Nana by Delacorta

In the mid-80's, I was a regular attendee at a marvelous repertory cinema and it was there I saw the movie Diva by Jean-Jacques Beineix.  There is something about it that fascinates me to this day. Two of the characters, Alba and Gorodish, especially intrigued me.  There was an air of mystery surrounding Gorodish, who, as played by Richard Bohringer, had a sort of rumpled cool that I admired.  I had the rumpled part down cold if not the cool.  Then there was Alba, the woman-child, who exuded youthfulness and a simmering sexuality that made me feel like a dirty old man at 20.  I couldn't take my eyes off either of them despite the fact they really weren't the main characters.  

It wasn't until some years later I learned Diva was based on a novel of the same name by an author named Delacorta.  I thought one day I might come across it but since I assumed the book would be in French, what good would it do me? Despite three and a half years of study in college, I wasn't fluent enough to attempt to read it so you might imagine my surprise and delight to find a copy of Nana, the prequel to Diva, in my favorite used book grotto, in English, no less.  I practically raced home to start reading it.  I have since learned there are five novels featuring the exploits of Gorodish and Alba and Nana sets the stage.

As if this weren't already a sort of miraculous find, there is an inscription dated January, 1984 which reads "To Peter, because I love you.  Love, Cathie".  It made me wonder who Peter and Cathie were in 1984 and it made me wish I was Peter.  If Cathie bought this book and did so just because she loved him, she must have been one cool babe. It filled me with longing for a woman I'll never know.

In any case, Nana is no great literary event.  It is dated, trashy, at times completely unrealistic (a man and woman have sex on a moving motorcycle, going full speed.  At night!), and made me once again feel like a dirty old man.  That's because Gorodish is a dirty old man and thirteen year-old Alba is the object of his, ahem, desires.  As written, Alba, desires nothing less.  Perhaps this seemed kinky or risque or simply French in 1979 when Nana was published.  Now it seems rather creepy. 

However, once I got past all that, I loved it!  It gave me the back story I've always hoped for about both characters along with the promise of four more books about them.  Gorodish is a cool-as-ice con man and paired with Alba's street smarts and willingness to do anything for him, Nana is cinematic, dramatically tense, and great, pulpy fun.  Sometimes trash is treasure and I so look forward to tracking down the rest of the series.

Ready, Steady, Go! by Shawn Levy

Like so many people, every January I tend to get a touch of the post-holiday blues.  It isn't depression so much as a letdown and I'm always starved for something, anything, that will fully engage me.  Many is the Janvier where no matter what book I read, what films I watch, what music I listen to, what fabulous parties I attend, nothing grabs me the way I need.  This month I got lucky when a dear friend of mine lent me this absolute delight.

Shawn Levy first came to my attention some fifteen years ago with Rat Pack Confidential, an engaging account and a story-behind-the-story of The Summit, the famous show the Rat Pack put on in Vegas while filming Ocean's Eleven in Hollywood.  Shame on me for losing track of this talented writer. 

Sub-titled The Smashing Rise and Giddy Fall of Swinging London, Ready, Steady, Go! examines how the scene that had an enormous worldwide influence on popular media and youth culture was built, brick by brick and person by person.  Not only did this cultural explosion encompass the obvious exports, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, but the men behind them, Brian Epstein and Andrew Loog-Oldham.  Levy also brings focus on fashion designer Mary Quant and the first supermodel, Jean Shrimpton, (Twiggy, familiar to us here in the U.S., is portrayed as less the next big thing than this year's girl), actor Terence Stamp, photographer David Bailey, artist and gallery owner Robert Fraser and hair stylist Vidal Sassoon.  This often overlapping group created a small scene that became a gigantic force in pop culture and had a tremendous effect on class and social standing that reverberated throughout the UK.  And who knew Vidal Sassoon fought in the Israeli army against the Egyptians?  Not me. 
 
