September 5, 2014

“Perfidia” by James Ellroy

Reviewed by Mark Lindquist
Special to the Seattle Times

James Ellroy can be ornery. “I hate hipsters, I hate liberals, I hate rock ’n’ rollers, I hate the counterculture, I hate movie people,” he said in an interview promoting his new novel, “Perfidia.” He also hates Presidents Clinton and Obama and has no use for the modern world.

Ellroy’s mother was murdered in Los Angeles when Ellroy was 10. The case was unsolved. “The Black Dahlia,” the first novel in Ellroy’s LA Quartet, was based on the unsolved murder of Elizabeth Short, which bore some similarities to the murder of Ellroy’s mother. Short’s body was found in an abandoned lot, mutilated, severed in half and posed. The press went crazy. Ellroy blended the facts of the case with fictional police officers and his own theories, which resulted in his 1987 breakout novel.

Three more novels completed Ellroy’s LA Quartet: “The Big Nowhere,” “LA Confidential” and “White Jazz.” Two of the books — “The Black Dahlia” and “LA Confidential” — were made into movies, and Ellroy became a literary celebrity of sorts. He followed the LA Quartet with The Underworld Trilogy: “American Tabloid,” “The Cold Six Thousand” and “Blood’s a Rover.” Writing about crime, corruption, greed, lust, brutality, drugs, madness and all the dark corners of the human psyche, Ellroy commingles fictional characters and incidents with historical characters and incidents, creating a weird pastiche of American life. 

His style, like his subject matter, is occasionally coarse.

“Perfidia” is a prequel to the LA Quartet and the Underworld Trilogy. Ellroy introduces us to younger versions of the characters who made him famous. Your appreciation of Ellroy’s unabashed attempt at the Great American Novel will depend, in part, on your familiarity with his oeuvre. I’ve read three of the seven books “Perfidia” riffs on and felt I was missing some pieces.

Still, the book is a compelling puzzle.

On the eve of the attack on Pearl Harbor, a Japanese-American family is found dead. Either they committed a ritualistic suicide, or they were murdered. Los Angeles Police Department Police Chief William H. Parker from “LA Confidential,” who was the actual police chief of the LAPD from 1950 until 1966, appears as Captain William H. Parker and oversees the investigation. Hideo Ashida, a police chemist, and the only Japanese-American employee of LAPD, is assigned to work the case.

Kay Lake, from “The Black Dahlia,” appears as a 21-year-old adventuress learning her way around LA. “I wanted to run away to Los Angeles and become someone else there … I was equal parts innocence and lunatic grit.” Kay’s chapters, written in first-person diary form, were among the most engaging for me, illuminating the motives and desires of the men who are intertwined by the investigation.

Beginning on Dec. 6, 1941, and unfolding in 23 days of real-time narration, “Perfidia” is a murder mystery, a subversive historical novel, and a dark meditation on power, politics, race and justice.

Perfidia, a Spanish word meaning treachery or betrayal, is the title of a song from the big-band era. Ellroy used the song in “The Black Dahlia,” and it obviously still speaks to him. With “Perfidia,” he repeatedly returns to the scene of the crime.

August 3, 2014 

“Whiskey Tango Foxtrot” by David Shafer 

Reviewed by Mark Lindquist
Special to The Seattle Times

Literary fiction rarely seems edgy or even fun these days. One theory is that most of the smart, ambitious and talented writers started migrating to movies and television back in the 1980s.

Go west, young one.

David Shafer, author of “WTF,” missed the wagon train. We are lucky he did. His inventive, comic, dystopian semi-thriller restored my faith in fiction. Remember the TV show “Thirtysomething”? Shafer undoubtedly does. His novel is 30-somethings on pot, dosed with computers and conspiracy theories, zinging with wit and pop culture savvy.

His leading 30-somethings, Leo, Leila, and Mark, are brought together in an effort to oppose the Committee, a corporate cabal seeking to privatize and possess all the information in the world. Leo is a substance abuser with a trust fund, Leila is a former idealist working for an international nonprofit, and Mark is a best-selling and self-loathing self-help author.

Leila is recruited by the opposition, and she helps recruit Leo, who in turns helps with Mark. Leo and Mark are estranged friends from college. After Mark’s book, “Bringing the Inside Out,” became wildly successful, Mark ignored Leo. The book, “pretty basic stuff about how you’re never going to be certain, and there are too many variables to control for, and that probably the work of life is all about balancing,” deeply annoyed Leo.

James Straw, however, the master of the cabal, sees it as a motivational bible. He wants Mark to work for him as “Storyteller-in-Chief.” Straw offers Mark money and luxury. The equally shadowy opposition offers Mark, Leo and Leila “a chance to be part of something grander” than themselves.

Shafer’s writing is hip, wickedly hilarious, cutting edge, and ultimately concerned with old-fashioned notions of morality and redemption. He both mocks and adopts Mark’s counsel, “Build the world you want to be a part of.”

January 16, 2009

“This One is Mine” by Maria Semple

Reviewed by Mark Lindquist
Special to the Seattle Times

Maria Semple has lived in Los Angeles and written for television shows, including “Arrested Development,” “Mad About You” and “Ellen.” According to publicity materials, she recently “escaped” L.A. and now lives with her family on “a little island off of Seattle.”

After reading “This One is Mine” (Little, Brown and Company, 400 pages, $26.99), Semple’s first novel, you will understand why. With Joan Didion’s eye for the bleak, Nathanael West’s ear for the desperate and her own taste for the comic, Semple has penned a scathing vision of show business in a repellent La-La Land.

Her heroine, Violet Parry, appears to have the life she wanted and worked for: she’s an Emmy-winning television writer married to a fabulously successful band manager. She has a child, a nanny and a dog walker. Her husband fell in love with her because, among other things, she was “an artsy chick who read the business section.”

She gave up her career to raise children after she started identifying with the ’80s T-shirt emblazoned with the Lichtenstein-like woman “who realizes, to her horror, OH, NO, I FORGOT TO HAVE CHILDREN.” After a few years as a mommy, Violet imagines there ought to be a follow-up T-shirt, one where the woman “is finally cradling her prized baby,” but the thought bubble now reads, “IT’S ALL ADDING UP TO NOTHING.”

Still, Violet is a woman who can appreciate moments and music and driving in the hills, believing that “music sounded better on Mulholland.” She channels her dissatisfaction, as many before her have, into remodeling their large house.

Life takes a lurching turn when she meets Teddy Reyes, the broke bass player for a two-bit cover band. He’s a hustler, a mooch, an addict and he has hepatitis C.

Violet is smitten, naturally.

Though it’s never clear why exactly Violet dives into a tailspin affair with Teddy the loser, it seems to have something to do with the vibe surrounding her in a city where salespeople snub women with engagement rings smaller than three carats.

Meanwhile, her husband, David, is trying, in typical L.A. fashion, to find meaning in his life through Buddhism. This leads him to a yoga retreat where he has a breakdown of sorts in a sweat lodge, one of the funniest set pieces I’ve ever read.

In another story line, David’s off- kilter sister Sally determinedly plots to lure a savant sportscaster into marriage, something the numbers geek is equally determined to avoid.

Everyone, in other words, acts borderline loony.

This might be off-putting but for Semple’s forgiving and funny voice guiding us through the nuttiness with well-grounded prose. Unlike some former television writers who turn to novels, she employs none of the cheap tricks of her previous trade.

This is not a made-for-TV movie and it doesn’t end like one. People pay for their mistakes, as we do in life, and some of them learn lessons — understanding, forgiveness, gratitude — and live on with their scars. Some leave L.A.

August 15, 2008

“Pharmakon” by Dirk Wittenborn

Reviewed by Mark Lindquist
Special to the Seattle Times

Dirk Wittenborn is the literary equivalent of the Velvet Underground, the 1960s band that didn’t sell many records but was famous in certain circles because almost every kid who bought a Velvet Underground record started a band.

In the early 1980s, Wittenborn published “Zoe,” a smart, funny, hip tale of a young model navigating her way through the starry glamour of New York City. It didn’t sell many copies, but several Wittenborn fans I knew became professional writers.

Weirdly, there is nothing in the publicity materials for “Pharmakon,” his new novel, that acknowledges “Zoe” or his first novel, “Eclipse.” Instead he is promoted as “the Emmy-nominated producer of the HBO documentary ‘Born Rich’ and the author of ‘Fierce People,’ for which he wrote the screenplay.”

OK, Wittenborn may be a producer and screenwriter now, but “Pharmakon” (Viking, 403 pp., $25.95) proves his fans were right about him as a novelist — he’s first-rate, even if he hasn’t been working at his craft much in the past three decades.

“Pharmakon” is smarter and funnier than “Zoe” and much broader in its scope, doing for the United States and pharmaceutical drugs what “Zoe” did for New York City and recreational drugs.

In the book, William Friedrich, a 1950s Yale professor of psychology, discovers a drug that appears to be the mother of all anti-depressants. Called “The Way Home,” the drug is culled from a plant indigenous to New Guinea, and it is reported to be the secret to the happiness of an obscure tribe of cannibals.

Before this discovery can be properly distilled and developed, and thereby make Dr. Friedrich as rich and famous as he desires, one of his test subjects runs amok and commits murder, and the drug never makes it onto the market.

From here the book becomes a family drama that covers nearly half a century of medicine, pharmacology, psychology and nearly every neurosis you can imagine, all told through the knowing voice of Zach, Friedrich’s youngest son who becomes a writer.

Zach has two brothers, one of whom dies, and two sisters. His siblings each have a strong, startlingly unique personality, and a talent for aggravating their father.

“Governments hire me to think about their [expletive] problems,” Zach’s father complains to him. “You’d think one of my children would listen to me when I give them advice.” Dr. Friedrich also likes to say, “We are complicated creatures.”

And drugs in this book — and there are more drugs per page here than in a Kurt Cobain biography — only serve as a temporary reprieve from the inescapable madness of life, whether the drugs are pharmaceutical or recreational.

“There had been no miracle cures. Wonder drugs for the mind came and went out of style like the hemlines of ladies’ skirts and the width of men’s ties. Ultimately, they were remembered as ill advised as last year’s fashions.”

As a footnote, I have to point out that Wittenborn’s father was, like William Friedrich, a professor of psychology at Yale in the 1950s and, again like William Friedrich, had a troubled patient who composed a death list that included the professor. I don’t know how much of the rest of Wittenborn’s story is true in the literal sense, but it all rings true in the literary sense.

April 4, 2014

“Blood Will Out” by Walter Kirn

Reviewed by Mark Lindquist
Special to The Seattle Times

“I was in the mood for an adventure…. I was a writer, even more importantly a writer between books, and I had a hunch I was going to meet a character.”

Thus Walter Kirn, language artist, enters the world of Clark Rockefeller, con artist. Memoir meets true crime in this fortuitous American matchup between author and criminal.

Rockefeller, born Christian Gerhartsreiter, adopted a crippled dog from the Humane Society where Kirn’s wife worked, and Kirn offered to transport the animal, curious to meet a Rockefeller.

At the time, 1998, Kirn was a magazine writer and a not yet well-known novelist. Rockefeller was a con man and not an actual Rockefeller.

“I found him instantly annoying,” Kirn writes, “a twee, diminutive hobbit of a fellow whose level of self-amusement seemed almost delusional.”

Nonetheless, they become friends of sorts. Kirn, a Princeton graduate and the son of middle-class Midwestern Mormons, was fascinated by the faux Rockefeller in a manner reminiscent of Nick Carraway’s fascination with Jay Gatsby.

Gerhartsreiter, unlike Gatsby, does not turn out to be all right in the end. 

Coming from Germany to America as a teenager, Gerhartsreiter arrived just in time for the go-go years of the 1980s. “The Official Preppy Handbook,” Kirn suspects, served as Gerhartsreiter’s assimilation cheat sheet.

In 1985, Gerhartsreiter, aka Christopher Chichester, then claiming to be a British baronet, murdered and dismembered a San Marino, Calif., man, John Sohus. Afterward, he changed geography and identity, moving to Connecticut and becoming an American blue blood. He relied on art scams and moneyed women for income. 

In 2008, he kidnapped his daughter, making national news, and was subsequently found out and arrested for the 1985 murder. 

Even after the California trial and conviction, Gerhartsreiter’s motive remained murky, but Kirn suspects it was literary. In an effort to understand, Kirn revisits Dostoyevsky’s “Crime and Punishment,” Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley novels, Hitchcock’s “Rope,” and “Star Trek,” the original TV series. 

“Some people kill for love and some for money,” Kirn observes, “but Clark, I’d grown convinced, had killed for literature. To be a part of it. To live inside it.”

Kirn runs this epiphany by the assistant district attorney, but “he awarded me not a flicker of agreement, let alone comprehension.” I pity this assistant DA.

Clark, as Kirn calls him throughout, isn’t fully revealed until the trial. Kirn never stops examining how he, a professional writer, could be snookered by an amateur. “As a college English major, I’d learned the phrase, ‘suspension of disbelief,’ but with Clark you contributed belief, wiring it from your personal account into the account you held with him.”

Still, Kirn concludes, despite his artful lies, Clark “wasn’t a real artist.” He was a good liar without great talent. 

Kirn, who was once dumped by a Boston Brahmin, obliquely identified as writer Susan Minot, because he didn’t have “enough money or the right friends,” is the perfect Carrawayesque narrator to tell this tale of glitter and gullibility. This is one of the best true-crime books I’ve ever read and also one of the best memoirs. Kirn’s sentences are smart, his metaphors are apt and his ability to cobble together pieces of pop culture in new, illuminating ways is the work of a real artist.

March 29, 2015

“Crow Fair and Other Stories” by Thomas McGuane

Reviewed by Mark Lindquist
Special to The Seattle Times

By outliving Raymond Carver, Thomas McGuane became one of our best living American short-story writers. Now, Captain Berserko, as McGuane was known in the 1970s, just has to outlive Richard Ford to claim the crown. 

In a recent interview with NPR, McGuane said, “I think there’s only one interesting story … and that’s struggle.” This book contains 17 variations on that story, all set in Montana, where McGuane, author of novels, essays, screenplays and short stories, lives, writes and raises cattle. 

In the first piece, “Weight Watchers,” McGuane takes us straight into the land of the losers and alienated. The narrator’s father moves back in with him because, “My mother had thrown him out again, this time for his weight. She’d said that he was insufficiently committed to his weight-loss journey and that if he hit two-fifty she wouldn’t live with him anymore.”

While the father struggles to lose literal weight, the narrator, a middle-aged man with no intention to ever marry, struggles to lose the emotional weight of the baggage his parents dumped on him. “As a kid,” the narrator explains, “I viewed my parents as an anthropologist might view them and spent my time as I sometimes spend it now, trying to imagine where on earth they came from.” 

Like many of McGuane’s characters, his complaints are disguised as stoic non-complaints. “It’s not that there’s anything wrong with my ability to communicate: I have a cell phone, but I only use it to call out.”

In “Hubcaps,” which could have been titled Portrait of a Criminal as a Young Man, a boy’s affection for baseball is slowly soaked into nothingness by his heavy drinking parents. Like the alienated adult of “Weight Watchers,” the boy is given free rein by his egocentric parents, but it’s a freedom that leads into a trap. 

The alcoholic grandson of “Grandma and Me” — there’s a lot of drinking in these stories — leaves his blind grandmother at a river bank so that he can have a drink and chase a dead body he saw float by in the river. I liked Grandma, who “was convinced every empty building housed a meth lab,” but her grandson prefers the company of the corpse, which he strangely identifies with.

“Prairie Girl” is one of the few stories to focus on an arguably successful character. “Mary Elizabeth was an ambitious woman, but she was not cynical,” McQuane writes. Mary, a former prostitute, marries the gay son of a banker and begins her “ascent from vulgarity and survival.” In the end of the story, her son is going off to college. 

“She watched him as he looked out the window at the prairie. She thought he was beautiful, and that was enough. It didn’t hurt that the car was big and smelled new and hugged the road with authority. She said to herself, as she had since she was a girl: ‘I can do this.’ ” 

Even the losers, as Tom Petty noted, get lucky sometime. This is especially true in the masterfully layered world of McGuane. He enriches every life he renders. Even when his characters don’t get lucky, they get great lines like this: “Telling someone to relax is not as aggressive as shooting them, but it’s up there.”

October 4, 2015

“Bream Gives Me Hiccups and Other Stories” by Jesse Eisenberg

Reviewed by Mark Lindquist
Special to the Seattle Times

Depending on your taste, Jesse Eisenberg is either the funny, awkward guy who shot Bill Murray in “Zombieland,” or the funny, awkward guy who played Mark Zuckerberg in “The Social Network.”

He is not the funny, awkward guy who sang “These Eyes” in “Superbad,” though he is sometimes mistaken for him.

You might also know Eisenberg as the guy who penned a clever series of stories for McSweeney’s, “Restaurant Reviews from a Privileged Nine-Year-Old.” These stories and others make up his debut fiction collection, an alphabet soup of sketches, riffs, and innovations, including “A Short Story Written With Thought to Text Technology.”

The aforementioned “Thought To Text” story, like many in this book of 44 stories, starts with a deceptively simple premise, and then zigs and zags and surprises as Eisenberg reveals his characters. 

Eisenberg, an Academy Award nominee, recently shared his theory of character and comedy with NPR. “When you’re acting in something, even if it’s a comedy, you’re supposed to find the emotional truth in it. So even when I’m in a comedy, you end up trying to find … what’s driving a character and it usually has something to do with something that’s not that funny. And, of course, the juxtaposition of funny context and serious person dealing with funny context is what makes it funny.” 

And Eisenberg is funny.

In “A Marriage Counselor Tries to Heckle at a Knicks Game,” the title character encourages the New York Knicks, but “let’s also recognize the positive attributes of the opposing team.” She yells at the refs, “Are you blind? If so, it would be amazing that you’ve been accurately officiating up until this last play, which, for vantage reasons, appeared to be to be called incorrectly!!!”

The counselor concludes her heckling with these zingers, “May the home team prevail!!! Or the visiting team! Or, if possible, may they both prevail by transcending the false notion of prevailing!!!” 

Broken into sections such as “Dating,” “Self-Help” and “Language,” story titles include “My Roommate Stole my Ramen,” “A Post-Gender Normative Man Tries to Pick Up a Woman at a Bar,” “Final Conversations at Pompeii” and “Marv Albert is My Therapist.” 

In some instances, the whole joke seems encapsulated by the story title, but Eisenberg invariably tries to take the humor to another level and usually succeeds with wit and insight beyond his 31 years. 

“Whenever mom opens a menu, the first thing she does is look at the alcohol and breathe a sigh of relief.”

Eisenberg, also a playwright, is often compared to Woody Allen, likely because of their shared affinity for neurotics, intellectuals and artists. These stories remind me more of Steve Martin in the way they often subvert comic convention and, more significantly, in how the author empathizes with his characters. 

Eisenberg’s empathy, even more than his intelligence and wit, make him an artist worth watching.

May 23, 2008

“Snuff” by Chuck Palahniuk

Reviewed by Mark Lindquist
Special to The Seattle Times

Reviewing Chuck Palahniuk’s ninth novel for a family newspaper is a challenge. Palahniuk, the author of “Fight Club,” has written what his publisher describes as a “thoroughly researched” novel that “brings the huge yet under acknowledged presence of pornography in contemporary life at last into the realm of literary fiction.”

Is this just what you’ve been waiting for? If so, read on.

Cassie Wright, porn superstar in the twilight of her career, decides to go out with a bang, so to speak, by setting a world record for serial fornication on film.

“Six hundred dudes. One porn Queen. A world record for the ages. A must-have movie for every discerning collector of things erotic.”

Right off we know somebody is going to die in the end, and that this book, like most of Palahniuk’s work, is about sex and death.

For the next 208 pages we learn about Cassie, the men and the porn industry. Our narrators — Mr. 600, a producer who started Cassie’s career; Mr. 137, a television actor hoping to revive his career by marrying Cassie; Mr. 72, one of the young men who claim to be Cassie’s love child; and Sheila, the “talent wrangler” — are brought together in an endeavor Sheila likens to climbing Mount Everest.

“Snuff” actually serves as a history lesson on sexual landmarks. You will learn that at one time the world record for serial intercourse was 251, set by Annabel Chong. You will also learn that Annabel Chong was inspired by Valeria Messalina, the wife of a Roman emperor and a legendary slut. You will further learn that the blowup sex doll was invented by Adolf Hitler.

“To keep the Aryan blood lines pure, and prevent the spread of venereal disease, he commissioned an inflatable doll that Nazi troops could take into battle. Hitler himself designed the dolls to have blond hair and large breasts. The allied firebombing of Dresden destroyed the factory before the dolls could go into wide distribution. True fact.”

True fact is one of Palahniuk’s refrains here, and whether or not the many true facts about sex and death and pornography are actually true, I don’t know, and it seems beside the point. This is an absurd dark comedy about damaged people and the point, to the extent there is one, seems to be that seeking attention can end badly.

Palahniuk delivers on the “thorough research” his publisher promises, and his descriptive skills, his love of language and his weird humor are in top form.

Incidentally, the best thing about this book are the movie titles: “To Drill a Mockingbird,” “A Separate Piece,” “Gropes of Wrath,” “Snow Falling on Peters,” and many more I can’t list here. I can’t tell which ones are true, and which ones Palahniuk made up, which tells you something.

Sunday, August 18, 1991

Force Majeure by Bruce Wagner (Random House: $23; 474 pp.)

Reviewed by Mark Lindquist
Los Angeles Times Book Review

Mark Lindquist is the author of “Sad Movies” and “Carnival Desires.”

Thousands of people are coming to Los Angeles in a new gold rush.

Legends abound: Seven-Eleven clerk sells a screenplay for half a million dollars. Frustrated writer chucks a screenplay out of his car on the freeway, but it’s found and sells for $700,000. Twenty-three-year-old film student sells her first screenplay, something called “The Cheese Stands Alone,” for 1 million dollars.

As befits boom-town lore, fact and fiction merge. The 23-year-old film student, for example, turned out to be a moderately successful 28-year-old working writer. Her agent lied to better sell the script. The part about the million dollars is true.

In a sign of our times, the screen trade is being mythologized as never before, and one of the storied screenwriters of the moment is Bud Wiggins, the protagonist of Bruce Wagner’s novel, “Force Majeure.” The title, incidently, refers to the standard contractual clause that releases studios from their side of the bargain in the event of unforeseen disaster.

Wiggins first appeared on the scene when “Force Majeure” was a collection of privately published stories, given as Christmas gifts to people in the industry and available at the Book Soup bookstore.

Eventually these stories were adapted into a screenplay by Wagner. According to PMK, the powerful publicity agency promoting “Force Majeure,” the script is being made with Jim Belushi as Bud Wiggins. Now “Force Majeure” also is a novel, in seven stories, or chapters.

