D
(The Armory, July 2008)

Cake is a smart, speedy little bomb of noir fiction by a writer whose nom de plume is simply “D.” This slim novella is the latest offering from a new “street-lit” imprint called The Armory, from edgy Brooklyn house Akashic, and if you detect a whiff of coded language in the term “street-lit,” then you won’t be surprised to find that Cake is the unapologetic story of a young black drug dealer and a week in his violent world.

The anonymous narrator has fled to Atlanta after a murderous drug deal gone wrong flushes him out of Brooklyn, and despite half-hearted efforts to go straight, he inevitably gets caught up in the same hustle. When the narrator’s bungling cousin skips town, he is left holding the bag on a small-time drug operation that quickly escalates into a gang war. The maneuvering of the rival factions is relatively conventional crime-thriller stuff, but D’s descriptions of the atmosphere — the hopped-up cars, strip clubs, seedy apartments and motel parking lots — are quick and vivid. The dialogue sounds, to a bookish middle-class white man at least, authentically clipped and slangy. When the book accelerates toward its violent denouement and a final, jarring twist, there is no denying that D has mastered the tightly plotted structure of the genre.

The only criticism one could make of this mayhem-filled book is that, paradoxically, it perhaps doesn’t go quite far enough into the darkness at its heart. For all his badass hip-hop bravado, D retains an old-fashioned Raymond Chandler sense of character: he is very careful to preserve the moral center of his hero, who gets involved against his better judgment out of loyalty, and who never kills unless he has to. It would be hard to say for sure, but I suspect that a true gangster would be ugly on the inside and out, and no better than his surroundings. Whether this represents a failure of fictional nerve is hard to say. What we can say is that Cake updates the crime thriller with juice and grit to spare.

From The L Magazine (October 15-21, 2008)

Paul Auster
(Henry Holt, August 2008)

In Paul Auster’s inventive new novel Man in the Dark, an aging writer named August Brill narrates stories over the course of a single long night to keep his mind off a devastating series of recent family tragedies; near dawn, his granddaughter joins him for an intimate pre-dawn conversation. In the hands of a less gifted writer this would be barely a short story, yet upon this slender armature Auster hangs a tale that incorporates magic realism, science fiction, Kierkegaardian dread, postmodern metafiction, and a burning evocation of the terrors and dislocations of war.

The strongest part of the book is the story-within-a-story that the insomnia-wracked Brill makes up on the fly, a Vonnegutian whopper about a man who is transplanted to a parallel reality where the United States is mired in a brutal civil war. The crabwise relation between story and creator—a familiar theme for Auster, beautifully handled here—invests the episode with a dreamlike anti-logic that recalls Flann O’Brien. The adventures of Brill’s creation (tellingly, a magician named Brick) tap the primal power of one of the most enduring scenarios in science fiction: that of the outsider suddenly transplanted to an alien world. Brick’s bizarre experience in this alternate America mirrors the strangeness of post-9/11 life without slopping over into the didactic or obvious: Auster leaves the reader to register his own emotional response to this peculiar fable. Unfortunately, Brill grows tired of his jeu d’esprit and abruptly truncates it, returning to the obsessive plumbing of his grief.

When Brill is joined near the end of his restless night by his granddaughter Katya, equally shattered and adrift, he relates the story of his courtship and long marriage to his recently deceased wife in a sustained gulp of anguished reminiscence. Katya responds with some deep secrets of her own, and despite some tinny dialogue (“Why is life so horrible, Grandpa?” “Because it is, that’s all. It just is.”), the cross-generational connection between these two damaged souls is both odd and touching. Man in the Dark’s sole glimpse of surcease comes in the halting reassurances the two offer each other.

Although Auster’s prose is precise and burnished, at the heart of August Brill’s meditations lies a self-absorption and petulance that eventually feels weary and circular. Brill’s mind is a claustrophobic place, and no amount of mental games and allusions can fully open it up—readers can be forgiven if they occasionally wish that the guy would just fall asleep, already. More to the point, the horrific tragedies he has endured do not necessarily make his pain feel earned, and Auster’s inclusion of several unrelated vignettes of catastrophe, riot, and war feels like piling on. Still, this somber, elegant book, rife with nuances and subtle echoes, crisscrosses the line between memory and loss, reaches for the profound, and very nearly finds it.