Class had an overwhelming effect on British citizens.  There were the royals, the titled, the working class and the poor.  As Levy mentions in the opening pages, the rationing that began in England during World War II didn't end until 1958 (!) and that mindset made England a very gray place, especially for working-class people. In one of his stand-up routines, comedian Eddie Izzard describes growing up in a time when America seemed to have it all over England.  If you were an American and wanted to be an astronaut, such a thing was encouraged.  In Britain, the kid with that very same dream was told 'You're British.  Scale it down a bit'.  What happened as a result, this sense of 'classless' success of the David Baileys and Mary Quants and Brian Epsteins gave those kids not only hope to become astronauts (or anything else they dreamed of) but the will to give it a shot.  In a short time, little Carnaby Street, a virtual nothing, and London itself became the center of the swinging world.

Levy writes with authority but in a manner so genial it reads as though he's holding court over drinks at your favorite night spot and you can't wait to hear more.  As well, he writes RSG! from a very British perspective, an example being the inclusion of Terence Stamp as one of the bright young things of the time.  I could only remember seeing a film with Stamp (The Limey) from much later in his career.  To me, Stamp's roomie at the time, Michael Caine, would seem a better subject since his body of work is far more substantial and spans decades.  However, as Levy tells it, Stamp's success opened the door for young British actors of the 60's to become the British stars of the '60's.  

As with Rat Pack Confidential, Levy tells the complete arc of the story from the gray beginnings to the unexpected heights to the overblown end.  When the scene was over, Carnaby Street and the Kings Road were pale imitations of a creative vortex that thrived just a few years prior, leaving many dead, many more wounded and most everyone worse the wear.  Despite the casualties, the many legacies had profound impacts that are still evident all these years later. 

My Top Ten of 2012

That's my kind of baby New Year. 

Happy new year, all.  Here's one last look back as I pick the ten best books I read in 2012.  In this time of post-holiday blahs, you are certain to find something to grab you and pull you from your doldrums.  They will take you away from wherever you are.  If, in fact, you are already out of your doldrums, good for you.  You should read some of these anyway, you well-adjusted citizen of the world, you.   

Fiction 
The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce

People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks

Bel Canto by Ann Patchett  
 
Telegraph Avenue by Michael Chabon

Office Girl by Joe Meno

Non-fiction 
I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution by Rob Tannenbaum and Craig Marks

More Baths, Less Talking by Nick Hornby

The Receptionist: An Education at the New Yorker by Janet Groth

Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher: The Epic Life and Immortal Photographs of Edward Curtis by Timothy Egan

Over Time by Frank Deford

While I don't really have an order or preference, if I had to make a top pick in each category, I choose Harold Fry in fiction and  Shadow Catcher in non-fiction.  They are both exceptional reads.    

As ever, thanks to friends in the book biz who keep me aware of titles they think are worthy and a little under the radar.  Thanks to publishers for putting out great stuff among the muck and mire.  Thanks to booksellers for spreading the gospel.  Most of all, thank you for reading what I write about reading.  

May 2013 be a better year for us all. 

"It's been a long time, I shouldn't have left you..."

Eric B & Rakim quotes aside, I've been reading a great deal since last I posted.  I just finished Michael Chabon's latest, Telegraph Avenue, as well as Per Peterson's It's Fine By Me, both of which I'll write about at length soon enough, however, I've been doing a lot of dipping between a number of books that are well worth their while.  

First off, The Fun of It: Stories from the Talk of the Town.  Edited by Lillian Ross, who joined the New Yorker in 1945, this chronological collection of "casuals" from the magazine is a delight, especially if you're like me (and I know I am) and enjoy the short, engaging pieces at the front of each issue that leave you wanting more.  Great writing from great writers--James Thurber, Harold Ross, A J Liebling, Joseph Mitchell through the Shawn era staff and onto the current class including David Remnick, Jeffrey Toobin and Rebecca Mead.   

Here's a quote I found especially interesting: "Freshman congressmen come here [to Congress] half persuaded that their constituents' impression of them is true, that they are going to save the country, only to find out that the mechanics don't exist for saving the country through Congress."  That was from Congresswoman Claire Boothe Luce.  In 1943.  Nothing changes.