The first begins with Wiggins daydreaming in his mother’s house, where he’s been living while he works as a limousine driver. Bud is called by a reporter doing a piece on screenwriting and an agent who wants to set up a pitch meeting for a possible job at Universal. Bud brings the reporter along to the meeting. Everyone appears impressed, and Bud is elated.

Later, driving his limousine, he picks up a producer and an actor who are in hysterics about a writer — Bud — who made a fool of himself in a meeting they set up for research on a movie about a loser screenwriter.

Each of the chapters is a further exercise in failure, humiliation and degradation for Bud Wiggins. Wagner has pointedly forsaken structure and story. He uses coincidence to set up his comedy and piles on random events for effect. The what-happens-next in this book is a question of what can go wrong for Wiggins as he “circles the drain.”

So why do bad things happen to Bud Wiggins? Here is a writing sample of Bud’s:

“But the real source of his trembling was the recognition of a fountain, a deep spring at the root of his soul’s garden, water, water, human water, and like an eternal pond in a living park his eyes overflowed when like a grade school boy it came to him that the light dusting his companions, the cliffs, the beach, the birds, the aging asphalt highway, the waves of water and the littered sand–the awesome sunlight basting and tangling the world was millions of years old.”

Bud, who has a collection of stolen novels he hasn’t read, does not see a connection between lack of success and lack of writerly discipline or skill. This is not an unusual or even unfounded view in Hollywood. Bud thinks what he needs is to promote himself better.

He spends a lot of time in reverie: “Bud shifted on the sheets and thought about the park across from that school and the boy-created bramble labyrinth there–a natural playhouse and combat games habitat–another fetish, a fetish of space and branches, secrets and burrows, the wet brows and musculature of little boys.”

Wagner himself has an adjective fetish. His writing lacks control and subtlety. He writes like a screenwriter rebelling against the rigorous structure of his prior trade. Still, whatever his shortcomings as a prose stylist, he fearlessly lampoons Hollywood. He’s an insider with good aim. The only person who will want to have lunch with him now is Julia Phillips.

He knows the details that make key sentences ring with accuracy, and he’s sometimes hilarious. A particularly dark sequence concerns Perry Bravo, an ex-con who is invited to The Writers’ Guild to read from his new play, Go, Van Gogh: “He paused to sip from his beer, and the audience, led by the stouthearted Funt, began to clap. Servility and sexual tension filled the air. Bravo turned his finished bottle upside down and mimed a bear trying to extract the last drop of honey from the jar. The mob was in love.”

Wagner’s most effective technique is to accumulate the mildly amusing until it’s painfully funny, and then not funny at all: “After the reading, Bravo visits the house of the producer who organized the reading. He dislocates the man’s arms, ties him to a chair, rapes his model friend, burns her face, and then sodomizes the producer before murdering them both.”

There are uglier and sicker things in this book, yet none of it will seem unreal or shocking to anyone who has survived in Los Angeles for any length of time.

Wagner’s characters are cartoons, albeit the kind you may actually know. The ambitious and the amoral, the dumb and the deluded, the hucksters masquerading as artists — they’re all here. In fact, many of them bear strong resemblance to well-known Hollywood personalities, and Wagner has an eye for their most ridiculous traits.

Missing is the beauty and allure of Los Angeles. And certainly, not all the people who work in Hollywood are superficial, evil or insane. Still, Wagner has to cover the beat as he sees it, and besides humor and truth, which ought to be enough to recommend any book, “Force Majeure” possesses a sadness that is oddly moving.

Mark Lindquist is the author of “Sad Movies” and “Carnival Desires.”

Sunday, July 19, 1992

“Rich Kids” by Robert Westbrooke

Reviewed by Mark Lindquist
Los Angeles Times Book Review

You will probably not be shocked to learn that the children of rich movie-industry parents are likely to grow up spoiled, unhappy and mentally unhealthy. Robert Westbrook brings personal experience to the subject, however, as the son of Hollywood gossip columnist Sheila Graham.
His self-written bio sheet claims he couldn’t publish this book while his mother was alive. Best known as the mistress of F. Scott Fitzgerald, she presumably had standards in fiction. “Rich Kids” would have horrified her.

Jonno Singer, the narrator, is the son of Alexander Singer, a literary agent who becomes a studio president, a man attracted to women on the basis of what Westbrook knowingly describes as “Hollywood Love . . . the
kind of love which mysteriously evaporates the moment the circumstances of mutual self-advantage disappear.”

The elder Singer’s first wife commits suicide after her career and husband fail her. His second wife is Corina Norman, “a fabulously sexpot actress,” and Jonno’s mother.

When Corina’s career cools off, as “it” girl careers inevitably do, she becomes a self-pitying drunk. This is no great loss to Jonno, because you can’t lose what you don’t have. “She was hardly a mother at all except for a few minutes here and there in various photo opportunities, where she smiled into the camera with Rags and Carl on either side of her, and me–the baby–generally in her lap. The moment the photographer was finished, she’d brush us off like flies and return us to the care of our butler, Albert. . . . Our crime was being born and ruining her beautiful figure.”

When Corina’s career goes from cool to cold outright failure, Jonno’s father, true to Hollywood Love, finds another wife. Enter French star Michelle Cordell, “sluttish and slovenly,” usually stoned on hashish. She gives Jonno such maternal advice as “You must not smoke marijuana and drink alcohol at the same time. It will make you impotent when you try to
make love to the girls!” Jonno and his two brothers, Rags and Carl, are joined by Michelle’s children, David, and Zoe, the half-sister Jonno describes with every erotic adjective he can muster.

“Rich Kids” has something like a plot–Jonno’s father is murdered with his own Oscar and the question is which family member did it, but this is forgotten for many chapters while the narrator details his family life:

His oldest brother Rags is dying of AIDS. Rags, verbally abused by Corina, spends several years totaling cars for sport and having sex with the beloved butler Albert. Carl, second oldest, badly burned in a fire started by Corina when drunk, is a semi-socialist who runs a shelter for the homeless. Arguably the worst off and least interesting (until she murders someone) is little sister Opera, a 15-year-old TV star about to make the first “environmentally conscious teen movie.”

Half-brother David, who learns young Republicanism from the Los Angeles Harvard School and S&M from Gretchen the maid, grows up to run dad’s movie studio. Most important to Jonno is Zoe, of whom he can’t stop himself from saying  things like, “If I felt I could get away with it, I’d let my tongue come out and rest against her inner thigh. I used to imagine I was an abalone clinging to a bare girl leg.”

If this sounds incestuous, it is. Much in “Rich Kids” seems wrong, particularly the way in which Westbrook exposes and trashes the warped values of Hollywood while at the same time trying to move the reader with the narrator’s oft-stated lust and star-crossed “love” for his half-sister Zoe.

This incest is a direct byproduct of the very world the narrator and author despise. (Zoe’s father began molesting her when she was 5 and continued into her teen years.) While Westbrook occasionally hits chords that ring with awful truth, he has the Hollywood habit of shirking truth’s consequences.

“Rich Kids” ends with Jonno married to Zoe, flying back and forth between Los Angeles, where he has taken control of his dad’s movie studio, and Peru, where Zoe feeds llamas. Jonno lives with her as though she’s his wife, and we’re to believe their life is a happy one.

The book is also cheapened by sentences out of “The Perils of Pauline” that end almost every chapter: “The limousine took off in a ride I will never forget”; careless editing–tenses are forgotten and “you’re” is used as a possessive; the dozen or so times you’re told it’s not easy being a rich kid; constant explaining that undercuts the natural strength of the action.

Yet somehow “Rich Kids” is disturbingly compelling. This, I suspect, is thanks to the powerful allure the perversions and ruins of Hollywood still possess, something Westbrook understands, has seemingly suffered from, and here exploits.

Mark Lindquist is the author of Sad Movies and Carnival Desires.

Sunday, May 30, 1993

“Shopping in Space: Essays on America’s Blank Generation Fiction”  by Elizabeth Young and Graham Caveney (Atlantic Monthly Press/Serpent’s Tail: $21; 263 pp.)

Reviewed by Mark Lindquist
Los Angeles Times Book Review

Mark Lindquist is the author of “Sad Movies” and “Carnival
Desires.”

“Bright Lights, Big City,” “Less Than Zero.” Young authors, big
sales. It was the mid ’80s and the publishing industry found a new demographic group.

Novels by young authors were suddenly the flavor of the month. Though the works were often wildly divergent in style and content, they were herded together for shooting sprees, blasted for their depiction of night life and narcotics, for their connection to the movies and music and pop culture. In other words, for being of their time.

In 1989 Spy magazine issued “Spy Notes,” a Cliff’s Notes-like satire of “hip, urban novels of the 1980s.” When books achieve a status that inspires parody, they’re probably as permanent as anything else in our cultural landscape. “Shopping in Space,” a collection of essays, recognizes this.

Two British critics, Elizabeth Young and Graham Caveney, bring insight and intellectual rigor to bear on contemporary American fiction with an objective distance that could possibly only come from foreign shores. Nobody has written about contemporary American fiction in quite this way before. “Shopping in Space” smartly argues that these novels, “far from endorsing the worst aspects of a greedy and corrupt consumer society, together constitute a revealing critique of this society and illuminate all its darkest, weirdest corners.”

Pop music, advertising, TV and movies have all helped define postmodern literature. Young and Caveney, instead of whining about this, shrink the gap between “high” and “low” art. They explore irony as the dominant tone of our time. They know emotions often unexpressed or understated in postmodern works–love, fear, hope–exist nonetheless, and ache all the more because of the repression necessary to maintain protective distance in a society that puts high value on cheap junk.

In an essay subtitled “Less Than Zero–a Hollywood Hell,” Young cuts to the crux of Bret Easton Ellis’ view of the jaded L.A. teen-agers of his first novel — and the parents who raised them — when she calls it “essentially one of puritan disgust.”

Young understands that Ellis must possess a kind of old-fashioned nostalgia for a better life, a longing  for something more authentic and moral. This makes her perhaps the only critic on the planet to accuse Ellis of morality. And she’s right.

Young finds nostalgia also hiding in Mary Gaitskill’s heart. Gaitskill’s first collection of stories, “Bad Behavior,” is mostly about dancers, models and prostitutes, struggling city dwellers. While Gaitskill’s style is easily distinguishable from Ellis’ — she still believes in character, plot and structure — there are thematic links. Gaitskill’s closing story, “Heaven,” is a paean to old-fashioned American family life that finds art in the ordinary, a story that, like Ellis’ “Less Than Zero,” betrays a nostalgia for a less corrupt and cheapened existence than the one offered this American generation.

The family is also the focal point for Caveney’s take on the work of Jay McInerney, who opened up the market for young authors with the wild success of his first novel, “Bright Lights, Big City.” Noting that the narrator of this second-person novel continually creates himself in the image of adolescence, Caveney approaches the death bed scene between the unnamed hero and his mother as the moment in a child’s development when he recognizes himself as an independent whole. Caveney understands the line between mere adolescent narcissism and the heightened self-awareness of a natural writer dealing with the fictional nature of contemporary experience.

(Pop quiz: Who’s more real, Ronald Reagan or Wayne and Garth? Roseanne Roseannadanna or Oprah? Prove it.)

Caveney argues that the characters in McInerney’s most recent novel, “Brightness Falls,” who have aged into new priorities such as love and marriage, achieve their maturity by “acceptance of the reality of their illusions.” He means, I think, that they finally understand that life isn’t a movie and they can’t be adolescents forever.

Ellis’ “American Psycho” gives “Shopping in Space” a fat target for its most singular insights. To fully appreciate how smart and well reasoned this essay is, one must remember the hysteria that surrounded the publication of this serial murderer novel told in the first person. In a typical example, Gloria Steinem — who wrote her own neuroses into a political agenda and a bestseller — said Ellis should take personal responsibility for any woman murdered or tortured in a manner similar to those described in the novel. This is like saying Walt Disney should take responsibility for any deer killed in a manner similar to Bambi’s mother.

Young, however, realizes “the onus is on the reader to interject the moral values so conspicuously lacking in the text.” The action is recounted by an “unreliable narrator,” and, more than that, the narrator is not the author, not a character even, but a device. “Patrick, in his role of ultimate consumer, someone who is composed entirely of inauthentic commodity-related desires, cannot exist as a person.”

“American Psycho” is possibly the perfect example of what the authors call “blank generation” fiction, a classic postmodern text, focused on image and style, relentlessly ironic, self-reflexive, a puzzle. It is also clever and hilarious. And it is affirmative, ironically affirmative, of course, but still an affirmative book that cries out for a saner, more genuine and moral world.

Besides Ellis, Gaitskill and McInerney, “Shopping in Space” pulls together the works of Joel Rose, Tama Janowitz, Dennis Cooper, Catherine Texier, Lynne Tillman, Gary Indiana, David Wojnarowicz and, weirdly, Michael Chabon, who writes like one of their fathers. Though some of these books have been called subversive, most, in fact, border on reactionary. They are reacting against the values — or lack of — that have been handed down to them. “Everything goes when anything goes,” as the Replacements’ song says.

E. M. Forster said that literature can do what objective history cannot: capture the “buzz of implication” of an era; these novels will be the most revealing way for future generations to understand our time, a time when it’s no longer shocking if urban teen-agers bring their own babies and handguns to public high schools, a time when one of the best pop albums is aptly titled, “Nothing’s Shocking.”

Each of these books brings light, truth and understanding to an increasingly dark and mendacious era, and hasn’t that always been the stuff of good old-fashioned literature?

“Shopping in Space” should be read by anyone interested in the future of fiction. As the authors put it, “Ironically, fiction is now the closest we’re likely to come to truth and as such it should be loved and cherished.”

Love of literature shows on every page of this book, love that clearly grew out of a giddy adolescent crush but has matured, becoming deeper and more knowing.

Monday, September 27, 1993

“Fan Mail” by Ronald Munson; Dutton $21, 309 pages

Reviewed by Mark Lindquist
Los Angeles Times

Joan Carpenter is an anchorwoman. Her stated ambition is to be rich and famous. The Watcher is a fan. “Fan Mail” is a creepy book about their symbiotic connection.

When Joan begins her job in St. Louis, the Watcher sends her awe-struck letters that are no more warped than you would expect from a celebrity worshiper. His awe turns ugly, however, when a TV critic skewers Joan’s show. The Watcher castrates the critic and mails his testicles to Joan in a manner intended to boost the ratings of Joan’s sinking show.

The Watcher hopes this gesture will please Joan. Even more grotesque, Joan is pleased about the improved ratings. She finds herself where she wants to be — on the road to fame. But the Watcher is riding shotgun.

“Fan Mail” is told entirely through letters, phone calls, faxes and other forms of memoranda. This technique ups the creepiness quotient by increasing the feeling of alienation and highlighting the lack of genuine human connection in these characters’ lives.

Though this technique is effective, there is a downside. Character is rarely revealed through action, and Munson is not up to the task of truly portraying these characters through voice. Munson has a big plot to feed and this requires his characters to write and say things that people do not write or say.

Still, the most off-putting aspect of the book is the characters themselves. They’re repellent. More importantly, they’re not repellent in an engaging way.

Ironically, the Watcher has the most interesting voice. The conversations with his computer are simultaneously hilarious and scary. In a classic dramatic sense, the Watcher is the hero. You may even find yourself hoping he kills off the rest of the cast.

True to its genre, almost anyone in the book could be the Watcher:
* Charles Fishman, Joan’s boss, who is concerned solely with ratings
and is as subtly drawn as his name suggests.
* Gary Wells, Joan’s jealous co-anchor.
* Alexis Hartz, the ambitious celebrity-collecting real estate agent.
* Alan Carter, attracted to Joan, but stereotypically male and afraid
of commitment.
* Dan, a lawyer and Joan’s agent.
* Curt Collins, a gardener who writes bad poetry and is too stupid to realize even his bad poetry has more to it than the celebrity he worships, Joan.

The reveal is perfect — a surprise that shouldn’t be.

You would think Joan would look smart and deep, surrounded mostly by superficial idiots. Nope. No amount of literary allusions tossed into her letters — and there are several — can dissuade the reader from the obvious: This is a TV celebrity with all the depth you’d expect.

The reader is asked to forgive or understand her intense self-involvement since her husband died in a plane crash and her obsession with success cranked up after the tragedy.

Munson, a professor of philosophy of science and medicine, knows his book isn’t about character. This book is about plot, and the plot works. Also, Munson gilds this thriller with a cynical edge that continually comments on how and why the increasing number of disconnected people in our society leech onto celebrities.

Joan’s sister is, conveniently, a psychiatrist. This is her professional opinion on Joan’s superficial guilt: “It shows you’re a good person with appropriate feelings.”

Fortunately, Joan’s sister knows another doctor who’s an expert in this field and makes somewhat more trenchant observations. He believes that the professed love of a fan is not love at all, but a particularly twisted form of hate.

But is that the Watcher’s problem? Consider the “Cheers” theme song, which invites the viewer into “a place where everyone knows your name.” Well, no. Actually, Woody Harrelson and Ted Danson don’t know your name. And they don’t want to.

Healthy people understand this, of course. The Watcher, however, believes Joan knows him and wants to have a relationship with him. He is only guilty of believing what TV sells. This is what makes him sick.

Why exactly the Watcher must castrate and kill is never quite clear, but the Watcher does try to explain. He believes the “American dream” is not the old-fashioned one of making a decent living and raising a decent family or making a decent contribution, but one of achieving “fame and fortune.” And, as the Watcher says to Joan, “I wanted us to get to the top.”

If you are looking for literature, look elsewhere, If you are looking for a well-plotted thriller with an interesting contemporary edge, you will like “Fan Mail.”

 Entertainment & the Arts, Sunday, November 14, 1993

”Family Values” by Lawrence David

By Mark Lindquist
Special to The Seattle Times

Eighteen years of family life are, for the most part, convincingly and engagingly drawn in Lawrence David’s first novel. The multiple points of view are handled skillfully, and much of the dialogue between four brothers and one sister rings with truth and humor.

Yet David should have had more confidence in this slice of life’s ability to keep readers’ interest, because his novel flounders only when characters act in ways that seem designed to artificially heighten the drama. Like most families, this one has more than enough real drama.

In fact, it’s a mess in ways that are familiar to most of us – though David occasionally overwrites and over-explains, underestimating the universality of this territory.

The mother who admirably gives so much to this family is fueled by a resentment of her own mother, a woman whose selfishness was ahead of her time, and sadly the novel ends with this otherwise heroic mother becoming almost as selfish as the mother she rejected.

Still, the resiliency, importance and necessity of family life come through and David is to be admired for never once using the word “dysfunctional.”

Sunday, February 13, 1994

“Pool” by Ajay Sahgal

Reviewed by Mark Lindquist
Los Angeles Times Book Review, Front Page

“Pool” is one of the most authentic Los Angeles novels you are likely to read and the beauty of it is that not a single moment is set in L.A.

Emery Roberts, a twentysomething movie star, has walked off the set of “Sun City,” a $40 million dollar buddy cop thriller, and gone to Vermont. The reader has no idea why. Emery, the narrator, also has no idea why.

“Pool” could have been subtitled “Portrait of an Unexamined Life” or “Why One Should Avoid Hanging Out with Young Actors.” Pointedly anti-plot and with ciphers for characters, “Pool” is nonetheless compelling thanks to Sahgal’s spare, cryptic prose.

“Pool” is “Waiting for Godot” for a generation whose gods are celluloid. This first novel is funny, sad, and filled with shocks of recognition, particularly for those who have ever felt lost in the modern Sodom known as Hollywood. “I can’t go on. I must go on. I can’t keep writing screenplays. I must keep writing screenplays.”

In Vermont Emery joins other Hollywood expatriates who are holed up at a farmhouse: a screenwriter, a fired CAA agent, and the “Sun City” producer’s alcoholic daughter and useless son. Along with Emery is Danny, a USC film school grad, the “next Phil Joanou,” who films Emery’s every move on videotape. Emery is oblivious to Danny and his omnipresent camera in much the same way that normal people in, say, Seattle, are oblivious to rain.

Necessarily lacking the physical details of L.A. – no Santa Ana winds, no sweet eucalyptic wetness in the air, no wild-eyed coyotes to run over in a Range Rover -“Pool” proves that L.A. is merely a transportable state of mind. L.A. is convincingly, disturbingly, brought to life in the Vermont countryside.

There’s all the vernacular, banter, celebrity fixation, and barely repressed anger endemic to Los Angeles. And it is not limited to the expatriates. When Emery visits the local bars, townie
girls fawn senselessly over him and their boyfriends want to kill him.

When the group needs money, they have a garage sale and there are plenty of local buyers for Emery’s used Yamamato blazer, and his unread copy of “Ulysses” – for the musical version with a score by Michael Bolton.

Only one character in the novel seems to have a goal of any kind: the screenwriter. He is building a pool in the backyard. And it is not just a goal, but an obsession. Though this is ostensibly motivated by the snapping turtles that roam the nearby lake in menacing packs, there is clearly more at stake.

Building the pool is the screenwriter’s raison d’etre. He envisions a cool, turtle-less place, a thing of beauty. What he creates, mostly, is a big hole filled with mud. And then the snapping turtles invade. This is one of the smartest, funniest metaphors for a screenwriter’s life that I have ever read.

“Pool” is chock full of wickedly funny bits that will be especially appreciated by industry insiders. Characters make deadpan references to movies with hilarious titles and plot lines that are all the funnier because the joke-movies are no more absurd than, say, “Encino Man,” “Problem Child,” “Stop, or My Mom Will Shoot,” or any number of other wildly profitable movies.

“Pool” has plenty of set pieces that scriptwriters are paid to fill pages with: a brawl, a roman candle fight, a car crash, and the big production number when an entire movie crew invades the farm house. What’s interesting is that these scenes read like parodies of what one would expect. The idiot-proof drama that makes these paint-by-number scenes popular with studio executives seems to be intentionally filtered out.

The characters in “Pool” are so disconnected from what is genuine that they feel nothing. There is not much to be felt in a cliché. There is not much to be felt when nothing is valued. This valuelessness that kills the possible joy of these characters lives even creeps into the sex scenes. They’ve arrived young to what self involvement and constant indulgence invariably lead to: emptiness, burn out.

Hollywood, in the end, wins. Emery becomes resigned to his fate, and his fate is to fly first class, have beautiful strange girls beg to sleep with him, and make millions of dollars, without ever understanding anything about any of it. If this does not sound especially hellish, it will after you read this scarily convincing portrait.

Emery’s most redeeming quality is that he is mercifully free of the self-involved self-help posturing that substitute in Los Angeles for living an examined life. Even that requires more self-examination than Emery can muster. He does, however, perform Public Service Announcements for “Rock Against Fur.”

Pete Hamill, after hanging around drunks and actresses for too many years, came to a realization. Hamill recognized, as he put it, that he had been performing rather than living his life. He stopped drinking. This saved him.

The characters in Sahgal’s novel are light years away from this kind of realization, and probably incapable of the kind of action that might save them. Sahgal wisely knows what about this is sad, funny, and, at moments, even moving.

