Book Review: Pictures at a Revolution Brings Hollywood Turning Point to Life

Harrison: "Keep your damn muzzle shut about Newley if you know what's good for you..."

Book Review by Noah Mallin

Mark Harris' Pictures at a Revolution is subtitled Five Movies and The Birth of the New Hollywood and it concerns itself with the five films nominated by the Academy for Best Picture that year. It's a clever hook and allows Harris to dish juicy stories about Warren Beatty, Rex Harrison, Sidney Poitier and Kate Hepburn among many others.

The book's central scene is a July 4th party thrown by Jane Fonda and her then-husband Roger Vadim in 1965. The guest list was a who's who of Hollywood on the cusp with old schoolers and young turks each staking out their own ground. In attendance were key players in each of the nominated films that Harris covers in depth: In The Heat of The Night, The Graduate, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, Bonnie and Clyde, and Dr. Doolittle.

Harris does a great job in illuminating the often tortured creative process of each film while uncovering surprises along the way. We find out that Bonnie and Clyde was very nearly directed by Francois Truffaut, Poitier refused to shoot In The Heat of The Night in the segregated South, Rex Harrison was a drunk pain in the ass and directed anti-Semitic slurs Anthony Newley's way, and Mike Nichol's was accused of making The Graduate too autobiographical by casting Dustin Hoffman instead of Robert Redford in the lead. His insight into the murky relationship between Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy is particularly compelling.

The story of each film is filled with improbable actions and strange turns of luck and disaster, all aided by Harris' sharp storytelling. He lays out clearly where each film lay on the spectrum of Hollywood maverick-ness, with Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate as the new guard, In The Heat of the Night somewhere in the middle, and Dinner and Doolittle as the last gasp (for Spencer Tracy quite literally) of the old guard.

Pictures at a Revolution is damn near perfect for any film fanatic, a real treat.

Book Review: Then We Came To The End Puts the "We" in Ennui

Book Review by Noah Mallin

Joshua Ferris was once an ad man and the experience seems to have scarred him for life. Lucky us because his debut novel, Then We Came to the End out in paperback now, joins the canon of great modern office art. I don't mean the posters with the little kitty clutching a limb and the legend "Hang in There" emblazoned across the bottom, I mean art inspired by the office work experience. On some level Richard Yates' Revolutionary Road captured a piece of this as far back as 1961 but films like Office Space and both the American and British versions of The Office on TV make the collective hive of the work environment a subject and character in and of itself.

Ferris chooses an initially off-putting technique to convey the team consciousness of the workplace. Most of Then We Came to the End is narrated in the first person plural as in, "We asked Yop how long ago this was." Like starting a new job, it takes some time to acclimate to the rhythm this imposes but after a while it becomes second nature. It's also a device that captures some of the groupthink that exists in the specific setting - an ad agency that is very tied to the dotcom boom of the late 90s.

As they start to run into financial trouble and the layoffs begin, so too does the paranoia. There is a great sequence involving the office furniture, serial numbers and using the chairs of ex-employees that captures a measure of the Kafka-esque circus an office can be.

There is also a stretch mid-book where the narrative form changes and we get to know the boss Lynn, who is rumored to have cancer (no-one can trace the rumour's source). Although it's a bit disorienting it's also a very affecting part of the novel, and there is a nice payoff to it later on.

Ultimately Then We Came to the End is quite funny while also being awfully bleak, something it has in common with much of the best office art. It's a little sobering to think about which character one most resembles -- especially when we do get to end. Are we the guy whose office everyone hangs out in, the woman who is resented for always having the best idea, the grind, the wild man, the one everyone denigrates? It's telling that Ferris goes beyond stereotypes to build real characters out of most of these people and letting their petty and their noble sides jostle together.

Full of surprises, insight, tenderness and brutally comic satire, Then We Came to the End is a delight.

Book Review: Lethem's "You Don't Love Me Yet" Inspires Like...Not Love

Book Review by Noah Mallin

"You can't be deep without a surface" is uttered by two characters in Jonathan Lethem's latest novel, You Don't Love Me Yet and this slogan is as apt a motto for the book as any. I might as well say that this engaging breeze of a read is a disappointment after the lofty heights of his magical realist Brooklyn opus Fortress of Solitude and it's noir predecessor Motherless Brooklyn. Unlike the aforementioned, Lethem gets the surfaces all right but the depths remain resolutely unexplored.

