliver Stone had read THE PEDDLER before scripting Brian De Palma's SCARFACE, because really – even similar names and demeanors of their lead characters aside – it's merely about substituting one vice for another: cocaine for Stone, pussy for Prather."

Some other stuff from BOOKGASM's week that we don't want you to miss: our completely negative savaging of Bob Fenster's TWISTED: TALES FROM THE WACKY SIDE OF LIFE, Ed Gorman reviewing three recent offerings, a retrospective of Edgar Rice Burroughs' Mars series, plus reviews of YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO REMAIN PUZZLED, ESSENTIAL MARVEL HORROR, THE PINK PANTHER'S JUST DESSERTS, J.F. Gonzalez's THE BELOVED and more. And a book that's nothing but pictures of monkeys. Who doesn't love monkeys?

Wambaugh returns, Hef orgasms

Did you miss us last week? Probably not, because we're betting you were just like us: still in a post-turkey coma. But somehow, but Monday morning, we had managed to crawl off the sofa and return to another full week of book reviewing at BOOKGASM. Among the highlights (click the titles for the unedited goodness):

• HOLLYWOOD STATION by Joseph Wambaugh – "Reading Joseph Wambaugh's HOLLYWOOD STATION is like listening to a cop share a bunch of his war stories: You get a lot of lingo, sometimes too much detail, but also an abundance of craziness and "holy shit" moments that make your day job all the more miserable by comparison. ... This is not a novel about police officers trying to solve a crime (although they do); rather, it's a novel about police officers themselves – colorful, flawed, human – in realistic situations, both painful and peculiar, sometimes not ending the way you'd want them."

• DRAGONFRIGATE WIZARD HALCYON BLITHE by James M. Ward – "Rousing. You don’t see that word much any more, but it’s the perfect descriptor for James M. Ward’s fantasy series. ... This is a rousing adventure of naval battles, dragons, magic, dwarves, evil demons and a budding relationship ... a rousing tale of derring-do and highly recommended for those who like their work infused with sea salt, dragon lore, magic and fine, upstanding characters."

• BUNNY TALES: BEHIND CLOSED DOORS AT THE PLAYBOY MANSION by Izabella St. James – "And then there's the sex. You read a book like BUNNY TALES simply wanting to get the goods on whether Hef nails all those women at the same time. St. James doesn't disappoint, giving you an entire chapter devoted to those nights in the bedroom – a blow-by-blow (pun marginally intended), 10-page account that'll reshape your entire perception of Hef. As much I'm trying to forget, the images just keep flooding back to me. Baby oil. 69. 'God damn it ... wow.' Make it stop! ... The book reads almost like someone stuck a tape recorder in front of her and transcribed the result. In other words, it's entertaining, but empty, and I get the sense that we learned a little more from it than St. James did."

And for the rest of the week at BOOKGASM, there was a new SWAMP THING collection, a BEOWULF sequel anthology, Sheldon Rusch's FOR EDGAR, Eric Shapiro's DAYS OF ALLISON, Sean Doolittle's THE CLEANUP, Chris Blaine's DROWNED NIGHT, David Carradine's KILL BILL DIARY and a few others also worth clicking over to peruse. And if you didn't visit us earlier in the week, shame, because you totally missed your chance to win a signed copy of Paul Malmont's killer THE CHINATOWN DEATH CLOUD PERIL. Hey, membership has its privileges.

For a few dollars more

So this Tuesday, I bought a copy of the new SPLINTER CELL novel, CHECKMATE, by David Michaels. Before tax, it cost me $9.99. For a mass market paperback. This is a full two dollars more than the two previous titles in this series, all because it's in that fancy-schmancy new "easier to read" format. You know the kind: the paperbacks that are taller and skinnier than your ordinary ones. And that's it. Somehow, this merits a heftier price. Whatever.

Onto less pressing matters, here are highlights from this week at BOOKGASM – click the links for the full review:

• EIFELHEIM by Michael Flynn – "It’s not really a fair comparison to pit Michael Flynn’s EIFELHEIM against Umberto Eco’s masterwork, but there are similarities. The authorial presence, the sheer confidence with which Flynn rattles off complicated scientific concepts, the casualness when he imparts major clues to the reader, the subject matter itself, the one-line witticisms, the willingness to let things stand in their own actuality instead of using some hackneyed metaphor, to call an aquamanile an aquamanile when necessary. And that’s a very good thing indeed. ... A remarkably rich and dense work, EIFELHEIM instantly slotted itself into my top 10 books of the year list."

• THE REAL ANIMAL HOUSE: THE AWESOMELY DEPRAVED SAGA OF THE FRATERNITY THAT INSPIRED THE MOVIE by Chris Miller – "...contains the stories on which one of the funniest films ever made was based. I just wish these stories were as funny. ... I mean, if you find countless stories of throwing up a laugh riot in and of themselves, then this book is for you, since vomiting accounts for probably 70 percent of the stories here. It seems Miller – one of HOUSE's screenwriters – is looking back at his own college days with rose-colored glasses. "

• MY LOLITA COMPLEX AND OTHER TALES OF SEX AND VIOLENCE by Max Allan Collins and Matthew V. Clemens – "COMPLEX makes good on its title, offering one mystery after another crackling with sexual tension  – if not outright fornication – and fisticuffs, scuffles and more fatal fights. Don't misjudge the sex, either; though hot 'n' bothered, it's more of a hard-R nature than trenchcoat-friendly pornography, and it doesn't detract from the plots. In fact, it might even heighten them."

Want more? We also covered David Hewson's new thriller, a Roger Ebert hate machine, Michael Slade's KAMIKAZE, some old Ellery Queen novels, F. Paul Wilson's Repairman Jack series, the latest (and best) DC UNIVERSE novel, a Rolling Stones tell-all and some comics. Plus, we found time to bitch belatedly about the Quills. If that's not worth a click, what is?

Get THUNDERSTRUCK with a book this weekend

If you can read only one review on Bookgasm.com this week ... then you are really chintzy with your time. I mean, these last five days have seen us tackle such tomes as varied as a Richard Laymon reissue, comics based on Sam Raimi films, old Gothic paperbacks, the latest Joe Gunther mystery from Archer Mayor, a FRANKENSTEIN update from the UK, a Batman tale involving zombies, the history of the game Monopoly, a sci-fi classics anthology, Tim Lucas' would-be DRACULA sequel and the true Hollywood story of B-movie actress Jewel Shepard and her magnificent, paid-the-bills breasts.

Oh, and these four, for your mouse-clicking pleasure:

• THUNDERSTRUCK by Erik Larson – "Three years ago, Erik Larson's THE DEVIL IN THE WHITE CITY was all the rage, winning awards and racking up sales. Being about the most pleasurable kind of non-fiction you could ever hope to read, it deserved every bit of its success. In the book, Larson expertly weaved two true tales of an architect and a serial killer whose paths crossed at the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago.In his latest, THUNDERSTRUCK, Larson gives another double-jointed historical account of a man of imagination and a murderer. Can lightning strike twice? Indeed."

• COURT TV PRESENTS: MURDER IN ROOM 103 by Harriet Ryan – "The true crime genre sometimes gets a bad rap as the literary equivalent of the made-for-TV-movie. Actually, that comparison is sometimes spot-on. But MURDER IN ROOM 103 is proof that true crime doesn’t have to be crap. ... In true whodunit style, Ryan clearly lays out all the evidence, the suspects, the alibis and the possible motives, then lets the reader play juror."

• GRAVE DESCEND by John Lange (aka Michael Crichton) – "The latest crackerjack thriller from Hard Case Crime, practically writes its own review with a line of dialogue straight from page 24: 'It is, after all, a very good story — bizarre sinking of a luxury yacht, with mysterious beautiful girl on board.' ... DESCEND runs less than 200 pages. With such frugality, this mystery/adventure moves with the speed of a hammerhead shark – which, incidentally, (protagonist) McGregor encounters."

• THE SENSE OF PAPER by Taylor Holden – "I like my fiction to have a subject, a theme as backdrop against which the characters can interact. Purely character-driven studies that have as their only theme an emotional construct – such as coming of age, redemption, facing one’s fears or developing spiritual wisdom – are almost always tedious and boring. But when an author can intertwine emotional development and subject development, having them play off and work against each other, extraordinary fiction can emerge. ... This is an attempt at serious literary fiction even if it comes across as a modern Gothic novel, and sadly, Holden’s skills don’t quite match up to the ambition of the tale."

Postpone your productivity today by visiting Bookgasm to read more. Those spreadsheets can wait 'til Monday.

What's next, a police procedural starring Hulk Hogan?

Every once in a while, we at Bookgasm stumble across a book so much fun, it's worth all the blood, sweat and tears that goes in to the site. That my book, my friends, is Rudy Joseph's BIG APPLE TAKEDOWN. It's about the NSA approaching Vince McMahon to assemble a black-ops spy squad from his stable of pro wrestlers. Yes, you can scoff all you want and call it trash. Not being a wrestling fan, I'd call it a guilty pleasure except I don't feel guilty about giving in to its pleasures. Just because its cover is branded with the WWE logo and a cleavage-baring hussy doesn't mean it should be discounted automatically, despite our body's natural inclination to do so. Click the links below to read the full reviews ... if you still have any respect left for us, that is.

• BIG APPLE TAKEDOWN by Rudy Josephs – "Now brace yourself: I enjoyed the hell out of this book. Like WWE's matches – both live and televised – this is plotted simply but distinctly. Josephs makes it move, even if his word pool isn't exactly vast (note five uses each of "strawberry" and "chocolate" within a single paragraph) and even if he offers no surprises — except being so upfront that pro wrestling is all theatrics and a late-in-the-game cameo that certainly will have the intended market throwing their fists up in a whoop, provided they can read that far. (What intended market? The kind to which lines like this make sense: "The idea struck him like a double-arm DDT from Mick Foley.")"

• FABLES: 1001 NIGHTS OF SNOWFALL by Bill Willingham – "Bill Willingham get a chance to explore his FABLES universe with FABLES: 1001 NIGHTS OF SNOWFALL, an anthology that both supplements and stands alone from his acclaimed Vertigo series. ... Luckily, inexperience with prior issues of FABLES is not a detriment to the new reader; rather, SNOWFALL serves as an effortless ease-in to get newcomers used to the idea that you can deal with fairy-tale characters and talking animals in a manner that is cool, cutting-edge and very adult."

• THE LADIES OF GRACE ADIEU AND OTHER STORIES by Susanna Clarke – "Whether it satisfies depends upon your reaction to STRANGE. If you found that book's purposely antiquated language, paced plotting and predilection to footnotes charming, expect to get caught up in these stories, all set in STRANGE's world and utilizing many of its characters. If you didn't, look elsewhere for entertainment. And although these tales – save for the new "John Uskglass and the Cumbrian Charcoal Burner" – were birthed long before STRANGE made waves in hardcover, I would argue that Clarke newbies would be best served tackling the mega-novel before these shorts. Otherwise, you may be a little lost."

• THE WIDOW OF SLANE AND SIX MORE OF THE BEST CRIME AND MYSTERY NOVELLAS OF THE YEAR edited by Ed Gorman and Martin H. Greenberg – "as cumbersome a jawbreaker of a title as ever graced the cover of a highly readable volume. ... Honestly, none of the stories are bases-loaded home runs, but they’re all extra-baggers and Allyn, Douglas and Hockensmith are good for solid triples. But the bottom line is that you have to buy the book so the publishers won’t run screaming down the hallway when Gorman goes back to them next year with another collection of novellas. Seven long stories. Seven nights in a week. My guess is you won’t be able to ration them out that way. I couldn’t."

Brighten your Friday by visiting to read more, for this week's reviews also covered Halloween horrors, Bob Dylan and the Stones, he-man adventure novels, another post-MST3K gig for Michael J. Nelson, a World War II witch, costumed zombies, the Darwin Awards, Robert Bloch and the director known as Alan Smithee. Whew.

Sharon Stone's mystery bath ingredient is tame compared to dismembered starlets

The truth hurts. Except when you're talking about a heap of new non-fiction books. Content this week at Bookgasm sure leaned that way, though purely without intention. Sometimes these things just work out like that, and by "that" I mean these (as always, click the links to read the full reviews):

• THE DEVIL’S GUIDE TO HOLLYWOOD: THE SCREENWRITER AS GOD by Joe Eszterhas – "Joe Eszterhas is kind of a prick. But you probably already knew that. The shaggy screenwriter behind (as we are told many, many times) hits like BASIC INSTINCT and FLASHDANCE – as well as not-so-hitty films like SHOWGIRLS and BURN HOLLYWOOD BURN: AN ALAN SMITHEE FILM – has written a book that is supposed to be about screenwriting, but instead, is nothing more than one big slamfest comprised entirely of quotes from other people or short anecdotes about disgruntled crew members pissing in Sharon Stone's bathwater."

• EXQUISITE CORPSE: SURREALISM AND THE BLACK DAHLIA MURDER by Mark Nelson and Sarah Hudson Bayliss – "includes several actual crime-scene photographs, which – even decades removed – prove mega-disturbing. To see a book double as a true-crime tale and an art-history essay is jarring, but in a good way; it's definitely a take I've not seen before. The fact that it's presented in the coffee-table format both speaks to the true artistic nature of the subject as well as a streak of bad taste. Let's just say if you showcase this title on your furniture, you might be busy wiping up a lot of spilt Sanka and regurgitated breakfasts."

• THE DOG DIALED 911: A BOOK OF LISTS FROM THE SMOKING GUN – "a just-what-it-says collection of legal documents, police reports and other Freedom-of-Information-Act periphery culled from their popular, Court TV-owned site, organized into subject-specific chapters dealing with sex, drugs and Bill O'Reilly, and given fun-loving titles like '2 Tom Cruise Proclamations of Heterosexuality' and '82 Magazines to Which Our Brave Soldiers Will Never Masturbate.'"

Next week, we promise to get more fictional, though in these last few days we also devoted virtual ink to a crime tale with a bad fish pun in the title, the second ROGUE ANGEL adventure, a requisite horror anthology for Halloween and a slew of old Westerns (most of which sucked). It's Friday, so what better thing do you have to do? Work schmerk.

God bless Melanie Griffith's manmade breasts

If you've seen her flash them in that Paul Newman movie or your name is Antonio Banderas, you know what we're talking about. If not, reading BOOKGASM's new weekly column on movie-related books will fill you in. In the debut entry, Allan Mott discusses Julie Salamon's excellent THE DEVIL'S CANDY, which chronicled the making of THE BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES. One of the more memorable passages in the book describes the monkey wrench she threw into the production by showing up following a holiday break with an expanded chest. Writes Mott, "one does have to give props to Griffith for making the only smart creative decision of the entire film’s production, since the scene where she strips to her bra and panties (and thus shows off the results of her surgeon’s skilled hands) is easily the most memorable and worthwhile in the entire movie."

Speaking of, earlier in the week, we applauded Esquire's decision to name Scarlett Johansson as the Sexiest Woman Alive. Hey, a magazine is like a book; therefore, we can cover it. We also covered the most bizarre book press release we've come across all year: one for some flowery chick-lit thing that includes a story about Saddam Hussein's testicles and tiny onions. Forty-eight hours later, I'm still scratching my head.

Reviews? We did those, too. Among the notables (clink the links to read the whole darn thing):

• ECHO PARK by Michael Connelly – "This well-crafted cliffhanger doesn’t shortchange the reader on action, though. Woven into the tale are body parts in trash bags, shootouts, some sweet lovin’, and did I mention the lesbian partner?"

• CROSSOVER by Joel Shepherd – "both a kick-ass android political action tale and a deconstruction of humanity, with both aspects are equally rewarding. (If only my elementary school math books had lusty blonde female androids in them, I would have totally learned to carry that three.)"

• THE BEST AMERICAN COMICS 2006 edited by Harvey Pekar – "One major caveat: For Pekar to disqualify all superhero comics from the collection simply because he doesn’t like them seems to smack of the snobbery that marginalizes comics in the first place. In his own intro, he praises the idea for this book because 'it lends legitimacy to the cause of comics, my medium, and their creators.' The newcomer to comics who picks up this book may be turned off by its lack of variety, its emphasis on the serious. Strictly judging on a thumb-through, you’d think half of all U.S. comics centered on lesbianism and the war."

• THE WORLD OF JULES VERNE by Gonzague Saint Bris – "From early memories sipping seawater to depressed days as a member of a broken-hearted bachelors’ club, this covers cornerstones of the writer’s remarkable, prodigious life in bite-sized accounts readymade for short attention spans. As much information as it doles out on his life, it’s the emphasis on his lasting literary influence that will attract most interest."

There was lots more high-octane, lowbrow bookage action going on, from Freddy Krueger to Takeru Kobayashi, so do check it out.

Greetings from Bookgasm

For those of you who aren't familiar with Bookgasm.com since our inception August before last, here's the Reader's Digest version: Reading material to get excited about. We cover genre fiction (with a little oddball nonfiction thrown in), which means horror, sci-fi, mystery, thrillers and even comics (or graphic novels, if you prefer to sound hip).

Usually our site is loaded with new content every day, but with me currently working about 18 hours a day, it's been a rough week. But we still published daily, but dammit, we love you.

And here's a sampling of what our staff reviewed this week (just click the links to read the whole review if you'd like, and we'd like if you do):

• THE CHEMISTRY OF DEATH by Simon Beckett – "Older readers may be familiar with the Had I But Known (HIBK) school of mystery writing, roundly castigated by many but still a school that sold millions of books from popular authors like Mary Roberts Rinehart and Mignon Eberhart. While this school fell out of favor in the ’70s and ’80s, it seems to have morphed into a somewhat different style: the Had I Only Acted Appropriately (HIOAA) school of mystery writing, equally infuriating and equally popular."

• SOMEONE COMES TO TOWN, SOMEONE LEAVES TOWN by Cory Doctorow – "Simultaneously combining fantastic fiction with total nerdcore network noodling a la Neal Stephenson’s CRYPTONOMICON, SOMEONE is so original, so groundbreaking and so heartbreaking."

• ACT OF TREASON by Vince Flynn – "The modern-day political thriller gets a bad reputation sometimes, with some authors awash in all these technobabble terms or, even worse, making a plot so overreaching that it loses its audience. Vince Flynn’s ACT OF TREASON is the complete antithesis to those kind of books."

• THE CHAMPIONS CLASSIC: VOL. 1 from Marvel Comics – "I’ve always been a sucker for comic-book supergroups, whether The Avengers or Justice League of America, but as I age, I find the weirder they are, the better. (And weirder usually means short-lived, as is the case here.) The lineup comprising The Champions seems more bric-a-brac than most: a mythological god, a Russian hottie, a skull-headed biker and two ex-X-Men – better known as Hercules, Black Widow, Ghost Rider, Iceman and Angel."

• HORRORWEEN by Al Sarrantonio – "Some may think Sarrantonio is cheating by packaging this as a A-to-Z narrative when it’s not, but I actually much prefer it this way. With stops and starts at unpredictable points, the book keeps you on your toes. He’s got a real gift for this genre, for injecting Americana with the supernatural and putting the evil back in a holiday known today for lollipops and candy corn."

We've also got a secret weapon in Ed Gorman – novelist and short storiest (is that a word?) extraordinaire – who occasionally pens a column for our pages, as he did today.

There's more, including our every-Tuesday-morning column of pulp fiction, BULLETS, BROADS, BLACKMAIL & BOMBS, which this week took a look at some Dell's old Alfred Hitchcock anthology paperbacks. And we're also giving away five copies of Elizabeth Kostova's THE HISTORIAN if you've wasted enough time in your life watching vampire movies.

Meanwhile, Civil Online Discourse Continues

Over at if:Book, Bob Stein takes serious issue with Steven Johnson's Everything Bad Is Good For You, a book which proposes that video games and television drama make us "smarter." He asks:

"How can you define good and bad simply in terms of whether one's brain is better at multi-tasking and problem-solving? I'll grant that this shift in raw brain power might make us more effective worker bees for our techno-capitalist society, but it doesn't mean that the substance of our lives or the social fabric is improved."

The critique builds and builds, but then Johnson gets to reply. It's an interesting debate—and it's still going on, so do have a look.

Look, Michiko, Just Write A Damn Novel Already

When NYT book reviewer Michiko Kakutani took on the voice of Holden Caufield two months ago to review Benjamin Kunkel's Indecision, we all sort of shook our heads politely. After all, longtime readers knew it was an intermittently recurring tic of hers—remember the time she pretended to be Ally McBeal reviewing Bridget Jones?—and we just figured, okay, it's out of her system for another year or so.