“Pool” will not be a bestseller. It may, however, be destined for cult-classic status in Los Angeles.

Mark Lindquist is the author of two Hollywood novels, Sad Movies and Carnival Desires.

Entertainment & the Arts: Sunday, July 17, 1994

”Life, Liberty, And The Pursuit Of Happiness” by Peggy Noonan

Reviewed by Mark Lindquist
Special to The Seattle Times

Seventy-three percent of Americans believe the United States is in “moral decline,” this decline a national obsession, according to Newsweek. Peggy Noonan, a former speechwriter for presidents Reagan and Bush, does with her second book what she always did for the White House: give voice to the anecdotes behind those numbers.

What the media called Reagan’s genius – “the Great Communicator” – was really Noonan’s genius, the talent to score ideological points with stories.

In “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness,” Noonan searches to separate what is meaningful from what is not. Along the way she lays waste to various detours, particularly those of her own baby-boom generation. She also paints a devastating illustration of Gloria Steinem’s increasing irrelevance, trashes the rationalization that children need only “quality time,” and she connects the dots of our current youth crime wave with a rising materialism that has devalued motherhood.

Noonan understands that modern America’s problems are spiritual. Unlike Hillary Clinton, whose “politics of meaning” was dismissed as political posturing, Noonan no longer has to score political points for a boss in the White House, so her search for what is meaningful, for what will save us, cannot be so easily dismissed.

Unlike many of her contemporaries – such as former drug czar William J. Bennett – who have taken up the “values” dialogue in pursuit of power, Noonan joins because the search genuinely interests her.

Entertainment & the Arts: February 5, 1995

”Scorched Earth” By Stuart Stevens

Reviewed by Mark Lindquist
Special to The Seattle Times

War, Ernest Hemingway once observed, is the best drama. War without guns is called politics and it is – or ought to be – a close second for dramatic value. Stuart Stevens’ new novel, “Scorched Earth,” has all the conflict, intrigue, high stakes and barely contained nuttiness that rings of true politics.

The hero is Matt Bonney, a James Carville-like consultant who is hired to elect the half-Polish, Elvis-loving governor of an unnamed Southern state to the U.S. Senate. Problem is, the governor is running against Congressman Luke Bonney – Matt’s brother.

This being a contemporary campaign, and a Southern one at that, the mud is slung to new heights: The governor accuses the congressman of sleeping with three black transvestites; the congressman’s heterosexuality is defended by claims that he’s sleeping with his brother’s wife. The reader is given no better idea of what is true or half-true or blatantly false than you would get from a real political campaign.

Author Stevens is a UCLA film school graduate whose work includes writing the opening episode of the quirky television series, “Northern Exposure.” He’s also a successful political consultant whose savvy observations make “Scorched Earth” fast and hilarious.

However, politics – like anything else that verges on self-parody – can be a shaky source for satire. I found myself thinking that our times are begging for a literary attack on politics along the lines of Robert Penn Warren’s 1946 classic, “All the King’s Men.” In the meantime, Stevens offers the best-informed contemporary political novel you will likely find.

October 15, 1995

“Baby Cat Face” by Barry Gifford

Reviewed by Mark Lindquist
New York Times Book Review

Barry Gifford has been chronicling the decline of Western civilization for 25 years: as America goes, so goes Mr. Gifford. Not surprisingly, his books have become increasingly twisted and senseless, their plots fractured by random acts of madness, anxiety and desperation.

Still, no matter how far into weirdness Mr. Gifford wanders, his characters often remain less bizarre than those we see in the tabloids. His latest novel, BABY CAT-FACE (Harcourt Brace, $20), opens with a conversation about a woman who bludgeons her husband, then chops him up and cooks him. Many short chapters later, it closes with talk about an elderly woman decapitating her daughter. In between, characters lose limbs and lives and say things like “You don’t cry over anything you have to give up, because you eventually must give up everything.”

Much of the narrative makes little sense, a trait for which Mr. Gifford is commonly criticized. Sailor and Lula, the lead characters from his best-known novel, “Wild at Heart,” randomly appear: “To be 18 years old zooming along in a terrific car with an almost perfect girlfriend who can’t hardly get enough of you on a breezy spring afternoon in the South was just about it, thought Sailor Ripley. . . . And he was glad as hell he had the good sense to realize it.”

Indeed. Mr. Gifford’s characters face the ridiculousness of life with existential gusto — and in this, at least, there is perfect sense.

January 7, 1996

“One Night Out Stealing” by Alan Duff

Reviewed by Mark Lindquist
New York Times Book Review

In ”Pulp Fiction” and ”Get Shorty,” John Travolta defines the current pop culture image for hoods: hip, clever if not bright, and effortlessly charming. The hoods — or ”crims” — in Alan Duff’s second novel, ”One Night Out Stealing,” are slovenly, befuddled if not stupid, and inclined to senseless, self-destructive behavior.

”Once Were Warriors,” Mr. Duff’s first novel, was made into a well-received movie with unknown actors. ”One Night Out Stealing” will likewise require unknowns; not even Gary Oldman is sufficiently unwashed to play one of these leads. Sonny and Jube live off the New Zealand equivalent of welfare and spend their time scheming and thieving and, always, drinking: ”Near everyone humming from the state of being drunk. . . . Just felt real good, but yet not so good you felt it was gonna last. So there was the fear, some of it desperate, that the feeling was gonna go. Wear off. And so they gulped.”

Mr. Duff’s writing continually rings with depressing authenticity. While his story is set in Auckland and Wellington, the issues it raises — poverty, racial tension, family strife and social decay — will be all too familiar to American readers.

Sunday, March 10, 1996

“Blade Runner 2” by KW Jeter

Reviewed by Mark Lindquist
Los Angeles Times Book Review

Seattle writer and lawyer Mark Lindquist has lived in and written about Los Angeles. He is the author of “Sad Movies” and “Carnival Desires.” 

Los Angeles, 2021. The atmosphere is scoured raw by the merciless Santa Ana winds. Fires flare as subterranean gases rise from the city streets and ignite. Relief comes in the occasional monsoons, which temporarily shield inhabitants from the blistering sun.

At night, multilingual neon glares senselessly from both vertical and horizontal buildings. Earthquakes are less of a concern now that the taller buildings lie in crooked angles on their sides, casualties of past seismic activity. The Van Nuys Pet Hospital still features the blinking pink puppy that is transformed from sad and injured to happy and bandaged every few seconds. You could use such a resurrection.

Whereas in the 1990s there was merely a small voice in your head telling you to leave town, now a United Nations blimp circles the city, exhorting you not only to leave town, but to leave the planet. “Start anew!” Unseen speakers boom out promises of a better life awaiting you among the stars you can only rarely glimpse. The brown stew of pollutants in the air is so thick the government-issue breathing masks seem beside the point. You’ve lost the will to deal with the scavenger dwarfs who steal the emission control units off vehicles stalled in traffic. On the plus side, nobody talks much about the O.J. Simpson trial anymore.

You tried to leave Los Angeles before. You moved north to the remote cabin where you stayed with the one you love, Rachel. Problem is, the one you love spends most of her time in a life-support pod. Also, she is not human. She is a replicant.

Replicants, designed by the Tyrell corporation for labor–slavery really–are almost indistinguishable from humans, but they have a life-span of four years. To extend your time together, you bring Rachel alive for a short spell every two months. Despite this, or maybe because of it, the relationship is going swell.

One other problem though. You are a blade runner. Blade runners are the must brutal of the formidably brutal Los Angeles Police Department. Blade runners have a simple job: exterminate escaped replicants.

Replicants, designed from human templates, are designed to lack emotion so they can excel as slaves. Some replicants seem to have developed emotions–or were they secretly designed that way?–and as a result they resent their servitude. They escape, and they become dangerous. Rachel was one of the five you were assigned to kill. You killed four. Then you quit. You quit not because you hated it, but because you realized you were liking it too much.

Now the powerful Tyrell Corporation wants you to resume your previous profession. There may be a sixth replicant on the run. Or there may not be. Circumstances are suspect, tinged with the haze of conspiracy. Some have even suggested you may be the replicant.

Still, your sense that you are human is reinforced by some tangible evidence: A human woman loves you. Sarah, the human template for Rachel, has inherited the Tyrell corporation from her father. Sarah wants to be loved. She wants to be loved by you. Sarah is willing to destroy the corporation for love. Anyone that irrational must be human.

So why love a replicant, rather than the human upon which she is based? Why love the copy? This is the biggest danger of living in Los Angeles: You have learned to prefer the dead to the living, the fake to the real.

Your original creator, Philip K. Dick, who authored “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” which was made into the movie “Blade Runner,” is dead. K. W. Jeter, however, has uncannily inhabited Dick’s mind and is continuing your story with a duplicate eye, voice, weltanschauung. Jeter’s sense of irony, his appreciation of the cosmic joke, parallels your increasingly dark tangled life. Jeter has craftily assimilated the mind of Dick with the minds of the “Blade Runner” screenwriters David Peoples and Hampton Fancher to the point where it’s hard to say for sure who created what.

All you know is that you must return to Los Angeles, take this last job, hunt for the sixth replicant. Complete this final assignment and you can be with the one you love. You can start anew. You can be human. You can even learn to prefer the real to the fake, though you are not sure how yet. First, you will have to be far from Los Angeles.

June 30, 1996

“The Runaway Jury” by John Grisham

Reviewed by Mark Lindquist
New York Times Book Review

In his latest novel, John Grisham returns to his favorite theme: cleverness prospers. He’s also still hooked on the idea of the underdog who cons the evil cabal and scores big.

“The Runaway Jury” follows several vaguely developed characters as they attempt to manipulate the jurors in a high-stakes lawsuit against a tobacco company. Little of this plot is legal or realistic — but it is, of course, clever. Mr. Grisham has an unfortunate habit of concealing information and then revealing it for a quick plot jolt. This was less irritating in earlier novels like “The Firm,” in which there was also a point of view, a distinctive voice and some character development.

On the other hand, what do such quibbles matter, with a first printing of 2.8 million copies? Mr. Grisham, it seems, is living proof of his favorite theme.

July 21, 1996

“Outrage: Five Reasons Why OJ Simpson Got Away with Murder” by Vincent Bugliosi

Reviewed by Mark Lindquist
New York Times Book Review

Most prosecutors in the United States believe they could have done a better job of trying the O. J. Simpson case than Marcia Clark and Christopher Darden. Vincent Bugliosi is sure of it.

A former prosecutor with the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s office who won a conviction against Charles Manson (and the author of a book about the case, “Helter Skelter”), Mr. Bugliosi declares that he has “put people on death row — and this is not an exaggeration — where the circumstantial evidence was one hundred times less powerful than in this case.”

In “Outrage,” he characterizes his former office’s handling of the Simpson case as “the most incompetent criminal prosecution I have ever seen. By far.” Mr. Bugliosi criticizes virtually everyone involved in the trial at every stage of the proceedings, even into the aftermath.

Personal responsibility is a favorite theme of prosecutors, who routinely insist that people should be held accountable for their actions, but one of the many ironies of the Simpson trial is that the prosecutors — District Attorney Gil Garcetti, Ms. Clark and Mr. Darden — have shifted responsibility for Mr. Simpson’s acquittal to the jury, the news media, Judge Lance Ito or the defense lawyers.

Mr. Bugliosi puts the blame where it belongs, and explains how the case should have been prosecuted. His well-informed analysis is in welcome contrast to much of the insipid or pointless commentary about the Simpson trial.

Entertainment & the Arts, July 23, 1996

“Outrage: Five Reasons OJ Got Away with Murder” by Vincent Bugliosi

Reviewed by Mark Lindquist
Special To The Seattle Times

Most prosecutors in America thought they could have done a better job of trying O.J. Simpson. Vincent Bugliosi actually could have.

The onetime prosecutor who put away Charles Manson, Bugliosi has put people on death row when “the circumstantial evidence was one hundred times less powerful than (in the Simpson) case,” he says in his new bestseller, “Outrage: The Five Reasons O.J. Simpson Got Away With Murder.” He is appalled by how his former office handled the so-called trial of the century: “The most incompetent criminal prosecution I have ever seen. By far.”

Bugliosi acknowledges that he is a critical person, and his criticism of almost everyone involved in the trial is scathing. Though he is annoyed by what he considers sleazy defense tactics, as well as Judge Lance Ito’s lack of judicial control, his outrage is primarily inspired by the blundering of prosecutors Marcia Clark and Christopher A. Darden and their boss, Los Angeles District Attorney Gil Garcetti who kept Clark on the case even though focus groups actually called her names.

One of the many ironies of the O.J. trial was that personal responsibility was a favorite prosecutorial theme. Yet Garcetti, Clark and Darden all denied responsibility for the verdict. They blamed the jury, the judge, the defense lawyers and the media. Bugliosi puts the blame where it belongs, and he is absolutely convincing when he argues how the case could have been won.

His clear-headed analysis is a welcome counterpoint to a subject dominated by drivel.

February 23, 1997

“The Clinic” by Jonathan Kellerman

Reviewed by Mark Lindquist
New York Times Book Review

This is the 11th novel in a series featuring Alex Delaware, a psychologist who solves crimes simply by being smart. He also chats with a lot of interesting people.

The plot in this latest effort is pretty standard: a woman is murdered and various suspects are eliminated — or are they? — one by one. What makes the story somewhat interesting is the victim, Prof. Hope Devane, author of a best-selling male-bashing book called ”Wolves and Sheep: Why Men Inevitably Hurt Women and What Women Can Do to Avoid It.” She also formed an inquisition-style campus ”interpersonal conduct” committee to deal with sexual harassment, some of whose members turn out to have been involved in S & M sex games.

As one of the characters remarks, ”there’s a certain type of person likes to control things, make rules for everyone.” This is not an unusual neurosis, but Professor Devane had it bad. She was, therefore, someone for whom murder suspects abound. Delaware’s investigation reveals how Hope Devane became a professor, a feminist and a full-blown sociopath.

Mr. Kellerman’s novel stumbles when he tries too hard to be hard-boiled or hip, but his creeping revelation of the professor’s secret story is sordid and perverse — and it rings unsettlingly true.

September 14, 1997

By Mark Lindquist

THE KINGDOM OF SHIVAS IRONS
By Michael Murphy

Michael Murphy’s ”Golf in the Kingdom” is the best-selling golf novel ever published, maybe because it’s as much about metaphysics as it is about golf — about golf as spiritual knight errantry. Now Murphy (a founder of the Esalen Institute) is back, 25 years later, with a sequel, written in the hope of resurrecting Shivas Irons, the hero of ”Golf in the Kingdom.” But, as often happens, the new book lacks the impact of its precursor. After all, many other ”Zen and the Art of” books have subsequently mined this territory, and while Murphy’s ideas about psychology, philosophy and sports were on the cutting edge in 1972, many have since become commonplace maxims. Even the most earthbound N.F.L. lineman knows there are moments when we’re in ”the zone,” operating well beyond our everyday performance levels. Though ”The Kingdom of Shivas Irons” is ostensibly about Murphy’s search for the elusive Shivas Irons, its true concern is our quest for these moments of transcendence, and the book succeeds as a handbook for spiritual adventure. Still, there is always, as Murphy admits, the nagging question: Why golf?

August 3, 1997

“Chasing the Dream” by Harry Hurt III and Other Golf Books

Reviewed by Mark Lindquist
Special To The Seattle Times

In a possible sign of the impending Apocalypse, golf is creeping through the national consciousness. Tiger Woods and Greg Norman are as likely to be discussed at the local barber shop as Michael Jordan and Ken Griffey Jr.

Clearly it’s not right that men and women who hit a stationary ball with a stick, then walk a few minutes and do it again, should be compared to the warrior-athletes of the hardwood or diamond, but such is life at the end of the millennium.

What’s interesting is that many of the current golf books are not about golf per se, but about the quest itself: golf as metaphor for knight-errantry.

Two exceptionally fine examples are “Breaking Eighty: A Journey Through the Nine Fairways of Hell” (Hyperion, $22.95), by Lee Eisenberg, and “Chasing the Dream: A Mid-Life Quest for Fame and Fortune on the Pro Golf Circuit” (Avon, $24) by Harry Hurt III. Also out this summer is a book about the young man largely responsible for the golf boom and the resulting glut of books, Tiger Woods. John Strege’s work is titled, imaginatively enough, “Tiger: A Biography of Tiger Woods” (Broadway Books, $25).

Eisenberg, a former editor-in-chief of Esquire, devoted 18 months to improving his game, and he rationalized this indulgence by writing “Breaking Eighty.” Though his ostensible goal was to play a round in fewer than 80 strokes, he clearly had more in mind.

“To get golf right sets us on an arc of self-discovery and revelation,” writes Eisenberg. “It sets us on a path. The path is its own reward.”

One truly hopes he finds some noble truths on the path, because it quickly becomes clear that this semi-spastic scribe will never know the rewards of actually breaking 80.

This is a bright and talented man who has known much success in life, so why not with golf? Because golf makes men insane.

As Eisenberg descends through his “nine fairways of hell,” he becomes increasingly irrational. He seeks out instructors, physical therapists, writers, salesmen, all of whom offer contradictory advice. He listens to it all, tries it all, and continually, not surprisingly, fails.

This would be infuriating to read, except that Eisenberg is exceptionally good-humored, graceful and intelligent – completely unlike his golfing. He is highly literate, effortlessly working in references to thinkers such as social historian Christopher Lasch (“The Culture of Narcissism”).

Eisenberg understands that an obsession with golf could be due to “the growing emptiness of contemporary life,” that the game is a distraction not unlike drug and drink. Yet he does not let this dampen his child-like thrill in buying a new set of clubs.

Harry Hurt III, meanwhile, also attempts to improve his game through instruction, physical training, and, yes, new clubs. Hurt, however, has talent.

At 18, he was the No. 1 player on the Harvard freshman team, a golden future ahead. Then, a country club required him to get a haircut before his team could compete. Hurt quit. (Hey, he was only 18, and it was the late ’60s).

Cut to 25 years later: Hurt is a 43-year-old journalist who plays less than a round a year until a midlife crisis hits. Preposterously perhaps, he decides to attempt the PGA tour.

For most of us, this would be armchair fantasy. Who hasn’t sat, beer in hand, and projected himself onto the screen? But Hurt actually steps out of his chair and into the flow of action: He is a first-rate writer with a once-in-a-lifetime story, and a truly fine book results from this fortunate intersection of circumstances.

Hurt’s quest begins with amateur tournaments, then moves on to minor-league tournaments such as the Hooters Tour, then “Q school” – qualifying school for the PGA tour – and finally Monday qualifying rounds for the PGA tournaments.

There are numerous moments that cut to the heart of the male competitive spirit as Hurt brings an adult’s experience and a writer’s eye to this excellent adventure. Like Eisenberg, he punctuates his experience with literary allusions, but his reference points include Nirvana and the Rolling Stones as well as Shakespeare.

Though Hurt does not speak of golf as spiritual endeavor, his soul is involved, and though he loses money in the hunt, he has triumphs that are genuinely moving. Most impressively, by the end of the book, his wife has still not left him.

For “Tiger,” John Strege had full access to Tiger Woods and his family, and a thorough if uncritical biography results.

PGA tour commissioner Tim Finchem has referred to Woods as possibly “the most important player ever.” The young man’s success has measurably raised public awareness of golf, particularly in the minority community and among kids.

Sports-hero biographies are generally inspirational, but this one takes on a sad edge as Tiger goes from golf prodigy to marketing tool. The most interesting and telling detail in the book: Tiger’s first public comment when announcing at a press conference his intent to turn pro – “Hello, world” – was written by Nike ad meisters.

Lee Eisenberg and Harry Hurt III likely will never be in a Nike commercial, but, ironically, both their books are more inspirational than the biography of the young man who helped make their publishing deals possible.

September 28, 1997

“Balling the Jack” by Frank Baldwin

Reviewed by Mark Lindquist
New York Times Book Review

The title of Frank Baldwin’s first novel is a slang expression for betting everything on one attempt. Here the bet is on a game of darts — and the everything is both money and a girl. Although he is not the prose stylist Jay McInerney was when he made his debut with ”Bright Lights, Big City,” Baldwin’s book does revel in some of the key elements of what became a subgenre of 1980’s fiction: a narrator in his 20’s with a stifling entry-level job, aimless sexual encounters, prodigious drinking. Baldwin deploys an unusual amount of plot, which occasionally feels contrived, and his youthful exuberance is sometimes flat-out silly. Still, the narrator, Tom Reasons, spins a smart and amusing tale of urban knight-errantry: ”On the menu tonight is everything you get out of bed for: friends, women, music, drink.” True to the ”Bright Lights” model, Tom doesn’t know what he wants to do with his life, but he does know what he wants to avoid. ”We come out of school with a million commercials in our head,” he sighs, ”a million pictures of how it ought to be. A safe job, a family, our own house? I don’t know anybody who dreams about that.” But by the end of the book, even though he’d rather not see them (”I’ve never thought that far ahead and I’m not about to start”), they’re all lurking on the horizon.

November 23, 1997

By Mark Lindquist

TOUCH AND GO
By Eugene Stein

Eugene Stein has followed his first novel, ”Straitjacket & Tie,” with this uneven but sometimes inspired collection of short stories, absurdist sketches and incomplete, high-concept improvisations. One of the best stories, ”Close Calls,” is narrated by an executive in comedy development at a television network who has a highly developed talent for mixing drugs. In other stories, as in much contemporary fiction, AIDS is a recurring — though often unstated — presence. (The lead character in ”Death in Belize,” for example, is seized by the sexually transmitted ”Lima Plague.”) Several other stories explore sexual identity: in ”Mixed Signals,” when a high school student is gently told by a friend of his older brother’s that it’s all right to admit that he’s gay, the teen-ager replies: ”How do you know about me? I don’t even know about me.”

October 11, 1998

“Love is a Racket” by John Ridley

Reviewed by Mark Lindquist
New York Times Book Review

John Ridley’s crime-noir first novel, ”Stray Dogs,” was made into the Oliver Stone movie ”U-Turn.” This may explain why Ridley’s second novel, “Love is a Racket” (Knopf, $24), blends elements of the noir novel with the Hollywood novel.

True to the first genre, the book’s hero, a hard-drinking con man named Jeffty Kittridge, owes money to Dumas, a bad guy with a deceptively soft voice who just might kill him. True to the second, Jeffty is also a hard-drinking, burned-out screenwriter already being slowly killed by ”the gulag L.A.” Enter Mona, a street urchin with a striking resemblance to the actress Pier Angeli — who, Jeffty reminds us, killed herself with an overdose of pills. The first thing Mona says to Jeffty is ”Change?” She’s begging for money, but the double meaning is soon clear. Jeffty recruits her for a scam that could turn his life around.

The plotting is routine, but the writing is smart and edgy and even moving; if Richard Ford wrote genre fiction, it might read something like this. The only weaknesses result from unfortunate conformities to the noir formula and a digressive first act. Once Mona appears, however, Ridley has us hooked on his game.