I'm halfway through Frances and Bernard, an epistolary novel by Carlene Bauer.  Thus far I'm intrigued but I'm uncertain I like the characters all that much.  It will be a testament to Bauer's writing to turn my head.  Still, good stuff so far and I have time to form my opinion since the book won't be out until February.

Revisiting A Girl Named Zippy by Haven Kimmel and find it just as charming and laugh-out-loud funny as I remember.  This is one of those books I've been lending to friends since it was published in 2001 and not one of them has ever given it back without telling me how much they enjoyed it.  Please read or re-read this memoir about 'growing up small in Mooreland, Indiana' as the sub-title says.  I'm not sure where Kimmel is now but I do hope she's still at the writing game.

Surprisingly, Grove published another collection of Sherman Alexie short stories, this one entitled Blasphemy, which is a mix of old and new.  I thought I remember Alexie leaving Grove and going to another house at the time War Dance was published.  Perhaps I'm mistaken or maybe this is the last of some contractual obligation, a live album or collection of b-sides, if you will.  As an apostle of Alexie, I had to have it (Thanks Jen) and find the book quite satisfying and rife with stories you'd expect from him--some touching, some beautiful, some infuriating.  I was happy to re-read "What You Pawn, I Will Redeem" as well as "This is What It Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona", the basis for the movie Smoke Signals.  As mentioned before here in my little corner of cyberspace, Alexie is not everyone's cup of YooHoo but I think he is a master. 

Speaking of things cyber, The Movie Uncyclopedia was recently published as an e-book.  I had the great good fortune to be involved promoting both The Football Uncyclopedia and The Baseball Uncyclopedia.  This time around Michael Kun (who is just the nicest fella), Lou Harry (with whom I spent one of the funniest evenings of my life), Eric Feinstein (who I don't know at all), and Theresa Hoiles (who I hears smells nice) skewer the world of film and film fans. Together, they pool their years of movie-watching experience and let 'er rip reminding readers that what you remember and know about your favorite films is wrong, wrong, wrong.  Fat with footnotes and playful in-fighting among each other, they tackle some of the burning issues of filmdom with the grace of a sledgehammer.  Included at no additional charge--THE MOST EXCITING INTRODUCTION EVER!  Funny stuff, as ever, from this bunch. 

Ten Years After

As mentioned before, this blog started first as a desire to count how many books I read in a year then as a way to inform friends and acquaintances about what to read next. The first list was compiled in 1999 but by 2002 I was adding comments to each entry and emailing them at years' end.  I looked over that first batch yesterday and was struck by what a banner year it was.  That's not to say 2002 wasn't without some dogs and disappointments (and I'm not writing about them today) but, as Frank sang, it was a very good year. 

Two books that jumped out at me have been made into movies that will soon release: Stephen Chbosky's The Perks of Being A Wallflower and The Life of Pi by Yann Martel.  Buzz on both films is quite high and I'm anxious to see them.  Best of all, it will cause people to read the books, some for the first time, others again, and I envy them that.  

Perks was new ground for me because I didn't read YA fiction which was just starting to shirk off the taint of being 'crap for kids' and gain an honorable reputation. I wrote: 

Squarely aimed at the young adult market, Wallflower rises well above the typical teen fare even for a cynical former teenager like me.  Consisting of letters written by Charlie to someone whom we never meet, we get a glimpse into those horrible junior/senior high school days when you haven't a clue how to live but have a great need to be loved.  Throughout, it feels as though Chbosky somehow read our diaries and journals as he evokes all those emotions that were then so near the skin.
  
I remember finishing the book and immediately mailing my copy to my dear friend, Rocky, with whom I had shared so many of those experiences, imploring him to read it.  That the book was set in Pittsburgh further endeared it to me.

To see that ten years later author Chbosky has somehow managed to write and direct the movie version with a major studio and cast Hermione herself as one of the leads, gives me hope the film succeeds and gets this book in the hands of readers again.

