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.

July 8, 2008

“The Legal Limit” by Martin Clark

Reviewed by Mark Lindquist  
First published in The Oregonian

Martin Clark, a judge in Virginia, draws characters as well as Scott Turow and crafts plots as well as John Grisham.  “The Legal Limit,” his third novel, is a model for how to write a literary legal thriller with a wry sense of humor. 

This novel, however, is based on a true story, as they say in Hollywood. In the prologue Clark admits he has been tempted, like other writer/lawyers, to move to non-fiction, to write an “insider’s book about the legal system.” He’s resisted the temptation for two main reasons: 1) because he doesn’t want to lift the curtain to expose the inner workings of a system that requires a certain “dignity” and “mystique” to function effectively, and 2) because “day-to-day jurisprudence is a numbing, flat, repetitive affair.”

That said, a case finally came across his desk that changed his mind, at least partly. This book is “done as fiction,” but “it is at its core a reasonably accurate account of lives and happenings I discovered only because of my job.” 

Lucky Clark, and lucky us, because this is probably the best courthouse story I’ve ever heard or read: compelling characters, surprising twists, rich details, all told in a knowing voice that will affect the way you view destiny, God, the human condition, and the heady concept of justice.

Mason Hunt and Gates Hunt grow up with an abusive fool of a father who eventually, mercifully, abandons them. Mason becomes a prosecuting attorney in their home town, and Gates becomes a drug-dealing ne’er-do-well who eventually kills a man.  

Though the shooting is arguably in self-defense, Mason helps cover it up so that the killing goes unsolved. This seems contrary to Mason’s character, except that Gates, his older brother, continually protected Mason from their sadistic father and Mason is bound to him with a “visceral, epic connection.”

Life goes on. Gates ends up in prison for drug dealing, and Mason ends up married with a daughter. In one of the many strange and dark twists of this story, Mason agrees to give a kid a break on a Driving Under the Influence charge, and not long after that, the kid crashes into Mason’s wife, killing her.

Though the kid is not drunk, his driver’s license would have been suspended but for the break on the DUI, but maybe he would have driven anyway? As one of the characters remarks, “Who can say?”

After this stroke of bad luck, Mason’s life takes another dip downward when his brother, still in prison and increasingly bitter and crazy, decides Mason has wronged him by not using his position to free him.  Gates discloses Mason’s cover-up to police and Mason is charged with murder and the story appears to be headed toward your typical third act courtroom denouement. 

The trial, however, never happens.

What does happen involves as much legal intrigue and maneuvering as any trial, but is less definite, and somehow more satisfying.

Clark plays a small but pivotal role in the outcome. He not only proves once again that truth is stranger than fiction, but that judges are people, too.   

May 30, 2008

“My Liar” by Rachel Cline

Reviewed by Mark Lindquist
Special to The Seattle Times

Hollywood novels have a natural allure. Rachel Cline, a screenwriter and author of a previous novel, “What to Keep,” uses the Tinseltown setting to good advantage in her new work, “My Liar.”

An unassertive and insecure film editor, Annabeth Jensen, becomes entangled in a friendship with a hip indie-film director, Laura Katz, and their ephemeral, tricky relationship is mirrored by the illusory nature of the movie business.

Unfortunately, the complexity of Hollywood, commerce and artistic endeavors proves to be more interesting than the maddening relationship between Annabeth and Laura.

Desperate for Laura’s approval, Annabeth displays one of the least attractive aspects of show business: the neediness. I kept thinking about Sally Field’s infamous trill after winning her second Oscar, “You like me, right now, you like me!”

Annabeth, who comes to Hollywood from Minnesota, escaping an alcoholic father and angry mother, is fully imagined and well drawn, but Laura, about whom we learn less, is more compelling. Explaining Annabeth to her husband, Laura says, “She’s not really someone I need to cultivate professionally, and she can be a bit … snarky, but sometimes there’s this, I don’t know, momentum when we talk, like when you have a crush on someone in high school. … It’s just weird.”

And yes, it is weird, and it gets weirder. Annabeth and Laura begin working together, on Laura’s low-budget movie about a wide-eyed girl from the Midwest who comes to Hollywood for fame and fortune like thousands before her, and in the process their relationship shifts from adolescent crush to something, well, more deeply neurotic. The movie, titled “Trouble Doll,” is yet another mirror in the funhouse of reflections Hollywood stories often become.

Cline is a gifted writer with a clean, economical style, and she well understands both the psychology and the topography of Los Angeles and the movie business. Though I suspect Annabeth may embody some of Cline’s experiences as an artist in Hollywood, Laura seems to be the character with whom the author is more engaged.

Making a movie, like most serious efforts at art, requires an almost monomaniacal, and sometimes ruthless, devotion. The most interesting relationship in this book, for me, was the one between Laura and her movie.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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: 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, 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 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; 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, 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: 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.

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.”

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.”