Arts & Entertainment: Sunday, December 6, 1998

“Model Behavior” by Jay McInerney

Reviewed by Mark Lindquist
Special to The Seattle Times

In the late ’70s and early ’80s we called it “punk” when an artist said never mind the critics or, for that matter, the general public. “Bright Lights, Big City,” Jay McInerney’s first novel, was punk.

The odds would have been against its publication if not for McInerney’s friendship with editor Gary Fisketjon, who happened to dream up a line of paperback originals called “Vintage Contemporaries.”

After spending the latter half of the 15 years since “Bright Lights” straining for literary respectability, McInerney has slipped back on his red shoes for “Model Behavior,” his fifth novel. He has gleefully and shamelessly rewritten “Bright Lights” for the 1990s. Restaurants replace clubs as social focal points, celebrities replace cocaine as the metaphorical evil, and surrender replaces redemption as the semi-sunny ending, but the one-line synopsis is the same: beautiful model dumps young writer and sends him into a tailspin that forces him to search for a moral compass.

The lead character in “Model Behavior,” Conner McKnight, is a celebrity journalist burdened with just the right mix of self-satisfaction and self-loathing. The plot, such as it is, revolves around McKnight’s pursuit of an interview with a young actor.

McInerney uses the first person when he wants to write casually, switches into the second or third person when he wants to remind the reader he can write astoundingly well, and maintains a sneering energy throughout.

This is the literary equivalent of three-chord rock and roll, and I liked it. Voice, McInerney’s strong suit, drives the book more than the occassionally absurd story line. He writes of “toxic body consciousness,” and “carping the diem,” and “too little rapture of late.” He pulls chapter titles from R.E.M. lyrics, references obscure pop songs from the 1980s, and mistakenly refers to Sean MacPherson’s defunct Los Angeles restaurant The Olive as “a club in West Hollywood” just to see if anyone is paying attention. He has fun.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, who by law must be mentioned in any review of McInerney, felt that writers have one or two truly powerful experiences in their lives and that we spend our careers telling the story of the resulting emotion over and over. One of McInerney’s most powerful experiences to date has been, apparently, being dumped by a model. Proof of his skill and artistry is found in the fact that from this personal trifle he has written some of the most relevant literature of our time.

The seven accompanying stories, in contrast, are technically astute and, well, kind of boring. They could be interpreted as gropes for approval after the critical beatings McInerney’s work took in the 1980s. Interestingly, the New York Times Book Review, quite stingy in its recent appraisal of “Model Behavior,” still lauds these stories as “models of the form.” Yes, and there is little that distinquishes them from other models of the form. With the exception of “Smoke,” a fascinating outtake from McInerney’s fourth novel, “Brightness Falls,” these stories mostly serve to prove that McInerney can write like his elders, albeit with flair. I was put in mind of Nirvana covering a Perry Como song.

E.M. Forster said that fiction can do what history books cannot: capture the “buzz of implication” of an era. I predict that 40 or 50 years from now, when most of the critics’ current favorites are forgotten, McInerney will be enjoying a posthumous comeback and “Model Behavior” will be a popular computer disk, particularly among college students.

McInerney will be read in the future for his humanistic understanding and rendering of the buzz of our era. So why wait? Read him now.

December 20, 1998

“The Gates of Eden” by Ethan Coen

Reviewed by Mark Lindquist
New York Times Book Review

Ethan Coen and his brother, Joel, have made some of the more interesting movies of the last two decades: ”Blood Simple,” ”Raising Arizona,” ”Barton Fink” and ”Fargo.” Ethan Coen writes and Joel Coen directs. And while Ethan Coen isn’t quite as stylish with language as his brother is with a camera, he does have a distinctive voice and an offbeat worldview, both of which come through with varying degrees of success in his first collection of stories.

”Have You Ever Been to Electric Ladyland” is a brilliant monologue by a record executive trying to figure out who had a motive to castrate his dog. But ”Johnnie Ga-Botz,” composed of nothing but dialogue and stage directions, is the sort of exercise that talented, undisciplined creative writing students pound out at 3 A.M. The title story is a good example of what the Coen brothers are known for: a leap into an off-kilter yet fully imagined world in which a bureaucrat with the California Department of Weights and Measures thinks and acts like a hard-boiled detective.

All of these stories take place in Coen Brothers Land, a parallel universe similar to our own — except it’s weirder, funnier and better edited.

July 7, 1999

“Chump Change” by David Eddie

Reviewed by Mark Lindquist
Special to The Seattle Times

“I am a failure,” begins David Eddie’s narrator, David Henry. Though it is risky to assume a first novel is autobiographical just because first novels often are, it’s a safe bet here.

Eddie has pointedly adopted the autobiographical tradition, and the publisher’s promotional materials play it up: Both author and narrator graduated from the Columbia School of Journalism, both were letters clerks for Newsweek, both moved to Toronto and worked for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation – though, in a nod to Henry Miller, the CBC is called the Cosmodemonic Broadcasting Corporation.

Also included in the promotional package is a glossy card labeled “My Manifesto, by David Eddie.” “My motto is: drink up, do what your nature prompts you to do, say what’s on your mind; then, the next day, phone – or in extreme cases, write – and apologize. I guess that’s what `Chump Change’ really is: a form of apology for my behavior thus far.”

This 230-page attempt to atone tracks the narrator’s career arc from gleeful loser to struggling free-lancer to prosperous TV writer and back to gleeful loser.

On the road mess traveled, Henry drinks whenever possible, has perplexing sexual relationships, and talks, talks, talks. His rant targets include minimalist writers, which is ironic because Henry/Eddie could benefit from reading a few books written with nuance and control.

Henry is remarkably undisciplined with his life, and Eddie is remarkably undisciplined with his prose.

Still, this is an engaging read because of Eddie’s relentless energy, honesty and wit. He is someone you would want to have a drink with.

I only hope he sobers up long enough to write a second novel. Tip to the author: you should never add ice to Lagavulin, but just a measured splash of water.

Entertainment & the Arts, Sunday, February 28, 1999

“South of the Border, West of the Sun” by Haruki Murakami

Reviewed by Mark Lindquist
Special To The Seattle Times

This is a Japanese novel that feels as American as the movie “Casablanca,” which it brings to mind in both tone and plot. Hajime, the narrator, owns a jazz bar in Tokyo. He is in his mid-30s, has a wife, two children, and a BMW. Life is good, except he has moments where he feels he is “living someone else’s life, not my own.”

Hajime is haunted by the memory of Shimamoto, a precocious girl he had an intense friendship with when they were 12 years old. They lost track of each other after Hajime’s parents moved and he went to a different junior high school.

Twenty-five years later, Shimamoto reappears in Hajime’s life, much like Ingrid Bergman’s appearance at Rick’s. The jazz trio strikes up Duke Ellington’s “Star-Crossed Lovers,” which does for Hijime what “As Time Goes By” did for Humphrey Bogart’s character. This masterfully composed short novel is about what happens when these two reconnect. You can read it in one sitting, and then you will want to read it again.

Murakami has translated several American authors into Japanese, including Raymond Carver and F. Scott Fitzgerald, and comparisons to both are called for. Murakami shows the control and compassion of Carver along with the lyricism of Fitzgerald. The only weakness here is the occasionally wooden dialogue, which may be a translation problem.

Possibly because Murakami is Japanese and in his 40s, he gets away with something his younger American contemporaries have been criticized for: bridging the gap between literature and popular fiction. At times this book reads like a screenplay, but with a remarkably smart and moving voice-over.

This is Murakami’s fifth novel to be translated into English and his popularity here is on the rise. If you are not already a reader of his, this is a good place to start.

April 10, 1999

“Burning Girl” by Ben Neihart

Reviewed by Mark Lindquist
Special To The Seattle Times

Ben Neihart’s first novel, “Hey Joe,” a racy coming-of-age story, was fresh, hip and well-received. “Burning Girl,” his follow-up, focuses on Drew Burke, a 20-year-old scholarship student who becomes involved in the secret lives of a damaged rich girl and her gay brother.

Contrary to the impression given by the cover artwork, this is a graceful novel. Neihart has a gift for conjuring the wide-eyed rush of youth and its sense of endless possibilities. “He fell into a mood of hypnotized entitlement, as if he owned this highway and the blue-black clone sedans in every lane were part of a security detail escorting him home.” Drew’s infatuation with the monied life is engaging. The characters feel alive, the dialogue rings smart and true.

However, after about a hundred pages the style and tone shift into something between a thriller and a murder mystery. This happens too far into the book – one of several structural flaws – but the more troubling problem is that Neihart is not a suspense writer. He is too taken with language and detail that do nothing to enhance the tension, and his lead character chews up too many pages wondering and analyzing and explaining. Such is not the stuff of page-turning thrillers.

Neihart seems bored with the rules and cliches of the genre, but half-heartedly employs a few anyway. I would bet he doesn’t even like thrillers.

Still, the book remains readable, even occasionally compelling, because Neihart is talented. When critics look back on his career, which could be a notable one, this novel will likely be chalked up as an intriguing stumble.

Entertainment & the Arts: Sunday, May 09, 1999

“Another Life: A Memoir of Other People” by Michael Korda

By Mark Lindquist
Special To The Seattle Times

This autobiography put me in mind of a line from a Jim Morrison poem, “Did you have a good world when you died, enough to base a movie on?”

Michael Korda has had such a life, and he’s not even dead yet. As the subtitle suggests, Korda focuses his book more on people he’s known than on himself. But this is still his life, his world.

Korda started as an assistant to an editor at Simon & Schuster in 1958. He is currently editor-in-chief of S&S and a best-selling author with 11 books to his credit. In his 40-year career, Korda has dealt closely with the likes of Jacqueline Susann, Larry McMurtry, Tennessee Williams, Claus Von Bulow, Carlos Castaneda, Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon.

The celebrity anecdotes, which make up most of the book, are intercut with corporate drama. Some of the most compelling passages track the giddy ambition of Korda and Dick Snyder, young men plotting their ascent at S&S. They happened to make their moves at a time when book publishing was in transition from cottage business to semi-glamorous industry. This was a fortunate intersection of circumstances, and the result is a fascinating book by a large personality living in an interesting time.

Other people’s lives are handled with engaging candor, but Korda is much stingier with his own. His fascination with power and celebrity over more humdrum matters as, say, family, captures the mood of his time and tribe, and makes for a good read. It’s difficult to tell from this book if it has made for a good life.

Korda’s prose is surprisingly workmanlike, but he has an impressive memory, a good eye for telling moments, and surely knows how to pen a story. His instinct for what keeps pages turning has kept him in business all these years and serves him well here. As Korda might put it, this book works.

Entertainment News: Thursday, May 20, 1999

“Music for Torching” by A.M. Homes

Reviewed by Mark Lindquist
Special to The Seattle Times

A.M. Homes’ fifth book is daring, original, smart and artful, yet does not quite work as a novel.

Paul and Elaine, the lead couple, were first featured in Homes’ short story “Adults Alone,” from her collection “The Safety of Objects,” where they spend 18 pages obsessing about aging, and then smoke crack.

In “Music For Torching,” Paul and Elaine kick things off by trying to burn down their house.

“Why did we do it,” Paul asks.

“We did it because there was nothing else we could do,” Elaine answers.

The house, however, is only semi-damaged. So they attempt to put things back together and various absurdities befall them as they struggle on, like a yuppie Estragon and Vladimir in a suburban “Waiting for Godot.”

They stay with their neighbors until their house is habitable again and decide “that everything they ever suspected about how much better the lives of the neighbors are has been proven true. Everyone else is more organized, happier, their lives less fraught, more satisfying.”

Paul and Elaine are chronically dissatisfied. They ooze adolescent angst, which can be cool and hip if you’re young and writing songs such as “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” but is not cool or hip when you’re a grown adult with your own children.

Elaine thinks of herself as “stuck.” She has two affairs – one with a neighbor woman, and another with a local cop. Paul has a couple of affairs also – one with a different neighbor woman, and another with a crazy nameless “date.” Nothing important results from these encounters. They are just part of a series of weird incidents in this twisted and plotless take on modern suburbia. A man kisses Paul’s palm on the train home. Who knows why?

Bret Easton Ellis comes to mind, particularly in the moments of black comedy, but Homes, unlike Ellis, shows flashes of an alarming earnestness. She seems to take seriously the neuroses of her characters, which undercuts the humor.

While the adults act like adolescents, the children retreat into their own private strangeness. Daniel, the oldest, collects his mother’s lipstick, and obese-women porn magazines with titles like Chunky Bunch. His little brother Sammy spends much of his time at a neighbor’s house. After the Columbine school shootings, every editorial writer in the country seems to be asking, who is watching the children? Not the likes of Elaine and Paul.

Elaine describes herself as “Bored and boring. And pathetic. And stupid.” Yes, yes, yes and yes. And so is Paul. They are also amazingly immature.

These two were perfect fodder for Homes’ distinct style of short story, but they simply cannot carry a novel of 358 pages. Homes tries mightily, though. She employs an array of writerly tricks, avoids false steps, occasionally soars with inspired passages – “In the end, the goal is to be left with something: a spouse, children, even parents if you can manage it. The goal is not to be left alone” – but still, most readers are going to want to punch Paul in the nose and stuff a fistful of Prozac down Elaine’s throat.

You do not care whether they can rebuild their house and lives, if they can “make things good again.” You know they won’t. You know they will whine instead. You know something awful is going to happen to them, and the only question is what.

The publisher is giving this book a big promotional push, and I could not help but think this would be more effective if the material had been edited down to about half its length. Homes’ voice is so sharp, so unique and particular to our time, that she might have overcome the problematic Paul and Elaine if their griping did not drag on so long.

As it stands, this novel is not likely to increase Homes’ audience, but it should satisfy and impress those who are already admirers of her work.

July 4, 1999

Wormwood” by David Levien

Reviewed by Mark Lindquist
Special to The Seattle Times

This first novel was apparently written in the early to mid-nineties, but not published. Levien went on to co-write the screenplay for “Rounders,” a Miramax Pictures release starring Matt Damon, which was a hit.

Now Miramax, an organization known for its chummy relationships with artists, is publishing Levien’s youthful Hollywood novel.

These are not circumstances that would lead you to expect a good book, but “Wormwood” is a surprise pleasure. Nathan Pitch, the narrator, comes to Los Angeles with the requisite desire: “We wanted to get in, we wanted to make movies, we wanted to profit by this, to be made special from it.”

Pitch climbs up in the industry until he questions what he is doing, and falls. He becomes involved with the wrong woman – though at least she’s not an actress – and the wrong drink, absinthe. Wormwood is the root that gives absinthe both its intoxicating and toxic qualities, and it also gives Levien an apt symbol for Hollywood.

Levien knows the industry, knows its characters, knows their language and follies. He is insightful and truthful and clever. His weakness is his still-developing prose style. Related shortcomings include a tendency to explain too much – screenwriters are not allowed this indulgence and Levien runs amok.

Part of the mystique of Los Angeles is due to its peculiar environment: the palm trees, the sweet eucalyptus, the Santa Ana winds and so on. Sometimes it feels as though Levien intends to let a cinematographer and art director fill in texture later.

“Wormwood” is not quite artful enough to compete with classics like Nathaniel West’s “Day of the Locust,” or Joan Didion’s “Play it as it Lays,” but  it’s certainly worthy of honorable mention in the Hollywood genre pantheon.

Entertainment News: Sunday, August 15, 1999

“Not Ready for Prime Time” by Brent Askari

Reviewed by Mark Lindquist
Special to The Seattle Times

In his book “On Becoming a Novelist,” John Gardner, the writer and teacher who was a mentor to Raymond Carver among many others, had this advice for writers:

“One of the most common mistakes among young writers is the idea that a story gets its power from withheld information – that is, from the writer’s setting the reader up and then bushwhacking him.”

Bushwhacking is an unfortunate technique of playwright Brent Askari in his first novel. He ends chapters with sentences like, “And when I did find out the truth, it blew my mind.” This is especially unfortunate because his story does not need cheap tricks.

Justine Nichols, the narrator, a 22-year-old lead singer for an all-girl band, is a charming and engaging character. Abandoned by her parents and raised by an alcoholic aunt, she’s an intriguing study in dysfunction. Askari’s writing continually rings true in this territory.

Justine’s bandmates are drawn equally well: “Tara didn’t fit in with any of the high school crowds. Even the angst-ridden life-sucks-so-let’s-dress-in-black-and-worship-death crowd didn’t like her, because they thought she was a downer.”

I would have liked to spend more time with the band, but the story moves, as it must, to Justine’s confrontation with her mother, a TVstar Justine has never seen in the flesh. Their face-to-face comes in the hospital where the mother is staying after a suicide attempt. This scene, like most of the emotional high points, is handled with grace and wit.

Through the course of the story, Justine has two boyfriends who are her dysfunctional equals, but she is clearly not ready for love. By the end, having confronted her past and herself, she may be.

September 5, 1999

“Are You Experienced” by William Sutcliffe

Reviewed by Mark Lindquist
Special to The Seattle Times

This cross between a coming-of-age story and a road-trip novel was a best seller in England when it was first published in 1996. Now it makes its American debut in trade paperback, packaged for the backpack.

Dave, the narrator, is a 17-year-old Londoner with a year off before he starts school at the university. He decides to spend three months traveling through India, and not out of any intellectual or spiritual curiosity. His only goal is to bed his traveling companion, Liz.

Dave is immature and cynical, but also smart and funny. “I had heard the old cliche about how when you arrive in India, it’s like stepping into an oven, but this hadn’t prepared me for the fact that when you arrive in India, it is like stepping into an oven.”

Liz, unlike Dave, feels obliged to “give something back to India.” She reveals that she wants to bathe lepers. “It’s always been a dream of mine, actually,” she says. Not for Dave. When Liz begins meditating and saying things like, “My karma really has changed,” Dave responds, “Karma, my arse.” She abandons him.

Dave is forced to go it alone, and he begins mixing with the locals out of necessity. Dave is no Jack Kerouac – this is not a book about the joys and insights of new experiences, but more about the excruciating boredom of bumpy 14-hour bus rides. Still, Dave does start to get into the swing of things. He even hooks up with a native who speaks his language: booze and girls.

This is an enjoyable and occasionally hilarious read for anyone who has ever suffered from the idea that “a long and unpleasant holiday is of crucial importance to one’s development as a human being.”

September 20, 1999

“Everybody Smokes in Hell” by John Ridley

Reviewed by Mark Lindquist
Special to The Seattle Times

John Ridley’s first two novels, “Stray Dogs” and “Love is a Racket,” were the kind of thrillers that critics and fellow writers like: smart, edgy, ugly but with moments of poetry. His formula is pat: down-and-out characters want something, want it real bad, and they’re all wanting and scrambling and reaching at the same time and mayhem ensues.

In his third book, “Everybody Smokes in Hell,” Ridley turns the amp up to 11. He does for the noir genre what Quentin Tarantino did for independent movies.

Paris Scott, the main character, is a Hollywood loser who stumbles onto a rock musician’s last recording before death. His roommate, Buddy, stumbles onto a brick of heroin. Both think they’ve been given their big break. But no. They’re about to meet up with an extravagant cast of strippers, agents, rednecks, even an immigrant convenience-store manager. Some want the tape, some want the dope, some want the rush of violence, some just want to survive.

At first, Paris figures he can score a million dollars for the tape. After a lot of blood and death and plot twists, he just wants enough money to escape to the Florida Keys with a woman, any woman he can get his hands on.

Ridley draws his characters well, even the minor supporting characters, and he knows how to keep a story jumping, but there’s no emotion here. Neither Paris nor anybody else in this novel invites empathy. An opening disclaimer states, “Any similarities between the miscreants in this story and the actual insipid degenerates who populate the city I hate more than cancer is purely coincidental.”

Sounds like it’s time for Ridley to move his stories to a new locale, because Los Angeles is beating him numb.

Entertainment News: Sunday, November 21, 1999

“Soft Maniacs” by Maggie Estep 

Reviewed by Mark Lindquist
Special to The Seattle Times

If you like your fiction dark, demented and highly sexed, this book is for you.

You may even remember author Magge Estep as the videogenic gamin on MTV’s “Poetry Unplugged,” circa 1993. She has since toured as a poet with Lollapalooza, formed a band that opened for Courtney Love’s band, Hole, and released two CDs. Her first novel, “Diary of an Emotional Idiot,” was published in 1997. Kirkus Reviews called it “semi-literate.”

“Soft Maniacs,” her second book, is a collection of interconnected stories focused on two women: Jody, a crazy psychiatrist, and Katie, a crazy lion-tamer’s daughter. The stories are narrated in first person by the various men who have sex with them, love them, hurt them and maybe save them.

This narrative technique is terrifically effective at first, but eventually suffers from a blurring of the voices as the narrator’s personalities are overpowered by the author’s distinct tics. However, this can be forgiven if you accept that this is a woman writing about women in the way she suspects they are seen by men. That may be part of the point.

The stories all build on each other, and none lend themselves to a useful synopsis. The common theme is damaged and lost souls on the mend. Though Estep’s writing can be ragged, in the end she proves herself to be considerably more than semi-literate.

The last two stories both pack epiphanies that are surprising and gratifying. This book is the work of a skillful artist who, like her characters, is searching through the mania of modern life for something sane and worthwhile.

As one of the characters says to a suicidal woman standing on a window ledge, “Maybe there are reasons to go, but there are reasons to stay, too.”

Sunday, January 2, 2000

“Lo’s Diary” by Pia Pera

Reviewed by Mark Lindquist
Special to The Seattle Times

The legal issues raised by the retelling of Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita” from the pubescent child’s point of view are, unfortunately, more interesting than this first novel by Italian journalist and short-story writer Pia Pera.

Dmitri Nabokov, son of Vladimir and executor of his literary estate, chose not to sue when “Lo’s Diary” was first published in Italy in 1995. However, when Farrar, Straus & Giroux was preparing to publish the book in English, Dmitri Nabokov asserted copyright infringement.

The law was not – and still is not – clear. Parody does not require permission, while sequels or prequels do if there is an existing copyright. Once the copyright expires and the work passes into public domain, it can be legally ripped off. Consider “West Side Story,” “My Fair Lady,” “Clueless” and, most recently, “Ahab’s Wife.” “Lolita,” however, is still under copyright protection, and “Lo’s Diary” is neither parody, sequel or prequel. So the legal question becomes whether “Lo’s Diary” is “derivative” and, therefore, requires permission, or “transformative” and, therefore, a new and independent property.

A court decision would have set a precedent, and could have opened the door to endless literary thievery.

Imagine the possibilities: “The Great Gatsby” from Daisy’s point of view, “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” from Nurse Ratched’s, “The Old Man and the Sea” from the marlin’s, and so on.