The novel traces the horned-up path of bassist Lucinda Hoekke and her nameless band through L.A.'s bohemian latticework (a brave locale for a New York oriented writer). Hoekke answers phones for a "complaint line" masterminded by her artist ex, becoming obsessed with one caller in particular she calls "The Complainer." Some of his more interesting musings become grist for her band's songwriting mill, finally giving them the focus to write really great tunes. The problem is that The Complainer finds his way into both Lucinda and her band, complicating everything.

Issues of creativity and authorship are raised, only to slide across the slippery surface and drop off the edge. Lucinda barely gets past one dimension and The Complainer seems to be more an idea than a rounded character. Things happen, there are some funny scenes and clever conceits, but little of it adds up to much at all. He's on his firmest ground when his characters discuss theories of film and music but when it comes to the deeper issues of what makes them tick and why he comes up resolutely empty.

There is the shell of what could have been another fantastic Lethem opus here. As it is You Don't Love Me Yet (titled after a great Roky Erickson and a Vulgar Boatmen song -- the man does know his music) feels rushed, like a draft. As easy to skate on as the surface is, alluding to depths is not the same as actually having them.

Book Review: Banville Tacks as Black, but Plotting Lacks in Christine Falls

Review by Noah Mallin

I enjoy a good dark mystery whether it be a book, a film, or the 2000 Presidential Election. So evidently does Booker Prize winner John Banville, who lately has been penning a series of dark mystery novels under the pen name of Benjamin Black. The first of these is Christine Falls, now out in paperback (the form in which any good mystery novel should be savored).

It's a suitable moniker but one has to question whether it's necessary. Michael Chabon has been dipping his pen into many genres of late without worry of sullying his good name. Perhaps it's because Banville isn't yet fully acclimated to the strictures of storytelling that inform these books.

His set-up is a strong one. In strongly Catholic 1950s Dublin, hard-drinking pathologist Quirke discovers his brother-in-law seemingly in the act of altering the file of a deceased girl, the titular Christine Falls. His ensuing investigation unearths all sorts of family and institutional secrets perhaps better left buried.

There is no doubt that Banville has mighty descriptive powers:

"He was struck by the clammy coldness of the nylon; it had a human feel, like a loose, chilly cowl of human skin."

He also has a good way with characters, though occasionally some fall in the realm of cliche. Quirke makes for a sympathetic and mostly readable protagonist, even if he sometimes seems slow to take the bit. Often the reader is a bit too far ahead of him in figuring out where we're at.

Where Christine Falls gets tripped up is in its last two-thirds when it relies wholly too much on coincidence and a few plot machinations that strain credulity. It's here that Banville gets out of his depth and a first-rate mystery/crime novelist like Ian Rankin would know not to get bogged down.

The book is enjoyable and well-written until that point. Banville already has the second book in the series on the shelf and I'm curious to see if his plotting skills have caught up with the keen sense of 1950's Dublin (if not Boston so much), of character, and of description.

Book Review: Bechdel's Fun Home Delves Into Bittersweet Memories

Removing a key family member has a way of dislodging all sorts of family secrets and buried experiences that have spent years being packed away. I've seen this from a remove recently with a death in my own family, and it is echoed in Alison Bechdel's searching memoir Fun Home.

Fun Home, like Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis books straddle that uncomfortable highbrow/lowbrow divide between "comics" and "literature." As insightful as any plain-text memoir, both get sneered at for some by "cheating" in using a graphic form to help tell their stories. The outsider, neither-fish-nor-fowl nature of both of these enterprises fit well with their author's subject matter. While Satrapi is caught between different worlds during the Iranian Revolution and its aftermath, Bechdel and her father exist as different sides of a shared coin.

Bechdel chooses to come out as a lesbian while she's in college. She embraces this part of herself and finds comfort in knowing who she is. Shortly after this she discovers that her father has hidden a major part of his identity from the world through much of his life. Before she is able to have a chance to connect with him fully about their differing experiences with sexual identity, he dies unexpectedly.

