Southern Bookman

Times Puffs Up Nora Ephron's Career

I liked some of Nora Ephron's work over the years, but The New York Times went overboard in considering her a major writer and director worthy of front-page attention. Ephron's death of leukemia brought the full Times attention Wednesday, although the modesty of her literary and film efforts was apparent in the overly long obituary by Charles McGrath.

Times leads are among the worst in journalism,  plagued by twisting subordinate clauses and parenthetical phrases encased in parentheses, and McGrath's convoluted first paragraph followed the Times obit-speak style, including a gratuitious and awkward comparison of Ephron and Dorothy Parker. Ephron, McGrath claimed, was a modern-day Parker, only, according to McGrath, some people thought Ephron smarter and funnier. What people? None, except for in McGrath's imagination.

Janet Maslin, in a sidebar, was more honest in assessing Ephron's career, although she too had to bring up Dorothy Parker. If Ephron was a good as the Times claimed, couldn't her work stand on its own without Parker?

 While listing good films, if hardly classics, like "Sleepless in Seattle," that Ephron directed, the Times couldn't avoid her long string of bombs, such as a remake of TV's "Bewitched." "Julia and Julie," with Meryl Streep as Julia Child and Amy Adams as someone who tried all of Julia's recipes, drew critical acclaim, although I found it one of the worst movies I'd ever seen.

New York's cloistered media/literary world continued its boosting of Ephron, with one columnist saying something along the lines that her book parties were more memorable than the books themselves. A telling comment.

Ephron definitely was a gifted writer, film director and apparently, New York hostess. Her few collections of essays, a pop novel made into a movie and a handful of amusing, popular films don't place her among the cultural greats.

Hillary Mantel a Brief Affair

Now I've struck out twice with Hillary Mantel, first giving up on "Wolf Hall," and now "Bringing Up the Bodies," the sequel to her recounting of the Henry VIII-Thomas Cromwell story.  Her latest book, which recounts how Henry deposed of Anne Boleyn, has received universal acclaim from the usual suspects, James Wood, et al. I saw the art in Mantel's writing, but it never engaged me. I never saw Cromwell and the other characters as true, living beings; they remained words on the page. In short, the work bored me, not enticing me to spend hours with the Tudors.

Unfortunately, I had a similar reaction to Stephen Coll's massive investigation of Exxon-Mobil. The book, with all of its in-depth reporting, didn't seem to tell me much I didn't already know.

I'd been on a good roll with books that compelled me to keep reading, first Richard Ford's "Canada," then Buzz Bissinger's "Father's Day." "Canada" remains with me weeks later, including the fact that he gets away with a violation of a rule of dectective fiction, allowing two murders to go unpunished.

Thankfully, I'd picked up James Lee Burke's "Cadillac Jukebox" at the library's discard bin. Burke hits that happy spot between good and bad writing, although "Cadillac Jukebox" has one of the worst sex scenes I've ever read, if indeed I've ever read a good one. (With homage to Lady Chatterly). The post-orgasmic image of a leaping swordfish will stay with me, in a bad way.  For a native Louisianian like me, Burke's biggest strength is his evocation of the state's culture.

The summer of our discontent continues with a couple of Nook books, including Harold Bloom's somewhat batty "The Anatomy of Influence." The next "Canada" awaits, I hope.

New Yorker Examines Book, Film Industries in Changing Times

The current New Yorker offers two articles that say a lot about what's happening in the book and movie industries. The always excellent Ken Auletta analyzes the Amazon and Apple-book publishers battle over ebook pricing. Ted Friend's profile of the comic star Ben Stiller provides a wealth of auxiliary information about how it's decided which movies are made and become box-office hits.

Auletta shows how the book publishers hope to preserve the venerable system in which publishers depend upon bookstores to market their books. The e-book system is an entirely different model. The article shows that the Justice Department overreached in suing the book publishers and Apple for colludng in setting ebook prices, and sees Amazon as the monolith seeking to control the entire book operation, from publishing to sales. However, while Amazon's drive for a books monopoly is seen as potentially limiting the varety and quality of books published, Amazon does open the gates to self-publishing, letting writters bypass the traditional dependence upon publishers. The Amazon operation might let thousands of voices speak, or, as is likely, a structure will arise in which quality and popular appeal take precedence.

The conclusion reached by Auletta is an important one: The publishers make up a relatively small cottage industry and the real battle for dominance in among the giants, Microsoft, Google, Apple, Amazon and Facebook. They are seeking to control the Internet world's "entire equation," as F. Scott Fitzgerald said of his film producer Monroe Stahr, hardware, software, content, products.

Friend's profile of Stiller, one of the Hollywood's diminishing number of bankable stars, shows the movie business in a desperate hunger game of how to attract an increasingly distracted and fragmented audience. Fewer movies are being made and fewer stars emerging as the big profits are made from superhero vehicles and techno-franchises. Young men from 17 to 25 hold the key, with films limited for the rest of us.