But, no: It's only been two months, and she's channeling Holly Golightly to review Truman Capote's resurrected Summer Morning. Readers who dare follow this link will be forgiven the urge to claw out their own eyes in horror.

It's a Theory, Let's Put It That Way

Earlier this week, I reported for Galleycat (and if you're not reading that blog every morning, I wish you would!) on Philip Pullman's harsh words for C.S. Lewis, whose Narnia series was condemned as "a peevish blend of racist, misogynistic and reactionary prejudice." Well, suggests Reason blogger Tim Cavanagh, when it comes to 20th-century British literature, "racism is a big part of what makes some writers good."

Right, and if we apply the same principles to pop music, we wind up with the white nationalist teen sensation Prussian Blue, the band that proves you can so craft a peppy little number out of the life of Rudolf Hess.

It's Official: I'm Now a Quotable Expert

Former Amazon colleague Tim Appelo writes a piece for the Seattle Times on "disaster lit," and includes a bit of anecdotal book reviewing from yours truly:

"Reading the paperback of Kim Stanley Robinson's Forty Signs of Rain the week after Hurricane Katrina was eerie," says former Amazon editor Ron Hogan. "I knew that the novel hinged upon the efforts of D.C. scientists and lobbyists to force the government's hand on global warming issues, but I had no idea that its climax was going to be the arrival of a massive storm system which overflowed the Potomac and turned the streets of Washington into rivers. Some of Robinson's descriptions of the storm's impact seemed a little tame in light of what we'd just seen on TV, but other scenes—like the evacuation of the animals at the National Zoo—felt vividly authentic. I can't wait to see how he plays out the aftermath in the upcoming sequel, Fifty Degrees Below.

"Science fiction has always had an apocalyptic streak running through it," Hogan continues, "but there's usually a sense that if we just listen to the scientists, everything will turn out OK. Robinson's latest story seems to have that optimism, but there's also a hint of fatalism, too—as if to say that things have just about hit the breaking point, and we're going to have to start performing triage just to keep things going."

Of course, my enthusiasm for Fifty Degrees Below is also fueled in part by an admiration for Robinson's science fiction that goes back twenty years, when I was reading The Gold Coast as soon as I could dash off whatever little exercises my teachers were foisting on me that day.

Load Up on Guns, and Bring Your Friends

I'm a bit busy today, doing a bunch of interviews for my next PW feature story, so posting will be sparse today. But I wanted to note Jack Shafer's response to the WaPo/Marianne Wiggins flap:

"Stamping out conflict of interest may result in a 'fairer' book review. But will it produce a better one? I think not."

Keep in mind that Shafer cops to a "prejudice against fairness," and argues in favor of greater accuracy in book reviewing: "If the Post is going to apologize for publishing the Wiggins review on ethical grounds, I'd like to see it ask for reader forgiveness when fully vetted and unconflicted reviewers give bad books a free pass."

Fine, But Can You Get Kakutani's Pan Nullified?
I Suspect Not!

John Irving's been getting his share of negative reviews for his "half good" new novel, Until I Find You, described by turns as "sloppy and long" (Slate), "a bloated, tedious bore" (Detroit Free Press) and "a pretty good 300-page novel hiding inside a not-very-good 800-plus page one" (Austin American-Statesman). So when Marianne Wiggins told WaPo readers last month the book "reads as if Irving woke from a recurring nightmare and started dictating compulsively," there was no particular cause for surprise. In fact, despite calling him out on "lazy, unrefined writing," Wiggins went out of her way to observe that Irving was capable of much better.

Turns out she's been close enough, as far as the Post is concerned, to really know what she's talking about. As the AP reports, Book World apologizes, at Irving's prompting, for assigning the review to Wiggins without knowing that "Irving had dedicated one of his earlier novels to [her] ex-husband, Salman Rushdie," or that "Irving and Wiggins had socialized with each other in the past." Personally, I think the detail of the dedication is a bit of misdirection--A Son of the Circus came out years after Rushdie and Wiggins divorced, which makes me suspect that it's been at least twelve years since Irving "socialized" with Wiggins. Not that the Post guidelines aren't necessary, of course, although I'll have to work that much harder to find a book I can safely review for them now...

UPDATE: Both David Montgomery and Sarah Weinman, who actually have Post experience, share their thoughts on the matter. Sarah, of course, has it tougher than most, because she's not only the mystery columnist for the Baltimore Sun, but an active presence in the mystery writers' community.

Times Gets More Mileage Out of "9/11 Fiction"

NYT critic Caryn James considers "the intertwining legacy of terror attacks and fiction" and determines that "some of the most ambitious novelists in London and New York are not addressing the 9/11 attacks themselves but their intangible legacy." If that sounds familiar, well, that's because it's not much different than what Edward Wyatt was reporting in the Times way back in March, when "the literary world [began] to grapple with the meanings and consequences of the worst terrorist attack ever to happen on American soil." Just swap Chris Cleave for Jonathan Safran Foer, Michael Cunningham for Reynolds Price, and Patrick McGrath for Lynne Sharon Schwartz--you can even keep Ian McEwan right where he was. Any predictions on which authors will be included when Janet Maslin or Laura Miller revisits this theme again at the end of the year? (OK, that was a bit mean, I admit.)

The Shifting Moods of Joe Queenan

Gawker's Intern Alexis and I disagree over whether Joe Queenan's review of The Truth About Hillary (which I mentioned yesterday) is actually funny or not, but I'm grateful to her for pointing out something that totally slipped by my nonexistent memory:

"He then goes on to claim, 'As an expert on sordid non-fiction, I would not put The Truth About Hillary anywhere near the top of my list; it pales by comparison with Geraldo Rivera's sublimely vile autobiography, Exposing Myself... That's interesting... Because, Joe Queenan, we oddly, oddly, oddly remembered that you wrote about Rivera before, and, actually wrote this: 'And, without the mediating force of a ghostwriter, Geraldo Rivera's Exposing Myself might have been really disgusting, not merely nauseating.' Looks like you didn't hate his memoir as much as you now claim you do. If you only found it 'merely nauseating,' as opposed to 'really disgusting,' why would it be at the top of your most hated non-fiction books, Mr. Expert on Sordid Non-Fiction, hmm? Revisionist history much!?"

I'm not sure, but I think this means that as part of his "living Biblically" project, A. J. Jacobs can now throw rocks at Queenan.

Last Month's News About the Culture?

Last October, the Book Babes did an interview with Sam Tanenhaus about his plans for the New York Times Book Review, and he suggested, "We're going to treat books not as literary artifacts but as news about the culture." As one of the Babes interpreted that remark, "The selection of what is reviewed by the NYTBR will depend not on whether a book will stand the test of time in a literary universe, but whether it has currency in the here and now."

How well does this week's Review fulfill that mandate? Let's see:

• Posner's essay on media polarization isn't really a book review, though it does mention books. It's more NYRB than what we've traditionally thought of as NYTBR, but Tanenhaus has given plenty of indication over the last year that he's willing to take that path, and this lengthy piece is certainly "news about the culture."

• Fiction: The review of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is as timely as a weekly publication can hope in reviewing an embargoed book. In the books-in-brief "chronicle," Abdulrazak Gurnah's Desertion and Moris Farhi's Young Turk are both recent publications, but the remaining titles on the page go back a bit further, with one dating back to 2004. Still, credit should be given for offering this much space to non-American fiction. The Method Actors is also a fairly timely review, as the skewering of Tilly Bagshawe's Adored would be--if Janet Maslin hadn't already covered it a month earlier (admittedly not as stylishly as Elissa Schappell, though my personal bias undoubtedly factors into that evaluation).

• Nonfiction: The "last month" problem is even more glaring in the case of Joe Queenan's slam of Ed Klein's The Truth About Hillary. Not only was this territory picked clean when the book was fresh, it's already been covered heavily in NYTBR itself: first a Dwight Garner item on July 10th, then Naomi Wolf's historical perspective just last week. What does Joe Queenan bring to this well-stocked table other than his trademark putdowns? Mitigating against this, though, the other reviews are overall quite timely, only reaching back as far as April for the Augustine biography and the book about the Medicis in the grab-bag "chronicle" (though the haphazard grouping is a problem of a different sort).

  The question of how relevant Jay Gould, the 1940 Democratic convention, Tom Paine, and Saint Augustine are in "currency in the here and now" terms is one you'll have to answer for yourself; I'm not inclined to disagree with Tanenhaus' judgments on subject matter, only on the pacing of books tied to the news cycle. In the abstract, I'm in favor of history, and not just when it can "teach us about ourselves."
  

Obviously, there's just so much a weekly publication can do in terms of staying on top of current events. But getting Harry Potter in on time makes the late coverage on The Truth About Hillary that much more glaring. If Liesl Schillinger can get a hot book reviewed on quick turnaround, why can't Joe Queenan? Or do his intangibles make up for his tardiness--is it okay to be a month behind the news, and following in Naomi Wolf's footsteps to boot, if you're "funny"? I wouldn't have thought so--on the other hand, one could conceivably argue that even if most people in the news cycles have finished talking about Ed Klein's fascination with lesbians, the book's presence on the NYT bestseller list for the last five weeks is in and of itself proof of its relevance. In which case, we should be seeing a review of Nancy Grace's Objection! in next week's issue, right?

One Is Talking Numbers and the Other's Talking Length

Got a note from the folks at Lulu.com yesterday about their survey of the NYT bestseller lists over the last half-century, and it seems that women have slowly but surely been taking over. Whereas women fiction writers accounted for only 17.8 percent of the top selling books from 1955 to 1964, since 1995 they've increased their territory to 46 percent, and fully half the books that have shown up this year. (In the latest list, they hold five of the top six slots, surrounding Dan Brown's entrenched position.)

Respect, however, will apparently take a little more time. I'm not even thinking of the mocking tone in previous reviews of bestselling potboilers, but of the contrast in this week's NYTBR between the fawning cover placement (not to mention what may be the only flattering André Carrilho caricature in Review history) of John Irving's latest, which even Paul Gray tacitly admits after several long paragraphs of plot summary isn't very good*, with the half-page or so, whittling away the ad and the headshot, of commentary on Kathryn Harrison's Envy.

While Emily Nussbaum isn't completely won over by Envy, it's clear that she considers it a substantial book and Harrison a significant contemporary writer. So why is Harrison's effort given short shrift in comparison to Irving's, when the paper's own critics seem to believe she's better at handling psychological and sexual themes than he is? I'd like to be charitable and think it's because Harrison's book is just one-third as long as Irving's, or that somebody thought it might be unseemly to lavish too much attention on a writer who's also a regular (and regularly good) NYTBR contributor. Likewise, I can recognize Nussbaum's admirable concision as opposed to Gray's rambling. But maybe it's that being an eminence grise still trumps being a "wonderful writer," enabling a male author to be considered endearing when his protagonist goes through round after round of pre-adolescent sexual activity, while a woman author spends a decade contending with opprobrium for dealing with "narcissism, family violation, sexual taboo and physical suffering" in her fiction and nonfiction. That's Nussbaum's catalog of Harrison's themes, anyway, but it's kinda surprising how well it holds up when juxtaposed with many of Irving's novels, no?

*Contrast Gray's reluctance to deliver a meaningfully direct opinion with Michiko Kakutani's disgust with the "lackadaisical and weary," not to mention "hideously overstuffed," tome.

NYTBR Hits The Relevancy Jackpot

The NYTBR may have just used up its good luck quota for July by scheduling its review of Richard Davis' Electing Justice on the weekend Sandra Day O'Connor happened to announce her retirement. Blogger Ann Althouse politely but firmly rips Davis a new one, suggesting not only that there is no problem with how the Supreme Court justices get picked, but that he "only dimly envisions" an alternative without thinking through the ramifications.

It's a nice bit of timeliness that practically makes up for taking three months to review The Disappointment Artist and then taking three full paragraphs before mentioning the author...and even then, Brent Staples is reluctant to give up the spotlight: "I have walked these same sidewalks for 20 years and never encountered Jonathan Lethem on the street." The review ends with this supposition: "Perhaps he intends to use the vibrant Brooklyn village where he came of age in the next phase of his work." This after Staples quotes from The Fortress of Solitude and expresses some familiarity with the plot of Motherless Brooklyn...

Here's another bit of timeliness in this weekend's edition: After ignoring Christine Schutt's Florida until the novel was nominated for the National Book Award--at which point critics were rapidly deployed to explain why that lack of attention was justified--the Review doesn't waste any time getting around to A Day, a Night, Another Day, Summer. Then again, it's a half-page review that uses the "If you're going to..., you'd better..." argument as both opener and closer and seems to treat dealing with the stories as a necessary chore; it might be a positive review, but it's hard to tell through all the posturing.

NOTE: As of this post, I've brought "book review reviewing" back into the Beatrice.com fold. Although my ArtsJournal blog, Beatrix, will continue to feature that material, it will be excerpted from the posts made to this blog.

A Momentary Relapse of Maslin Watching

I have to confess that I've been deliberately avoiding The Traveler, sharing many of the same doubts about the novel and its deliberately mysterious author, John Twelve Hawks, that Sarah Weinman made public a few weeks ago, when she cited the buzz around it as "adventures in marketing bullshit." She quotes the PW article about the behind-the-scenes push; now NYT revisits the subject with an emphasis on how Doubleday is borrowing plays from the film promotion handbook. Said story dovetails neatly with Janet Maslin's rave:

"It takes outlandish nerve and whopping messianic double talk to inaugurate a new science fiction project on the scale of The Traveler. No genre is riskier. Either the author concocts a true Orwellian synthesis of the world's ills and envisions an epic struggle to remedy them or the author cannibalizes other, more legitimate visionaries, tacks on some silly jargon and winds up sounding embarrassingly second rate."

To be honest, I'm not really sure what half of that means. Is it science fiction itself than which there is no genre riskier, or science fiction on a certain scale? And just how does a "synthesis of the world's ills" exhibit an "Orwellian" nature? I take it that's supposed to refer to the overarching tyranny of 1984's world, but that's way too simplistic a reading not just of 1984 and of Orwell, but of epic-scale science fiction in general. Would any of you who have read Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle describe it as "a true Orwellian synthesis of the world's ills"? And if you don't think that's "really" science fiction, how about Neil Gaiman's American Gods, which is at least overtly fantasy? (And let's not even get into the space operas, save perhaps to note that Isaac Asimov always gladly cited Edward Gibbon as his role model, not Orwell--but then he was working several years before Orwell became a popular reading choice among Americans.)

Actually, this gets at my other major trepidation concerning The Traveler, which is a suspiction that, having spent my entire adolescence and early adulthood devouring all the science fiction I could get my hands on, I've seen this all before. I mean, once you've read Philip K. Dick's Valis, or Robert Anton Wilson's Masks of the Illuminati, or John Crowley's Aegypt, among others, you take the hype around The Traveler with a whole shaker of salt. I feel vaguely guilty about letting all that stop me from looking at the galley and actually forming an opinion of the actual novel; then again, life is short and there's so many books that need reading...

So Much for the Immediacy of Online Journalism, Again

I've noted the slow pace of the Salon book desk here and there and then some more, because it's so easy. In the latest example of tardy cultural reporting from the online newsmagazine that promises "ahead-of-the-curve daily book reviews," last Thursday's edition featured a review of Larry McMurtry's book on Buffalo Bill and Annie Oakley nearly three weeks after the author's chat with Deborah Solomon for the NYT magazine. Not only that, the Baltimore Sun had a five-day jumpstart, and the Houston Chronicle also beat Salon, this time by twelve days. And that's just the first page of the Google News search on McMurtry; moving on, I found reviews from the Dallas Morning News and the Los Angeles Times--hell, the New York Daily News got its review in a full week before Solomon's interview, meaning Salon got scooped--to the extent that you can describe book reviewers as being scooped--by almost a month. So much for "ahead of the curve," eh?

Apparently, Luther Albright's Tested Quite Well

I'll freely admit that I haven't seen a single word of the forthcoming novel from MacKenzie Bezos, The Testing of Luther Albright; all I know about it is what I've seen in the Fourth Estate catalog, PW, and the Amazon.com review. Bezos isn't a complete stranger to me; I've met her exactly twice: at the Amazon post-holiday staff party in January 1999 and then again at the same party a year later. It was common knowledge among the editorial staff that Jeff's wife was working on a novel, and that she'd trained at Princeton so it was probably going to be pretty good, or at the very least pretty polished. But after I left Amazon, I forgot all about it until Michael Cader mentioned it in Publishers Lunch a few days ago.

So when I saw that Amazon used 482 words to review her debut novel--the longest review I can recall seeing on the site since--well, since I worked there, frankly--I got curious as to how long the Amazon reviews for current NYT bestsellers might be. #1, Michael Connelly's The Closers, gets 445 words, but runner-up 4th of July, farmed out by James Patterson to Maxine Paetro, doesn't even have an official Amazon review. Neither do the latest stories from Nicholas Sparks and John Sanford, and then Sue Monk Kidd's The Mermaid Chair is summed up in only 274 words. The DaVinci Code is dispatched in 241 words, after which the Revenge of the Sith novelization and new novels from Chuck Palahniuk and Iris Johansen get no in-house coverage. Finally, in the #10 slot, Harlan Coben's The Innocent is reviewed with 289 words.

So then I thought I'd look at some recently published titles which might reasonably considered to have literary cachet. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and The History of Love? No Amazon review. Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go? 217 words--written, in the interest of full disclosure, by my pal Regina, who also treated Umberto Eco's latest in 293 words. Meanwhile, Ian McEwan got zilch from Amazon to describe his Saturday, which is exactly how much in-house attention was devoted to the book currently featured in the "what we're reading" section of the literature home page, Catherine Tudish's Tunney's Landing. (So apparently, "we're" no longer bothering to consistently report on what "we're" reading; a mere heads-up is sufficient.) And then after counting the 318 words used to review The Kite Runner, I got bored with this game and stopped. I didn't even bother to try coming up with a conclusion as to why Amazon's editors might have considered this particular novel worthy of the most substantial attention it's given a work of fiction in ages. Maybe I'll find out when I read it--which I'll have to do eventually if I want to find out if the comparison to Jonathan Franzen is apt or not.

Women to Sittenfeld: "We Are Not Amused"
(UPDATED w/Jennifer's Stance)

You'll recall that I heard from several women during BookExpo about their frustration with Curtis Sittenfeld's review of Melissa Bank's The Wonder Spot in NYTBR. Now the online reactions are coming in... "What I suspect is that the review is more about Prep than it is about The Wonder Spot," observes Gwenda Bond. "Or at least more about some of the holes Prep got pigeoned into." Robin Epstein, co-author of Shaking Her Assets, feels scorn for Sittenfeld's criticism of the novel as fostering identfication rather than empathy, the way a novel should, an assertion to which Carolyn Kellogg reacts, "Do readers of the NYTBR really need to be told what a good novel should do?" By Tuesday afternoon, Jennifer Weiner had reinforced the suggestion that the review was "less about the book, or its author, than it is about Sittenfeld’s anxiety about how her own work has been perceived." She also gives a line-by-line takedown of the piece that reminds me I really need to start book review reviewing again sometime soon...

Caren Lissner, on the other hand, accentuates the positive, focusing on how The Wonder Spot came across in the review as "entertaining and interesting... [with] a character women can relate to." And Alison Pace wonders, "Why, if Bank's outstanding debut... is largely credited with helping to create the chick-lit genre, is it so suprising, or so wrong, that she wrote chick-lit again?  Why does chick-lit have to be a dirty word?"

Sittenfeld's a onetime contributor to Beatrice, so of course I can't claim total objectivity on the issue. I will say that every time I can recall offhand that a review in the "new NYTBR" seems designed to get itself talked about, the critic usually comes off worse than the book--but, that said, I don't think she emerges from this piece looking as wrongheaded as Neil Gordon on A. L. Kennedy or as dick-like as Joe Queenan on A. J. Jacobs.

It's Time to Talk About Foer's Writing

Slate culture chief Meghan O'Rourke paired off with Ruth Franklin of The New Republic to discuss Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close this week, with O'Rourke declaring early on that Jonathan Safran Foer "intuitively 'gets' how and why a novelist should write about 9/11: to tell a story about the effects of that day on the imaginative lives of the people who went on afterward; a story in which the events of the day are not merely a lurid plot point but the engine for subtle transformation." It's a shame TNR didn't open up their digital archives to let readers see Franklin's earlier thoughts on the possibilities of the 9/11 genre, but she writes quite effectively here about her ambivalence with the novel, even as she comes to appreciate Foer's talent.