Farrar, Straus & Giroux dropped out of the budding legal battle. Barney Rossett, the former publisher of Grove Press, stepped in with Fox Rock Books, his new enterprise. Rather than gamble with the court, a compromise agreement was reached, whereby royalties were divided and both sides won something: The Nabokov estate protected its copyright, and Pia Pera’s book was published here. Also, Dimitri Nabokov was allowed to write a preface to the novel, the main purpose of which seems to be to portray Pia Pera as a “would-be plagiarist.”

Plagiarism “Lo’s Diary” may be, but it is not particularly artful plagiarism. Pera inexplicably decided to portray the 11-year-old “nymphet” as bitter and manipulative, almost sociopathic, and highly sexualized before meeting pedophile Humbert Humbert.

The rivalry between mother and daughter, clear enough in the original, is expanded upon at length by Pera: “Mom may be pretty, but I’m prettier.” “True beauty vanishes by the time a woman gets to be her age.” “The only way for an older woman to get herself married is to get the absent-minded man to fall in love with the child first.”

Lolita sets out to seduce Humbert shortly after he enters the story on page 71. “Hummie is practically mine. I really know what it takes with men.” Lolita’s calculations offer an interesting counterpoint to Humbert’s delirious and unreliable recounting of their interactions.

“Lo’s Diary” is most interesting when Pera mirrors Nabokov’s passages, such as the red apple encounter. In the original, Humbert grabs an apple from the 12-year-old and exploits the resulting wrestling match to work himself into a verbal and sexual frenzy. Humbert appears to believe that he has gotten away with “the longest ecstasy man or monster had ever known.” Nabokov ends the chapter with “Blessed be the Lord, she had noticed nothing.”

In Pera’s telling, Lolita knows exactly what Humbert is up to, even leads him there, and afterward thinks, “He looks around confused and satisfied, maybe he hasn’t yet realized what happened to him: that I seduced him. That now he’s mine.”

Later, during the road trip across America, when Lolita has tired of the game, when the seduction is over and the raping has begun, Pera effectively captures some of Lo’s trauma and helplessness. “A minor is a person the law doesn’t protect.”

The moments that work in “Lo’s Diary” directly riff on the original, while the freshly imagined scenes – such as a clumsy and gratuitous scene where Lolita tortures a hamster – mostly fail, particularly when contrasted with Nabokov’s artistry.

The best thing about “Lo’s Diary” is that it begs the reader back to “Lolita,” one of the benchmark masterpieces of this last century.

Entertainment News: Sunday, January 16, 2002

Miss Wyoming by Douglas Coupland

Reviewed by Mark Lindquist
Special to The Seattle Times

Douglas Coupland’s first novel, “Generation X: Tales of an Accelerated Culture,” was published in 1991. “Miss Wyoming” is his eighth book in nine years. Coupland also works as a designer and sculptor in Vancouver, B.C.

How can anyone write so many books in one decade? Well, for starters, don’t spend too much time crafting the prose or narrative. This works for Coupland because no one reads him for artistry. We read him for his pop-culture sensibility, for his oddly mannered language, for his asides, for those jolts of recognition.

The phrase “Generation X” was stolen from Billy Idol – it was the name of Idol’s first band, and Coupland has been ripping off and riffing on pop culture ever since. His second novel, `Shampoo Planet,” shifted to the modern tedium of “Global Teens,” Coupland’s name for the generation that followed Xers.

Then came “Life After God,” a collection of stories with diverse characters whose common bond was a flat ache for something to believe in. Lighter fare followed. “Microserfs,” a novel about computer geeks at Microsoft, was fun and squishy like an OK sitcom. “Polaroids from the Dead,” a collection of essays chasing the Zeitgeist, veered erratically between the sentimental and the incisive.

“Girlfriend in a Coma,” a high-concept novel, revisited everything Coupland had riffed on before, but from the wide-eyed perspective of a girl who wakes up from a 17-year coma. The title was stolen from a Smiths’ song, and if you don’t know who the Smiths are, you’re not part of Coupland’s demographic target. “Lara’s Book” was a tangent, a coffee-table thing, a weird mix of meditative essays and how-to strategies for techies who are into the computer game “Tomb Raider,” which features cyber creation Lara Croft.

Now, here’s “Miss Wyoming,” a zigzagging story about two pop-culture casualties who stumble onto each other: John Johnson, a burned-out 37-year-old movie producer, and Susan Colgate, a former teen beauty queen turned sitcom actress. Walking clichés, but they are drawn with surprising strokes of authenticity.

We are introduced to Johnson via this internal dialogue, “Hey, John Johnson, you’ve pretty much felt all the emotions you’re ever likely to feel, and from here on it’s reruns.” But John has never been in love, and this is the “one simple hole in his life.” He is in the hospital having a near-death experience when he sees Susan on TV and falls for her – “TV had taught him that love was pretty much a cure for all ills.”

Susan is the more complex character. She’s the damaged product of the child-beauty-pageant circuit. Her nutty stage mother moves the family to Wyoming, because how tough can the competition be in Wyoming?

Susan becomes Miss Wyoming, but eventually rebels and drops out of the teen queen game, only to land in the frying pan of a sitcom. Her acting career dies in “the grunge era.” She survives a near-death experience of her own, a plane crash, and meets John.

John may need Susan, but Susan needs to resolve some Jerry Springer-sized issues with her mother. A story line of sorts charts this out, and an interesting cast of extras develops along the way, but the narrative flashes backward and forward and sideways, which stalls the momentum.

The tricky thing about reading Coupland is navigating the opposing waves of irony, cynicism and sentimentality. He can wryly remark on the deceits of modern entertainment, then write this: “Susan could be more to him than his latest box-office ranking. With Susan he might actually raise something better out of himself than a hot pitch for a pointless film. Something moral and fine inside each of them might sprout and grow.” Not only does John appear to believe this mush, I get the sense that Coupland wants to believe it, too.

The pleasure in “Miss Wyoming” comes in lines like, “he turned into the killer bunny from Monty Python,” in the way the buzz of our time is rendered, and in the author’s conflicted tone. Coupland is too smart and knowing to be gushy, yet he can be just that, and it’s because he wants to be not so knowing, so ironic, so 1990s.

The overall impression Coupland’s catalog leaves me with is this: This is a bright guy who badly wants to believe in something but doesn’t yet. He is daring enough to venture into the existential territory of Richard Ford’s “The Sportswriter” and Walker Percy’s “The Moviegoer,” and if he pales somewhat in comparison, what younger writer doesn’t?

Lest this review seem jaded in a very 1990s way, I should point out that I enjoyed “Miss Wyoming” immensely – it’s clever, distinct and it occasionally moved me.

Arts & Entertainment: Sunday, March 05, 2000 

“A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius” by Dave Eggers

Reviewed by Mark Lindquist
Special to The Seattle Times

We’ve all had a friend who was bright, neurotic, unsatisfied, overanalyzed everything and just wouldn’t shut up. We hung out with that person because the positives outweighed the negatives. I expect this is how Dave Eggers’ friends must feel about him.

His memoir, or anti-memoir, is a rambling, sloppy mess of brilliance. Eggers, a founder of the defunct satirical magazine Might, and a current editor of McSweeney’s, lost both his parents to cancer within about a month of each other. Left with the responsibility of raising his 8-year-old brother, he turned it into an anthropological adventure.

“Though he has often been resistant, children so seldom know what is good for them – I have taught him to appreciate all the groundbreaking musicmakers of our time – Big Country, Haircut One Hundred, Loverboy – and he is lucky for it. His brain is my laboratory, my depository . . . He is my twenty-four-hour classroom, my captive audience, forced to ingest everything I deem worthwhile.”

Eggers recognizes that he is not the only person in the world to lose parents to cancer, or to inherit a younger sibling, but he points out that he is “currently the only one with a book contract.”

This smart-alecky tone is established early. The epigraph, “This Was Uncalled For,” is followed by “Rules and Suggestions For Enjoyment of This Book” such as “Skip much of the middle, namely page 213-395, which concern the lives of people in their early twenties.” And in the acknowledgments Eggers relates, “While the author is self-conscious about being self-conscious, he is also knowing about that self-conscious self-referentiality. Further . . . he plans to be clearly, obviously aware of his knowingness about his self-consciousness of self-referentiality.”

There is much to criticize about this book, but little that Eggers hasn’t already thought of and attempted to pre-empt. After 43 pages of preamble and a random drawing of a stapler, the story starts. Eggers’ mother is dying of cancer. Her death is agonizingly long. His fathers’ death is sudden.

Both parents gone, Eggers takes care of his 8-year-old brother, Chris, aka Toph. Eggers is 21 at the time, and is not clear why he, rather than his older brother or sister, becomes the youngest child’s caretaker. In any case, Eggers, his girlfriend, his older sister and Toph all leave the Chicago suburb of Lake Forest and move to Berkeley to set up house.

Soon it becomes just Eggers and Toph. Their lives are a parody of normalcy. They fake father-son fights, Toph begs Eggers not to date his classmates’ mothers, and Eggers writes notes to Toph’s teachers such as, “Dear Mrs. Richardson, I am sorry Chris is late this morning. I could make something up about an appointment or a sickness, but the fact is that we woke up late.”

The middle section of the book – the part Eggers advises skipping – chronicles the struggle of Might magazine. If you’ve never heard of Might, it was a thin Generation X ‘zine devoted to the art of ridicule and irony, exactly the sort of thing Jedediah Purdy, in his book, “For Common Things,” argued was contributing to the poisonous cynicism of our times.

Eggers, however, is 29 now, and interested in moving beyond irony and cynicism, working to the core of some genuineness that defies deconstruction, and he occasionally succeeds.

The book’s denouement comes when Eggers returns to Michigan to pick up his mother’s ashes and spread them into Lake Michigan, a scene that deftly mixes slap-stick comedy, self-protective solipsism and genuine sorrow.

The positives in this book are inventiveness, intelligence, relentless wit and, most of all, a good story. The negatives are knee-jerk irony and an aversion to subtlety.

The positives outweigh the negatives, however, and if you still like that hyper-clever friend who won’t shut up, you will like this book.

Arts & Entertainment: March 14, 2000

“Phoenix: A Brother’s Life” by J.D. Dolan

Reviewed by Mark Lindquist
Special to The Seattle Times

The memoir has become our most abused genre and, mercifully, seemed to have recently reached its high water mark with “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius,” Dave Eggers’ smart-alecky deconstruction.  

I had hoped I would not be reading any more book length personal gripes that had nothing to say about our world other than the obvious: life can be bizzare and cruel and people whine too much.

But then came J.D. Dolan’s memoir. This is non-fiction loaded with the insights and universal truths we expect from the best literature.  Dolan’s brave book is proof of how first rate writing can redeem almost anything.

Dolan grew up on the edge of Los Angeles in the “Leave it to Beaver” era.  His father was a Greyhound bus driver, his mother stayed home, his two sisters dated, and his older brother, John, owned a Corvette. The family was quietly, crazily, dysfunctional. Refusing to speak to another family member — for months, years even — appears to be the preferred Dolan family fight tactic.

J.D. idolized his brother John, as younger brothers are wont to do.  John taught J.D. to fish, to shoot a gun, to ride a motorcycle.  John gave J.D. his first gun, his first motorcycle, his first hero.  This is, at its heart, a simple story about two brothers that loved each other and then stopped speaking to each other for five years, and it has the breath-stealing power of a rifle shot to the chest.

J.D. and his brother were in their not-speaking phase when John was nearly fried to death by an explosion of steam at a power generating plant.  J.D. was, at that time, bumming around Paris, waiting for his first published story to come out in “The Mississippi Review.”  Prior to this, J.D worked as a rock and roll roadie, a driver, and a bartender, but his new life as a writer was about to begin. John’s life was, of course, about to end.

J.D. flies to Phoenix and meets up with his mother and his sisters at the hospital. The sisters have a hard time accepting that John is dying, but J.D. quickly recognizes the inevitable. What J.D. does have a hard time with is understanding how it came to this — how he is losing a brother he hasn’t spoke with in years and can not really  speak with now.

J.D. does not tell us exactly how or why the brothers became estranged.  He does not seem to understand it himself. There are hints that it had something to do with John’s disapproval of J.D.’s drug-addled rock and roll life, or maybe John’s dissatisfaction with his own mundane life. What’s clear is that something important was lost and that J.D. will never have the chance to get it back. 

Still, as the song says, where there’s something lost, there’s something gained, and that is what J.D. tries to find. And, in some small but significant ways, he succeeds.

One day, after J.D. cannot look at his brother’s “battlefield” of a body any longer, he leaves the hospital to do what he likes doing best, drive. “As I drove, I listened to the radio, I watched the heat waves rise from the asphalt.  I admired the nearby hills and smiled at tan women in halter tops.  And while my brother lay dying in a burn unit, I felt terribly, guiltily, hungrily alive.”

J.D. is the first to tell John he is going do die, though John may or may not be able to hear. During this final exchange, “It occurred to me that I wasn’t mad at my brother anymore, and I knew that in the end, when it mattered, he wasn’t mad at me.  And I knew that I loved him very much, and that he loved me.  And in this there was considerable grace.” 

Arts & Entertainment: Sunday, June 25, 2000

“War Boy” by Kief Hillsbery 

Reviewed by Mark Lindquist
Special to The Seattle Times

This energetic and ambitious first novel is narrated by Radboy, a 14-year-old deaf skateboard punk. “Storytellers lie,” he warns us right away, then proceeds to tell as much truth as he can.

The action kicks into gear when Jonnyboy, a 24-year-old “kweer,” beats up Radboy’s abusive dad. Jonnyboy and Radboy steal dad’s coin collection and split for San Francisco. On the way, they hook up with Finn and Critter, meth-head boyfriends, and Ula, a “Swedish Blond Communist,” and embark on a series of a drug-addled adventures, including a concert featuring Northwest indie rockers Sleater-Kinney.

Hillsbery has a good ear for subculture language, writes honestly and knowingly about druggy life, and the frenetic rhythms of his prose matches the subject. There is not a single comma in Radboy’s narration, which seems a bit gimmicky at first, but soon rings true to its source.

The story zooms along engagingly enough, like a hyper-modern “Huckleberry Finn,” but then takes a strange turn when an eco-terrorist plot develops. The politics are juvenile, which is not a criticism when you remember that the narrator is 14 and his friends are crackheads. “All I really know about politics is from punk rock zines and song lyrics and stuff on the Internet.”

What works about the book, despite the plot contrivances, is the voice, the flashes of wisdom and the desperate urgency in its theme of human connection, which eventually finds form in a late-developing love story between Radboy and Jason.

This is one of those first novels where the author is trying so hard to get things right, to make something honest and lasting, that his will, more than skill, turns this into solid modern literature.

Arts & Entertainment: Sunday, July 2, 2000

“Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man” by Joseph Heller

Reviewed by Mark Lindquist
Special to The Seattle Times

Joseph Heller died in December 1999, at the age of 76, just after finishing this novel, which was presciently designed to be his last.

Heller is, of course, best known for his first novel, “Catch 22,” the wildly successful anti-war novel from the 1960s. He wrote eight subsequent books, but has never matched the critical or commercial success of his first.

Eugene Pota, the subject of “Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man,” is almost 76, best known for his first novel and frustrated by his failure to match its critical or commercial success.

Pota is struggling with ideas for a new novel, which he knows will likely be his last, and he hopes will be his best. “This is a book about a well-known, aging author trying to close out his career with a crowning achievement,” Heller explains in this amusing postmodern exercise about a writer writing the very novel the reader is reading.

Unfortunately, Pota – and Heller – are “without a plot, at a loss for a subject, and have no clear idea what to move on to next.”

So we become privy to the throwaway sentences and concepts that eventually evolve into a novel as Heller details rejected – but eventually used – material.

There are several good, albeit undeveloped, riffs, the best of which features Tom Sawyer on a quest to consult a list of accomplished novelists about a career in writing. He learns that writers are an astonishingly miserable lot: alcoholic, neurotic, obsessive, unsatisfied, cursed with various maladies. Sawyer decides to be a riverboat captain instead.

This is a book I would recommend only to fellow novelists, aspiring novelists or the parents of aspiring novelists.

Arts & Entertainment: Sunday, August 06, 2000

‘What’s Not to Love’ is hilarious, postmodern

By Mark Lindquist
Special to The Seattle Times

There’s not much to say about this book except that it is often hilarious.

Here is what Ames says in an open letter to reviewers:

“I should describe the book for you, shouldn’t I? First of all, I’ve written two novels, ‘I Pass Like Night,’ and ‘The Extra Man,’ and this new book is a comic autobiography. I call it that because I’m fashionably avoiding the word ‘memoir,’ due to some memoir backlash about a year ago, but that’s just what this is – a memoir. I wrote this book in serial-like fashion in three years in a column I penned for a weekly newspaper called The New York Press. The word ‘perverted’ in my subtitle refers to some escapades I may have had that fall a little outside the norm of human relations, but not too far outside. After all, my parents – though they aren’t writing me lifesaving checks – still like to see me, as does my teenage son, so the book is not just a perverted memoir, if you know what I mean.”

What Ames means, I think, is that he doesn’t write exclusively about his penis, though it is a leitmotif.

Ames is obsessed with angst and sex, usually together, a bit like Philip Roth, but with an excessively self-reflective postmodern voice that brings to mind Dave Eggers and his smark-alecky ilk.

Ames’s second-favorite subject after his penis is his health, particularly his testicles and bowels. This is a Farrelly brothers’ movie for people who would never see a Farrelly brothers’ movie.

Arts & Entertainment: Sunday, October 1, 2000

“Love Hexagon” by William Sutcliffe

Reviewed by Mark Lindquist
Special to The Seattle Times

A United Kingdom best seller, this satirical sex farce has a clear target audience: twentysomething Londoners. Comparisons to Evelyn Waugh are inevitable, at least the Waugh of the “Bright Young Things” stage, but for contemporary American readers, the more apt comparison may be the sitcom “Friends.”

Sutcliffe’s writing is smarter and wittier than “Friends,” the situations are more real and involving, and of course Sutcliffe has that dry Brit style going for him. On the other hand, Sutcliffe’s characters are even more neurotic and annoying than the dim-witted cast of “Friends.”

Lisa and Guy are “the old married couple,” though they are not married; Josh, Lisa’s co-worker, is the pathetic one; Keri, the tart who carelessly crushes men’s hearts, is the good-looking one, Graham, Guy’s sidekick and drinking buddy, is the comic one; and Helen, Guy’s friend, is the equally familiar angst-ridden one.

Reduced to types, these characters sound like clichés of their age group, but Sutcliffe injects them with life. His dialogue is first rate, his insights brutally incisive and his mercy nearly nonexistent.

One of the potential shortcomings of satire is a lack of forgiveness for human foibles, and Sutcliffe can be especially unsparing. I began wondering if he really loathes his contemporaries. The leniency Sutcliffe showed his self-involved hero in “Are you experienced,” his first novel, is missing here, at least until the end.

While the other characters are left in uncertain lurches, Guy and Helen meet up in the Greek Islands for a minor epiphany. This scene – like much of the book – is screenplay-like in its visual appeal and unstated implications. We’re swept out of the literal and metaphorical claustrophobia of urban life into a larger world of possibilities, and Sutcliffe shows that he doesn’t really despise his peers, or at least not all of them.

Arts & Entertainment: Sunday, October 15, 2000

“Ready, Okay!” by Adam Cadre 

Reviewed by Mark Lindquist
Special to The Seattle Times

Someone had to do this. Ever since the Columbine High tragedy, I have been waiting for an author brave enough or shameless enough to write an adolescent novel that culminates in a campus shooting spree.

Though there is nothing intrinsically exploitative about crafting fiction from headlines, television movies have made it seem so, and thus this is risky territory that has been left conspicuously untilled.

Adam Cadre, with the engaging naivete of the young, has written the first serious novel I know of that is built around a Columbine High-style slaughter, and I have given nothing away here because the first sentence of his novel is, “The day I turned sixteen I had no idea that in four months nearly everyone I cared about would be dead.”

The whole book is about foreshadowing, and Cadre is well aware of this.

The narrator states, “I like black comedy as much as anyone, but the thing is, you really do have to put the comedy part in along with the black. Otherwise, it’s not clever, it’s just, just . . .

“Foreshadowing.”

Indeed.

And Cadre does put the comedy in along with the black. This is a novel that could be easily hated, especially in the hypersensitive Northwest, where Cadre recently moved from Southern California, but Cadre handles his material with fearlessness.

This is “Less Than Zero” as written by a “Garp”-era John Irving – smart, precocious and funny. There are some flaws in this overly long first novel, but the characters are real and involving enough that the author’s few missteps can be easily overlooked.

The narrator is a 16-year-old mixed-race high-school loser, a “deeg.” His name is Allen Mockery (Cadre has a Joseph Heller-like affection for goofy names). Allen has four siblings: his twin sister Echo, who doesn’t like to talk, 13-year-old Molly, who doesn’t like to wear clothes, baby brother Jerem, a reclusive computer hacker, and older brother Kreig, an inexplicably angry headcase. Their parents are dead, replaced by Uncle Bobbo, who is 36 years old and less mature than the children.

Allen’s school cohorts quote Nietzsche and F. Scott Fitzgerald, name-drop Heidegger and Kierkegaard, steal from Coleridge, and say things like, “Ah, the irony! The layers upon layers of meta-commentary.”

They sound more like the cinema majors I knew at the University of Southern California than high-school students, but Cadre, who is 26 years old, is closer to high school than I am. And while the language of the characters seems occasionally inflated, their emotions ring consistently true to adolescence.

Carver Fringie, the captain of the water polo team, explains his success with the girls at school: “People often ask me, `Hey, Carver, how is it that you get so many chicks?’ And the answer is really simple. Getting chicks is not difficult. Once they sense that you can hurt them, they will flock around you despite themselves.”

There is no plot here to speak of, so the dramatic tension arises from foreshadowing, and the complications of everyone having a crush on the wrong person – just like life.

Allen likes Peggy, who likes almost every boy except Allen, while September likes Allen, who’s oblivious to this, while Echo likes Carver, and so on.

Then most of them die.

What Allen takes away from their deaths is not clear.

“You can’t count up a handful of clues and come up with a neat little Reason for why people are the way they are. . . . You can’t understand Kreig until you understand our parents, and you can’t understand them until you understand their parents; you can’t understand Kreig until you understand Echo and Molly and Jerem and me . . . and you can’t understand any of us until you understand biology and psychology, and sociology, and economics, and astronomy. . . . To even come close to understanding a single life you’ve got to understand the entire universe.”

Well, no, not really.

But Cadre is young and ambitious, and if he continues to focus on novels he will likely have a significant career and will come to understand a few lives at least.

Arts & Entertainment: Friday, October 20, 2000

“Four Blondes” by Candace Bushnell

By Mark Lindquist
Special to The Seattle Times

Author Candace Bushnell wrote a gossipy sex column for the New York Observer, which became the book “Sex and the City,” which became the hit HBO series, which made her semi-famous.

Which goes to show that spending the 1980s in the club scene was actually a good career move.