From Rain Taxi, Fall 2008, Volume 13, No. 3

Louis P. Masur
(Bloomsbury, April 2008)

I had never seen the photograph that is the subject of Louis Masur’s The Soiling of Old Glory: the Story of a Photograph That Shocked America, but I recognized it immediately, viscerally, on some unconscious level. Boston: that photo was taken in Boston. Although I moved there some fifteen years after Stanley Forman’s Pulitzer-winning photograph put an indelible face on the fury and racism of the anti-busing riots, I felt that it was part of my inheritance, part of the air that pooled, fog-like, in hot summer nights of my adopted, and adoptive, hometown.

I knew people in South Boston, where, Masur quotes Forman as saying, “I was shit.” Not well; but an Irish family-owned press printed the jackets for the books my company published. I would go down there, and we would stand on the press floor, looking at proofs, and then they would take me for drinks in places where the sense of shared community was palpable. They were honest, kind, patient. They weren’t racists. They didn’t go around beating unarmed black lawyers with flagpoles. You can say I was naïve; I was. The men I drank with in Southie might have known Joseph Rakes, the flag-wielding image of bigotry run amok.

Louis Masur understands this. The Soiling of Old Glory is a good book, scattered and over reaching at times, but genuinely nuanced about Boston’s messy history, and legitimately insightful about the nature of mass-disseminated visual imagery, its power to shape perceptions and change lives. Its power to make us see, and to remember.

From The Brooklyn Rail (April 2008)

Chris Martin
(Copper Canyon, 2007)

With this lively debut collection Chris Martin establishes himself as a young poet with an arresting voice. American Music is a series of light-stepping meditations on city life that manage to be both profound and playful, with an unpretentious freshness that sets it apart from the usual hipster-in-the-city banalities.

Like all true New Yorkers, Martin comes from somewhere else — in his case, Colorado Springs by way of St. Paul — and like many before him, he finds New York City a fecund source of inspiration and wonder. Martin’s most immediately identifiable literary predecessor would be the Frank O’Hara of the City Poems era. As in O’Hara, the narrative content of the poems is aggressively unremarkable: the poet is saddened by the animals during a visit to the zoo, distracted by interloping teenagers during a Chelsea gallery jaunt, and excited by pretty girls, it seems, almost everywhere — but it is Martin’s unlikely perceptions and inventive language, the effortless leap from the specific detail to the universal truth, that transcends the quotidian details. On the subway “every winking turn traps / You into thinking that life / Is a meticulous plot dimly allotted / To you alone”; a wrong number “Has not stopped / Me from feeling a consequent / Note among many.” The blur of happenstance and sensory overkill becomes the raw material of verse.

Stylistically, the author has found a form that is both distinctive and austere, as all the poems consist of fourteen to twenty-six unrhymed tercets, ending with a single long line. It’s a good armature, simple and flexible: the tercets are rhythmically supple, and the closing line, as with a sonnet, gives each poem a pleasing note of finality or of questioning. It takes admirable discipline for the author to stick with this one form for the duration of a full-length book, but such restraint gives the verse an organic transparency — an uncluttered directness of expression — and the volume benefits from its smooth uniformity of form and internal consistency.

The true appeal of these poems is located in the way the observation of gritty realities can serve as a springboard for abstract and metaphyscial considerations that would not be out of place in the work of Wallace Stevens. In “I Am No Proprioceptivist,” for example, the sight of a man pissing into a trash can leads the poet to contemplate how “to be a thing / That is, that organizes other / Things into its own harmony / Or discord…” Martin has a well-tuned ear and a sprightly wit, and the poems’ compactness and conversational vernacular allow them to wear their philosophical underpinnings and occasionally slightly-daft speculations very lightly indeed. American Music is a superior piece of writing, and Chris Martin is a welcome addition to the ever-expanding roster of contemporary poets.

From Rain Taxi (Vol. 13 No. 1 Spring 2008)

Richard Price
(Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2008)

Richard Price’s novel Lush Life is a messy brawl of a crime story; diffuse, overlong, ambiguous and vexing, the book is, in short, a perfect fictional mirror for contemporary New York City. Price’s story deals with the fallout of a random murder on the Lower East Side: Two young black men from the nearby projects attempt a stickup of three barhopping hipsters, which goes awry when one of the victims resists in a burst of misplaced bravado. The ensuing investigation blows a huge hole in the lives of everyone involved, from cops to families to friends to assailants.