And, of course, I'm thrilled to see Slate citing The Elegant Variation when they reference "the whole Foer phenomenon," proof positive that somebody out there in Medialand is reading the blogs and paying attention. Or Mark's blog, anyway.

This Is Why We Need Book Review Reviews

Although I loved all the free publicity that came from being mentioned by Sarah Boxer in her NYT critic's notebook earlier this week, I was rather disappointed that she didn't address one of the most important reasons bloggers started reviewing book reviews. It's not because we wanted to get noticed--hell, if I wanted to attract attention, I can think of a lot better ways to do it than nitpicking Michiko Kakutani. It's because we've seen what's happened to book review sections in American newspapers and magazines in recent years--not only is the food so bad, as the saying goes, but the portions are so small--and we believe that books deserve better. (Of course, there are good reviewers, and we like to celebrate them, but bear with me for a second...)

A perfect case in point: Katie Roiphe shares cover space on today's Slate with an article accusing American book reviewers of "a certain gentle sexism" for not noticing that Ian McEwan's Saturday has a lot in common with Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway. Curious, I ran a Google search, proving to myself within seconds that Roiphe didn't know what she was talking about, because reviewers from New York to Detroit to Charlotte to rural Oregon all made the Woolf connection. The details are at Beatrix, because who else is going to call Roiphe on her glaring inaccuracies?

Victory Laps Around the Breakfast Table?

Emma Garman (Mediabistro) read the new novels by Jonathan Safran Foer and Nicole Krauss back to back and now she wonders if they're trying to play some kind of "cute postmodern joke" on readers. "One can only speculate as to what the couple was thinking when they made the decision--for this is no unwitting coincidence," she claims, "to come out with sophomore novels obviously collaborative, so numerous are the similarities." Garman goes on to add that the "literary power-couple's" tactics (if that's what they were) may have backfired to some extent, because Krauss wrote a "masterpiece" and Foer, well, didn't. She says, anyway; I haven't read both books yet, so I dunno.

...And The Survivors Were Named Adam & Eve

So I'm going through the piles of books spread out around my desk, and I end up looking at Mr. Golightly's Holiday, a Salley Vickers novel about a writer who comes to an English village and (I'm about to spoil the ending for you) is gradually revealed as God, culminating in a lengthy philosophical discussion with the devil--neither of them being directly named, of course, so we get descriptions like "his old rival" and "the figure with destroyed starlight for eyes." And my reaction to all this is, frankly, surprise that a plot seed that ought to be on the science fiction cliché list found success packaged as literature. On the other hand, fantasy writer Charles de Lint liked it well enough, though another SF reviewer was slightly less kind. So it might simply be a case of a book simply not being my cup of tea--personally, when it comes to stories about God in the modern world, I've always preferred the first Oh, God! movie, or the Godhead trilogy of James Morrow.

So Much for the Immediacy of Online Journalism

Two weeks ago, Edward Wyatt did a New York Times piece about the recent wave of fancy 9/11-themed books by fancy writers. A week after that, I finally managed to come up with something to say about it. But even that was a sprinter's pace compared to the literary editors at Salon, who chime in thirteen days after Wyatt with their thoughts on "what to read (from) the 9/11 novels." And what do they come up with, you might ask? Ian McEwan, Jonathan Safran Foer, and Frederic Beigbeder.

Good thing we have the literary counsel of Salon to draw upon so we know to read the new novels from McEwan and Foer. Because, Lord knows, the average Salon reader never would have hit upon either of those two authors on his or her own. (Admittedly, the Beigbeder isn't quite so blatantly on the general reading public's radar, but then again, USA Today was touting it over a month ago, and even they were picking up on the advance buzz from the bookbiz press.)

No, It's Not Bizarro Stephen King

For some technical reason, I'm currently not able to upload images to my new blog, Beatrix, which is a shame, because I really wanted to use the caricature you see here to accompany my thoughts on the reviews of the new Christopher Hitchens collection. It's by Portugeuse caricaturist André Carrilho, a regular NYTBR contributor who, I don't mind telling you, seriously creeps me out sometimes, especially when he does the thing where it looks like he takes a digitized photograph and just starts pulling at the face like it's made out of Silly Putty, then draws in the hair and the clothing elements, as in this triptych from last week's issue--I mean, when I'm trying to relax on a Sunday afternoon, I don't want a rough-hewn Hortense Calisher scaring the daylights out of me, right? On the other hand, when Carrilho tones things down a bit, or when he's flat out doing Eurocomic illustrative work, he can be rather captivating. It's just that NYTBR "house style" that seems to get me, although I kinda like his depictions of hair sometimes, like in the Fay Weldon illo, even if it makes her look like Debbie Harry... But, hey, David Levine drives some people nuts, right? Not to mention those woodcutty author portraits from about fifteen years ago. It's all a matter of taste.

Striking Blows Against God-Awful Poetry

August Kleinzahler hates Garrison Keillor's Good Poems, and he really hates The Writer's Almanac:

"Everything that comes out of his mouth in that treacly baritone, which occasionally releases into a highpitched, breathless tremolo when he wants to convey emotion, is a sermon. The homily runs something like this: we are good, if foolish and weak, and may gain redemption through compassion, laughing at ourselves, and bad poetry badly read."

Not that Kleinzahler's universally down on Good Poems: "On balance, it's a rotten collection I wouldn't recommend to anyone, but," he confesses, "it's not so bad as it might have been." Meanwhile, over in Boston Comment, Joan Houlihan attacks poets who won't give it a rest already: "James Tate, Philip Levine and Mary Oliver have each produced more than 16 books of poetry. Whatever has driven this production, it is clear from the trajectory of all three poets that something must stop it." The idea that it's okay--even desirable--to stop writing at some point and recharge one's batteries is a very tempting one; I'm not sure if I fully agree with it yet, but Houlihan's examples of the "marked deterioration in quality" in the later verse of her chosen trio do present a good argument for her case. Though I kinda like the Levine, really, and the problem with Oliver isn't that her late poems are worse; they're just as bad (or good, if you prefer) but longer. And Houlihan and Kleinzahler would both get a good cackle out of the fact that Oliver's "Wild Geese" is reprinted in Good Poems...

(Darned if I can remember which blogs I picked these links from, but if you keep using that "book culture" list off to the right on the home page, you might find them, and you'll enjoy yourself in the process.)

I Get What I Want: In Less Than One Year!

Last February, I observed "A new blog called 'Tenser, Said the Tensor' kicks off a series of posts on lingusitics in science fiction," and titled the item "The Languages of Pao Next, Please."

Finally, my wish is granted.

"The Languages of Pao is first and foremost about a particular idea from linguistic theory--it's a novel-length exploration of a particularly strong version of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis (hereafter SWH), the idea that our patterns of thought are affected by the features of the language we speak. As far as I can tell, most linguists don't believe this hypothesis (at least not in its strong form), but it makes for an interesting speculative starting point for a science fiction novel."

Indeed--this was one of my favorite novels as a teenager, and I still think it's one of the best science fiction stories centered around a "soft" science.

"Stakhanovite"? When Did WSJ Become Red Channels?

I've mentioned my Publishers Weekly reviewing intermittently here, so I guess I'm qualified to comment on the OpinionJournal piece attacking it and Kirkus for permissive attitudes towards anonymous anti-conservatism. Apparently James Bowman's conservative friend got a bad review from Kirkus, and it's evidence of a vast liberal conspiracy.

Bowman's first sneering shot is that your typical writer for these mags is "unlikely to be a world authority on the subject" because we come so cheap. (I'm looking at the NYT book page right now, and I'm willing to bet Bill Grimes isn't an expert on Sarajevo or war correspondence, no matter how much they're paying him.) But he's just getting started:

"What the mantle of journalistic 'objectivity' was to Dan Rather that of anonymity is to the reviewers of PW and Kirkus. Both, too, are relics of what we may call the unitary culture--or, to put it another way, a time when politics was of little or no relevance, in nearly everyone's eyes save those of the most committed Marxists, to reporting the news or assessing the worth of a book... [T]he era of the unitary culture is over. And the pretense of some among the literary elites that they can behave as if it were not over by simply ignoring conservatives--or treating their views as if they were faults of writing, thinking or researching--should be treated like the now-established bias of CBS News."

Bowman's an extravagant redbaiter--in another passage, he calls the PW reviewers "Stakhanovite readers," which is actually wrong, since we're not getting rewarded for increasing productivity--but his McCarranite insistence that "the magazines' politics tend to be predictably liberal" doesn't necessarily hold water. Bowman points to a handful of instances in which liberals get good reviews and conservative are panned; what he doesn't tell you is that Nation reporter John Nichols' Dick Cheney biography was dubbed "an unsubtle, repetitive hammering" by the same self-described liberal PW critic who told readers that Dude, Where's My Country? proves "[Michael] Moore's arguments work best when delivered mostly straight, since he isn't always as funny as he seems to think he is." Granted, the same reviewer also once accused Dick Morris of "hysteria" and "logical gaps," but that's not because he's a conservative, it's because that book was written by an illogical hysteric.

The reviewer is, of course, me. I'm sure I've said nice things about conservatives who can write well in addition to objectively criticizing the flaws in books by liberals, but I can't think of any examples offhand, sorry. (In my defense, I can only admit that I'm as unscientific in my sampling as Bowman is in his.) What I can tell you from experience--what I probably already have told you at some point--is that I've seen PW editors bend over backwards to ensure that political opinions do not prevent individual reviewers from making a serious, objective evaluation of a given book's merits. In fact, I've probably become a better reviewer in that regard in the two years that I've written for them. What I can also tell you is that I've only ever seen this sort of accusation from conservatives; liberals who get bad reviews either seem to recognize that they might not be the greatest writers in the world or they keep their crybaby outbursts to themselves.

Maybe I Should Move The Scar Higher Up My To-Do List...

Crooked Timber hosts a China Mieville seminar, with half a dozen critics weighing in on Mieville's novels and getting a response back. Plus all the comments from online readers. The main essays are all posted under a Creative Common license, so download the PDF omnibus and send copies to all your skiffy friends! You might find another critic who references Walter Benjamin while reviewing science fiction, but this'll probably be your one Bruno Schulz sighting for the year...

If your reaction was "Huh? Who?", you might want to spend some time in Runagate Rampant, Mieville's unofficial home page. Or, even if it's a bit late, read his Socialist Review Christmas story.

So Is Robert Tanenbaum Our Best Judicial Novelist?
(And What Does Janet Maslin Think?)

NYTBR naysayers who criticize the weekly review's treatment of fiction will certainly gripe about in this week's issue, in which only two fiction books get individualized treatment, and one of those reviews might just as easily have been consigned to Marilyn Stasio's crime column, since it offers Alan Dershowitz's take on John Grisham:

"There are few writers today capable of producing political novels of the quality of those once written by C. P. Snow and Alan Drury. Our best contemporary political novelist, Richard North Patterson, spends months interviewing the politicians upon whom he loosely bases his characters. He also masters the political issues he writes about--abortion, gun control, capital punishment. Compared with Patterson's likelife presidents, senators, congressmen and lobbyists, Grisham's political characters are stick figures--entirely predictable stereotypes without flesh and blood."

That sound you hear is the accumulative laughter of folks like Jenny Davidson laughing at Dershowitz's bold critical folly. My own immediate reaction came right after the line about Patterson's interviews with his character models. "Gee," says I to myself, "the ol' Ouija board must get a lot of action chatting up those Kennedys." But let's concede for the moment that Patterson is a "political novelist" just as Dershowitz says: in that case, his cardboard characters don't even begin to hold a candle to the genuinely realistic men and women in Charles McCarry's equally "political" Old Boys...but then, the closest NYTBR got to reviewing that was a Laura Miller namedrop.

UPDATE: Janet Maslin uses her NYT Mystery Monday slot to summarize Grisham's plot, such as it is. "It's certainly Mr. Grisham's prerogative to try new things," she sniffs, "and to make his own personal escape from the thriller format." She, however, finds The Broker somewhere between "notably relaxed" and "lazy." Be warned, though: she also gives away huge chunks of the ending. (No word yet on whether she shares Dersh's take on Richard North Patterson...)

In Case Sam Tanenhaus Doesn't Read Gawker...

Gawker's NYTBR-browsing "Intern Alexis" has spotted the problem with
Richard Brookhiser's review of The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln:

"'This book is already getting noticed' is how Richard Brookhiser dramatically opens his review of C.A. Tripp’s expos-gay of Abraham Lincoln. But what does that even mean? If you think about it, every book reviewed in the New York Times Book Review is 'already getting noticed' in one way or another. In fact, New York Times reporter Dinitia Smith 'already noticed' this book a month ago. Just sayin."

Alexis hits upon an important problem that's cropped up in recent months (that might well have plagued McGrath's Review as well; I didn't notice, but in all honesty I wasn't looking that hard). The "news about the culture" approach isn't an inherently bad one to take, but with several major books, that approach comes late. Think about how long it took NYTBR, in relation to other media, to give even a cursory review to Unfit for Command, or to deliver its more thoughtful consideration of Kitty Kelley's Bush family biography. Even given the longer lead times the Review has to work with, which can be especially problematic in the case of media-embargoed books, this is a serious issue.

Mind you, there's not a risk--yet--of the Review becoming totally overrun with "already getting noticed" books: this week's early-bird review of the short story collection Sightseeing proves they can still stay on top of things. Of course, fiction isn't as ruthlessly headline-driven as nonfiction... but then that circles right back to the issue of whether how headline-driven a book review should be in the first place, an argument that's been quite well hashed out in several other blogs already.

More About Charles D'Ambrosio

A few days ago, I passed along JT Leroy's recommendation of a Charles D'Ambrosio short story, and made note of a John Marshall review of D'Ambrosio's latest collection of essays. Well, over the weekend, I was informed that that review, for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, raised the critical eyebrow of Stranger book critic Christopher Frizzelle, who called Marshall's effort "pretty embarrassing" and "really obnoxious." Frizzelle, on the other hand, finds Orphans

"a smart, small, daring book, surprisingly alive, open to the world, inventive, occasionally furious, blistering and human, persuasive without ever once being pedantic, controlled, disarmingly funny, better than you can imagine."

I'm about to receive a copy of Orphans, and when I do, I'll let you know what side of that fence I fall on...but given my enthusiasm for the stories, you can probably guess how I'm leaning. (And while I'm waiting, I'll be digging into another book published by the same indie imprint, Clear Cut Press, a collection of short stories by Robert Glück called Denny Smith.)

Get the Interns to Run Google Searches If Need Be

I haven't been shy about my enthusiasm for Larry J. Kolb's spy memoir, Overworld, and since Kolb did pitch in last month, I'm not exactly an objective observer. But the recent Fort Worth Star-Telegram review by Pete Alfano really calls out for a bit of rebuttal.

I happen to disagree with the idea that the book, "while at times fascinating, ultimately is self-indulgent and somewhat overwritten," but I can see why Alfano thinks so, and that's not my objection. I'm more concerned about the (on its face reasonable) insinuation that not every one of Kolb's assertions should be treated as gospel fact. "Kolb asserts," Alfano writes, "that a young and more subdued the Rev. Al Sharpton spied on [Muhammad] Ali and other black leaders as a government informant, to avoid prosecution for alleged drug involvement."

As it happens, that's not something Kolb "asserts" out of the blue, but something he describes as having read in the press. Those last three words are the key here: Kolb isn't making any groundbreaking revelations about Sharpton, just recounting a fairly common story that, over the years, you could read about in Newsday articles or in a Nation profile of Sharpton or in Jack Newfield's Don King bio; Bryant Gumbel even played the portions of the FBI tape showing Sharpton with an undercover agent on his HBO show back in 2002. All of this information is readily available to somebody willing to do the slightest bit of research. I found the book a bit implausible, too, when I read it, so I looked up some of the random data points that could be verified, and each of them checked out. If you punch in the right keywords, you can even find the photograph of Jesse Jackson and Muhammad Ali in which Kolb says he's standing droopy-eyed in the background, looking an awful lot like Elvis.

As I say, I don't begrudge Alfano most of his criticisms of what he views as Kolb's technical flaws; it could just be that I'm willing to cut the guy more slack because I found his stories entertaining. While he feels "Kolb can't seem to make up his mind whether he wants to write about what it's like to be a real-life James Bond or about the lifestyles of the rich and famous," I see it as a demonstration that the world's "juice" is distributed as generously among Adnan Kashoggi and even Muhammad Ali as it is among heads of state. (Heck, in this administration, corporate and governmental seats of power are virtually interchangable.) Granted, we may never know for sure if Kolb's telling true about, say, the "real reason" Rudy Giuliani went after Kashoggi during his days as a federal prosecutor. But given how much of his story does hold up to scrutiny, it's certainly worth giving the author a lot more benefit of the doubt...and worth doing some of that scrutinizing before making a final assessment.

"Authors from Hell" Find a Guardian Angel

We have not been led to expect much from Citizen Girl, the second novel from nanny diarists Nicola Kraus and Emma McLaughlin...and most of the reviews--see, for example, Carol Memmott in USA Today or Ruth Davis Konigsberg in the NY Observer--have focused on the authors as much if not more than the book. That's in addition to the reportage: last November, NYT style reporter Alex Williams turned in an almost-schadenfreudean profile detailing how "the darlings of the book industry have been poked, probed and dissected by the unforgiving New York literary world." That piece was fairly tame, though, in comparison to a dispatch from February in the Observer (by Sara Nelson, now with the Post) which reported that "the authors have committed the unforgivable sin of making themselves unlikable in both the book and the journalistic worlds."

Amidst all the negative coverage, Kraus and McLaughlin have a champion in the form of Sacha Zimmerman, the New Republic reviewer for bestsellers. She calls Citizen Girl "wickedly funny and well written but not dogmatic or finger wagging."

"How refreshing! [Zimmerman later enthuses] This year, I have read about the painfully frumpy women of Joy Fowler's The Jane Austen Book Club, the saccharine plight of the widow looking for love in James Patterson's Sam's Letters to Jennifer, and the masochistic marathon sexcapades of a vampire huntress in Laurell K. Hamilton's Incubus Dreams. In nonfiction, I learned How to Make Love Like a Porn Star thanks to triple-X phenom Jenna Jameson, I read Alexandra Robbins's illuminating expose of the lurid lives of big-college sorority sisters, I was taught The Proper Care and Feeding of Husbands under the tutelage of Dr. Laura Schelsinger, and I was urged not to "waste the pretty" in He's Just Not That Into You. Thank God for Citizen Girl."

It's Karen Joy Fowler, by the way, but the error reflects as poorly upon the TNR copyeditors as it does upon the reviewer...and though I've expressed my low opinion of her "Pulps" reviews in the past, it does appear that Zimmerman is articulating her positions more strongly than she was when the column launched--and, in all honesty, I don't know whether I would disagree with her here, not having seen Citizen Girl yet. One author who might agree with her is Rachel Kramer Bussel, who interviewed the pair for Gothamist recently.

When Did NYTBR Hire Jerry Springer?

Maybe you've noticed that the NYTBR letters pages have gotten a bit hostile in recent months, but this weekend's edition hit a new low, as Kay Redfield Jamison attacked Daphne Merkin, the reviewer of Jamison's latest book, as "an avowed masochist who has written exhaustively on the pleasures of pain and the miseries of her existence," then implied that the only reason Exuberance had been panned was that it had been assigned to "such a relentlessly joyless person."

Before you could look up from the page and say "Oh no she DID-int," Merkin hit back at "Jamison's insultingly reductionist characterization" and observes, "The fact that the author sees fit to defend her effort with a scurrilous attack on the reviewer is less in keeping with intellectual discussion than with the mud-throwing tactics of the playground. Perhaps she should aim her sights higher all around." My first reaction was "OUCH!" but then my second reaction was surprise that whoever's putting the letters section together actually hung Jamison's ass out to dry by publishing what Dear Abby would have clearly recognized as the kind of letter you write to get your feelings out then destroy immediately--even if Jamison was foolish enough to put it in the mail.

Was the review that bad? Judge for yourself. As for me, I was underwhelmed, but I merely found it unengagingly humdrum, not wildly inappropriate.

As If She Cares What I Think, But Still

It's been nearly a month since NYTBR had a Liesel Schillinger review, and though recent pieces bugged me, her review last weekend of Inventing Beauty is the kind of solid writing with occasional flashes of humor that made me a fan of hers in the first place. Admittedly, the piece shows off less personality than has been evident in her recent NYTBR articles, but I'm willing to argue that that's a good thing--not that the personality in those pieces isn't interesting, but it appeared (to this reader, anyway) to be developed at the expense of weak books that wouldn't rate an appearance in the Review except as a foil for clever shredding, and, well, I just felt she could do better, and now I feel justified...even if other readers might say this piece was too dry.

