Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. At least that’s how I feel today.

This is the day to do what we should do every day: give thanks, acknowledge our blessings, live with gratitude.

Marcus Aurelius begins Book One of Meditations with a gratitude list. Specifically, he thanks people who taught him virtue and helped shape his character.

For example, from Diognetus he learned “not to busy myself about trifling things.” Or, as David Lee Roth of Van Halen put it more than eighteen hundred years later, “Don’t sweat the little shit. And it’s all little shit.”

Aurelius views gratitude as medicine for all that inevitably challenges and chips away at us in life.

In the final quarter of the book, he advises, “All you need are these: certainty of judgment in the present moment; action for the common good in the present moment; and an attitude of gratitude in the present moment for anything that comes your way.”

Books

Consistent with the theme of gratitude, I recommend Ikigai: the Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life by Héctor García and Francesc Miralles.

Ikigai, roughly translated, means “a reason for being,” or something akin to that. One reviewer said it means, “A reason to jump out of bed each morning.” I found it to be primarily about finding one’s mission in life. Whatever it means, the book is simple, short, and wise.

Many of the ideas and practices you will likely already know. Some may be new. Almost everything is useful.

Two other books I recommend are cited and discussed by the authors, Man’s Search for Meaning by Victor Frankl and Flow: the Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.

I think I spelled the Mihaly’s surname name right? Flow is dense and brilliant and I may revisit it in a future blog post.

On the fiction front, I’m starting City of the Sun by David Levien, co-writer of Rounders with Brian Koppleman. Many years ago I reviewed David’s first novel, which turned out to be the harbinger of a remarkable career.

David and Brian currently have an awesome show on Showtime, Billions. I don’t watch TV but I’m watching this series. It’s smart and cool and completely absorbing.

Movies

Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin killed somewhere between three and ten million people in a man-made Ukrainian famine. Released in 2019 and available on Amazon, Mr. Jones tells the story of free lance journalist Gareth Jones who tried to expose the slaughter and, to a lesser extent, the story of New York Times journalist Walter Duranty who tried to cover it up.

Jones and Duranty square off in a competition between truth and fake news before the term entered our lexicon. George Orwell, the author of Animal Farm, appears as a minor character and perfect framing device.

Polish director Agnieszka Holland does a remarkable job of capturing the look and feel of the time and place with a low budget. She has won awards for her previous films about the Nazi holocaust.

I won’t tell you what happens to Jones. You can watch the movie.

On a more upbeat note, my ten-year-old daughter Sloane and I are psyched this holiday season to watch Elf with Will Ferrell for the eleventh time.

Ikigai

I’m pleased to report I’m rolling on a new project, albeit slowly. I’m feeling the same buzz I had writing Never Mind Nirvana. I’ll keep you posted.

Meanwhile, life and law are also keeping me busy as I work at home during the pandemic. For more frequent updates, join my Lawyer Mark Lindquist Facebook Group and follow my Author & Attorney Facebook page if you haven’t already. I’ve also been posting on Instagram, my preferred social media. I appreciate the comments and messages, thank you.

Finally, I’ve been advocating for justice and helping good people in a series of compelling cases. You can read more at my lawyer website.

I wish you all a happy Thanksgiving, your own Ikigai, and a season of gratitude all year long.

Thanks for reading.

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.

Welcome to this special coronavirus quarantine edition of my blog.

While this post lacks my usual book and movie recommendations, there are some life lessons with levity.

Decades ago, Kurt Vonnegut said, “How should we behave during this Apocalypse? We should be unusually kind to one another, certainly. But we should also stop being so serious. Jokes help a lot.”

Top Ten Tips for Working at Home

Many of us are working at home now. I got a head start.

In February, I returned from visiting clients in Jakarta, via Tokyo, and went into a 14-day quarantine. People were becoming concerned about this coronavirus thing. 

Just as I was ready to return to the office and reconnect with colleagues, everything went online so we could work remotely. 

Shortly thereafter, Governor Inslee began issuing public health directives. “Non-essential” people were quarantined. Lawyers, apparently, are non-essential. 

Suddenly toilet paper was hoarded. Memes flooded Facebook. The end times seemed near.