The first third of the book, dealing with the murder and its immediate aftermath, is a tight and exhilarating piece of writing. When the leads fizzle and the investigation stalls, however, the narrative loses some of its momentum as police, witnesses and suspects settle in for an enervating waiting game. Price is a canny and observant writer — his dialogue snaps and snarls with the profane rhythms of everyday speech — and he has a pitiless sense of social geography. One sequence in particular, a depiction of a vigil organized by the dead boy’s friend, is such a cruelly accurate portrayal of the fatuousness of the young bohemians invading the neighborhood that one doesn’t know whether to laugh or cringe. Price, whose most recent busman’s holiday was scriptwriting for The Wire, has a nose for the inner workings of urban life: fiction verité at its finest.

What makes Lush Life so potent a read, despite its flaws, is that it upends the tidy certainties of most crime fiction, substituting a more real and jaggedly uncertain narrative. The cops on the case are hamstrung by bureaucratic inertia; the murdered boy’s father is deranged with grief; the survivor is unhinged by guilt and resentment; and the man who pulled the trigger is not some evil psychopath but a numb, confused kid. The book’s ending implies a nearly classical fatalism about the relentless cycling of history, personal and urban. As in life, tragedies explode and fade, lives crumble and renew, and the city moves on.

From The L Magazine (March 26-April 8, 2008)

Eli Gottlieb
(William Morrow, 2008)

This canny potboiler about the shock waves of an unexpected death has its creaky moments, but on the whole it is a piercing evocation of the enervation and essential loneliness of domestic life. Nick Framingham is a plodding, small-town, middle-management type whose friendship with Rob Castor, a Jay McInerney-like literary prodigy, has provided him with vicarious thrills since childhood. Rob’s sudden reappearance in Nick’s life sets off a landslide of recrimination that gradually accumulates the sinister momentum of a nightmare.

In its structure and tone, Now You See Him at times echoes Donna Tartt’s The Secret History—not a lucky comparison for most novels—but Gottlieb’s talent is for unmasking the fatal chinks in lives glamorous and humdrum alike. Nick’s self-absorption and limited powers of observation are the linchpins of his demise, yet Gottlieb’s characterization is almost entirely without the self-pity that mars many such first-person constructs. The homoerotic subtext of the relationship between the novel’s protagonist and his shadowy counterpart would have benefited from a more daring exposition, and at times the novel’s mechanics stretch credibility. Those criticisms aside, however, Now You See Him builds an absorbing and even tender narrative out of a sordid web of disaster.

From The Brooklyn Rail (March 2008)

Nell Freudenberger
Harper Perennial, September 2007

Nell Freudenberger’s career to date reads like a novel in itself, with her Harvard education, slinky good looks, New Yorker publication, famous literary agent, and mentions in Vogue and Elle. It is a letdown, of sorts, to find that her debut novel is such a banal affair. The Dissident tells the story of Yuan Zhao, an exiled Chinese artist who comes to live with the Traverses, a Southern Californian family that is a Woody Allen-style parody of shallow Beverly Hills life. The dramatis personae include an absent-minded writer father, a sexually unsatisfied homemaker mother, two surly teens, and a Chinese-American student who — surprise! — is authentically talented. Hijinks ensue, secrets are revealed, lessons are learned, etc.

This is, to put it mildly, well-trodden territory. To be fair, Freudenberger is a crisp stylist, and she effortlessly captures the tics and mannerisms of these feckless Californians, as observed by the bemused Yuan in his role as cultural ambassador. Freudenberger’s observational powers and way with a phrase only go so far, however, and as pleasant and absorbing as it is, The Dissident imparts no impact: it practically evaporates upon completion.

From The Brooklyn Rail (November 2007)

Twenty Thousand Roads: The Ballad of Gram Parsons And His Cosmic American Music
by David N. Meyer
(Villard)

It took Gram Parsons just over six years to change the face of American music. Parsons brought fresh force to country tradition with the International Submarine Band, remade the Byrds in his own image on the classic Sweetheart Of The Rodeo, founded the Flying Burrito Brothers, and recorded two solo albums of aching beauty, all before his death in 1973.

Along the way, he taught the Rolling Stones about country music, discovered Emmylou Harris singing in a nightclub in Washington D. C., wrote a handful of songs — “Sin City”, “Hickory Wind”, “Brass Buttons” — that stand as classics of down-home American soul, and, by all accounts, ingested more alcohol, cocaine, and heroin than seems possible. It would be hard to overstate his influence on country, alt-country, Americana, roots music, and all their permutations.