One article they won't be calling dry, that's for sure, is Erica Jong's take on Sylvia Plath, and if you ever wanted to know whether Ted Hughes tried to put the moves on Jong, now you know. ("He was a born seducer," she reports, "and only my terror of Sylvia's ghost kept me from being seduced.") The overripe essay has its moments, but seems a little too concerned with impressing readers with how intimately Jong knows Plath's hardships because she lived through years of critical disrespect for women writers. When she mentions that "Anatole Broyard, the writer and critic, told my writing class at Barnard we hadn't the sort of experiences that made writers," one wonders (a) what the hell he was doing teaching writing at a women's college if he really felt that way, but, more importantly, (b) who else was in that writing class? Jong doesn't say, and the essay is only concerned with Plath and Jong's reaction to Plath, so when she says "we," as in "we would have to ride our own wave to believe in ourselves as writers," it pretty much reads as the royal "we." If you're looking for a concise, sober appraisal of the restored Ariel manuscript, I'd strongly recommend the Meghan O'Rourke review in Slate, which offers an insightful consideration of Ted Hughes' editorial work.

Never Let Anyone Outside the Family Know What You're Thinking

It's a big ol' NYTBR this week, and though the year-end roundups and the massive Daniel Mendolsohn essay on Truman Capote probably have the strongest gravitational pull this week, I was pleased to see Neil Gaiman writing about Grimm's fairy tales and Sarah Vowell on The Godfather Returns, which she liked enough to actually make me interested enough to maybe try and scrounge a copy one of these days.

In his column on the bestseller lists, Dwight Garner notes observes that Mark Winegardner's authorized sequel "has received generally positive reviews." Not, however, in other parts of the Times, where Michiko Kakutani called it "a meal made from leftovers" while allowing that "as these sorts of follows-up go, it's a solid enough performance: dutiful, suspenseful, and only occasionally annoying." But Garner's right, the book has gotten some better reviews elsewhere; the early word from PW was good, and Jeff Guinn of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram liked it so much he also interviewed Winegardner. In Las Vegas, though, Jon Ziebell is less impressed--but it's actually rather surprising, at least to me, that he has nothing to say about whether or not the book depicts Vegas--where, apparently, the bulk of the story takes place--accurately. In fact, from Ziebell's review, you wouldn't even know the Corleones had anything to do with Vegas. Very strange.

These Kids at The New Yorker Have No Sense of History

It's not so much that the folks running the "Briefly Noted" section reviewed Robert Gottlieb's "brief but energetic" biography of George Balanchine but didn't even mention Terry Teachout's concurrently published book on the same subject. That is surprising, but since my objectivity about Teachout is somewhat constricted by acquaintance, I can't really speak to that. No, what really shocks is that nowhere in the paragraph devoted to the book does the anonymous reviewer acknowledge Gottlieb's five-year tenure as the magazine's editor.

Slate Hits the Poetry Trifecta

It feels like April when I read Slate today, what with all the poetry reviews. Dan Chiasson considers the Marxist verse of Anne Winters, dwelling on "the frisson between subject matter and poetic language." Adam Kirsch--who I'm starting to see everywhere lately, from his home perch at the New York Sun to an excellent New Yorker piece recently--digs into the new Derek Walcott, while James Longenbach looks back at Richard Wilbur, praising his best poems "not because they may or may not be stylish at any given moment but because they keep the English language alive." Incidentally, that Kirsch piece in The New Yorker I admired? Also about Wilbur. And if those two articles pique your curiosity, you can see what all the fuss is about next Monday (12/6), when the 92nd Street Y pays tribute.

How to Review Poetry and Poetry Reviews

It's hard to be 100 percent objective about David Orr's review of The Best American Poetry 2004, since Beatrice owes about half of its current audience to Orr's positive appraisal of this blog for NYTBR in October. Having made that disclosure, it's damn near about the most perfect review I've read in a long time, laying out the longstanding critical controversies surrounding the Best American Poetry series and the merits and flaws of the poems in this year's edition in a clear, orderly fashion that continually relates the issues raised to the text under consideration. If you don't know much about poetry, you'll feel honestly educated after reading this piece.

Times film critic A.O. Scott delivers another fine piece in the same issue on the latest book of essays by Dana Gioia. It's a pan, but as Scott outlines why he thinks Disappearing Ink is "disproportionately loaded with abstractions, cliches and nuggets of wisdom so uncontroversial as to be inane," he uses a close reading to make a calmly reasoned case for Gioia taking all the excitement out of poetic criticism with his "almost desperate attachment to conventional wisdom." And though he finds the book "pretty much useless either as cultural analysis or as literary criticism," he does at least give Gioia some degree of credit for broaching some interesting topics; he just wishes Gioia had actually done a little bit more than merely broach them.

An Intervention Would Not Be Unwelcome

Just two weeks ago, I was lamenting what NYTBR has done to Liesl Schillinger's writing by using her to attack easy targets like Susan Isaacs and Ann Coulter. It's gotten worse. This weekend, they sic her on Gloria Vanderbilt, and maybe it's just because Schillinger's bored out of her skull, but she's not even funny anymore, barely finding it in herself to do more than summarize the banalities her editors have forced upon her.

Those NYTBR-bashers who are just waiting to pounce upon Sam Tanenhaus for not including any fiction in the poetry issue while finding space to review non-poetry-driven nonfiction will undoubtedly use this as the perfect example; even by the "news of the culture" standard, it's hard to imagine why we're still being asked to pay attention to Gloria Vanderbilt, for crying out loud. Me, I'm more concerned with the more immediate effects on Liesl Schillinger's prose--it's one arguably justifiable thing to deploy her on bestselling icons of mass culture, but wasting her on irrelevancies is just plain wrong, and here's hoping future NYTBR assignments make much, much better use of her talents.

Let's Get Him and Ben Yagoda Together in the Studio

Benjamin DeMott's "Whitewash as Public Service," published in Harper's October issue, is now online. Wonder if the NBA nonfiction judges have had a chance to read it yet? As the headline observes, this ain't exactly Yagoda's examplar of nonfiction:

The plain, sad reality--I report this following four full days studying the work--is that The 9/11 Commission Report, despite the vast quantity of labor behind it, is a cheat and a fraud. It stands as a series of evasive maneuvers that infantilize the audience, transform candor into iniquity, and conceal realities that demand immediate inspection and confrontation.

Award-Winning Fiction Should Not Make Our Heads Hurt

On the back page of this weekend's NYTBR, Laura Miller notes correctly that the annual hue and cry over the supposed obscurity of the National Book Award fiction nominees "was turned up a notch" this year, but that's about all she gets right as she continues the Times calumny heaping (about which the newly arrived Mad Max Perkins has some choice comments), declaring the NBA short list is "like an especially emphatic thumbed nose in the direction of the literary establishment." Pretending that she can read minds, she says the rationale of the judges "surely goes something like this":

Since accolades and sales are already so unequally distributed, why not use a national prize to even things out a little and draw the spotlight to books that have been unjustly passed over? The judges are fellow fiction writers who feel they know all too well how easily good books go unnoticed. As one of this year's judges, Stewart O'Nan, retorted to the complaints, "It's not a popularity contest."

Practically casting O'Nan and the other judges as the art fags who finagled their way onto the high school yearbook staff so they could replace the jocks and pep squad snapshots with photos of all their Goth friends, Miller then suggests that her "impression" of the shortlist--"the great books you should have been reading and the press should have been covering"--is, in fact, what the judges had in mind, then says they got it all wrong anyway, because "none of them could be reasonably expected to please more than a small audience" because they're too busy ignoring the demands of plot and "sidestepping readerly expectations." And one can apparently be sure that a novel that sidesteps readerly expectations--by which Miller seems to mean her expectations as a reader projected onto the population at large--can't possibly be as good as one by "Philip Roth, Russell Banks [or] Cynthia Ozick," all of whom, as readers are well aware, have been overlooked this year even though they deliver unto readers precisely what is expected and would never think to traffic in "cool, ironic, and merciless" prose like Lily Tuck's.

Continue reading Award-Winning Fiction Should Not Make Our Heads Hurt

Caryn James Gets the Moody Blues

Caryn James tells NYT readers just what she thinks about this year's crop of National Book Award nominees: "[t]he minor resemblances of sex and city are nothing next to what really makes this one of the least varied lists of nominees in recent years: a short-story aesthetic. Not one of these books is big and sprawling. And not one has much of a sense of humor." Which is just plain wrong--The News From Paraguay and Our Kind aren't exactly Laurel and Hardy, but they do have a sense of humor bubbling beneath what James dubs "precious writers' program language" much like "the style, say, of Rick Moody, the novelist and short-story writer who is chairman of the five-person fiction panel and who has been known to write some woozily poetic prose of his own." Then she gets meta on us:

Awards are inherently silly, but there's a method to their silliness. Whether it's the National Book Awards, the Tonys or the Oscars, contests become guides to what the public might want to catch up on, offering something-for-everyone choices. For the best-picture Oscar, there is an art house film and a popcorn movie, a Lost in Translation and a Lord of the Rings.

Never mind that LOTR was more than just three "popcorn movies"; never mind that the only thing more inherently silly than awards would, almost by definition, be somebody who spends their time pontificating over them. (And never mind that when the NYTBR comes out this weekend, you'll see that it's almost as if James was passing notes with Laura Miller in English class.) Galleycat makes an excellent detailed criticism of the anti-elitist assault on the "short-story aesthetic", while OGIC of About Last Night finds a more positive spin, noting that James has some nice things to say about each book individually even as she attacks them as a class. And while I'm too busy right now to do more than steer you towards their responses, the Laura Miller piece definitely merits detailed response, and you'll find it here this weekend.

Between Literary Influence and Policy Reform,
I Know Which I'd Take

Ben Yagoda tells Slate readers The 9/11 Commission Report is a model of good writing, placing it in a lineage that extends from Hiroshima to Black Hawk Down. He quotes comission vice chairman Lee Hamilton on why the prose came out so lean: "Democrats pushed for adjectives to support President Clinton while Republicans pushed for adjectives to support President Bush. It was such a minefield that we finally cut out all adjectives and ended up with a sparse, narrative style." But while he considers it a model, Yagoda's not sure it's a model anyone will follow:

There's little chance that The 9/11 Commission Report will lead to an immediate spate of copycat broad-canvas narratives: Writing them is just too hard. To write a competent book in this form requires large amounts of research and ability. To write a first-rate one requires a massive, mortgage-your-house-and-live-on-ramen-noodles commitment, and, usually, the better part of a decade. The object lesson here is Jonathan Harr, who from press reports seems to have mortgaged his whole life to write A Civil Action. He has not produced a follow-up, possibly because he was so traumatized by the experience.

Actually, the object lesson might be an author Yagoda overlooks completely in his remarks: J. Anthony Lukas, who struggled with depression throughout his career and ultimately committed suicide before the publication of his last great book, Big Trouble. I mean, how many authors have done so much for narrative nonfiction that they get a prize named after them? (UPDATE: The article's conclusion seems to take on heavier significance after the news reports concerning the suicide of Iris Chang, the author of the critically acclaimed The Rape of Nanking whose current project examined the lives of American prisoners of war in the Pacific during the Second World War.)

Alexis the Intern, My New Fave Review Reviewer

I've become a big fan of Gawker's snarky Monday morning roundup of the NYTBR, and this week's entry offers a perfect example of why:

We almost peed in our pants when we saw Jonathan Bush’s letter to the editor, expressing how he and members of his family were "incredulous" to see the NYT's two- page review of Kitty Kelley’s Bush family tell all. "I read the New York Times regularly; thus I was truly surprised and offended to see your review, which treats this rotten book seriously.” Honey, the NYTeditors... recently devoted a page of the Review to the joys of butt sex. You think they’re somehow "above" reviewing the Kitty Kelley book?

I don't entirely agree with her about the footnotes in David Foster Wallace's look at the Borges bio, some of which I rather enjoyed, though I think one went on three words too long.* Wallace's criticisms of the psychological emphasis in Borges: A Life seemed rather apt, though I'll have to read the book to be sure; it's certainly a much different impression of the biography than the one I got from Christopher Hitchens.

* To wit: "Think about it--the personal lives of most people who spend 14 hours a day sitting there alone, reading and writing, are not going to be thrill rides to hear about." See? Three words too long. (And fourteen should be spelled out, but that's the copyeditor in me squawking...)

NYTBR Trying to Create the Next Dorothy Parker?

Reading Liesl Schillinger's brutal putdown of the new Ann Coulter screed was fun, of course, but it makes me wonder if she's become the NYTBR go-to gal for over-the-top attacks. After all, it was just last week that she found Susan Isaacs wanting in comparison to no less a cultural icon than The Facts of Life. It seems, to this reader at least, that there's a marked rise in her sarcasm in comparison to other recent reviews which featured slightly subtler digs and snappy but balanced summation. And while I'm hardly complaining about the pleasant fact that there's more and more of her work appearing in the Review these days, I do rather miss the more restrained--one might even say arch--wit of her previous reviews. As a point of comparison, see what happens when she likes Scott Bradfield's latest: clearly just as snappy as what she's doing at the Times, but without the mean edge of the last two weeks. Maybe it's just a question of the assignments she's been getting?

There's a World Going On Underground

It's the centennial of New York's subway system, and Joshua Robin of Newsday rounds up some subway-themed reading, finding "a torpor of sentimentality all too common in books about New York City," an un-updated version of a decade-old book, and a powerful collection of photographs taken on trains and platforms over the last few years.

Meanwhile, at NYT, Randy Kennedy considers the reissue of Walker Evans' Many Are Called and declares, "It is hard to imagine a better way to celebrate the subway's centennial or to reconsider Evans, one of the 20th century's most influential photographers and artists." The Times gets full mileage out of Kennedy, their former subway columnist who collected his best articles a while back in Subwayland; he also contributed a day in the life piece last week.

The Final Nail in the Checkpoint Coffin

The Complete Review provides an excellent summary of the hoopla surrounding the publication of Nicholson Baker's Checkpoint, which "certainly counts as one of the biggest literary flops of the year." It's a great analysis of the media's attention to the subject of the novel and frequent inattention to the novel itself, well worth a read even if the book's long past its sell by date.

"All that Passable Meant to Me"

A few weeks ago, I observed some dissatisfaction with Just Enough Liebling on the part of book critics who wished the selection could have been more representative of A. J. Liebling's prose. But Russell Baker calls it "a good place to start" in a Liebling appreciation for NYRB, declaring him representative of a generation of journalists "whose work combined literary quality and reportorial skill to a degree rare in today's journalism." Well, actually, at a certain point the article stops appreciating Liebling and detours into lamenting the humorlessness and lack of modesty in current reporters before finding its way back to Liebling in his non-journalistic modes.

Nursing a Cherished Myth

First of all, let's hear it for bloggers Scott McLemee and Lizzie Skurnick, both of whom appear in this weekend's NYT Book Review.

Elsewhere in this issue, Miranda Seymour is quite happy to see a new biography of Florence Nightingale, and cites approvingly "the energy with which she set about reforming filthy, disease-ridden hospitals" while looking down upon those who suggest "her role as a hospital reformer was greatly overestimated," lumping such critics together with the pseudo-Freudian quacks who imagine all sorts of sexual proclivities on Nightingale's part. Lest we miss the point, Seymour further mentions "the fierce attention to hygiene that was the foundation of her reforming work."

But don't discount the naysayers so quickly. Terry Brighton, in his excellent account of the Charge of the Light Brigade (Hells Riders), has reason to discuss Nightingale's activities, and adds his voice to those who have suggested in recent years that Nightingale showed little or no concern for maintaining hygiene at the hospital she ran at Scutari, creating an unsterile environment that resulted in the unnecessary deaths of thousands of British soldiers--and that her subsequent zeal for reform was based not on a successful track record as a military nurse, but in self-recognition of the disastrous consequences of her failure, which had been suppressed by the British government as a face-saving gesture. This is pretty much the same tack taken in Avenging Angel, a Nightingale biography published a few years ago, though Brighton takes the additional step of highlighting the overlooked success of another nurse in Crimea, Jamaican emigré Mary Seacole, who'd been rejected when she volunteered to serve at Scutari and set up her own operation.

Obviously, nobody expects Seymour to write about Seacole in the space of a one-page review of a Nightingale bio; it's just an interesting story and one of the many reasons I think you should read Brighton's amazing book. So let's return to the big picture: By skipping over the details of Nightingale's actual career to focus on the early family drama and the later reclusiveness, Seymour--for all I know taking her cues straight from the biography--squashes any genuine consideration of the merits of Nightingale's reputation in order to preserve a pop legend at strong odds with the historical record. NYTBR readers frankly deserve better; if Seymour has good reason to dispute the revised evaluation of Nightingale's performance, she should have presented it.

Roger Angell Gets Out Just in Time to See Sox Rally

Even though I only found out about it one minute before it was scheduled to start, I still felt bad about missing all the famous writers at the A. J. Liebling centennial tribute at NYU's journalism school, but I'd already missed as many innings of Game 5 as I was willing to miss...and, yes, once again, I stayed with it until the very end as Ortiz, once again, staved off the inevitable. I'm dying to find some time to get into the recent batch of Liebling reprints, including The Sweetest Science and The Telephone Booth Indian. I've had a chance to glance at the introduction James Salter wrote for another Liebling reissue, Between Meals, and it drove me nuts in the second paragraph:

Journalists cannot expect their work to last. Even Dreiser's or Hemingway's articles are of little interest to us. Though the standards for prose at The New Yorker were and are unusually high, there is only so much room in the stacks to be given to things of passing concern, and magazine pieces are not the path to being remembered.

Tell that to Joe Mitchell (or John Hershey, since Hiroshima was a "magazine piece"). The condescending tone continues when we're told "Liebling had remarkable talent although he may not have made the best use of it" because he was a journalist and not a fiction writer. (In fact, Salter only seems to like Between Meals, which started out as "magazine pieces," to the extent that it's memoir rather than reportage.) But anyway, I've got those, and I've got Just Enough Liebling, and I'm looking forward to experiencing firsthand the prose I've heard so much about over the years from folks who would tell me, sure, Mitchell's alright, but you have to check out the Liebling. Charles McGrath admires the man's range, though he's not completely satisfied with the selections in Just Enough. Neither is Terry Teachout--who will be happy to hear, if he hasn't already, that The Earl of Louisiana is already back in print thanks to LSU Press--and he's got some strong ideas about what should have been included. (By the way, David Remnick's introduction to Just Enough is in the New Yorker archives, having run as an article last spring.) I'll definitely be keeping their caveats in mind as I read, when I read, but I'm sure I'll be grateful just to be able to see what I can see.

Matsui Ruins Stephen King's Saturday
And the Ending of His Baseball Book (Maybe)

Poor Stephen King--he spends his Saturday night at Fenway sitting through a rather humiliating blowout by the Yankees, and tomorrow when the NYTBR lands at his front door, Michael Agger's going to look at The Dark Tower and ask, "[W]ould anyone read these things if they weren't by Stephen King?" He's not so sure, and I'm not entirely sold on his reasons why, but I appreciate the choice he made to put this final volume in perspective and review the epic as a whole, even if I think it would take a Believer article, or something of comparable length, to really do it justice.

That said, there's a lot to like in this week's Review, which may finally be hitting its stride. Judith Shulevitz does an excellent job on Robert Alter's translation of the Pentateuch, especially since she's given sufficient space to really delve into the issues, textual and metaphysical, raised by Alter's work. And having reviewed Richard Dawkins' The Ancestor's Tale for Publishers Weekly as a layperson with a strong curiosity about science, I was engaged by Carl Zimmer's more specialized take, especially since it led me to his blog, The Loom, where he's already talking about things he couldn't fit into the Times piece. I even liked Jon Meacham's premature eulogy for William F. Buckley, even if you have to look hard for the parts that are actually about the book he just wrote.

Nobody's perfect, though, and while I endorse the basic idea behind revisiting Eichmann in Jerusalem in the context of Saddam Hussein, I'm not sure that the execution (if you'll forgive the choice of words) holds up. I'm willing to accept the reinterpretation of Eichmann, but less convinced by Michael Massing's suggestion that Arendt suffered "a serious lapse in moral judgment" in her analysis. I'm even less convinced when, after speaking eloquently of "the unspeakable acts that ordinary people, when placed in the right circumstances, are capable of committing," he then addresses "the happenings at Abu Ghraib," an unfortunate choice of understating vocabulary at best, and lapses into an inexcusably passive voice to suggest of the American soliders that:

...placed in a situation where certain ends (good intelligence) were demanded from prisoners who had been demonized and dehumanized, they showed how quickly the dictates of conscience can fade.