Here is some good news though. Working remotely works. At our firm, we’re serving clients, accepting clients, and doing our jobs. Along isolation road, however, we learned some lessons. 

There are challenges to working at home. For example, there is no IT department at my house. There is a distracting nine-and-a-half-year-old. Nonetheless, I’ve found ways to carry on.

Here are my top ten tips: 

10) Create a home workspace. 

This should not be your bed. 

9) Start your day with a checklist.

Checklists have a double benefit. One, lists help you focus. Two, every time you check something off your list you earn a surge of dopamine. You can get the same rush from exercising, but checklists don’t make you sweat. 

8) Maintain contact with people. 

According to research, loneliness is one of the top challenges of working at home. Still, now is not the time to organize a rockin’ block party. Instead, try group chats, make phone calls, use FaceTime, discover Zoom. Please wear pants during any sort of video conferencing. 

7) Communicate with colleagues. 

Organizations have a collective knowledge that naturally spreads like, well, a virus. Whether it’s a hallway dialogue, a lunch break, or simply hanging out and sharing war stories, we are constantly exchanging information. When everyone is working remotely, we lose this. Call your colleagues. Ask about the weirdest thing that happened that day. Be grateful for the stories. I’m adding a chapter to my memoir. 

6) Stick to a schedule.

Psychologists consistently recommend a regular schedule as crucial for productivity and mental health. Schedules make us more efficient, reduce stress, and instill good habits. Further, schedules give us the illusion of control, which is particularly comforting during apocalyptic times. Your schedule should include time for things like helping your children with homework, lunch, and exercise. Ironically, many of us find ourselves working longer hours at home because there is no end time. Your schedule should also include happy hour. 

5) Cut down on news.  

You save time. You avoid toxicity. You tune out annoyances. You’re happier. Studies show news triggers your limbic system in noxious ways, stressing your body and dimming your mind. You will hear enough about disease, death, and doom without clicking coronavirus links eleven times a day.

4) Listen to music.

Lawyers should tell their clients this more often. Music, as Kurt Vonnegut noted, is the greatest of the arts. Science confirms what we already know. Music reduces stress, inspires creativity, lifts our spirits, and even supports our immune system. Music is a miracle drug. If you play an instrument, break it out. I did. I’m practicing the three chords I know and may even learn a fourth. 

3) Hydrate and meditate.

This is one of my mantras. Among other essential functions, water flushes out toxins and strengthens your immune system. You function better. Your skin looks better. You feel better. What water does for your body, meditation does for your mind. We need calm heads for The End of the World as We Know It. 

2) Read. 

I do not mean Facebook memes like the one of Hannibal Lector with the caption, “If we run out of food, we still have each other.” I mean books. Personally, I’m re-reading Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. “At dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself, ‘I have to go to work as a human being. What do I have to complain of if I’m going to do what I was born for?’”

1)  Don’t wear pajamas.

Laurence Olivier said you can play any part with the right costume. Clothes affect how others perceive you and, more importantly, how you perceive yourself. So my number one tip is this: do not wear pajamas during work hours. Don’t do it. Thank you. 

Oh, and more thing that was pointed out to me by Peter Farrelly: muumuus are the same as pajamas.

I’m an optimist and I’m confident the Republic will survive. Remember, the Renaissance followed the Bubonic Plague.  

Stay safe. Stay sane. 

Tip Eleven

As we know from the rockumentary movie Spinal Tap, eleven is somewhere beyond ten. “This one goes to eleven.”

So here is my eleventh tip: crisis equals opportunity.

President John F. Kennedy, and politicians who followed his lead and borrowed his tropes, have been criticized for saying, “When written in Chinese, the word ‘crisis’ is composed of two characters. One represents danger and the other represents opportunity.” Apparently, this is not technically correct.

While Kennedy may have been off on his linguistics, he was spot on about life.

Thanks for reading.

Happy Thanksgiving. Christmas is coming. ‘Tis the season for gratitude and books.

Books are, of course, the best gifts. While a bottle of single malt Islay Scotch is nothing to scoff at, liquor is still second to literature. I’m defining literature broadly to include “the entire body of writings of a specific language, period, people.”