Bushnell is thin, almost tall, quite attractive and blond. She is single, lives in New York City, and socializes with people who are rich, or powerful, or famous, or at least well-known for having fun.

“Four Blondes” (Atlantic Monthly Press, $24) is four novellas about four thin, attractive, blond women. Three of the four leads are single, all live in New York City, and all socialize with, or aspire to socialize with, the type of people who read or appear in The New York Times Style section.

This is Jacqueline Susann meets Edith Wharton, a novel of manners with no manners, pop literature that smartly captures the mores and obsessions of our times and does so with wit, insight and a lot of talk about sex. Bushnell writes enough about penises to make Philip Roth blush.

The first story, “Nice ‘N Easy,” focuses on Janey, an aging model looking for a man with a good summer house. “The secret to getting rich men, which so many women never figured out, was that getting them was easy, as long as you didn’t have any illusions about marrying them. There was no rich man in New York who would turn down regular (sex) and entertaining company with no strings attached.”

Or in Seattle for that matter.

Janey’s approach to life, where a summer house in the Hamptons is the pinnacle of aspiration, results in some unsurprising indignities. She’s warped, but she pays for her sins. Bushnell, like Susann, understands that readers want the fabulous to suffer for their fabulousness.

Winnie, the female lead of “Highlights (for Adults),” writes a “political/style column.” Her husband writes thought pieces for serious publications. They think of themselves as serious and important people because of their serious and important New York City lifestyle.

However, Winnie is disappointed with her husband. “He should have written a major, important work by now, which should have elevated her status in the journalistic world as his wife (she didn’t take his name for no reason).”

They both know something is wrong in their relationship, and in their lives, and they act out in various neurotic ways. As annoying as Winnie is, her emasculated husband is worse, and it’s a credit to Bushnell’s skills that she kept me involved with these two yuppie weasels, primarily by hitting notes that continually rang true.

“Platinum” is narrated by Cecilia, a crazy woman who thinks someone is trying to poison her. When she was a young girl, she wanted to marry a prince. As an adult, she married a prince. Now her life is nuts. Photographers follow her constantly, and her paranoia does not seem unreasonable. I kept hoping someone would poison her.

Bushnell has already sold the screen rights to Universal Pictures.

“Single Process” – yes, the titles all allude to hair coloring – features the character who most obviously resembles the author. Minky, a sex columnist, travels to London to meet a man because, “In London, if you’re an attractive, nice girl with some personality and a career, you can meet a man, date him, and – if you want to – marry him. On the other hand, in New York, you can be a beautiful woman with a body like Cindy Crawford’s and a high-powered career and you cannot even get a date.”

Minky meets a man with fairy-tale potential on the plane home, but the ending feels ambiguous, as it does with each of these stories.

Acceptance seems a theme throughout, but it’s not clear if acceptance is a defeat or a Zenlike victory. Bushnell’s women all want to be not alone, to be loved, to be with a man, but some of them also want to be men, and things don’t quite mesh for any of them.

Bushnell’s satire is on target and unstrained, except for occasional one-liners like “the rap artist Toilet Paper.” She can be careless with her prose and structure, but has a good eye for details, a great ear for dialogue and an excellent mind for dirty thoughts, which I expect will be toned down for the movie and TV series, even if it’s cable. So read the book.

Entertainment & the Arts: Sunday, February 04, 2001

Grisham’s strong, literary ‘House’

By Mark Lindquist
Special to The Seattle Times

You will probably not be surprised to hear that John Grisham, author of 11 best-selling legal thrillers, has written another page-turner. You may be surprised to hear that his latest novel features no lawyers, no judges, no courtrooms or conspiracies.

Grisham, in a foreword, explains that this work of fiction was inspired by family lore and his childhood in rural Arkansas and that “one or two of these events may indeed have taken place, though I’ve heard so many different versions of them that I believe none of them myself.”

High culture and pop culture have become increasingly intermingled these days. Literary writers such as John Irving and David Guterson gross millions without losing their literary cachet, while popular authors such as David Baldacci and now John Grisham stretch for literary credibility without losing their seven-figure advances. The phrase “selling out” has lost its meaning as popularity is the peak modern achievement.

And Grisham is not just popular, he is one of the most popular novelists of our time, with more than 60 million books in print. He is a craftsman and he writes good stories, engaging characters, clever plots. Additionally, he often weaves in the issues du jour: the tobacco industry, the death penalty, domestic violence, homelessness, and so on. He produces a book a year, which likely explains why his language is not as disciplined as his structure.

“A Painted House” was originally a serialization for the magazine of Southern culture, the Oxford American. Grisham may be making a bid for literary recognition, or perhaps this is just a story he had to tell, but whatever his motivation, this book works. Many early readers of Grisham, including myself, were starting to lose interest because his thrillers were becoming redundant, but this coming-of-age story returns us to the artistic promise of his first novel.

Knowing nothing of rural Arkansas in the 1950s, I cannot say for sure how authentic this book is, but it certainly feels authentic. Grisham’s simple and honest approach perfectly evokes the time, the place, and the people – every detail rings clear and true, and nothing is wasted. His spare prose matches the attitude of the rural characters he ably portrays.

“They were farmers,” Grisham writes in the first chapter, “hardworking men who embraced pessimism only when discussing the weather and the crops. There was too much sun, or too much rain, or the threat of floods in the lowlands, or the rising prices of seed and fertilizer, or the uncertainties of the market. On the most perfect of days, my mother would quietly say to me, `Don’t worry. The men will find something to worry about.’ ”

Luke, the narrator, is 7 at the time of the action, but it’s unclear from what distance he is narrating, one of the book’s few weaknesses. The plot is structured around the picking of the cotton and the variety of characters drawn to the farm for that season. In classic rite-of-passage fashion, Luke is witness to death and sex and birth.

Momentum builds in expert steps, as you would expect from Grisham, but unlike some of his most recent thrillers, he doesn’t sacrifice character in the process. He has also written some of the finest dialogue of his career.

Grisham hails from Oxford, Miss., William Faulkner’s hometown, but the clean and strong prose of this book puts Grisham more in the camp of Faulkner’s anitdote, Ernest Hemingway.

Arts & Entertainment: Sunday, June 3, 2001

Norweigan Wood and Sputnik Sweetheart by Haruki Murakami

Reviewed by Mark Lindquist
Special to The Seattle Times

“Norwegian Wood,” Haruki Murakami’s second novel, just published in America in paperback, sold more than 4 million copies in Japan when it was published in 1987.

Murakami became a literary star in his homeland. Tiring of his celebrity status, he moved to Italy, Greece and then the United States. After 10 years as an expatriate, he moved back to Japan.

The restless author’s writing has a flavor more American than most American writing. He has a keen feel for our pop culture – the music, the literature, the icons. His style is unquestionably unique, but there are obvious echoes of Raymond Carver and F. Scott Fitzgerald – both of whom he has translated into Japanese – and hard-boiled writers such as Raymond Chandler.

The title taken from the Beatles song, “Norwegian Wood” is a universal coming-of-age story: A 20-year-old college student named Watanabe loves two girls. One, Naoko, is a childhood friend living in a mental institution. The other, Midori, is a fellow university student whose vitality makes her the anti-Naoko.

Midori wears short skirts, talks frankly about sex and unabashedly believes in love.

Naoko, whose boyfriend committed suicide, warns Watanabe, “I’m a far more flawed human being than you realize. My sickness is a lot worse than you think: It has far deeper roots. And that’s why I want you to go on ahead of me if you can. Don’t wait for me. … Otherwise I might end up taking you with me.”

But Watanabe is 20 and in love and must follow the road to its end.

Some older Japanese critics consider Murakami frivolous because his characters seem disinterested in politics and social issues.

Young readers love him because he writes about detachment, individualism, romance and loneliness – and does so in clean, simple prose with occasional poetic bursts of surprising power.

His characters are partly defined by their preferences in music and literature, which is the universal prerogative of the young.

By largely ignoring the political battles of the 1960s, when the book is set, and instead focusing on the personal struggles of three individuals, Murakami wrote a book that is as relevant in America today as it was in Japan then.

“Sputnik Sweetheart” is Murakami’s seventh novel and his closest in tone and style to “Norwegian Wood.” The narrator, a 24-year-old teacher, is only slightly older than Watanabe and is similarly detached and existential.

“Who am I,” he asks. “What am I searching for? Where am I headed?”

The closest he comes to answering these questions, he feels, is in conversation with a 22-year-old woman named Sumire, an aspiring writer who quotes Jack Kerouac and wants to be like a character in one of his novels: “wild, cool, dissolute.”

The narrator tells her that without her his life would be like ” ‘The Greatest Hits of Bobby Darin’ minus ‘Mack the Knife.’ ”

Sumire, however, is in love with Miu, a businesswoman with bleached white hair who is 17 years older. Apparently abandoning her writing, Sumire takes a job as Miu’s personal assistant and travels to Greece with her. Sumire then disappears.

The narrator comes to Greece to help Miu look for her. What he finds instead of Sumire is two stories she has written on her laptop computer. One explains Sumire’s intense but ambivalent desire for Miu; the other, with shades of surrealism, explains Miu’s bleached hair and its cause, a bizarre incident that left Miu damaged and alienated.

This is a love story that becomes a metaphysical mystery and a meditation on human connection. “Sputnik Sweetheart” lacks the wide-eyed buzz of “Norwegian Wood,” but replaces this with an earned calm that is, in the end, even more satisfying.

Arts & Entertainment: Sunday, June 10, 2001

“Glue” by Irvine Welsh

Reviewed by Mark Lindquist
Special to The Seattle Times

Irvine Welsh is best known to the mainstream as the man who wrote the novel that the movie “Trainspotting” was based on.

In the “rave” culture, he is revered as the man who wrote “Ecstasy” and “The Acid House,” collections of stories that depicted raver clubs and electronic music with the same sort of giddy, literary energy Jack Kerouac brought to road trips and jazz.

“Glue” is Welsh’s version of an epic – a fat, multigenerational novel that intercuts the lives of four friends. Terry, Carl, Billy and Andrew are working-class fellows from Edinburgh who drink, drug, talk and generally mess things up in the pursuit of sex, money and other highs.

Welsh relies on voice and set pieces for momentum, rather than plot, which can be problematic in a 469-page book told from alternating points of view. Because of the repetitive nature of the action and the lack of forward motion, there are times when you could swear you already read this chapter.

Another possible put-off is Welsh’s Scottish vernacular. Here’s a typical sentence: “Jist when ah think aboot shoutin oot the windae or gaun doon fir a blether, ah see thit eh’s talkin tae Maggie Orr n this other lassie.”

Well, a typical sentence except that it lacks profanity, the preferred form of self-expression for all four of the protagonists.

That said, the book nonetheless succeeds on its own terms. The men flail along, tossing off brilliant one-liners and finding moments of transcendence and dignity in a world seemingly designed to sabotage, beat and emasculate them. There are shades of Hemingway in passages where the men buck up and carry on.

However, unlike Hemingway’s stories, where men go toe-to-toe against other men or nature or fate, Welsh’s characters mostly battle self-created stumbling blocks – and these lads are not quick learners. This may be one of the reasons the book doesn’t so much resolve as fade out.

In the final chapter, a character laments, “Life had to be more than a series of unsolvable mysteries.” Welsh seems to disagree.

July 15, 2001

“All the Finest Girls” by Alexandra Styron

Reviewed by Mark Lindquist
New York Times Book Review

”Do you think it’s possible to be a great artist as the progeny of one?”

This question is posed by the father of the narrator of ”All the Finest Girls” – he is referring to his wife, an actress who is the daughter of a great painter — but it appears to be on the author’s mind as well. Alexandra Styron, a former actress and the daughter of William Styron, has written a first novel about finding one’s place in the world.

Addy Abraham is 32, single, childless and dissatisfied with her work restoring paintings for a Manhattan museum. Addy is somewhat estranged from her father (a well-known philosophy professor) and from her mother, who relegated a good deal of Addy’s upbringing to a Caribbean nanny named Louise.

Much of the novel takes place on the island of St. Clair, where Addy has traveled for Louise’s funeral. Addy was an odd, willful child and only Louise could handle her, and thus meeting Louise’s family becomes what Addy calls a ”bid for self-preservation,” an opportunity for her to see things clearly in her own life at last.

Though Styron never answers that question about a great artist’s progeny, she approaches it artfully — the writing here is frequently accomplished, and the insights wise.

Arts & Entertainment: August 16, 2001

“Heavier Than Heaven” by Charles Cross

Reviewed by Mark Lindquist
Special to The Seattle Times

Rock biographies became a publishing phenomenon after “No One Here Gets Out Alive,” the Jim Morrison biography, became a New York Times best seller in 1980.

For those of us who read “No One Here Gets Out Alive” when we were young aspiring writers or musicians, the book served as a guidebook and a reading list — Yes, yes, this is how an artist takes on the world. 

Morrison read Nietzsche, Rimbaud, Blake, Huxley, Coleridge, Keroauc, Ginsberg, the beats, the Greeks, and any other writer a young artist should read. Morrison believed as Nietzsche wrote, “Say yes to life,” though he said yes to death at 27 in an accidental drug overdose.

Morrison took drugs to broaden his mind, to expand on life’s possibilities. At least that was the plan.

Kurt Cobain, the frontman for Nirvana — the band that first put Seattle on the rock ‘n’ roll map — was not the book-lover Morrison was. Cobain took drugs to kill the pain, both psychic and physical. He killed himself with a shotgun at 27.

Charles R. Cross, from a technical perspective, is a better journalist than Danny Sugerman or Jerry Hopkins, the authors of Morrison’s biography. Cross is more thorough, more cogent, less blinded by the glare of fame. Cross’ book lacks the vitality of Sugerman and Hopkins’ effort, but this may be in large part due to their respective subjects and the respective audiences.

Cross was editor of The Rocket, a Northwest music magazine, for 14 years. In the 1980s and early 1990s, there were talented and literate people at The Rocket, and its readership extended well beyond the small incestuous Seattle music scene. But by the year 2000, when The Rocket folded, it had become a magazine for people who weren’t readers. “Heavier Than Heaven” has that same problem.

Nirvana fans are a diverse mix, but they overlap more with the fan base of Guns N’ Roses than, say, the lettered folks who love R.E.M. and read book reviews. Cobain was well aware of this. On “In Bloom,” Cobain sang about fans who like his songs and like to sing along but “don’t know what it means.” These fans still bought his records. But they are not going to buy this book, because they don’t buy books.

If, however, you fit into the sub-category of Nirvana fans who do buy books, you should buy this one.

Fifteen other Cobain books are listed on Amazon.com, and I skimmed several, but none matches “Heavier Than Heaven” for research, accuracy and insider scoops. Sections of Cobain’s journals are excerpted, along with unsent letters and descriptions of Cobain’s drawings and other artwork.

Also, it’s worth noting that Cross, with unusual integrity for the field, did not allow the favor of his access to censor his reporting. The Cobain of “Heavier Than Heaven” is more complicated and infuriating than other portrayals of the Nirvana star.

Even if you kept up with the onslaught of publicity surrounding Cobain and his wife, Courtney Love, of the band Hole, Cross has new stories and details, especially about Cobain’s formative years and his conflicted approach to fame.

In classic Seattle fashion, Cobain thought it was uncool to admit he wanted to be successful. Cross also debunks some myths — Courtney Love did not turn Cobain into a junkie.

Cobain was a junkie before he was a rock star. He called heroin “heroine” and it was, to borrow Lou Reed’s phrase, his wife and his life. “Heavier Than Heaven” tells us the same thing writers from Jacqueline Susann to Norman Mailer have told us repeatedly: Fame and money and drugs don’t make the pain go away. Art, however, can grow out of the mess.

Cross’ prose style is workmanlike, apparently uninfluenced by the postmodern fiction and journalism so many contemporary nonfiction writers favor, but he gets the job done. Kurt Cobain, for better and worse, is the star of the show, along with his “heroine.” R.I.P.

Mark Lindquist’s third novel, “Never Mind Nirvana,” was released in paperback this summer by Villard Books.

Arts & Entertainment: Sunday, September 23, 2001

“All Families are Psychotic” by Douglas Coupland

Reviewed by Mark Lindquist
Special to The Seattle Times

Douglas Coupland has been quoted as saying that fame is the key to success, a belief he adopted from boyhood hero Andy Warhol.

“Generation X,” Coupland’s first novel, made him semi-famous in 1991. Since then he has hammered out a book a year and craftily kept himself in the press on a nearly constant basis. A Vancouver, B.C., resident, Coupland is a cultural commentator making a living as a novelist.

“All Families are Psychotic” feels like it was lashed together with the same control and forethought as a Jerry Springer show, though there are hints of purpose behind the chaos. One of the many ironies of this novel is that Coupland’s fiction is becoming as random and absurd as the “McJob” culture he satirizes.

The psychotic family Coupland focuses on, the Drummonds, consists of five exceptionally dysfunctional people. Janet, the matriarch, is a 64-year-old housewife who contracted HIV when her ex-husband Ted shot her HIV-positive son, Wade, and the tainted bullet lodged in her chest after passing through her son. Janet and Ted have two other children, Bryan, a suicidal musician married to an anarchist named Shw, and Sarah, an astronaut who was born without a hand because Janet took Thalidomide for morning sickness.

They all gather for a reunion of sorts in Orlando, Fla., to see Sarah off on a NASA shuttle mission. The story and characters are developed in a haphazard series of flashbacks, snapshots and stray thoughts. A letter taken from Princess Diana’s coffin strings along the main plot line — Wade and his wife intend to sell this letter to a European pharmaceutical billionaire so they can finance an experimental fertilization process that filters HIV out of semen.

Along the way, there are lots of robberies and shootings and kidnappings and other B-movie antics. All of it strains credulity, and none of it really matters.

Plot and character development have never been Coupland’s strong suits, but he still has thousands of loyal readers. The things he does best — social observation and commentary — are in fine form here, and there are plenty of pop-culture Couplandisms.

All the characters have moments where they drift off on tangents. Janet, during a robbery, muses, “Our lives are geared mainly to deflect the darts thrown at us by the laws of probability. One person in six million will be struck by lightning. Fifteen people in a hundred will experience clinical depression. One woman in sixteen will experience breast cancer. One child in 30,000 will experience a serious limb deformity. One American in five will be victim of a violent crime. A day in which nothing happens is a miracle, a day in which all the things that could have gone wrong didn’t. The dull day is a triumph of the human spirit, and boredom is a luxury unprecedented in the history of our species.”

Such are the riffs that hold this collage of a book together, along with the periodic epiphany. Though “All Families are Psychotic” is a farce, it is not a farce of the sort written by Molière et al., but rather a purely contemporary blend of Jerry Springer, Jerry Seinfeld and tabloid headlines.

Coupland is quite clever, and he can write with impressive precision, but he is obviously no longer interested in novels per se. He has found his niche as a semifamous cultural pundit who writes novel-like books. And, fortunately, he does this well.

July 28, 2001

“How to Be Good,” by Nick Hornby 

Reviewed by Mark Lindquist
Special to the Hartford Courant

Fans of Nick Hornby’s first novel, the decidedly hip and male “High Fidelity,” initially may be perplexed as to why Hornby is now writing about humdrum grown-ups from a female point of view.

Katie, the admittedly self-absorbed narrator, breaks up with her husband on the first page. She warns us, “If my thoughts about our marriage had been turned into a film, the critics would say that it was all padding, no plot, and that it could be summarized thus: two people meet, fall in love, have kids, start arguing, get fat and grumpy (him) and bored, desperate and grumpy (her), and split up. We’re nothing special.”

Furthermore, we’re told that the marriage we’re about to hear about is not like a film and is, therefore, instead a series of “dull, superficial arguments.” At this point, you might be inclined to put down the book and go see a movie, but don’t. Hornby will soon break out the wit.

Katie’s a doctor — “I’m a good person, I’m a doctor” — and her husband, David, is a newspaper columnist billed as the “Angriest Man in Holloway.” His anger is directed at homeopaths, restaurant critics, old people on buses who don’t have their money ready and the like. These rants seem strangely emasculated.

“I’m the man,” Katie points out, “I’m the daddy.” And she, more than David, seems like a guy from a Hornby novel as she wisecracks her way through the pitfalls of popular culture.

They have two children, a boy and a girl, and their married life in London is “a gentle, middle-class version of brutality and degradation.”

“I want us to live a better life,” Katie tells David.
“And how do we do that?”
“I don’t know.”

So it goes until the appearance of Dr. GoodNews, a hippie faith healer David invites to live with the family. GoodNews has issues with modern amenities, such as beds and dishwashers, and talks like a “nutter” half of the time, but occasionally points out things that are uncomfortably true, such as how the possessions game can make people spoiled and uncaring.

After David’s back pain is healed by GoodNews, he quits his column and gives up a novel he was working on.

“Why?” Katie wants to know, referring to the column. She couldn’t care less about his god-awful novel.

“Because I’m not angry anymore.”
“You’re not angry anymore.”
“No.”
“About anything?”
“No, it’s all gone.”

Worse yet, David is suddenly full of sanctimonious schemes. He and GoodNews collaborate on a self-help book titled “How to Be Good.” He forces the children to give up toys and to befriend repellent peers they don’t like. A street kid named Monkey joins their household. David even rallies his neighbors to take in homeless teen-agers.

“We’ve all been living the wrong life,” he says, “and I want to put that right.”

Katie — a good person, a doctor — can only sputter an obscenity. David thinks he is like Erin Brockovich, the character Julia Roberts played in the eponymous movie, sacrificing family life in pursuit of a higher good. Katie thinks he is daft.

So what does it mean to be a good person, to lead a good life? This is, of course, a good question, the type of good question that good books have been asking for many years.

Hornby doesn’t pretend to know the answer, or even to have especially strong opinions on the subject, except that he is sure false piousness is not the way to go.

I wanted much more acerbic wit from Katie, and much less of her grim determination to be a good grown-up, yet I still find myself recommending “How to Be Good” to friends as an ambitious example of entertaining literature.

Contrary to Katie’s protestations, this story is far better than a movie. It doesn’t just skip along to the neurotic tune of modern life, but incisively examines our relationships with each other and morality and popular culture, and though Hornby may not find any definitive answers, he certainly finds the humor.

January 13, 2002

“Why Did I Ever” by Mary Robison

By Mark Lindquist
Special to The Seattle Times

Back in the 1980s, Mary Robison was one of the minimalists mentioned in company with Raymond Carver and Ann Beattie. At about the time the John Hughes movie “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” came out on video, every writer I knew was reading Robison’s “Believe Them: Stories.”

Robison has published five previous books that were admired by both critics and fellow writers. She also did a screen writing stint in Hollywood, which apparently did not work out well.

“Why Did I Ever,” her first book in 10 years, is a Hollywood-bashing novel of sorts and a pointed rejection of almost every storytelling technique that makes movies work.

The narrator, Money Breton, is a three-time divorcée script doctor having a breakdown. In 572 chapter-like segments, Money chronicles the survival of herself and her damaged adult children in random fragments, flashbacks and elliptical dialogue.