An even more striking work, The Life of Pi completely knocked me on my ass.  Deservedly, it went on to win the Booker prize and sold millions.  Now as a big budget movie directed by Ang Lee, the film should lead millions more to read this absolutely remarkable and original work. 

Some of the other notables worth a read or re-read that I wrote about in 2002 include: 
Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer (Wow!  And a debut, too)
Empire Falls by Richard Russo (My first Russo. Hardly my last)
The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold (Oh, the ache)
Summerland by Michael Chabon (Proof he can write just about anything)
Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn (a delight for wordsmiths)
Shopgirl by Steve Martin (Steve proves he's a writer)
Niagara Falls All Over Again by Elizabeth McCracken (a haunting tale of friendship)

Less acclaimed but still terrific: 
The Half-Mammals of Dixie by George Singleton (where are you now George?  Please write)
Tepper Isn't Going Out by Calvin Trillin (love that man) 
McCarthy's Bar by Peter McCarthy (damned shame he passed away a couple of years later)

To say the least, looking back has been well worth it. 

When Penny met Pepi

Two showbiz memoirs, one with broad appeal, the other strictly for me.

Joseph Schildkraut was a famous stage actor in Europe who had considerable success in Hollywood, including a best supporting actor Oscar for his portrayal of Captain Alfred Dreyfus in The Life of Emile Zola.  He also played Otto Frank on Broadway and on film in The Diary of Anne Frank.  His father, Rudolph Schildkraut was an even bigger star in Europe and later a marquee name in the Yiddish theater here in the States.  Josephs' memoir, My Father and I, published in 1959, tells both their stories.  

Rudolphs' was a rags to riches story.  From nothing, he went on to become one of the most acclaimed actors of his time.  He was also a serial womanizer, an egomaniac and lived well beyond his means despite earning vast sums of money.  Put simply, the guy was nuts.

His son, Joseph, studied to be a musician but the lure of the stage drew him into the family business despite his fathers' protests.  Not surprisingly, Joseph had some difficulty getting out from his father's shadow but ultimately succeeded on his own, including work for D.W. Griffith and Cecil B. DeMille.  An Oscar ain't bad either. 

For a memoir from 1959, Joseph is quite forthright about his own skirt-chasing (though juicy details were omitted) and he is unapologetic about these as well as his failed marriages. 

Perhaps best of all, I was able to glean some important genealogical information from the book that will aid my own research into my family tree.  You see, while not a household name to most, Joseph was an important name in our house because he was my mother's cousin.  She referred to him by his family nickname, Pepi, and always had fond memories of him.  My parents remembered going to see Anne Frank on Broadway and Pepi taking my father's hand and running it over his bald head which he had shaved to make him appear older.  In fact, Pepi's honest portrayal and physical resemblance to Otto Frank led the the two men to become friends in their remaining years. 

Quite different in tone, My Mother Was Nuts is a funny, fast, and often surprising read.

So often, humor is born of pain and that can certainly be said of Marshall.  Her parents' marriage was unhappy at best and her mother made it clear that Penny's birth was neither planned nor wanted.  In fact, the frankness of Mrs. Marshall is alarming and uncomfortable, making it all the more remarkable that Penny didn't end up a basket case.  Instead, she simply stuck her head down and plowed forward.  

Having grown up in her mother's dance studio, she wasn't a shy kid.  She was likable, fun-loving and boy crazy.  While it was never her dream to be on TV, things have a way of happening for Penny Marshall and she was unknowingly wise to take chances since so many of them panned out so well. Laverne & Shirley was a huge success as were films she directed like Big, Awakenings, and A League of Their Own.  In fact, she was the first woman director to have two films gross over $100 million each.  

Unlike the Schildkraut memoir, My Mother Was Nuts contains lots of juicy stuff--drug trips with Carrie Fisher (no surprise there), benders with Belushi and Aykroyd, her marriage to Rob Reiner (whose success with All In The Family was eclipsed by his wifes' when Laverne & Shirley knocked Reiner's show from the top spot and became the number one comedy in America), her relationship with Art Garfunkel and others.  It is a memoir that is really charming, moving, and unexpected.  