Along with miscellaneous updates and life lessons, the main mission of this blog is to recommend good books and movies. This is especially true in the shopping season.

Stillness is the Key

My first recommendation of the season is non-fiction by the author of The Obstacle is the Way, Ryan Holiday. His latest, Stillness is the Key, is the perfect antidote to the toxic noise of our modern world.

“Stillness is what aims the archer’s arrow. It inspires new ideas. It sharpens perspective and illuminates connections…. Stillness is the key to, well, just about everything.”

Blending stories from Marcus Aurelius to Buddha, from Winston Churchill to Confucius, from artists to athletes, there is no better book about self-mastery, discipline, and focus.

If you are a friend of mine, you may be receiving a signed copy for Christmas. Don’t bank on this though. Buy it for yourself. Buy it for friends.

On the subject of toxic noise antidotes, you should also read Ryan’s first book, a smart study of media, Trust Me, I’m Lying. The epigraph by novelist, screenwriter, and film critic James Agee sums it up. “The very blood and semen of journalism, on the contrary, is a broad and successful form of lying. Remove that form of lying and you no longer have journalism.” Agee, a posthumous Pulitzer Prize winner, penned this decades before Twitter and Facebook.

Sex and Murder

My second recommendation is also non-fiction, but reads like a top drawer novel. Star Spangled Scandal: Sex, Murder, and the Trial that Changed America by Chris DeRose proves once again history can be entertaining and edifying.

With a title like that, you do not need a synopsis or quote. The book is as good as it sounds.

Chris is a fellow author/lawyer. I’m a booster. As Robert Pirsig, the author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, said, “Quality tends to fan out like waves.” I do my part to help.

Trial Lawyer Literature

My third recommendation has a more limited audience. On Becoming a Trial Lawyer is about exactly that. The author, Rick Friedman, a Seattle trial lawyer, sees trial work as “an inward journey” of “applied spirituality.” I concur.

I am halfway into Friedman’s book as I blog this. Later I will likely follow-up with more. Meanwhile, I am far enough along to recommend it to any lawyer who is a learner. It’s a cross between memoir and handbook for elevating personal and professional performance.

As someone who has read everything on trial tactics I can find, I feel qualified to recommend Friedman’s short book as one of the best. Power-to-weight ratio is perfect.

Fans of Ryan Holiday may notice some philosophical and practical similarities with Friedman. For example, both appreciate the power of observation and the advantage of detaching from opponents .

If you’re a lawyer, buy it for yourself or a colleague. If you’re not a lawyer, buy it for a lawyer you like. Amazon is your best bet.

#BooksAreBestGifts

Next blog post I will recommend novels to those who still read these artifacts of literacy. God bless you.

Reading novels increases empathy. The Brazilian government figured this out. NPR did a cool story about how Brazilian prisoners reduce their sentences by reading fiction and how this actually makes sense.

In prison or not, books are the best gifts.

Lion Air Update

Finally, stay tuned for developments on our lawsuit against Boeing for the 737 Max disasters. As I discussed with CNN, we recently settled four of our cases. That leaves 42 more.

Lewis Kamb of The Seattle Times wrote a good story about the human cost of the Lion Air crash. The story features a client I get to know quite well.

Whether we get there by settlement or trial, our goal is justice for our clients, accountability for Boeing, and safer skies for all. The fight goes well. I’ll keep you posted.

Public Speaking

I recently spoke to the Gig Harbor Republican Club about our cases against Boeing, personal injury law, and Indonesia. As a Democrat, I appreciate there are still patches of bipartisanship and common sense in our divisive times.

After cutting back in 2019, I am going to be available to talk to service groups more often in 2020.

Live with Gratitude

In this season of gratitude, I feel blessed by my work, family, and friends. Thank you all.

And thank you for reading.

 

It’s summertime, and the livin’ is busy.

Chelsea, Sloane, and I have been all over the county, from the Gig Harbor Maritime Parade to Meeker Days in Puyallup to the Buckley Log Show. We appreciate seeing friends everywhere we go. Pierce County is big, diverse, and friendly. I appreciate every opportunity to communicate with the community we serve in the Prosecutor’s Office.