 

 

Farewell, Andrew Sarris

I don't recall reading Andrew Sarris' movie reviews and essays in the Village Voice, but I must have since I subscribed to that counterculture newspaper during Sarris' glory days as its film critic. I must have been the only LSU student in the late '60s and early '70s to subscribe to the Voice, as well as the Paris Review. Each week I also received the New Yorker, the stage for Pauline Kael, whose reviews I hungrily consumed.

Although I'm not that familiar with Sarris' work, I do know about his career from countless memoirs about the New York art/movie/music/book/magazine/newspaper scene. Sarris died this week, and reading Sarris' New York Times obituary stirred my impressions of those days. My generation, strongly influenced by Sarris and Kael whether we read them or not, saw movies as our central art form. Sarris, one of the first to bring French auteur theory to America, led us to see the film director as a creative colossus.

 We searched out foreign films by Bergman, Trauffaut and others, and learned to speak with intellectual pretension about American films by John Ford, Billy Wilder and Alfred Hitchcock.  Little did we know when watching "Sunset Boulevard" or "Stagecoach" on summer morning television when we were children that we were viewing "cinema"; we just found them entertaining movies.

 

Buzz Bissinger's "Father's Day"

Buzz Bissinger's "Father's Day" presents an engaging portrait of Bissinger's severely disabled son, Zach. The "Friday Night Lights" author's book recounts a cross-country trip Bissinger made with Zach several years ago. Bissinger says he suggested the trip in an effort to grow closer to his son, who suffered brain damage when born prematurely. Zach, whose twin brother born three minutes earlier has achieved a normal life, has profound intellectual weaknesses yet possesses an eerily omniscient memory. He's able to remember years later complete details of what happened on a certain day in the past.

Bissinger has little original to add to the road narrative template, repeating well-worn cliches about the uniformity of American places along the interstate and the freedom of the open road. His attempts at colorful figures of speech turn purplish, and often feel forced. The ride is short on true drama: in one incident, Bissinger loses and refinds a camera bag, with Zach's help. This doesn't exactly rival Tolstoy. In response to Zach's desire to return to remembered places from the past, the route is haphazard, going from Philadelphia to Chicago and Milwaukee, south to the Odessa, Texas, of "Friday Night Lights" fame, then to an ill-considered stop in Las Vegas and the finale in Los Angeles. The places remain flat and indistinct. Through it all, Bissinger recounts his own failings and successes, and childhood memories.

The book gains comic and dramatic force from Bissinger showing his impaired son as often more mature and competent than him. Bissinger is unflinchingly honest in presenting his own weaknesses. The interplay between the author and the son carries the book, although at times the emotional register doesn't reach further than the "I Love You Man" sentiments of the old beer commercial.

With all of the "Father's Day's" weaknesses, the book possesses a compulsive readability. Zach, with his unfailing optimism, interest in others, desire for independence and mysterious savant's memory, is a highly attractive character. Bissinger succeeds in affirming the power of love and family and the triumph of the human spirit. 

Richard Ford's "Canada"

Richard Ford creates another memorable first-person narrator in his novel, "Canada." With younger writers going for meta-fiction fireworks, Ford reclaims the power of detailed description, a sure sense of place and vivid characterization. He overcomes risks of an implausible plot with his narrator's complex observations, delivered in idiosyncratic, elliptical, poetic language.

The narrator, Dell Parsons, turns out to be a 60-year-old man in today's 21st century looking back at events from the early 1960s, when he and his twin sister, Berner, were 15. Dell and Berner's parents show the optimistic, loving character of our image of the era's Moms and Dads, then quickly explode the myth with an ill-conceived bank robbery scheme. The Parsons are among the most inept bank robbers in literary history. Their foolhardy caper destroys the family, separating the children and leaving them essentially homeless orphans.

Dell, in complicated plot machinery that strains credibility, is sent to a wild town in western Canada to live with a mysterious pseudo-father. His adventures in Canada, leading to an act of shocking violence, make up the bulk of the novel. In another plot strand, the long-separated twins are reunited at the end. 

The book presents a strong indictment of the American psyche, especially the American male. Americans are presented as illogical, emotional, rootless, violent, criminal. In contrast, the Canadian character is shown as admirable, marked by consideration and love for others, community spirit, a sense of history and national pride. The Canadian-American conflict, part of our shared national psyches, is one of the novel's prevailing undercurrents.