One might reasonably describe soldiers on military assignment as "placed in a situation," though it would then be appropriate to ask by whom they had thus been placed. But to suggest that said soldiers were thus "placed in a situation" with "prisoners who had been demonized and dehumanized" begs the pressing moral question of who committed these acts of demonization and dehumanization, if not those soldiers themselves. Is Massing suggesting that the soldiers facing court-martial for what happened at Abu Ghraib inherited the "situation" rather than initiating and perpetuating it through those acts in which "certain ends...were demanded"? And all he can say is that those acts "showed" the illustration of a moral lesson? By eliding over these atrocities and falling back on the branding of Saddam as an evil monster seems an almost willful missing of the point, a deliberate failure to confront the implications of everything else he has to say. His bloodless description of Abu Ghraib is made even distasteful by its appearance just three pages after the review of Chain of Command, which appears to be raising precisely the important questions about who placed the soliders in that situation and what demands they made concerning the achievement of which ends. A Review that can consistently deliver the kind of coverage Michael Ignatieff gives Sy Hersh and Judith Shulevitz gives Robert Alter, with less of the issue-oriented hot air in essays like Massing's, is going to be a Review worth reading.

And Now, Back to Happier Subjects

It had been bandied about all last week that as part of the NYTBR makeover, the second "new" issue was going to feature a full-page review of Nora Roberts, thereby proving a commitment to commercial fiction. What the buzz didn't tell me was that said review would be written by Elissa Schappell, one of my favorite writers. She achieves a very useful balance between actually reviewing Northern Lights and providing a background context on Roberts. If all the reviews that took Sam Tanenhaus' "news about the culture" approach handled it this deftly, we wouldn't have anything to complain about. Likewise the two-page review Walter Kirn gives to Jack Kerouac's journals...and I note with some interest that his excellent summation of why Kerouac matters makes no mention whatsoever of a recently published so-called "definitive biography;" given the recent NYTBR penchant for grouping as many worthy books as possible into reviews, I can only assume that Kirn and Tanenhaus and everyone else share my opinion of its awfulness.

But...I really think Sophie Harrison dropped the ball in her review of David Lodge's Author, Author, especially when you stack it up against Daniel Mendelsohn's review of The Master, a comparison Harrison invites by invoking the subject of Toibin's novel about Henry James. Her treatment of that matter seems cursory to me, as does her handling of the issue of fictional stories about historical figures. Susannah Meadows does a fairly decent job of reviewing Unfit for Command in the space provided, but it seems too little, too late...and is Laura Miller trying to turn the publication into the Sherlock Holmes Book Review or what?

That said, I know a lot of NYTBR critics are going to say Franklin Foer's essay on neo-conservatives has no business being there, but I kinda liked it, even if it wasn't, strictly speaking, a book review.

There Is No Map to Hume and Behavior...
(Yes, That Is The Worst Pun to Headline Here)

One of the best qualities of the classic New Yorker--as I like to imagine it, anyway, from my fevered rereading and rereading of the Harold Ross biography--was that authors had a certain liberty to follow their obsessions regardless of questions of "relevance" to the readership. The operating assumption being that if the writer found it that interesting, he or she could find a way to make other people believe it was interesting, too.

Which is why I was pleasantly surprised to see David Denby use this week's "critic at large" column to review a book I was given as a Christmas present nine months ago, James Buchan's Crowded with Genius. If you found the subject of Enlightenment Scotland as interesting as I did, you might want to wait for the paperback, which will be coming in late November or early December, but heck--if you can afford to splurge, see if you can find it now. Don't just take my word or Denby's, either: ask Irvine Welsh, no slouch himself when it comes to Edinburgh-themed prose.

Finally, I Get to Say I Knew Somebody Back When

At least, I do if posting on the same USENET newsgroups qualifies as knowing somebody, though I'm actually one of the first to be highly skeptical of that proposition... In any event, the quite excellent bookblogger Sarah Weinman debuts as the Baltimore Sun mystery critic today. And between her and Suzy Hansen, I get the feeling I really ought to check out The Midnight Band of Mercy sooner rather than later...

Actually, speaking of people I knew back in the day, I was really glad to see the Matthew Klam byline on the NYT magazine's cover story on political bloggers, featuring my old HotWired colleague Ana Marie Cox. Klam's one of my favorites from that whole "20 Under 40" crowd the New Yorker touted five years ago, and it's good to have new things from him. Say, here's an item idea I'll toss out for any of you other bloggers: whatever happened to those twenty writers? (I can't even remember them all now...)

O'Rourke on McCarry, Fry on Wodehouse

P.J. O'Rourke calls Charles McCarry, whose praises I've sung a few times here and there in this blog, "the best modern writer on the subject of intrigue--by the breadth of Alan Furst, by the fathom of Eric Ambler, by any measure." He also reveals his explanation for "why McCarry has never achieved the popularity of John LeCarré, the author to whom he is most often compared."

McCarry has LeCarré's interest in ethical complexities and the tart style of LeCarré's early work. But, unlike John LeCarré, Charles McCarry knows right from wrong. His theme is never that the other side is just like our side except on the other side. McCarry's plots turn on the search for truth. The author and his heroes aren't in doubt about what the truth is: Good is good, and bad is bad.

Meanwhile, in the Guardian, Stephen Fry whets my appetite for Robert McCrum's bio of P.G. Wodehouse, soon to appear in the U.S. "No lover of Wodehouse will want to be without this masterly appraisal of the good life of a good man," Fry writes. "Who happened to be a very, very great writer indeed."

Another Non-Review Finds Its Way into the NYT Book Review

Dahlia Lithwick shows up in the NYTBR ostensibly to review a new Clarence Thomas bio, Kenneth Foskett's Judging Thomas, but she dispenses with that task in the first three short paragraphs, at which point she devotes the remainder of the article to her own theories about Thomas' psychological condition and an unfavorable extended comparison to Sandra Day O'Connor. It's an op-ed piece, not a book review--and a fairly weak op-ed piece at that, certainly not anywhere near as effective as Lithwick's better material in the Times over the last few weeks or in Slate.

Let's get back to the main point, which is that it isn't a book review. I've mentioned a few times here that I'm not inherently opposed to the idea of discussing current affairs through the framework of recently published non-fiction, but only if the reviewer seriously engages the actual book under consideration, rather than using it as a convenient hook for one's own hobby horses. If I see any fault with recent developments at NYTBR, it's in "reviews" like Lithwick's and Leon Wieseltier's that push the book into the background. At least Lithwick's was only one-third the length as Wieseltier's, and not nearly as cranky.

Leon Wieseltier, You Blockhead

Let us make every effort to be fair to Leon Wieseltier as he faces the printed criticisms of NYTBR readers in this Sunday's edition, in what will likely prove the tail end of the scummy Checkpoint review controversy. We have Jim Sleeper, who wonders why Wieseltier didn't mention that the neocons pushed for Saddam Hussein's removal even if no links to terrorism could be found. We have Barry Yourgrau, who calls the Bush administration "radical" and laments "the spectacle of our famed free press... sniffily pooh-poohing the fury and anguish we feel as our country gets carjacked down some bumptious and explosive dead end of fundamentalism." Robbie Lee and Nadia Berenstein wonder why the reviewer didn't give more thought to literary concerns when addressing "a work of fiction from one of America's most sensitive, sensible and observant writers." And Elaine Sagal didn't like the "scummy little book" opening.

So how does Wieseltier deal with all this? Essentially by spitting in Jim Sleeper's face and telling him that believing Saddam had WMD was a good enough reason for the war as far as he was concerned, even if it turned out to be wrong. "Did Sleeper know that Hussein was bluffing?" he sneers. "Then it was shameful of him to keep the information to himself." Furthermore, he continues condscendingly, it was necessary to destroy Iraq in order to save it--my characterization of his position, in all fairness, not his actual words--and maybe Saddam would've helped terrorists at some point even if no actual link to al Qaeda can be demonstrated at this time. But here's the kicker:

Anyway, it is not because one admires the president that one should recoil from a book about assassinating him. Once this would have been obvious.

Yes, that's right. The Day of the Jackal, The Manchurian Candidate, Libra, that Frank Sinatra film Suddenly...scummy little works, all. But let's extend the idea further--if assassination of the president (or similarly high authorities) is an unfit topic for literature, why not recoil from fiction that deals with the performance or contemplation of other distasteful acts? In fact, here's an open invitation to Leon Wieseltier to send in a list of subjects he deems unsuitable for tasteful literature, or publish such a list in the pages of The New Republic.

Continue reading Leon Wieseltier, You Blockhead

Finally, a Close Reading of Checkpoint

I cannot, of course, claim any objective neutrality when it comes to my colleague in Book Babe badgering, Mark Sarvas, but I'll come out in favor of his review of Checkpoint anyhow.

There’s a long, vainglorious history of would-be assassins capturing their testimony for the world at large, and Jay’s desire to do so plants him firmly in that tradition. At the same time, the novel can be read as a transcript of a tape recorded conversation – a transcript presumably found after an unspecified tragic event. Checkpoint is rife with such ambiguities of intention and design, which makes it stimulating cocktail conversation but unsatisfying literature. It’s a book that feels largely tossed off in a cathartic, passionate rush. But Baker is a writer of intelligence and skill, and Checkpoint is not without interest on a number of levels.

The Wieseltier Fallout Continues (With Afterthoughts)

Mark and Terry contemplate the response to Leon Wieseltier's sloppy rant in Sunday's NYTBR. Terry basically says, yes, the piece is bad, but as an editor, Tanenhaus has a professional obligation to run it as is, while Mark says balderdash--if you ask for a book review and you get something else, of course you can kill it.

But both say it much less glibly than that, so you should read what they say carefully and consider their positions well. My own take is somewhere in the middle: When you ask professional writers to review books for you, you should pay them for it whether you like it or not, but you shouldn't have to run substandard material. Obviously, someone's always going to find a slippery slope between killing a review for failing to live up to a critical standard and killing a review for the opinions it expresses, but sometimes you have to be willing to be seen as sliding down a slope when you know you're climbing.

If that seems troublesome, look at it from another angle: if you were a book editor rather than a book review editor, would you accept and publish a manuscript that, while superficially competent, was of lesser quality than what was promised (contracted for, even), especially if you knew the author was capable of better work?

Or, a sillier case: if you got a sloppy haircut, would you just accept it silently and resign yourself to looking ridiculous for a week, or would you tell the barber to do something to fix it before you got out of the chair? Remember, it's your haircut, and you're paying for it.

As you can guess, I'd have no problem telling Wieseltier to rewrite. And if he balked, I'd either pay him his kill fee and find a more competent reviewer or, if truly pressed against the wall, run his piece and then lose his phone number for good. I speak from experience on the other side of this issue, because I have had a review killed by a managing editor because I was told I hadn't made my case. I responded to his (forwarded) email by staying at my computer, rewriting the piece, and sending it to my editor within the hour. And that's the review they ran. Mind you, it was a paragraph long, so it's not like I exerted myself in a spectacular fashion; I just did a little more work to deliver a product that satisfied my client's requirements. Because I'm a professional, and that's what professionals do.

It's Time To Do It Right

The summer issue of the New York Review of Books had been sitting on the floor in front of the couch for a while (it's the Significant Other's fault; the paper came with the Salon subscription) until I finally picked it up this afternoon, looking for some "light" reading between my own book reviews. I was pleased by Geoffrey O'Brien's take on Fahrenheit 9/11, not only because of his critical reaction to the film, but also because, in the aftermath of Leon Wieseltier's body slam of Nicholson Baker in the Times, it was refreshing to see an essay that made a sustained political argument through close analysis of its presumptive subject, namely Michael Moore's film.

Now, I realize O'Brien had quite a bit more space to play with than Wieseltier, but that's no excuse for Wieseltier singularly failing to achieve a close reading of his assigned text or a genuinely thoughtful comparison of his assigned text to the author's previous works, two areas in which O'Brien's essay excels. And when O'Brien does address big-picture issues, they emerge from the assigned text in a much more organic fashion. If I were running the NYTBR, which I admit that I'm not, I'd hand every potential reviewer a copy of O'Brien's review and tell them, "Give me something like this, only one-third the length."

Or, in all fairness to the Book Review, I might send them to Barry Gewen's desk to discuss how he mentally organized and wrote his review of Gordon Wood's Ben Franklin bio, a swell article that I fear will be entirely overlooked thanks to Wieseltier's "scummy little book" antics.

Jesus, People, Get a Grip

Last weekend, I took an hour or so out of my busy schedule to read the advance copy of Nicholson Baker's Checkpoint Knopf had passed along, and my immediate reaction was, I suspect, similar to the one many of its readers have had or will have: over this the right wing is excited? As everybody who's really read the book points out, far from advocating the assassination of George W. Bush, Baker makes it blatantly obvious early on that the guy who wants to shoot the president is a nutjob (even if, in one of the dialogue's best lighter moments, he does have the inside scoop on getting a properly cooked steak). So the advocacy issue is simply off the table, unless you're just looking to ride a wave of indignation. But other than that, is Checkpoint any good?

Well, I thought it was a little good, but not much, frankly. Timothy Noah pointed out in Slate that the "debate" in which Baker's two characters engage isn't really much of a debate, though Rake's Progress quite properly calls Noah to task for accusing Baker of engaging in "pornography." Granted, Noah's on to something when he brings up "the shameless way Checkpoint panders to its readers' crudest beliefs." As somebody who has reviewed a lot of political nonfiction over the last decade, I feel quite comfortable saying that the problem with a lot of the recent anti-Bush material is a "preaching to the choir" quality whereby, because it is assumed the reader shares the author's low opinion of W. and Dick and company, all sorts of insults get tossed around. The problem with that approach is that it undermines the potential to persuade unconvinced readers with well-thought arguments and counterproposals.

Continue reading Jesus, People, Get a Grip

Space Opera Roundup

I was quite a science fiction fan when I was young, and had sufficient free time that I just plowed through everything I could get my hands on, especially if the books were packaged together in a series. On the implicit assumption, no doubt, that if an author was willing to devote so much time to a fictional creation, it must be interesting. Larry Niven was one of the guys I kept coming back to, especially when he teamed up with Jerry Pournelle--but the Ringworld series was all his own. (And, as it happens, exactly as old as me.) It's been more than fifteen years since Niven last visited his artificial....um, planet's not quite the right word to describe an elliptical band that stretches millions of miles around a yellow dwarf star, is it? Anyway, it's been ages, but apparently Niven's been semi-lurking on a mailing list devoted to his books, which inspired a story idea, and now we have Ringworld's Children. Interestingly enough, it seems he's doing this one for Tor but has another Ringworld book in the works for Del Rey...

Continue reading Space Opera Roundup

Taking a Page from the Dale Peck Playbook

Here's an example of the different guidelines various publications have towards book reviewing. An anonymous scribe for Publishers Weekly says A Movie...and a Book author Dennis Wagner is "a good observer of domestic and emotional detail, which will serve him well when he gets past tail-chasing why-we-write conceits and decides to tell a story straight." Over at Slate, meanwhile, Aleksandar Hemon calls the debut novel "the worst book I have ever voluntarily read."

And that's when he's being gentle. Hemon doesn't just hate the book, but the very idea of the book...and quite possibly the publisher for putting it out. Seriously, I haven't seen a review this hostile since Harlan Ellison's The Glass Teat...and that's including the essays in Hatchet Job.

Harken! It's Larkin!
(Sadly, Not Read by Adam Arkin)

Back in May, I noted a review or two of the new edition of Philip Larkin's Collected Poems. Well, now I get to do it again, because I've finally caught up with John Updike's thoughtful appreciation in the New Yorker.

A Tree Grows In Brooklyn,
And We Can Use It for Paper

I was thrilled to see Elissa Schappell, one of the friendlest authors I know, reviewing children's books set in Brooklyn for the NYTBR. It certainly more than made up for the disappointing My Life index created by Christopher Buckley for the last page, which relies too heavily on easy jokes like the wretchedness of Maya Angelou's inaugural poem. I will admit, however, to getting a good chuckle out of:

Gore, Albert
Calls BC ''greatest president since Washington,'' 467
Calls BC ''greatest president since Lincoln,'' 478
Calls BC ''greatest president since FDR,'' 789
Distances self from BC in 2000 campaign; loses, 935

Second-Tier "Pulps"

I haven't checked in on Sacha Zimmerman's "Pulps" column for The New Republic in a couple months, but Sarah Weinman happened to mention that her latest takes on the new Helen Fielding, and Sarah was so unenthused by the article I thought I'd see what was up. And I'm a bit underwhelmed as well, just like the last time.

First of all, I'm mildly curious as to why a column devoted to "what America is really reading" would focus on a book that hasn't cracked the NYT top ten list for hardcover fiction and isn't even one of Amazon's 500 bestselling titles. Not that nobody is reading Olivia Joules and the Overactive Imagination, but it hardly seems like a barnbuster yet. Zimmerman, on the other hand, likes it a lot, and readily bashes the rest of chick lit in an effort to single Fielding's heroine out from the "thin, attractive label whore[s] working in fashion, p.r., or magazines." Which just goes to show Zimmerman hasn't read any Caren Lissner yet.

Fusilli, You Crazy Bastard! How the Hell Are You?

Not so good, reports Jim Fusilli, former monthly crime book reviewer for the Boston Globe. He tells WSJ readers he's still scarred by the experience:

Writing that monthly column for the Globe was easily the worse job I've ever had, and this coming from a man once responsible for the nightly hamburger run for a dock's worth of Teamsters.

Most of the complaints will be familiar to any book reviewer; e.g. "For every superior work of genre fiction... there were dozens that disqualified themselves for serious consideration through dull writing, erratic pacing, meandering plots and wooden characters. Many new writers tried too hard to sound like an old master, and several of today's old masters tried hard not at all." And I can assure you he's not lying about how quickly the books pile up around every bit of free space in one's living quarters. If it weren't for the fact that one out of every thirty or so is something the Significant Other wants to read, I don't think their presence would be tolerated nearly as well as it is...

It's My Life, And I'll Think What I Want

Remember when the New York Times doubled back and moved John Dean's review of The Politics of Truth, originally intended for the Sunday section, into the daily "Books of the Times" section to, some might speculate, balance out Michiko Kakutani's rush to judgment? Well, you might say it's happened again...mere days after Kakutani's roughing up of Bill Clinton's memoirs, the Times website has taken Larry McMurtry's NYTBR review and made it live, and let's just say he and Michiko don't see eye-to-eye on this one.

In recent days the memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant have been raised as a stick to beat Clinton with, and why? Snobbery is why. Some people don't want slick Bill Clinton to have written a book that might be as good as dear, dying General Grant's. In their anxiety lest this somehow happen they have not accurately considered either book...There are plenty of stout sticks to beat Clinton with, but Grant's memoirs is not one of them.

McMurtry also suggests, "I happen to like long, smart, dense narratives and read My Life straight through, happily. I may not know Bill Clinton any better than I did when I started, but I know recent history better, which surely can't hurt." Of course, the fact that he had more than one night to do it before his press deadline may have lightened his mood somewhat.

There Are Many Reasons to Love Louis Menand

...to which we can now add his review of his review of Eats Shoots & Leaves. Other reviewers have dealt glancing blows, but if literary criticism has any power left in this nation, Menand's made a fatal strike.

"The supreme peculiarity of this peculiar publishing phenomenon is that the British are less rigid about punctuation and related matters, such as footnote and bibliographic form, than Americans are. An Englishwoman lecturing Americans on semicolons is a little like an American lecturing the French on sauces. Some of Truss’s departures from punctuation norms are just British laxness. In a book that pretends to be all about firmness, though, this is not a good excuse. The main rule in grammatical form is to stick to whatever rules you start out with, and the most objectionable thing about Truss’s writing is its inconsistency. Either Truss needed a copy editor or her copy editor needed a copy editor."

After which, he delves into a delightful meditation on the idea of "voice" in writing, which among other things makes me want to track down James Agee's film reviews.