You can learn more at www.marklindquist.org or follow on Facebook. We can always use more volunteers, yard sign locations, and, of course, donations. Thank you!

#KeepOurProsecutor #KeepOurCommunitySafe

The Keep Our Prosecutor Kickoff Concert with The Beatniks is Saturday, April 14, at 6 pm. Join us, thanks!

Tacoma Mayor Woodards will welcome the crowd, Detective Ed Troyer will serve as Emcee, and The Beatniks will rock the Landmark Temple Theatre in Tacoma! We expect musical guest stars as well.

You can learn more at our Facebook event page. #KeepOurProsecutor #KeepOurCommunitySafe

Thanks, see you Saturday night!

And thanks for reading.

Happy new year!

I’ve updated my “Have a Pleasant New Year” article, a precursor to my “Zen Lawyer” column. I hope you experience plenty of pleasantness this year.

Chelsea, Sloane and I are always enthusiastic about the spirit of adventure and growth inherent in a new year. Possibilities.

If you are the sort who believes in New Year’s resolutions, here is a thought from Marcus Aurelius: “When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive — to breath, to think, to enjoy, to love.”

Happy Thanksgiving!

“Gratitude is not only the greatest of all the virtues, but the parent of all others.” Marcus Cicero

Ladenburg, Strickland, Lindquist. Sounds like a law firm, but it’s actually the co-authors of an editorial on Tacoma, the city we are grateful for. We compare Tacoma’s past reputation with today’s reality. The future is bright.

I recently opened a medium.com account. This will serve as a one-stop shop for my beliefs on “literature, leadership, and life.” In other words, random dispatches from this endless contest of lightness versus darkness, truth versus lies, good versus bad. I’ll try to make sense of the rancorous chaos out there.

Thanks for reading.

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.

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.”

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: 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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, 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: 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.

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.

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.

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.

John McGrath wrote a good story about an unusually entertaining Continuing Legal Education class featuring sports, law, and life lessons. In summary, be cool.

Mary Ann Gwinn, the blessed Books Editor for The Seattle Times, put together an honorable tribute for the 40th Anniversary of Elliott Bay Books in Seattle.  I weighed in along with my friend Garth Stein and others.

I’m working on a new novel, slowly. I never mind being asked about it as it reminds me I have work to do.

Thanks for reading.

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 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 & 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.”

Foreward to the German edition of “Never Mind Nirvana”

Mark Lindquist never makes anything up except names. He writes down his life. Not to know his other books and to start with “Never Mind Nirvana” is a little bit like opening a biography somewhere in the middle and starting to read there.

What I would like to say to you now is to put aside “Never Mind Nirvana” and read “Sad Movies” first, and then “Carnival Desires,” and only after that you should read “Never Mind Nirvana” and then you can look forward to his next novel that will come out soon because in that one you’ll find out how Pete Tyler, the hero of “Never Mind Nirvana,” is doing today. But unfortunately, “Sad Movies” and “Carnival Desires” are difficult to find (though “Sad Movies” may be published in Germany soon). And I certainly never lend my copies to anyone, not even to my closest friends (I had to buy “Sad Movies” about five times because nobody ever returned it). So when I was asked to write this foreword, I thought it would be a good idea to write down What Happened So Far. A kind of prologue for all those readers who didn’t have the pleasure like I did to have been there from the beginning.

Some sunny afternoon in the late Eighties, I pulled a paperback out of a shelf in my favorite bookstore in San Francisco because I liked the title. When I don’t know an author, I often only read the first sentence in order to decide whether I want to have the book or not. Mark’s first sentence in his first novel was:

I wonder why I don’t kill myself?

Sold.

I wonder why I’m wondering, then tell myself not to think like this and light a cigarette instead.

It’s about three A.M.

This is how “Sad Movies” begins, the story of a young guy living in Venice, California, who works for Big Gun Films and writes copy for softpornos about Las Vegas Showgirls with machine guns. The T Team – this is one job they can’t blow.” He decides his life would be more useful if put to an end, so his girlfriend will cash in on his life insurance, and then an old friend comes into town and talks him out of it. When he finally tells his girlfriend about his failed plan, she gets angry with him. He tries to calm her down. I was going to leave you a note absolving you.

