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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If it is true that tragedy can fuel great art, then there would seem to be no bigger engine for contemporary fiction than September 11, 2001. By any measure, 9/11 is the defining event of our time, and any picture of our society is incomplete without it. Yet the writing that immediately followed the attacks seemed unwilling to address the tragedy head-on.

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The Downtown Book: The New York Art Scene 1974 – 1984
edited by Marvin J. Taylor
Princeton University Press ($35)

It is always both startling and inevitable when yesterday’s avant-garde inexorably turns into today’s orthodoxy. Samuel Johnson famously estimated that the passage of a century’s time was prerequisite to an objective evaluation of a work’s reputation. The acceleration of culture aside, by Dr. Johnson’s formulation The Downtown Book arrives 80 years early, yet much of the art and music it covers already seems as distant and displaced as a sepia-toned daguerreotype.

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Jim Feast’s novel Neo Phobe, written with Ron Kolm, is a shaggy monster of a book, redolent of meta-narrative and deconstructionism and word and mind games reminiscient of the the ‘70s heyday of Donald Barthelme and Tom Robbins.

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“Rock writing.” It’s an oxymoron, isn’t it? Rock is noisy, profane, communal; writing is silent, contemplative, and solitary. Writing about music, Elvis Costello once said, is like dancing about architecture. A good Costellian witticism — he has a point — but I doubt even he really believes it. Reading and writing are how we make sense of our experience, and …

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As a longtime admirer of Chuck Klosterman’s writing on pop music and culture, it pains me to report that his latest book, Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story, is a dismal, shoddy piece of work. The premise is promising: Klosterman sets out on a cross-country road trip to visit all of the sites of rock ’n’ roll’s long, rich history of death. It seems a brilliant idea — Klosterman’s combination of irreverence and curiosity make him the perfect candidate to unseat the holy-pilgrimage seriousness (and pathos) of most writing on rock ’n’ roll tragedy.

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“What can you play now that’ll have me in tears and screaming for more?” Brendan Benson asks his lover in ‘Them and Me.’ The Detroit native’s new album The Alternative to Love is not quite the answer to that question, but it’s damn good. The disc kicks off with ‘Spit It Out,’ a first-rate piece of car-and-beach power-pop, and then embarks on an album-length catalogue of rock styles. Benson obviously has a fan’s appreciation for the whole sweep of rock’n’roll; ‘The Pledge’ is a Ronettes knock-off, complete with echoey drums and bells, and other songs feature a 70s double-tracked guitar line here, a bit of spaghetti western wobble there… there’s even a theremin! The result falls just barely on the good side of the line between affectionate homage and kitsch.

Benson has a pleasant, reasonably expressive voice, and his musicianship — he plays all the instruments on the album — is deft and capable. The thing is, there are about a million guys like Brendan Benson out there — shaggy, tuneful indie-rock dudes who can turn a phrase — which is neither a reason to buy this album or not to. He has had a longer road than many, perhaps — his 1996 debut was buried by Virgin during the waning days of grunge — so The Alternative to Love’s razor-sharp pop-rock with a twist comes as handy payback.

from The L Magazine