Liberal Media At It Again

After her hatchet job on Joseph Wilson last month, it's hard to come up with reasons why one should trust her judgment on any political memoir, let alone Bill Clinton's, so I'm taking her assessment--"sloppy, self-indulgent and often eye-crossingly dull"--with a grain of salt for the time being. Though I'm not surprised at her disdain for the lengths at which Clinton defends himself against the right-wing detractors who sought to end his presidency ahead of schedule, given her similar reaction to Wilson's counterattacks...and, as Salon points out, given the historical antagonism of the Times towards Clinton.

Meanwhile, at USA Today, Harriet Rubin does her best to undercut Clinton by wondering who'd want to buy a stupid presidential memoir anyway. Apart from repeating the lie that Mark Twain ghostwrote U.S. Grant's memoirs, she comes up with this gem (first noted by TMFTML):

Abe Lincoln is loved for his 300-word Gettysburg Address. He never wrote a memoir.

Is it just me, or is that veering into Red Skelton at the Friars Club territory?

Colons to Newcastle

Remember when Edmund Morris subtly deflated the hype over Eats, Shoots & Leaves? Timothy Noah of Slate is even less impressed:

...[L]et's face it. Punctuation isn't hard or particularly complex. It's only with some effort—mostly the interjection of lots and lots of jokes—that Truss is able to make her book stretch to 204 pages. I don't dispute Truss' contention that people violate basic rules of punctuation on a regular basis and that the results can be maddening. Even educated people botch them. Even people who graduated with high honors from the finest universities in the world.

So how did the book get to be so popular? Noah postulates it's because its purchasers all like to imagine they're the ones who don't make those mistakes so they can "join her in bewailing, as you review these rules, the sorry ignorance of those who don't know them." And then he offers some great advice: "Pick up a book about something you don't know much about. Everyone is ignorant about something."

Lemony Snicket Spokesman Praises Fellow Alienated Modernist

Daniel Handler tackles the new short story collection from David Foster Wallace for Newsday, admitting "some of his themes seem dated--you know, like the work of John Cheever is dated, or Nabokov or Homer."

Infinite Jest first put into concise form--all 1,079 pages of it--the numb despair of late capitalism's unrelenting sales pitch, with a reducto-ad-absurdum irony that re-created the culture it was skewering. Nowadays, you can get that from any Radiohead song. The world's caught up to David Foster Wallace, which is bad news for the world, since its citizens might read less of him.

One of those stories, "Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature," is available online.

Critics Come In For Criticism

"Our Girl in Chicago," the pseudonymous half of About Last Night, looks at how newspapers are treating recent novels starring Henry James in articles by Mel Gussow (NYT) and Jonathan Heawood (Independent).

So What If Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction?

Monday's Slate features Aleksandr Hemon's take on The Great Game: The Myth and Reality of Espionage, a survey of spy fiction by former CIA official Frederick P. Hitz. NYTBR recently let Laura Miller take a crack at the same book, but where she focused on how real-life spies draw upon fiction for inspiration in crafting their inner and outer selves, Hemon zeroes in on Hitz's conclusion that "no fictional account adequately captures the remarkable variety of twists and turns that a genuine human spy goes through." Which, Hemon dryly notes, is "completely missing the point of fiction," especially espionage fiction, where the raison d'être is not about exterior plot twists, but interior moral dilemmas.

Vidal/Buckley It Ain't

Wen Stephenson compares and contrasts David Brooks and Thomas Frank for Boston Globe readers and finds that despite sitting on opposite ends of the political spectrum, the two authors have much in common:

As their book titles suggest, these guys Think Big. They ask the Big Questions, and they offer Big Answers. They prefer the sweeping vista and the grand statement to the finely tuned argument. They're bold, they're brash--and yes, they're funny.

But it's the fight card that holds the most interest, juxtaposing extracts from On Paradise Drive and What's the Matter With Kansas? for enlightening effect.

I See a Great Need

In Friday's Opinion Journal, Brian Carney celebrates the thrillers of Charles McCarry, "a novelist with an uncanny imagination, and a compelling one, even if his work is less known than it should be." And Sunday's WaPo has Charles Trueheart praising McCarry's latest, Old Boys. But he, like Carney, is enthusiastic about everything McCarry's ever written. So why are all those novels unavailable, dammit?

The Very Essence of Snark?

Seattle Post-Intelligence book critic John Marshall did not enjoy The Mother Knot, Kathryn Harrison's latest memoir. Dubbing her "publishing's queen of pain," Marshall musters up all the luridness within him to recount the book's narrative arc of emotional and physical trauma brought on by undefeated memories of a mother from hell, finally sneering, "All that's lacking on the memoir's final page... is the aching strains of Tchiakovsky's 'Pathetique' rising in the background." And then he gets really personal:

The fact of the matter is, Harrison has plumbed her personal depths in print too many times. The effectiveness of memoir often hinges on reader empathy for the writer and Harrison has drained the empathy reservoir through her excessive and sometimes bizarre revelations. And there is starting to be a different reflex altogether, especially as the sense grows that the talented Harrison has turned profiteer on her own travails. The reader response with Harrison no longer is: We're With You Through Your Traumas. It's more: Get on With Your Life and Keep Something Secret for a Change.

Now, I'm willing to admit the possibility that a memoirist, by explicitly drawing upon her life and her identity to create her art, will undoubtedly have to face a certain degree of critical conflation of personal identity and the self represented on the page. But I also think there's a line to be drawn between explaining why a memoir doesn't work and beating up on the author, and my initial reaction is that the line's been crossed here. And I'm awfully curious to know how Marshall knows what the reader response to Harrison's work is, as opposed to his response. Passing off his personal distaste as cultural dismissal doesn't particularly strike me as an intellectually honest tactic.

Caring & Sharing

Stephen Metcalf brings the Slate discussion of The Jane Austen Book Club to a close with an important question followed by a fundamental complaint:

[I]sn't the entreaty behind any book's cutesy po-mo trickery, whether it's by Joyce or Dave Eggers or Karen Joy Fowler, "Don't judge a book by the book"? If there weren't a human story at the core of Ulysses (two really, the stories of Bloom and Stephen), would we put up with its narrative chicanery and endless verbal legerdemain? Fowler's ability to wink coyly for me never overcame how little emotional, sexual, or financial danger she put her characters in. And she gains no shelter by invoking Austen, on this or any score. The Austen whose feelings, like Shakespeare's, we supposedly never can fully divine still wrote very definite sentences like, "Vanity was the beginning and the end of Sir Walter Elliot's character."

He then suggests that part of the power of good fiction, especially novels, "starts with feeling the likelihood... of no connection whatsoever." Which is to say, that feeling you get when you slowly start to realize that this story about other people in another world still, somehow, speaks to your most intimate concerns in a way that profoundly disturbs (in the sense of upsetting your complacency, not necessarily in the sense of offending). I don't know that I agree with him and Meghan O'Rourke fully about TJABC; part of it may be a case of de gustibus and all that. But even in disliking the novel, they've given me, and presumably other fans, an opportunity to think about it again carefully, to turn the story over in our minds and see if we can understand where they're coming from. In some cases, I can; in others, we'll have to simply agree to disagree.

We Are Not Amused

This week, the Slate book club considers Karen Joy Fowler's The Jane Austen Book Club, which I've mentioned before. Unlike many reviewers, Meghan O'Rourke hasn't fully cottoned to the book or its first person plural voice, finding in it a "coy cutesiness" that leads to in-jokes over narrative nuance and character development. Stephen Metcalf was even less impressed:

When readers start giving each other the high-hat about what they like and why—and more virulently, about what should be taught and why—a noble aspiration (to round out the canon with the unwhite, the unmale, and even sometimes the undead) gets easily confused with a base aspiration: to market to people on the basis of what we might call their census identity, as women, African-American, young adult, etc. I was delighted to be reading a book from the point of view of middle-aged, bookwormy women; I started to run out of gas, and early, when it became clear it was targeted, like the old International Coffee ads, pretty exclusively to middle-aged, bookwormy women.

Considering the severity of their judgment in Tuesday's installment, one wonders what they'll find to talk about for the rest of the week. But apparently at least one installment will touch upon how allegedly un-male the single male protagonist is, which should be interesting; I'll admit that he comes uncomfortably close in some respects to a Sensitive New Age Guy, but I was somewhat intrigued by how Fowler combined those personality traits with his background in science-fiction fandom to make him a Sensitive Sci-Fi Nerd.

More Gaps in My Reading List

Sarah points out an appreciation of Ross Thomas in the Boston Globe which makes me even more sorry that I haven't gotten around to reading his books yet.

Meanwhile, in The Guardian, Henry Shukman makes a case for Somerset Maugham, with a comparison to Maupassant thrown in for good measure.

"So why is his reputation so low in Britain? For one thing, he tends to gets judged by his worst work... It's as if some strange grudge lingers in the literary air. It's all the odder that it seems to have cleared in America, in spite of Edmund Wilson's double-damning of Maugham (twice he attacked him in the 1950s as the ultimate in "mediocre"). But Americans read short stories, and perhaps that makes the difference."

We do? Well, at any rate... Oh, Shukman also mentions in passing a recent swipe at Maugham by Christopher Hitchens in The Atlantic Monthly, which includes a line you could unpack for hours: "An ideal way to 'lock in' homosexual disposition is probably to spend time as a gynecologist in a slum district of London..."

This Be the Verse, Deal With It

The Larkin reexamination continues, but unlike other critics upset by the revision of the poet's canon, Stephen Metcalf has nice things to say about the new Collected Poems in this week's NYTBR, even considering the omission of work "Larkin did not see fit to publish, including some major poems, most notably 'Letter to a Friend About Girls' and 'Love Again.'"

... passing over the immature work, the reader hits upon a virtually unbroken string of quietly harrowing masterpieces. For the first time in one volume, we get Larkin as Larkin intended.

The extra-long piece does get down fairly deep in its consideration of Larkin's use of language, but there's only so much you can say about poetry itself before the average reader's eyes glaze over, apparently, which means yet another round of "What's yr take on Philip Larkin?" (With apologies to Le Tigre.) The effort to contextualize his racism doesn't entirely convince, but then few such efforts are ever fully successful. And as an added bonus, Metcalf offers the best feint in a long while by a Times contributor around the paper's reluctance to use certain words, even when they're integral to the discussion: "Put another way: he thought his mum and dad had indeed . . . well, you know the rest."

A Little Late for National Poetry Month, Guys

Stephen Burt considers the new Collected Poems of Philip Larkin, and delves into why some think it's worse than the old Collected Poems.

Few poets—not even Larkin's own model, Thomas Hardy (whose prolific output belied his gloom)—insist so profoundly on their antisocial bent. How could a poet so cranky find such a broad public—find himself not only admired, but embraced?

There's also some space given to discussion of "Brunette Coleman," Larkin's literary disguise for girls-school fiction which, when published after his death, some British reviewers found disappointingly pornographic. (Which is to say, not pornographic enough.)

Still Warm Corpse Serves as Plot Device

Patrick Anderson has a Monday column reviewing thrillers for WaPo I've somehow missed before now, and this week he probes John Weisman's Jack in the Box, which peddles the "Bush let 9/11 happen" theory as its McGuffin.

This mother of all conspiracy theories is advanced by Edward Lee Howard, the real-life former CIA agent who defected to Moscow in 1985 but in the novel returns to Washington in 2002 to make amends. He tells his bombshell to an ambitious Republican senator who hopes to use it to replace Bush as president. First, however, the senator consults our hero, Sam Waterman, a CIA agent who was forced into retirement because he pushed too hard looking for Russian moles at the agency's headquarters. Waterman loathes Howard and doesn't believe his charge against Bush, but to disprove it he must journey to Moscow, because Howard has fled back there.

I happen to be rather wary about using contemporary real-life figures as crucial hinges in fictional narratives, particularly thrillers. Howard died in Moscow in July 2002; it's unclear from the review and a cursory search for info on the novel whether Weisman places his supposed trip to the U.S. before or after that date--I'm guessing before, since he "has fled back there," and presumably winds up dead. At its most extreme, I think this technique verges on the irresponsible, and I freely concde I don't have any idea whether that's the case here. But on a more general basis I agree with Julian Rathbone's contention concerning "the mistake of presenting real historic personalities, leaders or otherwise" in such stories, as "it is at street level that the impact of historical forces are experienced and therefore understood." He was talking, by the way, about what makes Eric Ambler's work so good.

Take It Into Town, Happy Happy

Jonathan Miles and Michiko Kakutani both reviewed Eventide, the sequel to Kent Haruf's acclaimed Plainsong, for the Times this week. Both concluded Haruf is to a certain extent repeating himself, but Miles is much harsher, pointing out several cases where the author almost repeats himself word for word and dismissing a pair of secondary characters as "archetypes of poor white poverty, exhumed from the archives of socialist fiction." He thinks Haruf has taken most of the shadowy elements out of his fiction to accentuate the shiny happy bits readers will presumably like, and he thinks the novel suffers for it.

Kakutani, however, thinks "Mr. Haruf makes us care about these plain-spoken, [sic] small town folks without ever resorting to sentimentality or clichés." Though she admits his sophmore effort is "lacking the fierce originality of Plainsong," she finds "the haunting appeal of music" within it--perhaps exactly the kind of reaction that Miles might regard as critical mush.

You Can't Say I Didn't Warn You...

Back in March, I passed along one of the first scouting reports on Alice Randall's second novel, Pushkin and the Queen of Spades. It sounded iffy then, and now that the critics have had a chance to inspect the merchandise closely, it sounds pretty awful.

Carlin Romano at the Philadelphia Inquirer goes back and revisits the negative reviews The Wind Done Gone received as a means of contextualizing the tension between Randall's self-positioning as an empowering force in African-American literature and the literary establishment's dismissal of her as a bad, bad writer. When he does tackle the protagonist/narrator's "memoir/plea to her wayward son to sway him from marrying a white girl," he tears into Randall hard, pointing out that for an alleged professor of Russian literature, the character makes dumb mistakes about Russian history, culture, and language--not that her command of English is any better.

Meanwhile, at NYTBR, Lizzie Skurnick (woo!) takes a similar approach. Even constrained by space limitations, Skurnick gets in some pretty good shots as she explains how "the novel veers drunkenly from the poetic to the analytical to the biographical." She also contextualizes the novel's publication by passing along Randall's defense of her writing style, where she brashly attempts to link an attempt at avant-gardism to a self-proclaimed Afro-advocacy: "To say I have to follow a traditional novelistic structure is like saying I have to straighten my hair."

Of course, it's not like saying any such thing--and more to the point, it seems to me that people are not so much asking her to write "traditional" fiction as they're saying she's not especially good at the experimental stuff. Ishmael Reed got high marks for Mumbo-Jumbo, after all, because it wasn't just mumbo-jumbo. Can the same be said of Pushkin and the Queen of Spades? Irene Warner at the San Francisco Chronicle is willing to give Randall credit for her wordplay, so maybe there's a case to be made. She also offers up this backhanded compliment: "Unfortunately, Randall does such a fine job of portraying Armstrong's fixation on her elite education and blind spot for compassion that it becomes harder and harder to care about her, never mind like her."

It Does Seem Odd, But These Things Happen

It's been a couple months since I read the galleys of Peter Robb's A Death in Brazil, but I'm pretty sure Richard Eder fudges a detail in his description of the opening: "A young burglar sneaks into his Rio de Janeiro apartment." As I recall it, the burglar doesn't have to sneak into the apartment, because he's been flirting with Robb for some time on the bus, all the while suggesting that he's going to rob him and kill him. But Robb lets him into the apartment anyway, which leads to this:

Murders happen anywhere and mine most nearly happened in Rio. Twenty years later only the scar of a small knife wound on my arm reminds me this is a memory and not a dream. The night went on and on like a dream, with a dream's ungraspable logic, or a Brazilian soap's. Details become wonderfully vivid, like the old carving knife with a long curved and darkened blade carelessly left earlier on the kitchen bench of the Copacabana flat, in the moment it was being held at my throat. My Portuguese lost its rudimentary awkwardness and became unreally fluent very fast. Words I never knew that I knew came pouring from my throat. Things flowed with a dream's weightless speed. The danger lay in the speed. A flailing knife blade moves faster than thought. Movement had to be slowed, the heat lowered. It was the one thing I understood. Let nothing happen. Respond to violence, not with violence, speed, and noise, but with ponderous torpidity, envelop each new threat in slowness. The beautiful Portuguese periods began to roll, slowly, slowly, but with what baroque grace, from my amazing tongue. Obtuse fearlessness stayed the hand with the knife, impassive calm put a little wobble in the spin of violence.

But whichever one of us has the shaky memory, Eder and I agree you should read it. He says, "It is the Brazil that Mr. Robb sees beyond the sensations that gives his book its great traveling dimension." I call it "a delightful jumble: Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil with a Latin beat." And the fact that a substantial portion of the book deals with the first presidential campaign and eventual ascendancy of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who generated controversy recently when he tried to kick out a NYT reporter who filed a story about national concern over his fondness for drink--well, that's just a timely bonus.

"A Working Stiff In a Low-Rent Genre"

For the new Voice Literary Supplement, Benjamin Strong examines I Am Alive And You Are Dead, a 1993 biography of Philip K. Dick by Emmanuel Carrère only just know translated into English. After opening with a wacky encounter with a PKD fan, Strong issues the usual apologia for talking about genre stuff:

Dick geekdom waits for you mostly with science fiction novels of inspired Modernist conceits and tacky raygun covers—a few are beautiful...

If you decide to haunt used bookstores or public libraries for your reading pleasure, maybe, but none of the Vintage reissues sports what I'd call a "tacky raygun cover." Although some of the Carroll & Graf covers might fit the bill, I suppose...

It's Official: I Like the NYTBR's Direction

Like you were all waiting for the Beatrice verdict to come in, I suppose... Anyway, though the execution could have been punchier, I liked the concept of getting Skip Gates and Cornel West to talk about Brown on the 50th anniversary of the decision. And I really like the extra-long cover feature on the "prodigiously researched and thoroughly unsentimental" Negro League Baseball.

And Joyce Carol Oates has given cause to possibly revise my take on Janet Maslin's possible coyness about Lucy Grealy and Ann Patchett, since the passages Oates quotes have just as much, if not more, barely contained homoerotic subtext. That, and reading the original New York article, gives one the strong impression that Grealy consistently eroticized the relationship as a means of asserting her position in it (and her preeminence in Patchett's emotional hierarchy). Which isn't to say that they were or weren't lovers, just that Grealy seems to have discovered effective ways of using physical affection to get what she wanted.

Political/Media Books the New Mother's Milk of the Glass Teat

Newsday columnist Paul Vitello is so sick of journalists selling books on TV that he comes out and says "this insider trading on the public airwaves seems unethical," but when you get right down to it, he really doesn't have much to say other than that it bugs him, and then the article just flops on its back and dies. I mean, really, it's kind of hard to get worked up about Tim Russert going on talk shows to plug a book about his dad, unless maybe you're a crankcase. And let's face it: guys like Hannity, O'Reilly, and that ilk aren't even journalists; they're pundits, and all a reasonable person can expect from them is to promote themselves and their opinions. The books exist only to promote the TV shows which exist only to promote the books, and Rupert Murdoch usually gets a cut out of both. (Is there a Fox News personality who doesn't have a HarperCollins deal? I'm just asking...)

Caryn James, on the other hand, has much closer analysis of how political authors--some of whom, like Bob Woodward and Ron Suskind, are journalists--use television to promote their books. This is a much more insightful article, and does touch upon a genuinely compelling ethical point and its resolution:

Because Viacom owns CBS as well as Simon & Schuster and the Free Press, there has been much speculation about synergy, and "60 Minutes" declared its corporate link on the air after the Woodward interview. But the books have validated the attention. Mr. Clarke's forceful narrative and behind-the-scenes details allow him to make a strong case that the Bush White House dangerously neglected terrorism in favor of going after Iraq. Like Mr. O'Neill and Mr. Wilson, he had served under Republican administrations, and each of these books carries the weight of someone who reluctantly, thoughtfully, changed his mind about a former boss's policies.

It's Time to Do It Right
(Now Doesn't That Make You Feel a Whole Lot Better?)

Apparently the NYT decided Michiko Kakutani's take on Joe Wilson wasn't something enough to stand on its own, because they invited John Dean to take a whack at The Politics of Truth. Since I thought Kakutani was particularly dense, I'm glad to report that the book Dean read actually seems like the same one I read and reviewed, which has a lot more to it than the victim's take on "the most vicious hatchet job inside the Beltway since my colleague in Richard Nixon's White House, the dirty trickster Charles W. Colson, copped a plea for defaming Daniel Ellsberg and his lawyer." I was struck by Dean's decision to emphasize the fingerpointing at Elliott Abrams instead of the more detailed suspicion Wilson throws upon Lewis Libby. I'd also take some issue with Dean's assessment that "his conclusions appear based largely on hearsay from the Washington rumor mill." Hearsay does play some part, sure, but there's also a fair amount of reasonable inference from the public record. It's also worth pointing out that "his conclusions" mirror exactly the rumors floating around the official investigation, and that Dean doesn't repeat Kakutani's mistaken assertion that Wilson's named suspects have denied any involvement.