Finally, below is the book trailer for My Mother Was Nuts, which is the funniest I've seen in ages.  

  

Bel Canto by Ann Patchett

Ann Patchett is a bestselling, award-winning novelist.  As if that weren't enough, she recently became a bookseller.  After Nashville lost its best-loved indie bookstore, Patchett partnered with former BDD sales rep, Karen Hayes, and opened Parnassus Books to fill the void.  (Full disclosure: Karen is a friend of mine and was always one of the most respected and beloved sales reps in the biz.)  Much has been made of her decision to enter into the realm of bookstores at a time when publishing is more uncertain than ever, people read little and buy books even less, and Jeff Bezos continues to create a monolithic retail empire that rivals the ancient pharoahs in scope.  As a result, I feel something special for Ann Patchett and, having never read her work, I was thrilled to find two of her books at the re-sale shop where I often find treasure.  Bel Canto is treasure, indeed.

Here's the set-up: in an unnamed, underdeveloped South American country, a birthday party is being thrown to curry favor with the CEO of a Japanese electronics giant in hopes he will open a much-needed factory.  Mr. Hosokawa is a lover of opera and the administration has hired Roxanne Coss, the reigning queen of sopranos, to entertain him at the vice-presidents house along with a host of international business luminaries.  As the stunning performance comes to an end, the lights go out and from the airshafts emerge revolutionaries whose plan is to kidnap the country's president.  The rub is that the president cancelled at the last minute to stay home and watch his favorite soap opera and so, right off the bat, the situation has gone horribly wrong. 

What unfolds is far more than a tense hostage drama.  It is an examination of how music binds people together, changes them, transforms them, uplifts them, and creates common ground where there is little.  In honesty, I have little appreciation of opera.  What I have heard simply doesn't speak to me but Patchett writes so beautifully about it, it may be necessary for me to rethink this.  However, it was more than just opera itself.  Patchett shows how music can completely remove the terrorist from his tiny backwater village, how the worldly CEO recalls the sense memories of attending his first opera as a child when his family could scarcely afford such a luxury and how even the leaders of the coup respect the soprano for her skill and how her voice could cause men to go into battle just to protect it.  

Patchett peoples the story with characters of great diversity, richness and depth: the isolated Diva is made human, the aloof CEO is made flesh, and Hosokawa's translator, Gen, is the heart and soul of the book.  The interactions between the characters is far more than Stockholm syndrome as this unlikely collection of business types, dignitaries and dirt-poor soldiers unite behind the power of song.  

After reading Bel Canto, my "special feeling" for Ann Patchett has grown considerably.  Please keep fighting the good bookstore fight, Ms. Patchett, and, by all means, keep writing. 

Of Dishonest Schemes and Dreams of Genies

A few weeks ago, there was an unsettling article in the New York Times about a man who created a company to furnish authors, many of them self-published and aspiring, at best, with favorable book reviews, mostly on Amazon and other websites where 5-star reviews are the coin of the realm and the key to successful sales.  The authors paid him, sometimes handsomely, for the privilege (you can read the entire piece here: http://goo.gl/YLCqh).  As an example, they wrote of an author who has become quite successful utilizing this service, but who also went so far as to give his own work high marks under several pseudonyms while giving low marks to other authors. 

What we learn from this article is what we already suspected: this happens all the time, whether for pay, like this Rutherford fellow whose defunct company, gettingbookreviews.com is the meat of the article, or under false pretenses or both as in the case of the aforementioned author, John Locke, whose use of these tactics made him the first self-published author to sell over one million e-books on Amazon.  Locke takes it all in stride, a sign of the times, a legitimate way to distinguish himself among all those books that get published every year, no bad taste in his mouth.  Coming as no surprise, Locke's next work was a non-fiction primer, "How I Sold One Million E-books in Five Months". 

Let me just say how utterly distasteful I find this whole practice, as a book blogger, as a former book publicist, and as a reader.