At times it feels like a writing class exercise, albeit demonstrated by a skilled practitioner.

Here is an entire chapter:

“Hollis reads to me from a dictionary: ‘Oscillate … A vibrating motion as things move backward and forward, vary or vacillate between differing conditions and become stronger and weaker.’

‘Huh,’ I say. ‘Well, but that describes me.’ ”

Everything people criticize about minimalism is packed into these pages, but there is also much of what makes minimalism so perfect for our time.

Some of the riffs — such as the letters to Sean Penn — show the wonder of economical wit and pop-culture references in talented hands. Not a single word of Robison’s feels like it’s careless or pointless.

Still, sometimes her story seems lost in her technique. And, as Money says, “Part of the drag of being lost is that it’s called that.”

Entertainment & the Arts; Sunday, April 28, 2002

“My Life in Heavy Metal” by Steve Almond

Reviewed by Mark Lindquist
Special to The Seattle Times

This is the coolest and freshest collection of short stories I’ve read since the 1980s. While his contemporaries turn to novels and screenplays, Steve Almond has been publishing zeitgeist short fiction everywhere from Playboy to the literary journal Ploughshares.

All 12 of these stories deal with sex and regret. In the title story, David, a rock journalist in his 20s, tries to translate the adolescent ethos of rock and roll into his own love life and pays the adult price.

“Geek Player, Love Slayer,” an office romance between a female reporter and “Computer Boy,” is less successful, but still intriguingly of our time. “How did Computer Boy become the Lifeguard of our decade?” the narrator wants to know.

“Run Away My Pale Love” returns the reader to David. He’s older and courting a local in Poland. Different country, similar screw-ups: “There is a point you reach when you are just something bad that happened to someone else.”

“Moscow” is filler, a track you would skip if this were a CD. Almond’s writing is mostly first-rate, clear and perceptive, but he teaches creative writing at Boston College and his weaker stories seem designed for classroom consumption.

“How to Love a Republican” cranks things back up. Two political junkies pathetically destroy their attraction to each other against the backdrop of the Bush-Gore 2000 election.

The final story again features David, who is now a teacher in his 30s. David becomes involved with a 22-year-old woman and, unsurprisingly enough, screws up again. “But I am certain that you, too, have some episode in your life that lines up against this one, some mad period of transgression in which your body, your foolish body, led you toward tender ruin.”

Entertainment & the Arts: Sunday, June 30, 2002

“American Falls” by Barry Gifford

Reviewed by Mark Lindquist
Special to The Seattle Times

The author of 40 published books — fiction, nonfiction, poetry, literary biographies and miscellaneous mischief — Barry Gifford is a lesson in perseverance.

He is 55 years old. His only well-known novel is “Wild at Heart,” which owes its fame to the 1990 David Lynch movie starring Nicolas Cage. Still, 22 of Gifford’s books remain in print, according to Amazon.com.

He’s currently with a small publisher that bills “American Falls” as his first “major collection” of short fiction. I’m not convinced it’s major. There are 21 stories, most of which would be better called vignettes, and a melodramatic crime novella with the requisite classic vehicles and oddball characters.

The title piece is a simple but intriguing sketch about a Japanese-American motel owner in the 1960s. When a black man who murdered his wife checks into the motel, the owner protects him from police. Gifford, as per his usual M.O., suggests but doesn’t explain the motel owner’s motive.

Other highlights of this wildly uneven collection include “The Big Love of Cherry Lane,” wherein the 21-year-old Cherry seduces a 13-year-old boy she babysits; “New Mysteries of Paris,” literary esoterica speculating on the psyche of Andre Breton’s heroine Nadja, and “A Fair Price,” a farcical look at an actor who has his car stolen and then meets the star-struck family of the thieves.

Gifford observes that actors are “perhaps the least well-equipped human beings on the planet to lead successful personal lives.” This is saying a lot in Gifford’s world, where most lives are an amazing mess.

However, grace and epiphany seem to be always floating at the edge of these lives and this, for me, is what makes him an artist to keep up on, even when he’s just goofing around, as he is here for the most part.

August 2, 2002

“Ash Wednesday” by Ethan Hawke

Reviewed by Mark Lindquist
Special to the Seattle Times

If Ethan Hawke were not already a famous actor, his second novel, “Ash Wednesday” (Knopf, $22.95), might make him a well-known novelist in the much smaller way novelists are known. He’s written the sort of joyously tortured book that guys in their 20s like to carry around and quote to girls over coffee and cigarettes.

When his first novel was published in 1997, one critic wrote: “Somewhere between astronauts walking on the moon and poodles walking on their hind legs lies the accomplishment of actors writing books.”

It would be easy to review Hawke with a variation on that sentiment, but the truth is, this is a good book.

Hawke has advanced substantially from his first novel, a Salingeresque story about a young actor.

One of the best things I can say about this book, ironically enough, is that it wouldn’t make a good movie. It’s about character, language and ideas.

And the main idea is love.

Jimmy Heartsock, a staff sergeant in the Army, breaks up with his pregnant girlfriend, Christy, and then 15 hours later goes AWOL and chases her down at a bus station and proposes. Christy is understandably skeptical, but she allows him to drive her from New York to her home in Texas in his Chevy Nova. Thus develops a classic existential road-trip tale.

To love or not to love is the question.

Christy is not optimistic. “I knew we would never get married. I understood and had come to terms with the fact that our destiny was to break each other’s hearts, to destroy each other.”

Jimmy, for his part, is desperately committed. “I really love this girl and I see her as an opportunity, a window, you know? A chance to show up for something. Even if it’s a terribly humble goal, it’s one I might be able to achieve.”

The son of a manic-depressive who commits suicide, Jimmy has some big-time issues, as they say. Among other problems, he’s very angry. “What am I supposed to do with all this anger? What’s the right way for it to manifest? God knows I was getting sick and tired of tripping all over it.”

In one of the funniest chapters, Jimmy, who’s pushing 30, goes mano a mano against a snotty 12-year-old boy in a basketball game, and it’s a serious grudge match. Jimmy triumphs, makes the kid cry, and then apologizes and tries to hand out life lessons: “Success isn’t measured by what you achieve, it’s measured by the obstacles you overcome.”

Christy, whose politician father has been successful at everything except marriage, has a trunk full of fears: “Good morning, fear. You are my oldest friend.” And she isn’t quite sure about Jimmy. “Would he really be happy as a married man? It’s a boyish and silly quality, but his lust for adventure was one I admired. His eyes were full of a desire to prove himself.”

Their story is told from alternating his and her points of view. Both Jimmy and Christy are damaged but on the mend. “To know who you are and then to accept it — that is life’s journey,” a priest tells Jimmy, and this is also the book’s journey.

This is a fully felt novel with a lot of truth. Hawke has a good sense of place, but his strong suit is dialogue, internal and external. He has an impressive understanding of the agony and the irony of self-examination.

In the end the lovers appear to find the grace and resurrection they are seeking, and Hawke appears to have found a second career.

September 8, 2002

“Anything Goes” by Madison Smartt Bell

By Mark Lindquist
Special to The Seattle Times

Elvis Costello once said that writing about music is like “dancing about architecture, it’s a really stupid thing to want to do.”

With “Anything Goes,” Madison Smartt Bell joins the ranks of Salman Rushdie and Don DeLillo — accomplished authors who’ve written rock ‘n’ roll novels that seem like a really stupid thing to want to do.

Bell is best known for his successful trilogy of historical novels set in Haiti, but he started his career in the 1980s with pop-culture-saturated fiction about lost young men. This is his 13th book, and he’s returned to the sweet confusion of youth.

Jesse Melungeon, the narrator, is a 20-year-old bass guitarist with a bar band that covers the likes of Lynyrd Skynyrd and the Allman Brothers. His bandmates are stock characters: the rogue lead guitarist, the stoic black guy, the worldly older woman and the wizened leader who holds it all together.

Oh, and there’s the dark stranger who appears when a Guitar God is needed.

As a coming-of-age story the book develops engagingly and starts to pick up pace, only to be jarringly derailed by Jesse’s original songs. “Seven songs inside your head, seven sets of words you know, I know, you know, anything goes, you know, you know, you know.” Lyrics without music usually suck, even Elvis Costello’s, sometimes.

Bell is much better with physical details, such as the look and smell of dive bars and their denizens, and he understands the fetishistic affection musicians have for their instruments. If you want to know what it’s like to be young and on the road with a group of dysfunctional musicians, this book will take you there, even if it’s a really stupid thing to want to do.

Entertainment & the Arts, October 17, 2002

“Porno” by Irvine Welsh

Reviewed by Mark Lindquist
Special to The Seattle Times

Irvine Welsh’s first novel, “Trainspotting,” was an international best seller and a cult-classic movie. His witty twisted take on the youth culture of Edinburgh was daring and original.

Sales have been downhill for Welsh ever since.

His five subsequent books have been successful to varying degrees, but none has tapped into the motherlode of zeitgeist: “Trainspotting” nailed it. This is understandable, of course, as it’s a strange and rare confluence of circumstances that make a pop culture touchstone possible.

What’s a pop-lit author to do?

Well, Welsh has written a sequel. The “Trainspotting” boys are back: Simon “Sick Boy” Williamson, Mark “Rents” Renton, Danny “Spud” Murphy and psycho Frank Begpie. They’re 10 years older, not much wiser, still frantic and depraved.

Sick Boy returns to Edinburgh, where he buys a bar and begins plotting to produce a pornographic movie, not just a “grainy wank-boy’s cheapo vid, but a proper pornographic movie with a great script, a decent budget and really sound production values. One that’ll enter the canon of great films of the genre.”

The other boys get into the mix, each with scams and schemes of his own. The surprise is a fresh female character, Nikki Fuller-Smith, a massage-parlor worker who dreams of grander things. “A flash of elation rises and settles as it dawns on me. I want to be a porn star. I want to have men masturbating to images of me, all over the world, men whom I don’t even know exist!”

The book is narrated in alternating first person chapters by the various characters.

This is not a necessary sequel — if there is such a thing — but it is a worthy sequel. Welsh’s understanding and abiding affection for these characters once again redeems them.

Entertainment & the Arts: Sunday, February 16, 2003

“11 Karens” by Peter Lefcourt

Reviewed by Mark Lindquist
Special to The Seattle Times

While the memoir emerges as the favored form of our time, Peter Lefcourt has chosen to tell his life story the old-fashioned way. He calls it a novel.

The author of “The Dreyfus Affair” and “Di and I” apparently led quite the bacchanal life, but this is probably not atypical of a writer coming of professional age in the 1960s and 1970s.

Lefcourt distinguishes himself with a high-concept conceit: Eleven of the significant women in his life were named Karen. He states that the odds against this are 29,976-to-1. I presume he made this up.

While this framing device may seem far-fetched, each of the Karens he describes has the ring of only slightly exaggerated truth. There’s precocious fifth-grade Karen, high-school-slut Karen, nudist Karen, Italian Karen, Lolita Karen, prostitute Karen, suicidal-poet Karen, indifferent Canadian Karen, strip-Scrabble Karen, nutty-actress Karen, and married Karen who lied about her name and turned out to be a Rhonda.

Though each Karen is a type, Lefcourt recalls details that bring them fully to life, and his abiding affection for them is clear and genuine.

“Karens, wherever you are, if you read this, forgive me the liberties I have taken with our stories. I have loved you all, briefly perhaps, imperfectly perhaps, but without design or dissimulation.”

This is not a novel of sexual conquests but an unpretentious and very funny telling of a writer’s apprenticeship and the profits and costs of his sexual explorations along the way.

In the book, the Lefcourt character turns to writing pornography. In life, Lefcourt fell further. He wrote for television. Sometimes it shows in the way he rushes the story along, groping for the punch line.

While the amorous episodes are played for laughs, the chapters accumulate a surprisingly weighty sadness as each affair ends in hapless satisfaction, and it becomes clear that all are destined to end that way.

Perhaps unconsciously, Lefcourt has constructed a morality tale about the emptiness at the end of carnal pursuits.

Entertainment & the Arts: Friday, July 25, 2003

Bushnell takes another stab at skewering New York’s social circles

By Mark Lindquist
Special to The Seattle Times

As the line between high art and low art becomes increasingly blurred, into the picture steps Candace Bushnell, author of “Sex and the City” and former gossip columnist for the New York Observer.

“Trading Up” (Hyperion, $24.95), her first novel, is no less knowing, no less merciless, and no less funny than Tom Wolfe’s “The Bonfire of the Vanities.” However, Bushnell, by traditional literary standards at least, is less of a writer than Wolfe. Her language isn’t as fresh, her style isn’t as distinctive, and she can’t seem to avoid clichés.

Nonetheless, “Trading Up” is just as entertaining and dead-on as “Bonfire.” While Bushnell adopts the heightened realism of Wolfe, she also invokes the memories of Edith Wharton (she borrows the name Selden from “House of Mirth”) and Jacqueline Susann (downers are called “dolls”).

Bushnell even takes an amusing swipe at the high-art competition. A Jonathan Franzen-like character, author of “The Embarrassments,” is described as “arrogant and full of himself, as well as mean.” His work is critiqued as “pretentious and navel-gazing.”

The medley of Bushnell’s high- and low-art influences makes for a postmodern pastiche that somehow comes off as original and wholly believable. Even some of the clichés ring true. “It was so glamorous, Janey thought, to be traveling in a chauffeured Mercedes, to be rich and swathed in fur coats, to be laughing and slightly drunk after a champagne lunch at one of the city’s most exclusive restaurants, to be beautiful and to have beautiful and famous friends, and to be on her way to a jewelry auction at Christie’s.”

Janey Wilcox, who appeared in “Four Blondes,” Bushnell’s collection of stories, is back. She’s a 33-year-old AMW, actress-model-whatever, and she’s vacuous, ruthless and unredeemed. And she’s a sweetheart compared to some of the supporting characters who surround her in this caustic view of New York’s social circles.

Off-putting as this may sound, “Trading Up” is a page turner. There is something fascinating about seemingly privileged people destroying their lives with pettiness and intrigues.

Janey is, as they say in the biz, following her dream. The dream is always the same: money and fame. What’s interesting here are the machinations and humiliations Janey goes through.

She trades sexual favors for a screen-writing gig that goes horribly wrong, sleeps with a friend’s boyfriend, marries the wrong rich man — she should have called it off when she saw he wore dark socks with sandals — and even sells herself to a Middle Eastern gunrunner for $10,000 a week.

Ah, the good life. Except Janey doesn’t seem to be enjoying herself.

“She shuddered. In three months, she’d be thirty-four, in a few years, forty. What if her life continued on and on in the same pattern? What if she ended up being one of those women who never really get anywhere, who end up at forty with no relationship and no career? She had seen those women at parties, laughing too hard and wearing clothing only twenty-five-year-olds should wear … No! she nearly cried aloud. She wouldn’t end up like that — she must take a chance.”

Janey takes plenty of chances, and most turn out badly. Bushnell, staying true to her realism, does not try to redeem her anti-heroine. The story ends with a hollow triumph that is sadly appropriate and, in its own perverse way, totally satisfying. This is more a cautionary tale than a breezy summer read.

The last time we see the Franzen character he is at a post-Oscar party “swilling his drink, nearly busting the seams of his plaid flannel shirt with self-importance” as he discusses his book with a powerful agent. Janey is working the room, pitching her own screenplay, which is based on her life story. In Bushnell’s view of our marketplace-driven culture, Janey and the Franzen character, low art and high art, are much more alike than different.

Entertainment & the Arts: Sunday, August 31, 2003

“Diary” by Chuck Palahniuk

Reviewed by Mark Lindquist
Special to The Seattle Times

Chuck Palahniuk just keeps popping out the books. This is his seventh in as many years. His prose style, rather than sharpening, is becoming increasingly jagged and addled, which may be due to his frantic pace.

Graced with a blurb from Ira Levin (“Rosemary’s Baby”), “Diary” announces Palahniuk’s intent to move into the horror genre, albeit with his own spin. The results are mixed but compelling.

While the book suffers some of the usual shortcomings of genre novels — arch dialogue, contrived plot, thin characterization — it is far more inspired and philosophical than one would expect from even a top-drawer horror novel.

The ostensible story concerns an island community trying to fight off an invasion of tourists. Peter Wilmot, an island-family scion, goes to art school and meets Misty, a “white trash girl” who dreams of a middle-class life. He marries her and brings her back to the island, where she is expected to become a great artist. The survival of the island community apparently depends on her greatness. None of this is particularly clear, but the point is that Misty must be kept prisoner, and kept miserable, so that she can produce great art.

“Poor Misty Kleinman, she told herself, it wasn’t a career as an artist that she wanted. What she really wanted, all along, was the house, the family, the peace.” This, of course, is one of the timeless dilemmas of the artist: the friction of creativity versus the comforts of conformity.

The story is narrated in the form of a diary, and it is unclear who is writing the diary until the very end — a cheap trick — but it is addressed to Peter, who is in a coma after a botched suicide attempt. The writer is clearly bitter, and clearly Palahniuk.

F. Scott Fitzgerald believed that every character in a novel is a variation on the author, disguised to various degrees. Palahniuk barely bothers with the masks anymore. “Everything is a self portrait,” he acknowledges. “Everything is a diary.”

What this book is truly about is art, the artist and suffering. “This was Peter’s theory of self-expression. The paradox of being a professional artist. How we spend our lives trying to express ourselves well, but we have nothing to tell. We want creativity to be a system of cause and effect. Results. Marketable product. We want dedication and discipline to equal recognition and reward. We get on our art school treadmill, our graduate program for a masters in fine arts, and practice, practice, practice. With all our excellent skills, we have nothing special to document. According to Peter, nothing pisses us off more than when some strung-out drug addict, a lazy bum, or a slobbering pervert creates a masterpiece. As if by accident.”

What makes one a real artist Palahniuk is less sure about, but he is obsessed with their suffering. “Mozart and his uremia. Paul Klee and the scleroderma that shrank his joints and muscles to death. Frida Kahlo and the spina bifida that covered her legs with bleeding sores. Lord Byron and his club foot. The Brontë sisters and their tuberculosis. Mark Rothko and his suicide. Flannery O’Connor and her lupus. Inspiration needs disease, injury, madness.”

Let the good times roll.

No wonder Palahniuk keeps frantically producing his books. He’s probably afraid that if he stopped he would decide to do something else with his life, and that would be a shame.

Entertainment & the Arts: Friday, July 18, 2003

See Portland through ‘Fight Club’ writer’s eyes

By Mark Lindquist
Special to the Seattle Times

Crown Journeys, a series of “literary travel books,” matches interesting writers with interesting places, or at least that’s the idea. Roy Blount Jr. on New Orleans, Bill McKibben on the Adirondacks and Chuck Palahniuk, the author of “Fight Club,” on the town he knows and loves best, our neighbor Portland.

The only rule of the format, according to the publicity, is that the writers take their journeys on foot. Palahniuk likes writing about rules — “The first rule of Fight Club is … ” — but he’s not much for following rules. In “Fugitives and Refugees: A Walk in Portland, Oregon,” (Crown Journeys, $16) he doesn’t exactly walk in Portland.

Instead, he mixes together a pastiche of interviews, characters, memories, self-mythology and tour-guide tips that give the reader a fascinating and tempting view of his hometown. He also includes a glossary.

Seattlelites may be amused to know that Portland shares with us a Pill Hill, a Ban Roll-On Building, and, of course, a Nordstrom colloquially known as Nordy’s.

Portland, Palahniuk concedes, is where people who couldn’t afford to live in Seattle moved. Katherine Dunn, the author of “Geek Love,” who also lives in Portland, tells Palahniuk that Portland attracts the “most cracked of the crackpots. The misfits of the misfits.”

This probably isn’t as true as Dunn and Palahniuk would like to believe, but it gives you an idea of Palahniuk’s take. In the introduction, he promises to deliver “a little history, a little legend, and a lot of friendly, sincere, fascinating people who maybe should have kept their mouths shut.”

He also delivers a lot of Chuck Palahniuk, particularly in his so-called postcards, vignettes of his life from 1981 to 2002. These chapters are among the book’s most engaging, especially if you’re curious about the experiences that formed the writer.

At 18, Palahniuk was working as a messenger by day and washing dishes by night while living with two stoner roommates. “In a moment of sacrifice, I find my childhood tonsils in a jar of formaldehyde with a label from Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital. In a grand gesture, I make a wish and throw the sealed jar off our apartment balcony, into the blackberry briars that cover the hillside.”

Palahniuk doesn’t say what the wish was, at least not right away.

This is not a research-intensive book, but Palahniuk is impressively well-informed about his locale, especially the sex industry. You can learn about the many clubs Portland has for swingers, voyeurs and sexual dilettantes, including the addresses.

He also includes information on more mainstream distractions such as museums, gardens, churches, courtrooms, theaters, haunted houses, the zoo and so on. Palahniuk, however, is almost always more interested in the characters that inhabit the places than the places themselves. As he admits, “I’m a lot more interested in collectors than collections.”

The main collector here is, of course, Palahniuk. What he’s collecting is memories. “The most I can ever do is to write things down. To remember them. The details. To honor them in some way.” And he does.

Richard Ford, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his novel about a man who sells real estate, has observed that homes are vivid things, necessary and consoling, but they lack the permanence of art.

Palahniuk has solved this by turning his home city into art.

This book made me want to run down to King Street Station and catch the Amtrak train to Portland, and it also made me want to appreciate every detail and moment of my own life here in Seattle.

The wish Palahniuk made when he threw his tonsils onto the hill was that someday he would be a writer.

Entertainment & the Arts: Friday, August 01, 2003

‘The Wave’ captures Seattle’s years on the cutting edge

By Mark Lindquist
Special to The Seattle Times

In the 1970s and 1980s, many young people with an adventurous or alternative bent left Seattle for New York and Los Angeles. In the 1990s, most everyone came back, and they were followed by the hordes.

Seattle somehow became Scenester Central for musicians, writers, Web geeks, restless souls and the coterie that surrounds them all. Caren Gussoff was apparently one of these people. Born in New York, she lived here during the go-go years, and after a number of moves, settled here permanently three years ago.

Several of the stories in “The Wave and Other Stories” (Serpent’s Tail, $14) are set locally. In the title piece, a novella, two young women from the New York club scene have relocated to Seattle unbeknownst to each other. Olive, who teaches writing on Capitol Hill — as Gussoff did — is obsessed with Allison, who was popular in the New York scene and sang in a band called Betty Rage.

“I knew Allison, I followed her, but I am not a stalker. Many people know Allison, and followed her news. She’s a bit famous, her friends a bit famous, to people like me, the many people like me. The ones no one writes about.”

Their paths eventually cross in Seattle and they connect, “bound together in the sorority of poor childhoods.” Many of us know these damaged women well. Gussoff certainly does. Allison is drawn with dark strokes of doom. One of her blog entries states, “I’m not dead. Love Allison,” so you can guess where this is going. Her story does not have many surprises, but it does have many spasms of truth, and it is smartly and sharply told.

