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.

(more…)

This scabrous detective yarn is the straight-fiction debut of Warren Ellis, better known as the creator of the Transmetroplitan graphic novels. The whacked-out sensibility that characterized Transmetroplitan survives the transition to prose, but without the supercharged imagery, the narrative comes across as slapdash and juvenile. Crooked Little Vein relates the cross-country adventures of down-and-out private eye Mike McGill and his feisty sidekick Trix, with the plot functioning almost exclusively as a device for introducing a staggering procession of perverts and fetishists. Ellis may be after dark, shocking affects, but the action is so peppy that any sting is neutered. Crooked has some fun with the conventions of the gumshoe novel, and floats a half-baked sub-theory about the cultural mainstreaming of the deviant, but on the whole remains single-mindedly shallow. After a while, you get tired of waiting for the next gross-out, although the relationship between Mike and Trix eventually betrays a hint of sweetness and mutual need. It’s an amusing ride, but hardly a major accomplishment.

from The L Magazine

This overtly poetic Midwestern Gothic has a rhythm and pull that carries it through its sometimes overwrought stylings. Jason “Coleman” Moore is an itinerant jazz guitarist and sometimes-sailor whose alcohol-soaked life is haunted by the ghosts of his domineering forbears and by fraught relationships with his daughter, his former lover, his ex-wife, and his musical soul-mate and partner. Moving backward and forward through time and place, between Detroit in 1932 to present-day Lake Huron, Of Song and Water is a convincing if static portrait of loss and regret. more »

(published in KGBBarLit, Winter 2007)

The protagonist of Michael Lowenthal’s engaging novel Charity Girl is one of the 50,000 women spuriously imprisoned by the U.S. Government during WWI. This sounds like a dull premise, but what bubbles up through the setup is a spirited, sexy romp through a Boston in the grip of war fever. Frieda Mintz, a 17-year-old Jewish shopgirl, likes fast cars, handsome young officers, dances, drinking, and the Red Sox; her resistance to parental authority and independent spirit mark her as something of a proto-feminist. The details of her arrest and exile to a women’s labor house have obvious parallels to the suspension of civil rights post-9/11, but Lowenthal wisely chooses not to force a political message onto his narrative. The period setting is vividly rendered without the overabundance of superfluous detail that makes so much historical fiction headache-inducing. What stays with the reader from Charity Girl is Frieda Mintz and her thirst for life.

from The L Magazine

The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and the American Voice
by Greil Marcus
Farrar, Straus & Giroux ($25)

This diffuse, frustrating, and occasionally brilliant book continues in the vein of cultural criticism that Greil Marcus has made his own over the last thirty years. Starting in 1975 with the now-classic Mystery Train, Marcus has spent his entire career working variations on one fairly simple idea: that the story of American culture, its central truths, are communicated in diverse, sometimes public, sometimes private ways. By finding common ground in the voices that speak from the margins of art and society, he hopes to uncover truths that are inaccessible to the mainstream.

The Shape of Things to Come brings the same strategy to a different set of voices. Marcus’s themes tend to resist compression, but the organizing principle here is the delineation of a peculiarly and identifiably American voice that speaks in the Puritan tradition of prophecy–not as a prediction of future events, but as an apocalyptic expression of the sometimes contradictory promises the nation has made to itself.

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