(Of course, by "something," I mean "good," but the NYT could have another quality in mind, absolutely.)

That Oh-So-Liberal Media

Michiko Kakutani reviews The Politics of Truth for NYT this morning, but I'm not impressed. "The story of former Ambassador Joseph Wilson would seem to have all the plot elements of a Hollywood thriller," she claims, but I don't see the pitch--"guy goes to Africa trying to figure out if Saddam's looking for uranium, proves he isn't, and when he says so, the vice-president's chief of staff or somebody like that goes after his wife, and then the guy REALLY tells the press how he feels"--selling as a movie, unless you throw in a bunch of guns maybe.

Kakutani's actually pretty good on the summary of that scandal, until she gets to talking about how "some beltway (sic) watchers anticipated that Mr. Wilson's book might reveal the identity of the White House leaker." Well, maybe some fools did, but did sensible people really expect that Wilson had been pounding the D.C. streets for clues and was going to spill the beans in his book? I mean, if he knew anything for sure, he'd be talking to the federal investigators. So it's hardly fair to say "the book... serves up little but Mr. Wilson's own speculation and a rehash of material familiar from newspaper and magazine articles." Anybody with any intelligence knew going in that's all the book was going to contain, unless he'd somehow managed to get one of the reporters to whom his wife's career was disclosed to reveal the source.

Kakutani then repeats the same mistake the Times made when the news desk covered this story last week. As Josh Marshall pointed out:

The White House has gone to great lengths not to deny that these men were involved in disclosing Plame's identity. In fact, they've refused to do so. Rather, they've clung to hyper-technical claims that none of the three were involved in the "leaking of classified information" in the hope that journalists will read this as a blanket denial, which is it not.

But on to Kakutani's criticisms of the book's style...

Continue reading That Oh-So-Liberal Media

New Sterling: Not Sci-Fi, But Still Recognizably Sterling

Last Friday, Salon kicked off a new recurring feature--reviews of science fiction and fantasy novels--with a look at the latest from Bruce Sterling. But is The Zenith Angle really SF? Andrew Leonard asks the same question about this "tale of a computer geek caught up in the dot-com crash and the fallout from 9/11," ultimately suggesting the novel's just "a setup for an extraordinary rant that reads as if the author had just taken over the podium at a hackers conference, fueled with tequila, frothing from every pore." And for that very reason, he adds, impossible to ignore.

I'll wait to see for myself, but my initial reaction isn't one of surprise, as earlier Sterling novels (I'm thinking most of Heavy Weather) showed a similar tendency to ramp up towards such outbursts--one of the hazards, I suspect, of using (science) fiction as a vehicle for covert (or not-so-covert) social criticism. Take writers who believe they know how the world works, and/or how it should work, have them work in a genre with characters who often find themselves explaining things, and the results seem almost inevitable. But as I say, I'm withholding final judgment until I see for myself...since I am a fan, and since I do find much to appreciate in Sterling's social criticism, especially in his most recent nonfiction book, Tomorrow Now.

Taking Any Excuse to Press Dawn Powell
Upon You, the Reader

Alex Kuczynski takes a closer look at "gossip lit" for the Times Sunday Styles section, pegging a genre that encompasses The Nanny Diaries, The Devil Wears Prada, and Bergdorf Blondes, which she describes as Plum Sykes' "minimally disguised memoir," with a withering assessment from Sykes' ex-beau to bolster the argument:

Mr. Loeb said he had read a few chapters of Bergdorf Blondes before it was published. "I was not overjoyed," he said. "The things that are fictionalized no one is going to believe are fiction. And then there are details that I thought were private, and when you are in a relationship with someone, assume will remain private." He said he had no plans to read the entire book.

Sykes makes her own case for distinguishing her novel from the others, which she says should properly be described as "assistant lit." In which case, then, one might propose that the nanny diarists et alia are treading a path blazed by, among others, Kate Christensen in In the Drink and Jeremy Thrane. On the other hand, Bergdorf Blondes might also be the more genuine example of Kuczynski's "gossip lit," an antecedent of which she finds in Capote's Answered Prayers, to which I would add Dawn Powell's The Locusts Have No King, widely held to include a thinly veiled portrait of Clare Booth Luce. This would certainly be my take, based on my (unfinished) reading of Blondes, though Powell never quite got so directly into her characters' heads, as I recall.

Life During Wartime:
Political Fiction in the 21st Century

Other bookblogs have generated much conversational heat lately talking about the state of the political novel; I've mostly steered clear because it's not a field in which I have much insight. But I'm happy to point out other people's thoughts on a subject. Ray Conlogue of The Globe and Mail reports from a Montreal writer's festival where a panel of writers discussed the topic; one comment that struck me came from Maggie Helwig:

"So I don't agree that literature doesn't have any effect on history. It does make things happen. Unfortunately, the things that it makes happen are evil."

She speaks particularly about racist literature in Serbia and Yugoslavia, as it pertains to her novel, Between Mountains, which features an American-born Serbian war criminal, but then of course I immediately thought of The Turner Diaries, which by that standard might well be the most influential American political novel in ages. Ultimately, I don't suppose it's any surprise that the panelists seemed to settle upon a fiction that holds a mirror up to modern injustices without grand speeches about who is to blame or what is to be done.

You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown

You may recall that I was all excited a few months ago about the impending release of the first volume of The Complete Peanuts, which has all the strips from the premiere in late 1950 to the end of 1952. Well, it's out, and everybody else is getting excited, too. Almost--WaPo reviewer Douglas Wolk isn't entirely satisfied with the earliest strips because "the jokes... are often too facile, and Schulz leans too hard on his punch lines." But by the end of 1952, "Schulz is already hinting at the much darker idea that made his strip great: that it's even funnier to see children's play anticipating adult suffering on a child's scale."

A while back, in USA Today, Gary Strauss highlighted what struck me when I was eagerly poring over the advance reader's copy a few months ago: the marked differences between the earliest strips and the "classic" version of Peanuts that usually springs to mind. Not only is Schulz's drawing style subtly different (though the characters are all still recognizable), the balance of power hasn't quite settled in yet. Charlie Brown isn't as much of a loser yet, so he's socially on even footing with the other kids, and even gets a couple zingers in now and then. (Surely one of Wolk's complaints is with the sheer number of strips ending with Charlie Brown being chased by Violet after having made a particularly sassy crack.) Snoopy's still just a dog for the most part, and hasn't even started walking around on his hind legs yet. And readers across the country may ask themselves, "Shermy? Who's Shermy?"

Sure, this material doesn't have the epic sweep of Snoopy's WWI adventures, or Charlie Brown's baseball rash, but it's pretty swell in its own way. This, and probably the next few volumes, wil be great surprises for a lot of readers; I think my own intitial plunge into the backstory (through those Fawcett paperbacks) only ever got back to the late '50s or early '60s.

Continue reading You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown

This Is a Headline for a Blog Item
About a Review of a New Book
by John Barth by Daniel Handler

A book review which happens to give at least one of its readers immense pleasure.

Tactfully mention that Barth is in his 70s, spend a few quiet moments pondering own mortality and the faint hope of having any sort of literary career whatsoever in 70s, move quickly through guilty phase: How would I feel, in my 70s, if some young whippersnapper called my recent work "slackening?" Pace briefly around office. No, literary criticism must be honest or else meaningless!

Daniel Handler is pretty much the most popular writer ever to subject himself to Beatrice's questions, still drawing a couple hundred readers a week--though one suspects many of them are parents of Lemony Snicket fans who quickly hit the back button as soon as they read my subhead.

Possibly Walker's Worst Review in 20 Years

Michiko Kakutani stomps the new Alice Walker novel, Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart, to death. And then stomps on it some more to make sure. Because she really, really hates the protagonist's "tortuous journey from self-pity to self-congratulation." As I say, perhaps not since Thomas Disch's ""Snapped Prose In Slim Volumes," a 1984 article for the Washington Post wherein he reviewed Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful, has Walker gotten a smackdown this harsh. Oh, how I wish that review was available online, but 'tis not; still, if you can track down a copy of Disch's The Castle of Indolence, it's worth reading for his perceptive commentary on contemporary poetry.

Now It's Time to Say Goodbye...

Yes, Sam Tanenhaus started editing the NYTBR on the 12th, but the issue you've just read was done by then, waiting for the weekend. And Chip McGrath's last issue struck me as a bit...well, odd, really, in its organization. The first thing that struck me was the dozen pages separating the review of Neal Stephenson's The Confusion from that of A Pirate of Exquisite Mind, a biography of William Dampier, whose circumnavigational and scientific exploits are roughly contemporaneous with the fictional adventures of Jack Shaftoe--in fact, were it not for Stephenson's overwhelming interest in economics, one might easily imagine a major role for Dampier in his "Baroque Cycle." McGrath also chose to put a dozen pages between reviews of Simon Sebag Montefiore's new biography of Stalin and Aaron Hamburger's short story collection The View From Stalin's Head. The gap here is more understandable, as Hamburger's stories are mostly about gay Jewish American expats in Prague, not about Stalin at all...but then mightn't it make sense to review the two books in different issues to avoid any inadvertent mental conflation? (By the way, for another take on the Hamburger, see Jose Lambert's appraisal in last week's Forward.)

Ah well; anyone can be an armchair quarterback. Let's at least hope that Tanenhaus continues to solicit reviews from Choire Sicha, a recent addition to the Review's critical stable who hits his stride in a brilliant appreciation of Plum Sykes' Bergdorf Blondes, a novel which he believes "should inspire readers everywhere to rise up and rip one another limbless." (I'm in the middle of it, actually, having just put it aside as soon as The Confusion arrived late Friday, and I'm rather enjoying Sykes' wit, but more anon...)

Love the Concept, Execution Needs Work

The New Republic launches a new column called "Pulps," which looks closely at the books people are actually reading. But not, based on Sacha Zimmerman's first two sentences, that closely:

There are a million stories in the naked city, but there appears to be only one story in Washington, D.C. Have you ever read a book set in the capital that was not related to government?

Why, yes, as a matter of fact I have--several of them, actually, along with every other George Pelecanos fan. Including Hard Revolution, which has been getting major review attention recently enough that an attentive book review reader would have noticed. And then there's Paul Kafka-Gibbon's novel from 2001, Dupont Circle (to which Jonathan Yardley had mixed reactions), which might well answer Zimmerman's followup question, "When was the last time you read a romance set in the cafés of Dupont Circle, with no conspiracy in the background?"

All of this is prelude to a tearing apart of Brad Meltzer's The Zero Game that goes into plenty of detail about what Zimmerman thinks is wrong with the book but doesn't point out, as I observed back in February, that Meltzer resorts to lying (or misdirection, if you prefer) in the flap copy to generate suspense over the death of a major character. Zimmerman also confuses a henchman for the evil mastermind, but ultimately hits upon the "terror in the heartland" meme that gives the thriller its oomph, and even looks upon it with approval--apparently it makes The Zero Game "bad but germane." Which is just a little more harshly than I'd assess the debut of "Pulps."

Can You Spot the Gimmick?

The Literary Saloon passes along this Telegraph review of Kevin Jackson's Letters of Introduction. I tried awfully hard to dig up one of the Independent columns collected in this volume, honest I did, but I must be Googling wrong. If you find one, comment on it! (American readers, fret not: the book's available through IPG...)

In an extract from his previous book, Invisible Forms, Jackson considers the book title.

Liquor Up Front

While I'm waiting for the publicist at Three Rivers Press to realize just how much I need and deserve a review copy of Poppy Z. Brite's new novel, Liquor, I'm biding my time with various reviews. David Winkler-Schmit gives good ink in Brite's hometown paper, the New Orleans Times-Picayune, praising her "insider's knowledge of the kitchen and its lingo." Meanwhile, at the WaPo, Bill Sheehan is equally enthusiastic, and recognizes that this novel is a major turning point for Brite:

It remains to be seen whether the horror fans who make up most of Brite's constituency follow her into this kinder, gentler fictional territory. If they choose not to, the loss will be theirs. As Liquor and its various siblings demonstrate, Brite is a smart, observant novelist with a natural storytelling voice. Her decision to abandon the dark, gothic materials that made her reputation, and to focus instead on the insular society of culinary obsessives, represents both a genuine creative risk and a necessary step in the evolution of a gifted, unpredictable writer.

At Least Stephen Glass Fabricated His Bullshit

Cornel West calls Michael Eric Dyson "the most talented rhetorical acrobat in the academy" and "one of the most courageous and engaged intellectuals in America." Of course, he said that before he read Dyson's latest, Mercy Mercy Me: The Arts, Loves & Demons of Marvin Gaye, so maybe a public recantation will be forthcoming. Because this "biocriticism" of the R&B legend is, frankly, so inept I would have been embarrassed to turn in when I was an undergraduate...and it would boggle the mind that an accredited professor could get away with such nonsense except that he's not actually with an academic press. (Though, in all fairness to Basic Books, they usually manage to do much better.)

Continue reading At Least Stephen Glass Fabricated His Bullshit

We Hate It When Our Friends Become Successful

(well, okay, not my friend, yet, but can't resist a Morrissey reference)

You may have already seen Sara Nelson's recounting of the dark horse success Matthew Sharpe's enjoying with The Sleeping Father. Rejected by 20 "big" houses, starting with Villard, which had published his first novel and short stories, Sharpe eventually ended up taking a $1,000 advance from Soft Skull Press. But he's not only getting the last laugh, he's undoubtedly already starting to earn royalties just a few months after publication, since this trade paperback original has been getting well reviewed in many book sections. And that's even before Susan Isaacs went on Today and told viewers they should read it. Which doesn't quite lead to Oprah numbers, sure, but undoubtedly takes both the author and the publisher to a whole new level of sales.

Continue reading We Hate It When Our Friends Become Successful

Will Furst Last?

A regular reader writes with news of an Alan Furst retrospective in The New Criterion. Brooke Allen actually isn't as gaga as everybody (myself included) seems to be about Furst's tales of ground-level Second World War espionage. Though he lavishes detailed praise on the early novels, Allen raises an argument against certain trends he sees unfolding in the more recent fare that deserves careful consideration by even Furst's most ardent fans. He concludes:

There is no shame in being a genre writer; it’s possible, even, that there have been fewer first-rate genre writers than first-rate literary novelists. If Furst forgets about being “important” and concentrates on fulfilling his considerable, if highly specialized, gifts, his work and stature will surely continue to grow.

A lament those among us who grew up with healthy science fiction habits are certainly sure to recognize as well...

Literary Appreciation in Passing

When Mark interviewed Dan Rhodes for The Elegant Variation, Rhodes mentioned he was working on an essay about Patrick Hamilton for the Guardian. Whoomp, there it is! Certainly makes me want to track down The Midnight Bell...and I hadn't even realized the same man wrote Rope and Gaslight. But it appears that just in time for his centennial, Hamilton's completely out of print...

Meanwhile, Christopher Hitchens appraises John Buchan, who was inventing the modern thriller around the same time Hamilton was doing his best work. (Hitchcock's a link between the two, having adapted The 39 Steps as well as Rope.) This Atlantic essay balances Hitchens' youthful enthusiasm for the ripping yarns with a modern recognition of the more unsavory qualities, like the persistent anti-Semitism.

"It's not good Heinlein, but it is new Heinlein."

So sayeth Chuck Yarborough, eager sci-fi fan and Cleveland Plain Dealer weekend magazine editor, when he reviewed the long-lost For Us, The Living last month. Which I only bring up now because the Times, long after allowing Janet Maslin to pay cursory attention to the novel's existence, has Mel Gussow fill in the backstory.

Less a traditional commercial novel than philosophical fiction, it has value for its prophecies and for the light it sheds on Heinlein's other books.

The philosophical element gets played up heavily; Robert James, a scholar who wrote the afterword to this rescued edition, tells Gussow, "The impression was that he was writing commercial fiction from Day 1. Like a juggernaut he dominated science fiction. Actually from Day 1 he was writing what society should be about." But then, couldn't one conceivably make the argument that "writing what society should be about" is what every "Grand Master" of the genre (whether they were formally awarded that title or not) was and is up to, to varying degrees? And that this sociocritical element was pretty much understood within at least a core portion of the readership? In my mental library, for example, it's always been interesting to compare Bruce Sterling--and, more recently, Cory Doctorow--to Heinlein, or Frederick Pohl, or [insert name here], with an eye towards how their futuristic settings offer satirical critiques of very contemporary trends.

Phillip Pullman Now Officially "Culture"

Ed and Maud got me all excited for this one: Michael Chabon in the New York Review of Books. Truer words than this were never spoken: "The goddess of writers was smiling upon Philip Pullman on the day he came up with the idea for daemons." Chabon does an excellent job of revealing how the His Dark Materials trilogy plants one foot in epic fantasy and the other in "literature." It's a bit synopsis-heavy, but then maybe we can't expect NYRB readers to be up on their YA literature. And just when you might get broed with the plot summary, Chabon tosses off another gem of an observation, e.g. "it is Byrnison the bear and not Scoresby the Texan who plays the Lee Marvin role in this novel." Even better, he's honest about the weak elements of the third volume, when Pullman allows his themes to overtake his characters:

...Lyra has lost nearly all the tragic, savage grace that makes her so engaging in The Golden Compass; she has succumbed to the fate of Paul Atreides, the bildungsroman-hero-turned-messiah of Frank Herbert's science fiction novel Dune, existing only, finally, to fulfill the prophecy about her.

And how cool is it to have references to Herbert, Michael Moorcock, and Jack Vance in the NYRB, while avoiding the apt-but-easy comparisons to Ursula K. LeGuin or Madeleine L'Engle? Pretty damn cool.

Remember the Chicago 8
(You Heard Me, Boomers, 8)

Today marks the 62nd anniversary of the death of Lucy Parsons, one of America's most influential labor activists. Born in Texas of African, Native and Mexican-American descent, she moved to Chicago in 1873 with her husband, Albert, and helped him to organize the city's workers. When Albert was named as a co-conspirator in the Haymarket Square riot of 1886, she helped mobilize his defense. Martin Duberman chose to revisit their story in his first novel, Haymarket, from which I had the pleasure of hearing him read a few weeks back.

Continue reading Remember the Chicago 8
(You Heard Me, Boomers, 8)

Knight Moves

Earlier today, I mentioned my analysis of Janet Maslin's review of Bobby Fischer Goes to War, and it got me to wondering if other reviewers had gotten a firmer handle on the book.

Louis Menand does a great job in his New Yorker article, capturing many of the book's nuances, though I might quibble with his assertion that David Edmonds and John Eidinow act as if "chess, a game they give no indication of knowing a great deal about, is normally an esoteric pastime." They don't go into particularly deep analysis, true, but even their rough summaries display some familiarity with the subtleties of the game. I'll admit, though, that those subtleties come across more as a grasp of the psychological intricacies than of specific piece-moving strategies.

Continue reading Knight Moves

An Emphasis On Nonfiction We Can Get Behind

Enthusiasts have begun comparing this book to Edward Gibbon's ''Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,'' and also to ''The Golden Bough,'' Sir James George Frazer's work of comparative mythology. But Vollmann's book does not resemble either of them in any way -- except, of course, for being very large.

In the "Things We Thought We'd Never See, But Are Awfully Glad We Did" category, add this weekend's New York Times Book Review placement of William T. Vollmann's Rising Up and Rising Down (which I've been wanting for some time now) on the cover, with a nearly two-page review inside. Scott McLemee is clearly familiar with Vollmann's work, picking up on his juxtaposition of "dense thickets of figural language" with a flat voice that reads like "some cross between Alain Robbe-Grillet and Joe Friday." And it's hard, even as a Vollmann fan of long standing, to disagree with all of the criticisms of the author's tendency to expand rather than contract his prose, though I'm not entirely convinced the gap between Vollmann and Elias Canetti is as vast as McLemee claims in his closing lines ("It is the difference between a living masterpiece and a work of grand obsession that, far too often, lies dead on the page").

The Times has also put together an online index of its coverage of Vollmann and his work, including a profile from last year, just before Rising Up and Rising Down came out, plus another profile written by Madison Smartt Bell back in 1994.