Becky looks incredulous. What the fuck kind of note would have absolved me, she asks. You think you’re that good a writer?

In the end, they rescue a dog, and the hero survives, but then the story ends much too soon, you finish it much too quickly. And on the last page it says: Mark Lindquist lives in Venice, California. This is his first novel. I can’t remember how many times I reread “Sad Movies” back then, but I do remember why it put a spell on me. In all of its morbid melancholy it was so wickedly hopeful, dark in its humor, yet full of love for life, and deeply personal. Bret Easton Ellis hailed it as hilarious and affirmative – and I was dead sure Lindquist would publish another novel in no time.

But it took three years, and while I was anxiously waiting I kept hoping he wouldn’t change his mind and kill himself after all. In 1990 he finally published “Carnival Desires,” his second novel and my favorite one of his books, which I almost missed because there was only one hardcover edition. “Carnival Desires” kept every promise “Sad Movies” had made, and more. It was mature and beautiful and breathtakingly straight from the heart.

Classic rock, 97.1 KLSX. Now, new from U2 – Libby turns off the radio as she drives into the cemetary.

“Carnival Desires” begins with a funeral, a young man has taken his life. It is the story of a group of friends trying to survive in Hollywood. A desperate round dance on the edge of an emotional abyss, full of music, humor and tragedy, and the hero is a screenwriter named Bick who falls in love with an actress and he rewrites a script only for her and he still doesn’t get her in the end.

Of course we’re using each other, one of Bick’s friends tells him. But at least we like each other. Bick doesn’t want to die, but he does want another life, he wants to retire from screenwriting, turn his back on Hollywood, and he just doesn’t know how to do it. In the end, another friend is dead, and Bick, while trying to leave his driveway to leave town, has an accident and so he ends up staying and becomes Best Man at somebody else’s wedding.

And on the back of the book it said: Mark Lindquist lives on a boat in Venice, California. He has written screenplays for several movies.

At some point I heard that he had been dating Molly Ringwald, but that they had broken up. After that, nothing. For years I waited in vain for his third novel, and eventually I was convinced that he was burnt out, a drug addict – or dead. I left the States and for a few more years, I still looked for him in German bookstores, but finally I gave up.

Eleven years after its first publication, I read “Carnival Desires” again, I had almost forgotten how good it was, and I decided to search for Lindquist one last time. I was afraid to find an obituary somewhere in the internet. Instead I found his name on People Magazine’s Top 100 List of The Most Eligible Bachelors in the US, a very lively website – and finally an explanation for the years of silence. In the early Nineties, shortly after “Carnival Desires” got published, he had left L.A. to go back to his rainy hometown of Seattle, to go to law school and become a lawyer.

He began another life and what that one is like, you can find out in this book.

“Never Mind Nirvana” had only been published the year before I found out about it, and I read the book and wrote a torrid fan letter to the marklindquist.net website. Mark wrote me back. A year later I invited him to my premiere at the filmfestival in Seattle, and he was going to go to LA that weekend, but changed his mind because he was in the middle of a murder trial, so he showed up at the screening that night, and that’s how we met. Fifteen years after I had paid a couple of bucks for a paperback, shortly before the lights went down in the third row of a downtown multiplex theatre, Lindquist and I shook hands and said hello.

We’ve become friends since then, and that’s how I know that he never makes anything up. He recently said to me the truth is the best we can do. He’s right. And that’s exactly what he does in his writing.

He tells the truth about himself.

Mark’s life goes on and he is still writing it down. I deeply admire him for the courage to follow his calling. To find out more about that, you will have to wait for his next novel. But I’m sure I’m allowed to tell you this much: the new hero seems awfully familiar – and he lives on a boat.

And when I call him, Nirvana is still playing.

Sandra Nettelbeck, Berlin, 2002

Sandra Nettelbeck is the director of the German film “Mostly Martha,” which was adapted into the USA movie “No Reservations,” starring Aaron Eckhart and Catherine Zeta-Jones.