Despite his towering legacy, the most complete biography Parsons has received until now is Ben Fong-Torres’s well-intentioned but slapdash Hickory Wind (1991). Fong-Torres has a keen sense of Parsons’s music, but he scrambles to keep track of the myriad musicians and scenesters who moved in Parsons’s orbit, and his narrative feels choppy and rushed. With Twenty Thousand Roads, Parsons has finally received a book equal to his musical accomplishments and outsized personality. David N. Meyer’s biography is an exceptional piece of research and writing, lucid and penetrating about the music, fair-minded yet tough about Parsons’s shortcomings and wasted potential. Meyer has tracked down and interviewed hundreds of Parsons’s associates, some of whom have never spoken on the record before, and his synthesis of these sources is fluid and absorbing.

Meyer has gone farther than anyone else in understanding the roots of Parsons’s self-destructive tendencies, tracing them to his upbringing in a rich Southern family haunted by suicide and alcoholism. He also debunks many of the myths that have grown up around Parsons, and provides as objective an account of Parsons’s doomed last night at the Joshua Tree Inn and its notorious aftermath as we will ever have.

For the most part, Meyer’s analysis of Parsons’s music is articulate and perceptive, with the exception of his dismissal of the Fallen Angels, the pickup band that toured with Parsons in 1973 (Meyer faults drummer N. D. Smart for his inability “to play anything other than a 4/4 shuffle,” even though Smart’s drumming on the waltz-time “Drug Store Truck Drivin’ Man” is sprightly and swinging).

Meyer’s book is otherwise especially illuminating about the technical aspects of the music Gram made his own, whether explaining the difference between Nashville and Bakersfield country or discussing the intricacies of pedal-steel guitar playing. As a bonus, the book includes a comprehensive and often droll (Keith Richards is identified as “the only man who can play a Chuck Berry song worse than Chuck Berry”) encyclopedia of Parsons’ contemporaries.

The true strength of Twenty Thousand Roads, however, is its insight into how Parsons’s demons and excesses were inextricably linked to the greatness of his music. Meyer is clear-eyed and occasionally brutal about Parsons’ drug use, wobbly work ethic, and callow self-absorption, but he refuses to romanticize his subject’s excesses or exploit them for prurient effect. In the end, Meyer’s book betrays a deep sense of sadness over what could have been. That sadness is part of what made Gram Parsons’s music so moving. It is also part of what killed him.

From NO DEPRESSION, Issue #72 November 2007

Dorothea Dieckmann [Trans. Tim Mohr]
Soft Skull Press

To most Americans, the name Guantanamo is convenient shorthand for the excesses of the so-called War On Terror. No one who reads Dorothea Dieckmann’s lacerating novel, however, will ever again have the comfort of thinking of the infamous prison in abstract terms.

Guantanamo: A Novel is an unforgiving read. Dieckmann, a German novelist and critic, takes as her protagonist a young tourist named Rashid and drops him without exposition into a nightmarish series of torture and beatings. The effect, in the hands of her calm, precise, lyrical prose, is disorienting and scouringly brutal. Only through a series of hallucinatory flashbacks does the reader learn how cruelly arbitrary Rashid’s fate is.

Judging Dieckmann’s novel, which is well-served by Tim Mohr’s extraordinarily nuanced translation, is a question of literary prejudice. The book is beautifully written and clearly serves a moral purpose; at the same time, reading it is a grim and joyless experience. Ironically, perhaps only a European could provide such an enervating account of the fallout of America’s national obsession.

From The L Magazine

From American Book Review, v 28 #5, July 2007

Why another poetry anthology? The question hangs over the inaugural issue of Zoland Poetry, a new annual from New Hampshire independent house Steerforth Press, like a tacit rebuke. Bookstore poetry sections are clotted with anthologies of every stripe, and the market for poetry being presumably a zero-sum game, the advent of another entry into the tightly-packed shelves bears the weight of self-justification. Any modestly attentive and industrious reader of poetry, a rare enough creature to begin with, must sometimes feel the urge to throw her hands in the air and flee to the relative safety of the thrillers.

Happily, Zoland Poetry stands a much better than average chance of luring her back. What the inaugural issue lacks in focus and consistency it more than makes up for with a determined catholicity of taste and a quirky, cheerfully inclusive sensibility. Editor Roland Pease has assembled a roster of poets whose provenances range from Iceland to Persia and whose prosodies run from austere haiku-like meditations to feral free-verse explosions. If Pease’s selections indicate a lack of a strongly coherent vision, it is in the service of experimentation and openness, qualities lacking in many contemporary anthologies.

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