As a blogger, I am beholden to no one.  There have been times when I disliked a book enough that I simply didn't bother to post about it as it was a waste of my time and yours.  There have also been times when I have received advance copies from friends and industry colleagues whose books could have used a "push".  While there may have been a twinge of remorse on my part that I couldn't help out this friend or colleague, in six years I have remained honest in my assessments of the books I've read--if I liked it or not, I said so.  

As a publicist, you know damn well how cluttered the reviewer's desk is, how little time they have, how little space is available for a book review (of all things!).  Part of your job as a competent flak is your ability to distinguish the book from the pack.  For all your efforts and all your cleverness, sometimes you win. More often you lose but from this you learn that base hits add up and most home run kings often lead the league in strikeouts.

As I've opined in the past, the conceit that "everyone has a story" is one of the inherent dangers of self-publishing because not every story deserves to be published.  The other problem is that once self-published authors actually hold a book, their book, in their own two hands, well I haven't met a one who doesn't think they don't belong in the Times Sunday supplement or on Oprah's settee even though the book is a field guide to the tastiest edible nocturnal plants of southwestern Ohio and how to paint them on rocks with acrylics and then use them to decorate your guest house.

Ultimately, where I take the most offense is as a reader.  I'm no naif, no Polyanna, no Pangloss.  I'll accept hype and buzz, if they're legit-ish (don't get me started on the practice of 'blurbing'), I'll understand if I didn't love the book, if it didn't speak to me, if you've written about events or characters I simply dislike or your style is too fill-in-a-blank-of-your-own here. Just tell me a great story.  Don't bullshit me.  

Yesterday, I saw a small bright spot from our friends at Shelf Awareness: four dozen UK authors have condemned these practices and have pledged not to utilize these tactics (http://goo.gl/JOvEU).  I hope authors 'round the world will follow suit.  

I suppose committed readers will find all this as tawdry as I do and I suppose I can't expect the casual reader to vet the books and authors they read, given they read so few these days.  However, it does seem that, as in so many other instances in our current society, the social compact is in tatters, honesty is entirely flexible, and success is the only true measure.   Once this door has opened, never to be shut, it seems the only genies that can be put back in their bottles were on 60s sitcoms.

More Baths, Less Talking by Nick Hornby

I've been a devoted fan of Nick Hornby's work for quite a long time.  I remember opening a new bookstore and a friend lending me an early finished copy of High Fidelity and was immediately taken with his prose and his characters.  I knew Rob and Barry and Dick.  They were me and my friends and the dudes from the record store where I shopped and the bookstore where I worked. I, too, made passive/aggressive, not-nearly-so-subtle-as-I-thought-I-was mix tapes for girls I liked.  Hornby nailed it and lad lit was born!  (Cue sunbeams and trumpet fanfare and dropping testicles.) This begat About A Boy, as touching a novel as I'd read and still one of my faves.

Fortunately, Hornby had too much talent to stay too long in the lad lit ghetto and he produced How To Be Good and A Long Way Down and the lovely Juliet, Naked, as well as forays into non-fiction and YA books and screenplays.  Oddly, I didn't follow him into magazine writing because I thought the mag for which he writes, The Believer, all too hipper-than-thou for a dork like me.  With More Baths, Less Talking, I may have to change my thinking.

Sub-titled Notes From the Reading Life of a Celebrated Author Locked in Battle With Football, Family and Time Itself, Hornby does what I do with this blog: he writes about what he reads, with plenty of digressions about wife and kids, his outside interests, and his fame, along with gibes and japes at Believer editors and subscribers and a ton of hilarious self-deprecating remarks, albeit far more successfully and entertainingly than do I because he's a celebrated and talented author and I, well, I'm neither celebrated nor particularly talented nor am I an author but more of a lazy schlub with a badly-maintained blog and far too much unqualified opinion.  Go Steelers!  Hurray for Mrs. Next!

That said, Hornby is witty and insightful, his asides are clever and biting, and his reading choices are inspired.  A slim volume at a mere 135 pages, More Baths, Less Talking provided me with lots to consider, plenty to laugh about, and a desire to make this very blog as entertaining as his magazine pieces.  If only I can find the time and acquire the talent.