The other stories in this collection share, for the most part, an affection for lonely fringe characters and our steel-gray city.

The standouts include “Bruce Lee,” in which two young women visit the kung-fu star’s local grave site and commiserate about loss, and “Love Story,” which is hilarious. If you’re single and frustrated with dating, “Love Story” alone is worth the price of this paperback original.

Entertainment & the Arts: Sunday, December 28, 2003

“Still Holding” by Bruce Wagner

Reviewed by Mark Lindquist
Special to The Seattle Times

How much hypocrisy, insanity, neediness, dysfunction and delusion can an author stuff into a novel of just under 300 pages? If the author is Bruce Wagner and the subject is Hollywood, the answer is a big fat amazing boatload.

In “Still Holding,” Wagner’s multiple story lines revolve around 34-year-old movie star Kit Lightfoot, a practicing Buddhist and People magazine’s “Sexiest Man Alive.” Everyone loves Kit, except Kit. “He hated the way he acted, the way he spoke, the way he thought.”

His girlfriend is a vulgar TV actress named Viv Wembley, who seems to most enjoy sitting on the toilet while she gives miscellaneous orders to her personal assistant. Kit and Viv have nothing in common but fame. In fact, the debilitating craving for fame is what links most of Wagner’s characters.

Becca Mondrain, a Drew Barrymore look-alike, becomes Viv’s assistant while she’s waiting for her proverbial big break. Her boyfriend is a Russell Crowe look-alike. They are both up for parts in a new Spike Jonze movie about look-alikes, “about the nature of celebrity and what this town does to people.”

Kit, meanwhile, is up for a Darren Aronofsky-directed movie about a movie star who becomes brain damaged in a car crash, just as he’s about to do a movie about a mentally handicapped man. Then, as the meta-ironies pile up, Kit is bonked on the head with a bottle by a Kit Lightfoot look-alike and, yep, Kit suffers brain damage himself.

As farcical as the plot twists become, the novel never loses its documentary sense of authenticity. Real-life celebrities mingle with Wagner’s fictional creations, a technique others have used, but Wagner takes it to a new extreme. The fictional characters seem no less real, and no more fake, than the real-life characters.

In a repetitive ironic touch, raging egoists take up Buddhism, feeding their egos through a pose of ego-negation.

Wagner’s only failing may be that in his successful effort to be merciless, virtually every character is despicable or pathetic, except for maybe Rob Reiner, which makes for a long 296 pages.

Entertainment & the Arts: Sunday, March 28, 2004

“Little Children” by Tom Perotta

Reviewed by Mark Lindquist
Special to The Seattle Times

Tom Perrotta has carved out an impressive career writing about adolescents in “Bad Haircut: Stories of the Seventies,” “The Wishbones,” “Election” and “Joe College.” Though not all of his main characters have been technically adolescents, the lead in “The Wishbones,” for example, was a 20-something musician who still lived with his parents, Perotta’s main characters can be thematically linked through their adolescent ethos.

Who am I; what can I get away with; ’tis it nobler to rock on or grow up?

“Little Children” is Perrotta’s first attempt at an adult novel, an ensemble piece about two unfortunate suburban couples and their dysfunctional neighbors. Todd, a former high-school football star in his mid-20s, is married to Kathy, a beautiful documentary filmmaker. They have a 3-year-old son, the sole focus of Kathy’s affections. Todd has become a househusband, a handsome loser who has flunked the bar exam twice and is about to go down a third time. He begins an affair with Sarah, a quasi-feminist who is married to Richard, an Internet porn addict who eventually dumps Sarah to pursue Slutty Kay, an Internet porn queen.

And for a bit more spice, a convicted child molester moves into the seemingly placid neighborhood.

This might sound like John Cheever run amok, except that Perrotta is a satirist. He cuts loose here with some hilarious observations and set pieces that expose human foibles at their funniest. Perrotta’s fans will find this book to be one of his most knowing. The scene where Todd’s tackle-football team takes the field against a group of surprisingly beefy accountants is absolutely classic, grown men with jobs and wives acting like dimwitted bad boys.

So, all told, Perrotta is once again writing about adolescents, except with children. Todd and Sarah revel in the rush of initial infatuation, exhibiting none of the earned wisdom and inhibitions of adulthood. They would be maddening in their naiveté if not for Perrotta’s incisive comic eye. He manages to satirize and sympathize at the same time, redeeming all his characters by digging deep for their shared humanity, which shines through in a surprisingly serious final scene.

Entertainment & the Arts: Sunday, March 27, 2005

“The Disappointment Artist” by Jonathan Lethem

Reviewed by Mark Lindquist
Special to The Seattle Times

“These confessions have started to bore me,” Jonathan Lethem writes toward the end of “The Disappointment Artist,” a memoir thinly disguised as a collection of pop-culture essays. Lethem may have been bored, but I wasn’t.

I haven’t been a big fan of Lethem’s fiction, yet I was fascinated by these essays that elliptically lay out a chart of his development as a writer — well-read nerd in the 1980s, published science-fiction novelist in 1994 and National Book Award winner in 1999 for the literary detective novel “Motherless Brooklyn.”

Fan or not, here are some things you should know about the adolescent Lethem: He watched “Star Wars” 21 times in one summer. He read every book by Kurt Vonnegut and Raymond Chandler. He loved the Talking Heads and Pink Floyd.  He tattooed the cover art from Philip K. Dick’s “Ubik” onto his arm. His mother died when he was 14.

Loss, he says, fuels his novels. In this, at least, he is like most novelists.

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that writers are “a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person.” Lethem is an excellent example. He is a sci-fi geek, a well-read intellectual, a fan of Marvel comic books, a devotee of Jean-Luc Godard and a cryptic writer working in a confessional mode.

“Of the writers I know, I’ve been the most eager to point out my influences, to spoil the illusion of originality by elucidating my fiction’s resemblance to my book collection,” he admits. This is one of the aspects of this book that’s so compelling. Lethem’s deepest and most complex relationships have been with artists he’s never met, except through their work.

Rarely does a novelist seem to truly grasp the mysterious forces that guide him. Many are too suspicious of the muses to even attempt to understand. Not Lethem. He fearlessly analyzes his influences — movies, books, artists, friends, parents — and his insights are highly personal, but also often universal, and thus these essays reach the highest goal of the memoir form.

Entertainment & the Arts: Monday, May 02, 2005

“The Evil B. B. Chow” by Steve Almond

By Mark Lindquist
Special to The Seattle Times

“I liked the guy. … But there was something desperate in his tone, which made me suspect he hadn’t really decided who he was, that he hoped all his ideas might make him someone.”

This is from one of Steve Almond’s stories with an unprintable title, and it well describes most of his characters: clever thinkers who might analyze too much and try too hard, but who reach forgiveness and epiphanies for their efforts.

I loved these people.

Almond’s first collection of stories, “My Life in Heavy Metal,” was a remarkably smart and hip debut. He followed this with “Candyfreak,” a nonfiction best seller about a candyfreak, himself. I couldn’t get past the first chapter, but I guess a guy has to make a living.

I don’t know if aspiring writers gain much from writing programs, but apparently the instructors can. Almond teaches creative writing at Boston College and he has an amazing grasp of the confusion and splendor of collegiate life, and how it contrasts with — and resembles — the confusion and splendor of real life 10 to 20 years later.

This collection of hits includes several standouts, including “Larsen’s Novel,” a laugh-out-loud look at a dentist’s first novel, and “Appropriate Sex,” where a college writing instructor has a sexually-charged encounter with a student “who viewed her sexuality as a bright new user option only obscurely related to her heart.”

Most of the stories overtly involve sex, often focusing on the most awkward results of sexual impulses, but Almond consistently finds something moving and resonant in even the clumsiest assignation. People meet, struggle with intimacy and then rejoin the bright world wiser.

I’m glad Almond has returned to what appears to be his true love. With the possible exception of masters such as Richard Ford, nobody today is writing better short fiction.

Entertainment & the Arts: Sunday, May 15, 2005

“Haunted” by Chuck Palahniuk

Reviewed by Mark Lindquist
Special to The Seattle Times

Chuck Palahniuk, like the unnamed narrator of his best-selling novel “Fight Club,” appears to be going around the bend. In “Haunted,” he has splintered his personality into 23 hapless would-be writers who are snookered into a “writers’ retreat” gone bad, way bad.

The concept is that for three months this diverse group of neurotics will leave the mainstream world and just read and write, perfect their stories. “This much time, we’d bet on our own ability to create some masterpiece. A short story or poem or screenplay or memoir that would make sense of our life.”

Sounds good, except that their benefactor traps them in an old theater to use as guinea pigs for some obscure purpose.

The main narrative is divided by 23 short stories, one from each character. However, all the characters share the distinctively choppy writing style of Chuck Palahniuk, as well as his grim world view and fetishistic attraction to suffering.

“War. Starvation. Plague. They fast-track us to enlightenment.”

Palahniuk’s novels are hard to categorize, this one even more so than most. Primarily it appears to be a satire of reality television — an effective one — but it’s also a homage to horror stories, and a meditation on pop culture.

Convinced their kidnapping is the stuff of contemporary news and movies and book deals, the characters decide to amp things up for better drama, for better marketability. Mind-numbing atrocities follow.

“Will this be just one horrible event after another after another after another — until we’re all dead?” one of the characters asks.

Answer: yes.

On the plus side, you won’t mind seeing most of these characters die.

The Bret Easton Ellis serial-killer satire “American Psycho” came to mind, but without the hipster wink and irony. Palahniuk appears to be earnest about all this.

I’ve recommended this book to a few people, but they are all a little bent.

Entertainment & the Arts: Friday, October 21, 2005

“Veronica”: The soulful memoir of a fallen model

By Mark Lindquist
Special to The Seattle Times

In the past, memoirists borrowed form from novelists. Now novelists are borrowing from memoirists. Intensely personal narratives find an eager audience in our confessional times, especially where there’s a dose of sordidness.

One of the compelling qualities about Mary Gaitskill’s early fiction was its autobiographical flavor. When she arrived on the literary scene in 1988, she was promoted as a former prostitute, stripper and teenage runaway — she sounded teasingly similar to some of her characters.

“Veronica,” her second novel and a National Book Award finalist, is the reminiscence of Alison Owen, a model from the ’80s who ends up alone and broke after a car crash ends her career.

The title character is secondary. This is Alison’s story and, like a memoir, it’s an attempt to make sense of who she is and where she’s been.

“You want to say, This is me; this is who I am. But you don’t even know what it is, or what it’s for. Time parts its shabby curtain. There is my father, listening to his music hard enough to break his own heart. Trying to borrow shapes for his emotions so that he may hold them out to the world and the world might say, Yes, we see. We feel. We understand.”

Gaitskill’s characters often are on the hunt for understanding and connection. “I wanted to love,” Alison explains. “But I didn’t realize how badly I had been hurt. I didn’t realize that my habit of distance had become so unconscious and deep that I didn’t know how to be with another person.”

Alison develops a peculiar friendship, a connection that might save her, with the uncomely Veronica, who dies of AIDS. The narrative skips around from the ’80s to the present and from Paris to New York, driven primarily by Gaitskill’s engaging and penetrating style.

Never before in fiction has a model been this knowing, this feeling or this poetic. Yet every sentence rings true. Gaitskill is talented enough to make you believe that the memoir of a fallen model can be as soulful as it is sordid.

Entertainment & the Arts: Friday, April 28, 2006

“This Book Will Save Your Life” by A.M. Homes

By Mark Lindquist
Special to The Seattle Times

New York may be the city where most authors like to live, but Los Angeles is the city where most authors like to set books about contemporary alienation, particularly New York authors.

A.M. Homes, a long-time fixture of the Manhattan literary scene, apparently camped out at the Chateau Marmont on Sunset Strip long enough to write one of the better Los Angeles novels I’ve read. “This Book Will Save Your Life” is as acute as “Day of the Locust,” “Play It As It Lays,” and “Less Than Zero,” but with a wider sweep.

Richard Novak, a successful stock trader hiding from life in his house in the hills, is a middle-aged man who believes life can be controlled. Then he suddenly suffers a mysterious malady that resembles a heart attack, but might just be an existential crisis. He is seen by a “psychological internist” who turns out to be a fake — this is L.A. — but who may know what he’s talking about.

“Live,” is the faux-doctor’s prescription.

Thus begins Richard’s upscale picaresque adventures in La-La Land. He connects to various degrees with his brother, his ex-wife, his housekeeper, an immigrant donut-shop owner, a movie-star neighbor, a counter-culture novelist and a woman who’s weeping in the produce section at Ralph’s after abandoning her children.

“You’re a freak magnet,” his housekeeper says.

Some of these freaks, such as the donut man, broaden Richard’s horizons, while others, such as the stunningly self-involved woman who abandons her children, serve as cautionary tales, but all are warm-up acts for the reunion the book builds toward: Richard’s son comes to Hollywood for the summer to work as an intern at a talent agency.

As multiple stories intertwine, chaos and catastrophes erupt around the characters, reminding them, and us, that life can be crazily random, that you cannot protect yourself with money or walls or anything else.

Homes is a top-drawer writer, knowing and economical. She finds the telling details and the dead-on snippets of dialogue that resonate and expand the implications of what could be just another life-is-hell-when-you’re-bored-and-have-too-much-money novel.

Homes is also fearless. In past books she has explored pedophilia, murder, obsession and self-destruction. L.A., a city famous for its extremes, proves to be perfect territory for her boundary-pushing bent.

Though the title of this novel initially struck me as ironic, or at least tongue-in-cheek, by the end of the book I realized Homes means it. She believes we can be saved by anything that awakens us to life’s possibilities.

Entertainment & the Arts: Friday, June 09, 2006

“JPod” by Douglas Coupland

By Mark Lindquist
Special to The Seattle Times

“I think people in the year 2020 are going to be nostalgic for the sensation of cluelessness.”

“I’ve come to the conclusion that documents are thirty-four percent more boring when presented in the Courier font.”

“If you’re an incredibly famous rich person who does more in one day than I do in a month, does your perception of time’s passing go slower or faster than it does for me?”

Douglas Coupland’s latest book, “JPod,” is billed as a novel, and it does resemble a novel in some ways — words, characters, dramatic incidents — but it is more precise to say this is a collection of random thoughts and observations, ironic dialogue, word games and number puzzles.

Coupland has returned to the geeky techie culture he explored in his 1995 success “Microserfs,” but with even less of a story line and less emotional engagement. Given the book’s form, it seems pointless to relate the plot. Suffice it to say that the narrator Ethan Jarlewski and five co-workers at a Vancouver, B.C., video-game-design company are subverting the game they are charged with creating.

Ethan describes his colleagues in “Living Cartoon Profiles.” None of the characters are fully fleshed out, and this appears to be intentional. As one of them says, “You feel chilled because you have no character. You’re a depressing assemblage of pop-culture influences and cancelled emotions, driven by the sputtering engine of only the most banal form of capitalism. You spend your life feeling as if you’re perpetually obsolete — whether it’s labour market obsolescence or cultural unhipness.”

Except in instances such as these when Coupland speechifies through his characters, or when he is portraying someone over 30, his dialogue is pitch-perfect. He knows his main subjects. In his 40s and well-established, Coupland still best understands twentysomethings drifting in oceans of information. However, he remains detached from their issues and, as a result, so does the reader.

There are many moments of brilliance in these pages, such as Coupland’s analysis of “micro-autism” in both the general population and the computer industry. There are also some missteps, such as when he takes a tip from the postmodern how-to book and casts Douglas Coupland in a major supporting role.

” ‘Oh, God,’ ” the book begins, warning us, ” ‘I feel like a refugee from a Douglas Coupland novel.’ ”

Though fans of “Microserfs” and “Generation X” should enjoy Coupland’s latest musings and mischief, he will not win many converts with this one.

August 18, 2006

“Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs” by Irvine Welsh

Reviewed by Mark Lindquist
Special to The Seattle Times

Drunks have long been a comedy staple, and Irvine Welsh, the Scottish author of “Trainspotting,” spices up their drunkenness with drugs for an extra comic kick. With his eighth book, “The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs” (Norton, 391 pp., $24.95), he sticks to his tried-and-true territory of drink, drugs, sex and general vulgarity.

Danny Skinner, a restaurant inspector in Edinburgh, Scotland, is a heavy-drinking, drug-abusing skirt-chaser — about what you would expect from an Irvine Welsh hero. Skinner’s mother is a former punk rocker who loved the Clash — as did we all — and slept with three men the night of a Clash show in 1980. One of the men spawned Skinner. She jokingly tells Skinner his father was guitarist Joe Strummer, and he is beaten up at school for claiming his dad was in the Clash.

At 23, Skinner decides to search for his unknown father, thinking this might move his stalled life forward. “He desperately wanted to know about his own father before … becoming one himself.” Potential candidates include Alan De Fretais, a celebrated chef and author of “The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs,” an “aphrodisiac cookbook.”

A Master Chef, De Fretais writes, is “more than just a chemist: he is an alchemist, a sorcerer, an artist, as his concoctions are not designed to remedy maladies of body or mind, but attend to the far more wondrous task of uplifting the soul.”

Skinner’s soul is definitely in need of heavy lifting, weighed down as it is by various compulsions he’s unable to control or even understand, including an acute hatred of a tee-totaling co-worker, Brian Kirby.

“I can’t explain this rage against him,” Skinner admits to himself, “the impulse to precipitate and savour his annihilation, and part of me is horribly ashamed of it: the pathetic nature of it all, the raw, searing illicit pleasure this hatred of him gives me.”

Skinner’s super-intense loathing transports this novel from naturalistic moorings into the realm of magic realism. Skinner unwittingly casts a curse on Kirby, which causes Kirby to suffer the consequences of Skinner’s hard living. When Skinner drinks too much, Kirby suffers the hangover. When Skinner brawls, Kirby suffers the bruises. The two of them become mysteriously and inextricably linked.

However, this does not play out like John Donne’s famous meditation, “No man is an island,” but rather more like the Clash’s fatalistic rant, “London calling to the faraway towns, now war is declared and battle come down.”

The narrative frequently switches back and forth from third person to first person, and sometimes into a Scottish patois that can be difficult to decipher in the early going, but it’s compelling nonetheless. All the characters in this book, even the minor ones, are drawn with scary accuracy in Welsh’s unique voice.

Welsh stumbles only when he strains to tie together Kirby’s victimization and geopolitics, blaming the powerful for everything. The political lectures are as hackneyed and simplistic as the character portraits are original and complex. Besides, the proselytizing undermines the power of the story. As Joe Strummer said, “When you blame yourself, you learn from it. If you blame someone else, you don’t learn nothing.”

Entertainment & the Arts: Friday, January 05, 2007

“Kockroach” by Tyler Knox

Reviewed by Mark Lindquist
Special to The Seattle Times

The premise here sounds like a high-concept Hollywood pitch: “It’s Damon Runyon meets Kafka, except instead of a man becoming an insect, a cockroach becomes … a man, a gangster! It’s got violence, girls, atmosphere, and it’s smart, too.”

In the opening pages, I thought Tyler Knox’s first novel, “Kockroach,” felt gimmicky, the unfortunate product of a writer’s workshop, but then I started getting into it, and I was hooked. Literary fiction is not often this wildly fun.

Kockroach, our eponymous anti-hero, awakes in an awkward human body. He is not overly troubled by this transformation because cockroaches, “awesome coping machines,” do not waste time dwelling on the past. They live in the present.

“Deal with it, that is the cockroach way. … Whenever a cockroach sits back and wonders what it’s all about, he gets stepped on.” Driven by primitive impulses, and unrestrained by morality, Kockroach is well-equipped for success in the criminal world, and eventually the business world and beyond.

His guide is sometime narrator Mickey Pimelia, known as Mite, a cynical runt who has been kicked around his whole life and is always looking for someone strong to latch on to. Enter Kockroach, with his brown suit, dark glasses and superhuman strength.

“Let others fill their hearts with the lonely struggle to reach great heights,” Mite says, “I need someone to carry me.” In a symbiotic relationship, they rule the 1950s underworld of New York’s Times Square, which Mite describes as the “Times Square of pinball palaces and shady dance clubs, of the grand old Sheraton-Astor and the fleabag junkie haunts what surrounded it, of the Broadway theaters where never I set foot and the Roxy burlesque, with its second-rate strippers playing to a third-rate crowd, where certainly I did.”

Knox shifts voices and perspective, from hard-boiled to modern-hip, dropping allusions to people as varied as Richard Nixon and the Ramones. You can tell when an author is having a good time, and Knox has a ball.

He has done his research on arthropods and also on Homo sapiens. Like Franz Kafka’s “Metamorphosis,” this is a story about what it means to be human.

Kockroach finds that no matter how much he conquers and consumes, he is still hungry. “His greed has concomitantly grown to monstrous dimensions, whispering, imploring, shouting in his ear that he doesn’t have enough, not enough, that he needs more, more, everything.” Mite, on the other hand, craves the comfort of a saner existence.

Though the ending is predictable — Kockroach shares the same ultimate ambition as Don Corleone and many gangsters-cum-businessmen before him — it still works. Nearly everything about this portrait of the cockroach as a young human is artfully executed and signals the emergence of a promising new novelist.

Entertainment & Arts: Friday, February 16, 2007

April 27, 2007

“Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey” by Chuck Palahniuk

Reviewed by Mark Lindquist
Special to The Seattle Times

Journalists often lift technique from novelists, and sometimes novelists return the compliment by imitating the documentary style of nonfiction.

In “Rant,” Chuck Palahniuk adopts the oral biography format used by George Plimpton for “Truman Capote” and Jean Stein for “Edie” in his study of Buster Casey, a “naturopathic serial killer.” This style, you would think, might lend an air of authenticity to the story. Instead, Palahniuk’s eighth novel is a high-minded version of “South Park.”

Palahniuk, the author of “Fight Club,” is arguably the most popular underground writer working today, if you can call a best-selling author underground. His fans will no doubt appreciate his latest, which includes all his signature declarations on disease, destruction, sex and death.

Buster “Rant” Casey has died, apparently, and his friends, family, and various unreliable narrators comment in punchy, alternating passages. Slowly we learn about Rant’s weird childhood, his freakish relationship with pain and insects, and how he left his small town and moved to the big city where he hooked up with the Party Crashers — people who ram cars into each other to remind themselves they’re alive.

The book is set in a William Gibson style cyber-fiction future that is fully imagined and designed to reflect the consumerist present. The multiple-narrator format allows Palahniuk to philosophize on nearly every subject that vexes modern life, and he does.

This is what draws fans to Palahniuk. There is nothing exceptional about his prose or plotting, but his voice is truly unique. He writes at the edge of crazy, and you can feel his desperate urge to get at the truth of things, even if he is not sure where the truth lies and it’s making him nuts. As one his characters says, “There’s plenty of folks who find crazy people attractive.”