Fun Home is Bechdel's examination of she and her father's identities, sexual and otherwise. She tries to understand her remoteness from his death by understanding his remoteness from his children. Delving into memories that take on altered significance with the knowledge she has gained about her father and herself.

The book is suffused with a wry ironic humor. The title comes from what she and her siblings called her father's (and sometimes their) place of business -- a funeral home. The drawings are wonderfully straightforward and precise, as is the prose. There is a touch of Maurice Sendak in her characterizations but none of his whimsy. She often uses her frame to pack in telling details, as when her exacting mother is on the phone sweating the details of her play rehearsal. A little arrow points out that she is removing from the oven "Moussaka for five and fresh sourdough bread in fifteen minutes."

Fun Home, now out in paperback, is a worthy addition to what feels like a gusher of new memoirs. Bechdel has a clear, interesting voice and pen, and her story is at once tragic, funny, and sweet.

Fun Home gets 4 out of 5 hearses:

Books: Franzen Finds His Discomfort Zone

Franzen: Novice Masturbator

Jonathan Franzen's memoir The Discomfort Zone, now out in paperback, occupies an oddball space in the current world of hyper-dramatic self exposure through writing. Unlike the Sean Wilsey and James Frey and Augusten Burroughs tomes there is no drug addiction, sexual misbehavior, or psychiatric crises. Rather there is bland Midwestern psychic and physical repression so well embodied by the title.

What this makes for is an uncomfortable and somewhat dissatisfying read. For the most part The Discomfort Zone is a coming of age book, but Franzen is such a cypher as a boy that so much of what he writes seems to hint at a lot more under the surface than is readily evident. All of his friends, whether male or female, are saddled with their last name as identifiers. At first I thought he grew up in a suburb of particularly piquant namers who called their sons Manley and Davis and their girls MacDonald and Siebert. He is so beaten down by his distant and disapproving mother and father that he builds a good boy shell around himself that only serves to hide a somewhat less good boy interior. This is a boy who even as a teen didn't masturbate.

The two best sections here, titled "Then Joy Breaks Through", combines a history and explication of a church group the town teens were very involved with called "The Fellowship" and then "Centrally Located" which describes some very harmless schoolkid pranks. Both are rich with detail and incident but whenever the story circles back to Franzen himself it blanks out, running aground against the flanks of his tight defenses.

As a big fan of his novel The Corrections it is interesting to see little (and not so little) chunks of the authors life that were re-purposed for his brilliant novel. But if the hurly-burly of simmering surfacing resentments pierced his own life, it's not evident from The Discomfort Zone.

The Discomfort Zone gets two out of five Jocelyn Elders:

Book Review: Winner of the National Book Award -- Clever, Witty, Slight

Jincy Willett: Hyperbolous Titler

Jincy Willett's Winner of the National Book Award comes with that attention-grabbing title built-in. One of the Barnes and Noble readers reviews begins thusly: "I needed a book to read on a train ride, so when I read 'Winner of the National Book Award' on the cover of this book, I hastily grabbed it, trusting that it would be a good read. It wasn't until later that I realized that this is the *name* of the book, and that no such accolades have been (or will be) awarded to this novel." The reader goes on to castigate the book, which really is a lot of fun before a somewhat dour last quarter. Willett has a gift for character description and much of what she writes is quite funny coming as it does from the voice of the book's narrator, Dorcas Mather. Dorcas is a reserved caustic Rhode Island librarian fated to share life with her outgoing voluptuous twin Abigail. Abigail is the subject of a poorly written tell-all which crosses Dorcas' library transom. "Winner of the National Book Award" is Dorcas' rebuttal to what she feels is an offensive intrusion into her life, partly at the hands of her sister. In some since Willett doesn't seem to take this far enough. There is the merest hint that Dorcas's may be whitewashing her own role in the events a tad but this is never really played up as much as it could be. Bits of information, like the daughter the sisters contrive to raise together, are released in a rather arbitrary way that is undoubtedly purposeful but frustrating. The book winds up with an ending that is inevitable but not nearly interesting enough to warrant some of the very funny and well-drawn scenes that occur earlier on, such as a barroom wedding reception marred by a grieving priest. There is plenty of well-observed humor at the expense of the book world, with authors pompous and popular and their readers all coming in for the skewer. Overall this is an enjoyable read but I suspect Willett has something even loftier and just as funny raring to get out.