Proposing Emily Hall as Book Babe 2.0

Flitting about the book reviews at The Stranger, I've seen Hall take sides with Dubravka Ugresic, chip at Virginia Postrel, touch briefly upon Curtis White, and (for those who prefer fiction) allow herself to be swept up by Peter Carey. I like what I see. Her reviews don't necessarily answer all the hard questions they raise, but at least she confronts them head on. If Poynter takes seriously my suggestion to replace just one Book Babe, they'd do well to consider bringing Hall in to fill the gap.

"I Can't Describe It" Is Not, Strictly Speaking, A Book Review

Seattle's alternative alternative weekly, The Stranger, reviews Free Stream Velocity, a new collection of poems by John Olson. (The paper is a longtime supporter of Olson, taking up Echo Regime in 2000; also that year, they let him write about "what poetry is for.") Christopher Frizzelle is ecstatic (and, in all fairness, does have quite a bit to say about the content of the poems, despite my jocular headline):

Hell, I can't describe it, except that many of the pieces are a sequence of associations, one followed to the next, until the poet, as Gertrude Stein described it, is emptied of the feeling.

Olson has also discussed the influence of Bob Dylan's Tarantula. And here's his poem "The Day Was Gloves."

Recent Subway Reading

In and out of Manhattan the last few days, I've been making my way through Francesca Delbanco's Ask Me Anything, in which Rosalie Preston, a young actress in New York, recounts her fling with the father of one of the other members of her small theater troupe, a group whose friendships date back to college. Carlin Romano at the Philadephia Enquirer praises the "controlled voice" of Delbanco's debut:

Like all gifted fiction writers, Delbanco knows how to pin attitude and gesture with a tight phrase, to drop insights without giving them drumroll treatment or ditching them too quickly for fear of seeming mannered.

Continue reading Recent Subway Reading

The Great Brain

Last weekend, unable to deal with the prospect of seeing a guy get beaten for two hours straight with guys yelling at him in Aramaic, even for the sake of cinema, I opted instead for the Adam Sandler/Drew Barrymore romantic comedy 50 First Dates, which I actually rather enjoyed. The setup--Barrymore's character experienced a trauma that resulted in the loss of her ability to hold onto short term memories--reminded me of Memento, of course, but also of an excellent book I read a few weeks back and have kept meaning to say something about, Mind Wide Open by Steven Johnson. Johnson pokes around his own neurological infrastructure, subjecting himself to fMRI scans, biofeedback experiments, and visual cue recognition tests, revealing how a cluster of different "modular" functions come together to create the illusion of a single consciousness. There's any number of fascinating paths to explore, like how an instinctual fear response can outlast the immediate memory of the provoking incident, or the potential for modern psychology to expand the Freudian paradigm and create a new way to talk about the mind--to address, for example, the self-regulation of a diverse collection of drives rather than the "repression" of one drive or another.

The emphasis on the "modular" aspects (which can be traced back at least in part to Marvin Minsky's wonderful The Society of Mind) seems to build quite naturally on Johnson's ideas in his previous book, Emergence, which addressed how complex behaviors are generated from the interaction of many, many simple units. And he's got an easygoing, highly personable style, even when he's not using himself as a case study, that makes the science very easy to follow. But if you're still confused, Johnson can explain it himself, as he did on NPR's Fresh Air. Or, if you live in New York, catch him tonight at KGB.

Continue reading The Great Brain

Beware What You Ask For

In the San Francisco Bay Guardian, Helena Echlin wonders where the dotcom novels are: "Very few novelists have tackled the dot-com-obsessed late '90s, and none have taken the Bay Area as their setting."

Actually, she's wrong on that, but because she appears by all accounts to be a recent British transplant, it's understandable that she's never heard of Carla Sinclair's godawful Signal to Noise, which another SFBG reviewer panned seven years ago as "an extended gossip-inspired fizzle with all the hilarity of someone else's high-school slambook." (Actually, the review in toto is an excellent cheat sheet on how not to write a roman a clef, so it might be worth a look for would-be writers; lord knows the novel sure isn't, and rightfully deserves its obscurity.) More surprisingly, she doesn't mention Douglas Coupland's Microserfs, but then, I can't remember anymore where exactly that's set; it might have been Seattle. And wasn't there a Doug Rushkoff novel set in the Bay Area, though it was about a cybercult rather than a dotcom?

And, hey, if you know any candidates, name them in a comment, won't you?

Continue reading Beware What You Ask For

From Russia With Faint Admiration

Maud found a review of Tom Bissell's Chasing the Sea from the Moscow Times. I've mentioned before how much I enjoyed Bissell's description of his travels through the environmental and political disaster area that is modern Uzbekistan. Michael Bernstein wasn't as wild about it as I was, but still finds it "an informed, subtle and humorous take on a country that for decades has been relegated to the back pages of history."

The review's okay, but I'm more curious about the target audience for an English-language Moscow newspaper that's reviewing books from American publishers...

The Last Time I Dip Into This Well, So Help Me God

Thus, fourteen pages into American Sucker... we are treated to Denby’s brief-but-harrowing addiction to Internet pornography. Denby being Denby, this revelation is naturally accompanied by a disquisition on how Plato, Hegel, and Nietzsche might judge these activities, which is either comically self-important or one of the most ingenious meta-commentaries on masturbation we’ve come across in some time.

Daniel A. Brennan reads American Sucker so you don't have to.

Who's Left to Play the Great Game?

Fred Kaplan's review of the new thrillers by John le Carré and Joseph Finder in last week's Slate, which I only got around to reading today, put me in mind of Charle McGrath's similar piece in the magazine section of last Sunday's Times. (Given the differing lead times at their publications, I don't think anybody cribbed from anybody else, and it's not like the ideas discussed below are so unique that [at least] two people wouldn't have thought of them independently. Hell, you were probably thinking the same thing and just didn't have a column to tell the world about it.)

McGrath's surprised there aren't more thriller writers dealing explicitly with post-9/11 geopolitics; "they're writing instead about corporate espionage and theological cover-ups in the Middle Ages." After considering that maybe it's just a case of not enough time going by for authors to get their bearings, he raises another theory: Many of the best thrillers deal in ambiguity and relativism, but in these times, "we desperately want clarity and understanding, not more suggestions that 'intelligence' is an oxymoron, and we seem to need to believe that our enemies are fundamentally different from ourselves."

Continue reading Who's Left to Play the Great Game?

And Isn't It the Most?

I didn't open the floor to comments in a recent post about writers' stances on Iraq because I feared the political fracas that would ensue. But one reader wrote in to tell me what he would have said, including a very apt quote from Nabokov:

It is hard, I submit, to loathe bloodshed, including war, more than I do, but it is still harder to exceed my loathing of the very nature of totalitarian states in which massacre is only an administrative detail.

That sums up a major plank of the pro-invasion platform pretty effectively, and I can certainly sympathize with it. Although I'd like to be a complete and utter pacifist, I do end up thinking there are times when war is necessary or perhaps even justified. I also believe, though, that you cannot justify war by making a false case for it, and it seems increasingly clear that the Bush administration did so, though whether through outright deception or incompetence or a combination of the two I wouldn't venture to say. But let's steer things back to literature...

Brandywine Books and Our Girl in Chicago both have favorite passages from a Bruce Bawer essay (60K PDF file) in the Hudson Review critiquing an anthology of poets against the war in Iraq as a batch of "smug, trivial verses in which their principal goal is to proclaim their own sensitivity." Here's one of mine:

This book is a riot of first-person singular pronouns; inconsequential autobiographical anecdotes abound ([Sam] Hamill writes in his introduction of the poet's "obligation to assay the human condition from an intensely personal, often subjective perspective"). What few images there are of life in Saddam's Iraq, are idyllic and rich in atmosphere that feels derivative of National Geographic photos: "She rises in the glow of a red sun / to make strong coffee ... She sits / drinking slowly, beneath her lime tree" (Patricia Monogham, "The Woman of Baghdad").

Continue reading And Isn't It the Most?

You've Got Your Mother in a Whirl

The Onion AV Club looks at Sue Carpenter's "Trojan-horsed hipster memoir" 40 Watts from Nowhere, and though they aren't too thrilled with the "and-then-this-happened approach," they do find plenty to like:

...Carpenter's stories capture the joy of spinning tunes for friends and strangers without rules or regulations. She makes her stations sound like a lot of fun, and makes it impossible not to wish there were more of them out there. With luck, she might even inspire someone to do something about it.

Carpenter does have interesting stories to tell about running "pirate radio" stations in San Francisco and Los Angeles, but you've got to endure a lot of whining along the way. She's enamored with the romance of living outside the law, but hates how much it costs and how all her DJs take advantage of her. She's thrilled with being an underground sensation, but annoyed when her notoriety threatens to rise to the level of government attention. That latter contradiction gets particularly tiresome; people who post flyers for their illegal activities in hip Silverlake record stories don't have much room to complain about attention from the press, or the attention from authorities brought about by attention from the press.

A lot of the information Carpenter chooses to share falls under the category of Not Compelling to Anyone But You: Junkie boyfriends, for example, aren't a form of "vicarious liberation," and they certainly aren't "an inadvertent opportunity for me to experience life's seamier aspects without actually participating." (It amazes me that she could say this while living in SF, where they did a pretty thorough job of making even the straight folk AIDS-aware.) They're just junkie boyfriends and they get old fast.

Thankfully, in this case, they disappear pretty quickly, too.

Continue reading You've Got Your Mother in a Whirl

Can Writing Be Taught?

I've been a fan of Tom Bissell since PW asked me to review Chasing the Sea ("The humor and poignancy in this blend of memoir, reportage and history mark the author as a front-runner in the next generation of travel writers"). So I'm happy to report the magazine's website now has his essay from The Believer's December/January issue, "Sir, Permission to Go AWOL From the Interesting, Sir!"

I've always had a love-hate relationship with writing manuals myself, so it's fun to get Bissell's take on them. Two that I've actually found quite helpful are How to Write a Mystery by Larry Beinhart and One Continuous Mistake by Gail Sher.

Scum, Like Cream, Floats to the Top

Janet Maslin previews the forthcoming new era of expanded Times coverage of airport reading by stealing a trick from Anthony Lane (who, sure, probably got it from somewhere else, himself) and reading a whole mess of bestsellers at once--and, oddly enough, the "new" Heinlein. Of course, she pulls it off badly, but then, she is to the Times book review section what Daphne Merkin was to the New Yorker film critics' stable.

Not counting the lazy assertions that people who buy John Grisham or Elmore Leonard would buy a blank book if it had one of their names on the cover (oh, those undiscriminating masses), we get this prize gem concerning the new J.D. Robb:

And even if it unfolds in the midst of household droids and futuristic technology, "Divided in Death" isn't really science fiction.

Sure, and the part about it being set decades from now? That doesn't make it sci-fi, either. It's just a unique thriller, kind of like Fatherland wasn't really an alternate history novel.

At least she points out how Spencer Johnson is trying to repackage his past publishing failures to remarket them to a public who actually gives a rat's ass what he has to say now.

American Sucker, Stay Away From Me

As somebody on some blog somewhere points out, and I wish I could find the original cite, today marks the third time the Times has either reviewed American Sucker or profiled David Denby in the last week and a half. (The other review came last Sunday.) And, amazingly enough, although every single article in the Times concedes Denby went on his stock market adventure as a reaction to the breakup of his marriage, nobody seems to consider it worth mentioning that his wife left him for another woman.

OK, granted Denby doesn't confront the issue directly in his first chapter, noting only that "she had mysteriously changed in her affections. Not just in her affections. She had changed in her being, and she was no longer whole, she was broken, and I was not the one to fix what was wrong."

But it's not like they don't know who she is. Because they do. And she herself has mentioned the "change in her being" (albeit in passing) in The New Yorker. So why not at least mention it, if only as obliquely as Denby himself does?

I suppose you could argue that the matter is only of tangential relevance to Denby's chronicle of his own mental state and the misadventures it led him into, but it seems, at least from the excerpt I've read, that the specific nature of his marriage's dissolution might have had some influence on his frame of mind and that acknowledging the possibility isn't necessarily an invasion of privacy, since she's not in the closet about her choice. And then it strikes me as funny that the Times is ready to lavish heaps of attention on a guy "brave enough" to admit his failings as an investor; in the dotcom bust, losing money on the stock market hardly makes you special. While at the same time they help, consciously or unconsciously, distract readers from aspects of his story that are much more unique--and thus not without some potential interest.

Next Up, Elvis Mitchell & Andy Klein
Discuss the New Jonathan Rosenbaum

Slate invites its regular film critic, David Edelstein, to become A.O. Scott's pen pal as they discuss two new books, The Dream Life by J Hoberman and Down and Dirty Pictures, which take on '60s cinema and the rise of indie film, respectively. And, as usual with the Slate book club, they'll be appearing all week. Let's see if things get as hot as they did during the movie club's year in review, in which Hoberman himself took part (along with Mahnolia Dargis and Sarah Kerr).

Continue reading Next Up, Elvis Mitchell & Andy Klein
Discuss the New Jonathan Rosenbaum

Recent Arrivals

A while back, PW had me review Keystone, a biography of early film comedy star/producer Mack Sennett by Simon Louvish that, partly because of the paucity of data on Louvish and partly because of Keystone's prominence as a studio during its peak years, includes informaton on a slew of other early film legends. But, I warned, "although Louvish regards all his sources, from celebrity memoirs to fawning magazine articles, with healthy skepticism, he appears to have been seduced by their florid style. 'Murky shadows gathered in the sunny glades where the movie people had frolicked in their make-believe innocence in never-never land' is a typical example," an undercutting distraction from the strong historical research on display. If you're already familiar with, say, the Fatty Arbuckle story or the murder of William Desmond Taylor, a lot of this may be old hat, but I was engaged by the story of Keystone as a precursor to the golden age of the powerful film studios.

I also got my finished copy of Join Me, the story of a Brit slacker who launched his own cult of personality online and watched it spin out of control all over Europe, all the while trying to keep his girlfriend from figuring out what he's gone and done. "The story's pretty silly," I admitted, "and Wallace's plan is strongly reminiscent of the theme of Pay It Forward (which he acknowledges), so he lets readers in on the joke right away, dragging them into his confidence." And you know what? It works. Now Americans can get in on the fun.

Imperial Roundup

Joshua Micah Marshall, the Talking Points Memo blogger, writes in the New Yorker about recent books on the prospect of American Empire, both for it (David Frum & Richard Perle) and against (Chalmers Johnson). He also mentions last year's Niall Ferguson, Empire (get the digested read), but not the upcoming Colossus, which makes the comparisons of previous empires to current American events explicit.

Just Call Me "The Ned Flanders of..."
(oh, never mind)

Andrew Sullivan reviews Irshad Manji's The Trouble With Islam in this week's NYTBR with, one suspects, exactly the sort of mix between serious issues and light tone the Times overlords would like to spread throughout the system, like the description of the self-styled "Muslim refusenik" as "the Lisa Simpson of Islam."

I actually attended the first stop on her U.S. book tour at Coliseum about two weeks ago, and came away mostly impressed; the television presenter aspects of her speaking style, like the cheerful tone that never wavers whether agreeing or disagreeing, became a minor annoyance after a while, but it's hard not to be convinced by her enthusiasm about spiritual matters or her call for fellow Muslims to take a more active, thinking role in shaping their religion and its professed values.

Continue reading Just Call Me "The Ned Flanders of..."
(oh, never mind)

Natalie Wood: A Life

Scott Eyman reviews Gavin Lambert's biography of Natalie Wood for the New York Observer, and, when you subtract the penchant for phrases like "the bisexual, addictive personality who went by the name of Nicholas Ray," effectively argues for Wood's significance as one of the last of the studio-made stars though "without ever earning the bona fides of a major actress."

But opinions on her skills vary; last week, in the Times, Stephanie Zacharek played up Lambert's elaboration on how Wood's talent demonstrated itself on screen and his close relationship with his subject. "The consideration Lambert accords Wood isn't just good taste or cautious discretion on his part," she commented, "it's a case of his having a brain, a critical sensibility, and using it." (Eyman also believes Lambert's "most valuable quality as a biographer—aside from an unforced but erudite style—is empathy" with his subject.)

Meanwhile, at the WaPo, Carolyn See starts out by leaning strong on the personal connection between Lambert and Wood, wondering aloud if his novel Inside Daisy Clover is about her. (She also calls it "one of the two best novels about Hollywood," without telling us what the other one is, dammit!) Then she compares Lambert's book to another bio that came out nearly three years ago, ultimately deeming it "more sophisticated," skims the surface of the actress' life, and veers off into recalling an interview she conducted with Wood years ago before finally issuing a more emphatic recommendation.

Continue reading Natalie Wood: A Life

This Could Be a Fun Parlor Game, Too

Thanks to Arts & Letters Daily for the link to this Chronicle of Higher Education report on Hesperus Press, which focuses its attention on the minor works of major writers. If you go to the publisher's website itself, they seem to frame it more as shorter, significant works that could serve as introductions to these authors, but would you introduce somebody to Mark Twain via Diary of Adam and Eve rather than Huckleberry Finn? Not that Diary isn't great, because it is, just that it's more like a way to discover a facet of Twain rather than Twain himself. (They also have Tom Sawyer, Detective, which gets a bad rap, though I seem to recall liking well enough when I was 10.)

Still, just a quick browse through the catalog reveals a lot of stuff I'd like to check out--hell, I'd never even heard of Machiavelli's Life of Castruccio Castracani before--so all in all I suspect Hesperus is on the right track. Let's see if I can get on their review list!

Continue reading This Could Be a Fun Parlor Game, Too

Warning: Litcrit Jargon Ahead

Frederic Jameson, one of the titans of postmodern theory, weighs in on William Gibson's shift from the near future of cyberspace to the present, Pattern Recognition, for the New Left Review. Your enjoyment of the article will be directly proportional to your tolerance for sentences like, "In any case, the representational apparatus of Science Fiction, having gone through innumerable generations of technological development and well-nigh viral mutation since the onset of that movement, is sending back more reliable information about the contemporary world than an exhausted realism (or an exhausted modernism either)."

There's a cute idea about eBay as the 21st century collective unconscious, but I don't agree that Gibson's "hped-up name-dropping" is necessarily that radical or noteworthy; he just happens to add a little more edginess to a trope Bret Easton Ellis pretty well ran into the ground and which Mark Leyner parodied quite effectively. (Actually, when Glamorama came out, I remarked quite loudly that Ellis' prose was turning into a [bad] imitation of the early '90s "Team Leyner" style.) And the two-paragraph aside about Bruce Sterling actually reads better than what Jameson has to say about Gibson.

Continue reading Warning: Litcrit Jargon Ahead

Some might say, "Well, duh."

Patti Thorn and Marty Meitus at the Rocky Mountain News discover bestselling women novelists of the 1970s are losing their touch as they sift through new books by Colleen McCullough, Belva Plain, and Barbara Taylor Bradford. (Although, in all fairness, I should point out that my experience to this triumvirate is limited to the first couple chapters of The Thorn Birds shortly after the miniseries first aired. When it comes to multigenerational family sagas, my tastes were formed by Frank Herbert, I'm afraid.)

Colin Farrell as an Italian-American?

Stephen Cooper, who edited The John Fante Reader (available in paperback from Ecco) and also wrote the Fante biography, Full of Life, about which Book magazine had this to say, which I bring up any time anyone ever mentions Fante in my presence, and which anybody who wants to learn what it was like for writers to be down and out in Los Angeles should find a copy of and read right now, wrote to let me know things are moving forward with Robert Towne's film version of Fante's most famous (and, to many, best) novel, Ask the Dust. Towne will be writing and directing (for the first time since Without Limits, the "other" Prefontaine biopic), with Colin Farrell as Fante's literary alter ego Arturo Bandini. Also starring Selma Hayek and Donald Sutherland. This somewhat condescending review of the Reader at least includes a powerful excerpt from the novel that displays Fante's ability to shock readers awake; here's a less combative take from the AV Club at the Onion.

This is actually the British cover to the biography, but I like it better than either of the American covers and, frankly, it might be the easiest version to get hold of if you're looking to buy right now, and you really should. But don't forget to try your public libraries!

I didn't put Rising Up and Rising Down on my holiday list, because I knew I wasn't going to be able to convince anybody to spend $120 on a 7-volume treatise on whether the means of violence can ever be justified by the means. Not to mention the odd looks I knew I'd get.

But I'm a huge fan of William T. Vollmann, and I'll be saving up my own hard-earned money for this, even if I can't imagine finding the time to read it for some months to come...