Ford achieved his greatest renown by creating one of his generation's most representative characters, Frank Bascomb, the narrator of three novels considered classics. Besides the Bascomb books, Ford has created a fictional world of striking variety. While the Bascomb novels, beginning with "The Sportswriter," take place in suburban New Jersey, he has also placed books, now including "Canada," in the American and Canadian West.  With roots in Mississippi and New Orleans, Ford has also written about the American South. Several strong rivers of American literary history flow through his work. While his books evoke familiar themes, he gives them an original, personal stamp.

"Canada" adds to Ford's reputation as one of our best writers. The characters are vivdly realized, taking shape as living personalities, even the most minor ones. The detailed scenes, memorable dialogue and Dell's philosophical musings display the novel's classic virtues. Ford's work creates a strange, dreamlike reality, in which disaster, brutality and wildness are magically transformed into beauty.

 

Varied American Voices

Ray Bradbury's death highlights a long divide in American literature, between writers considered "literary" and mere genre hacks. Bradbury is one of the science fiction writers considered worthy of  higher study and critcal acclaim, now safely embalmed in a New York Times front page obituary loaded with cloying Times obit-speak and a sidebar by Michiko Kakutani in her patented critic speak.

Most sci fi writers have now made it to "serious literature" land, with Bradbury following luminaries like Philip K. Dick. In detective fiction, Raymond Chandler was among the first to make it among literary writers, followed by a host of others. Now, even writers like gratuitious violence king Jim Thompson are encased in their Library of America mausoleums.

Now "literary fiction" is a separate genre, with sc fi and crime esconced in academic study and courses. The fiction battles were mirrored in the poetry world in the 1950s, with Robert Lowell talkng about "Red Skins and Palefaces" and beats like Allen Ginsburg encircling the academic, formalist camp of writers like Lowell, who loosened up in later life. The battles continued in the 1980s and 1990s, with the new formalists and the Language poets battling each other.

Writers like Bradbury show the fertility of American talent. Beginnng with Mark Twain, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, the country produces an astonishing wealth of writers. With increasng chatter about American economic and cultural decline, the country contintues to produce a stream of writers, even as reading falls off. The immigrant experience remains a protean source of literature.

Internet "blogs," like this one, enable anyone to claim authority. Self-publishng demolishes the gates and the gate keepers. MFA programs churn out more witers, who churn out more novels, short stories and poems. Still, writers rise to the top and receive fame, riches and readers. From TV to movies, American remains the land of stories.

The dwindling core of readers, who like well-written fiction and nonfiction no matter the genre, can appreciate the pleasure of writing, whether Bradbury or Faulkner, Elizabeth Bishop or Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

Farewell, Ray Bradbury

Ray Bradbury said he received his education in the public library, so it is apt that I'm writing this appreciation of him in the public library. The science fiction writer died Wednesday at age 91.

With his hardscrabble background, Bradbury was the essence of American democracy, a self-taught author who succeeded through hard work, perseverance and talent. My first memory of Bradbury was reading an except of his "Farenheit 451" in Esquire magazine. I also loved his "Illustrated Man" story, although I stayed away from his Martian chronicles. Another memorable work was his writing manual, loaded with classic advice and inspiration for writers. I recall his anecdote about how he wrote at typewriters for which he had to pay an hourly fee to use. So, I'm now writing this on a computer in which I have 55 minutes. The last thing of Bradbury's I read was a childhood memoir in the New Yorker's current Science Fiction special.

In this age when science and education are under attack, especially from America's now sadly mainstream right wing, the loss of a learned humanist like Bradbury shows the decline of public discourse. The atmosphere of his "Farenheit 451" is all too prominent.

Jennifer Egan Visits the Goon Squad

I happened to see a PEN America interview with Jennifer Egan, in which she displayed a winsome intelligence, and decided to read her "A Visit From the Goon Squad," the 2011 Pulitzer winner. The book didn't hook me previously, but this time it captivated me.

 Egan explained in the interview that she was torn about calling the book a novel, since it can be considered a collection of interrrelated short stories. The hardcover editions of the book don't carry the label "a novel," although the publisher's marketing department insisted this be added in the paperback edition.

The book can be considered "experimental," meta-fiction, postmodern, yet it possesses a popular readability not associated with these terms. Egan proves herself part of that group of American writers who consider themselves "stylists," using elevated language that gives an aesthetic pleasure like poetry. The separate stories in the book do form a  plot, a development of characterization, yet these are fragmentary and illusive. Language is the book's unifying quality. A tour de force is a brilliant chapter with a format like a Power Point presentation. The chapter achieves a fresh poetry.

Now Egan has written a New Yorker story first offered to the public as a series of Twitter tweets. She's open to exploring new forms of story telling through Internet vehicles. The story "Black Box," is also printed in the New Yorker, and I have yet to read it beyond a brief glance that left more of a shrug than a buzz. 

"Good Squad" possesses a  shallowness, a facile sense of optimism.  Egan's command of language and strong characterization give it more value than the usual  pop confection.