Winner of the National Book Award garners 3 out of 5 trophies:

Book Review: The Zero by Jess Walter -- Memory Tricks and Political Slicks at Ground Zero

Jess Walter spent several weeks at Ground Zero starting a few days after the attacks of September 11th, but he seems just as damaged by his stint as a ghostwriter for an autobiography of New York's disgraced former top cop Bernie Kerik. His novel The Zero (Harper Perennial, Paperback, $14.95) is haunted by the aftermath of the twin towers destruction and the decisions that leaders made as a result of that day. The author himself prefers to call it a September 12th novel. Walter is not alone in tackling this subject but he comes at it in a unique way. His protagonist is a cop, Brian Remy, who suffers from conspicuous gaps in time and a severe case of macular degeneration which causes his vision to be obscured by "floaters and flashers" like damaged film stock. The time gaps are disorienting to character and reader alike, every few pages we are in a situation that Remy has to untangle from where he just was. One minute he could be about to pick up a cup of coffee and then... BAM! ...he's stepping off an unfamiliar elevator to a floor he's never seen before. Even worse he begins to suspect that the times he can't account for have been filled with misdeeds that he himself may be a central perpetrator of. There is an element of satire to the mysterious government agencies that all seem more interested in scooping each other than in protecting Americans and the vaguely threatening mayor (unnamed but clearly Giuliani) who speaks in platitudes about not letting the terrorists win.
Ultimately Remy's journey through darkness is meant to be a metaphor for America's own confusing, disjointed journey. Walter is not wholly successful in blending Chuck Palahniuk style mindfuckery with Kafka-esque satire and Chandler inspired hard boiled mystery. The climax is more of a resigned shrug and the puzzle pieces seem to fit together rather arbitrarily. Still it's a fascinating read and suggests that Walter is a writer worth watching.
Four out of Five memory chips:

Book Review: Einstein Book Relatively Good Reading

"Must have been rough working with that Tim Robbins fella Al..."

Walter Isaacson was a managing editor of Time Magazine as well as CEO of CNN, and as a writer and historian he's a pretty good managing editor. This is not to say that his book, Einstein: His Life and Universe (Simon & Schuster) isn't worth a read. Issacson has picked an inherently interesting subject and Einstein's life has enough of interest to hold a reader's attention. Isaacson also has a throughline: that Einstein went from radical young turk to stubborn defender of the old order in physics over the course of his career and that this shift was consistent with his anti-authoritarianism.
This is all good stuff and the anecdotes (Einstein was actually a pretty good student despite the old saw about him failing math, he loved to sail alone but could not swim) are plentiful but Isaccson isn't a talented enough writer to really make this material sing the way a Robert Caro or a Doris Kearns Goodwin could have. Passages such as "Okay, it's not easy, but
that's why we're no Einstein and he was..." hardly stir the soul.
Granted Isaacson has the added challenge of presenting abstract scientific and mathematical theories and putting them into context, which he manages rather well. I'm no great shakes when it comes to this stuff yet I felt I understood just what was so radical about Einstein's early theories and his theory of relativity and also what the great man found off-putting about the quantum physics he had helped to usher in. This is Issacson's greatest triumph with the text and it is a considerable one given the complexity of the ideas.
Where Isaacson has a harder time is getting to the root of Einstein as a man. He at times could be a terrible father (his brutal response to his older son's marriage is inexcusable especially in light of its similarity to his own first marriage) but His Life and Universe tries to suggest he was a bad husband as well but that's not so clear. Isaacson also gamely tackles Einstein's political awakenings, much of which is quite interesting.
Most of all Einstein: His Life and Universe is well arranged, dutifully covering Einstein's role in inaugurating the atomic age, his involvement in the McCarthy red scare etc. It does often feel more like a clothed outline rather than a stirring piece of historical writing but for the illumination of the science and for the gathering of all of this disparate material it is worth a read.
Three out of Five atoms: