L.A.Weekly
voted on the book list Best books of 2008
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By Marc Weingarten
...Many of the young folks in Leni Zumas’ stories are... trying to divorce themselves from burdensome emotional ties and consequent interference with self-actualization. It’s a testament to Zumas’ skill that the book, which contains dope addicts and stories set in loony bins, doesn’t devolve into a Girl, Interrupted for the pitchfork.com generation. She’s too smart to fall into that trap.
The title story tips us off to Zumas’ knack for crawling inside the heads of protagonists who feel trapped by circumstance. An unnamed son is living with his two legally blind parents, whom he calls Black and Blue (a nod toward some history of abuse?). This isn’t some syrupy Mitch Albom–esque triumph of the human spirit: The handicapped characters, who are usually ennobled in such stories, are creepy and venal here, capable of casual cruelty and betrayal — as when the son comes upon his mother with a teenage boy he has invited to spend the night:
Downstairs, a strand of noise from the kitchen — Blue’s voice. Please, she is saying. Oh please. Give me your hand.
Plum chutney comes up my throat. I swallow it down.
I don’t think so, says the kid’s voice.
Please touch me. Please, here —
I run in and hit the light. Yellow pours onto Blue, who is naked except for underpants. Her breasts look like puddles of dough. The kid is backed up against the stove, hands over his face, sweatpants — thank God — on.
Click here to read the rest of Marc Weingarten's review.
http://www.laweekly.com/art+books/books/into-the-wild-janet-sarbanes-and-leni-zumas/19211/
More book reviews at
http://www.laweekly.com/art+books/books
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By THOMAS PERRY
In 2001, an editor at Scribner sent me the manuscript of a first novel called TheJasmine Trade by a Los Angeles Times reporter named Denise Hamilton. It was an intriguing, contemporary story built around some Asian teenagers whose parents left them on their own in San Marino mansions while they returned to distant countries to run their businesses. I wrote an enthusiastic endorsement. Since then, there have been four more well-received novels and an anthology called Los Angeles Noir. So I didn’t open Hamilton’s new book, The Last Embrace,without expectations.
In it, Hamilton resuscitates one of the great, enduring fictional situations, the one in which a lone, mysterious stranger shows up in a small town and begins asking questions about a missing person. It’s the plot of Bad Day at Black Rock and of High Plains Drifter. Only in Hamilton’s rendition, both the stranger and the victim are beautiful young women, and the corrupt, cowardly little town is Hollywood.
It’s October 1949. After the long trip from Champaign, Illinois, Lily Kessler steps off a train at Union Station, looking like one of the legion of pretty, naive newcomers seeking an acting career. She’s actually something else, a woman who spent the war in Europe spying for the OSS, and she has the skills of an investigator, the persistence of a termite and a sacred trust to fulfill. The mother of her fiancé, an OSS officer killed in Europe, has asked her to find her only remaining child, an actress called Kitty Hayden, who left her boarding house one night and didn’t return.
Read the rest of Thomas Perry's review here:
http://www.laweekly.com/art+books/books/...
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Review by Marc Weingarten
Sarbanes, the author of the quietly devastating and mordantly funny collection Army of One, is a writing professor at CalArts; the school’s Web site notes that she specializes in “theory of narrative.” I’m not sure what that means, but after you read her collection, it’s clear that she’s got some compelling ideas about story and plot and is not afraid to put them into practice.
Sarbanes likes to break up her compact stories with elliptical blocks of text, thereby helping to move a story along through time and space without devoting three years of her life to a novel. In “Dear Aunt Sophie,” she traces the estrangement of two sisters, as well as the creeping cynicism of adulthood, through a series of e-mail exchanges between a wide-eyed child and her aunt. In one such e-mail, Sophie writes:
So much of your time is taken up with recovering from the everyday shocks people deliver to you in passing — those careless little acts of uncaring, like driving a Hummer or spending fifty thousand dollars on a wedding or paying their nanny less than minimum wage. And that makes it so you have to spend more time reminding yourself of the careful little acts of caring people also perform, like offering to let you use their Vons Club card when you forget yours so you can still get the discounts, or picking up a hitchhiker in the desert even though they could get murdered by him ...
Click here to continue reading the article.
http://www.laweekly.com/art+books/books/... ]]>
Steve Erickson: Contortionist supreme
By NICK MOORE
www.laweekly.com/special/la-people-2008/...
“I don’t even think of Zeroville as a ‘Hollywood novel,’” Erickson says, unassuming and barely audible under the ArcLight sound system, which is blaring Bernard Herrmann from its impossibly high ceilings. “Hollywood novels tend to be about the movie business, and although there’s a bit of that, Zeroville is about loving movies, or being obsessed with movies.”
Zeroville is a book so enamored with film that it reads like one — quick scenes that cut, characters that reappear implausibly, dialogue firmly rooted in place but captured like a dream. Erickson’s books are postmodern in execution, not necessarily in message. For all of their tricks — his time lapses; his miraculous lakes that bubble up from nowhere to submerge Hollywood; and his inclination to suddenly break from the story he’s been telling for hundreds of pages to tell another, unrelated one — his novels are romantic, emotional and unabashedly human.
“In my books, when I do anything that might be regarded by others as experimental, it’s because I think that’s what’s going to serve the story. I hope I create this reality in my books that the reader will feel compelled to give him or herself over to. I’ll do whatever I need to do to create that.”
Click here to read all of LA Weekly's profile of Erickson:
www.laweekly.com/special/la-people-2008/...
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EDNA O'BRIEN: IRELAND'S OTHER LITERARY HEAVYWEIGHT
By Jim Ruland
This summer, instead of slogging through all 250,000 words of Ulysses (as well as the shelf-cracking row of books you’ll need to decipher it), read Ireland’s other modernist prose stylist and genius storyteller: Edna O’Brien.
The author of more than 20 novels, short stories and plays for stage and screen, O’Brien has had a prolific career spanning nearly 50 years. She has been described as possessing “the soul of Molly Bloom and the skills of Virginia Woolf,” and heralded as “the most gifted woman now writing fiction in English” by none other than Philip Roth. She has received countless accolades, yet remains one of Ireland’s most misunderstood writers. Shortly after the release of her critical study of James Joyce in 1999, one reviewer sniffed, “All Edna O’Brien’s effort proves is that lightweight novelists should stick to what they do best.”
O’Brien’s relationship with Ireland has always been a cantankerous one. Her first novel, The Country Girls, written in 1959 during a three-week frenzy, was condemned by the minister of culture as a “smear on Irish womanhood.” The book, which deals with the sexual awakening of a young woman from a small village in west Ireland, was promptly banned. As were her next eight novels.
Read the rest of Jim Ruland's article in the LA Weekly here:
http://www.laweekly.com/art+books/books/... ]]>
EDNA O'BRIEN: IRELAND'S OTHER LITERARY HEAVYWEIGHT
By Jim Ruland
This summer, instead of slogging through all 250,000 words of Ulysses (as well as the shelf-cracking row of books you’ll need to decipher it), read Ireland’s other modernist prose stylist and genius storyteller: Edna O’Brien.
The author of more than 20 novels, short stories and plays for stage and screen, O’Brien has had a prolific career spanning nearly 50 years. She has been described as possessing “the soul of Molly Bloom and the skills of Virginia Woolf,” and heralded as “the most gifted woman now writing fiction in English” by none other than Philip Roth. She has received countless accolades, yet remains one of Ireland’s most misunderstood writers. Shortly after the release of her critical study of James Joyce in 1999, one reviewer sniffed, “All Edna O’Brien’s effort proves is that lightweight novelists should stick to what they do best.”
O’Brien’s relationship with Ireland has always been a cantankerous one. Her first novel, The Country Girls, written in 1959 during a three-week frenzy, was condemned by the minister of culture as a “smear on Irish womanhood.” The book, which deals with the sexual awakening of a young woman from a small village in west Ireland, was promptly banned. As were her next eight novels.
Read the rest of Jim Ruland's article in the LA Weekly here:
http://www.laweekly.com/art+books/books/...
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EDNA O'BRIEN: IRELAND'S OTHER LITERARY HEAVYWEIGHT
By Jim Ruland
O’Brien’s relationship with Ireland has always been a cantankerous one. Her first novel, The Country Girls, written in 1959 during a three-week frenzy, was condemned by the minister of culture as a “smear on Irish womanhood.” The book, which deals with the sexual awakening of a young woman from a small village in west Ireland, was promptly banned. As were her next eight novels.
The problem? O’Brien writes about sex and its repercussions in a way that is graphic, frank and utterly unheard of in conservative, “priest-plagued” Ireland. Her first three novels follow the adventures of Caithleen and Baba as they flee their convent school in rural Ireland, find considerably older husbands in Dublin, and confront their failed marriages in London. Along the way, the girls conceive out of wedlock, have extramarital affairs and contract venereal disease.
Read the rest of Jim Ruland's article on Edna O'Brien here:
http://www.laweekly.com/art+books/books/...
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In the latest LA Weekly Literary Supplement, Thomas Perry wrote an essay In a Jam: How Suspense Keeps the Novel on Edge.
Here's the first part:
Suspense isn’t a pleasant sensation. We go to great lengths to manage our lives in ways that will keep us from having to go through periods of uncertainty — particularly when it’s prolonged, and when the stakes are high. But in reading fiction, especially a novel, we crave this sensation of increasing tension, and the higher the stakes, the better. We love the experience of sitting somewhere in perfect safety with a book while some character serves as our surrogate in facing a world full of danger. What we’re enjoying is growing excitement, followed by a tantalizingly delayed cathartic ending. It’s a quality of all good fiction, and it’s why the reader keeps turning the pages.
Great suspense writing doesn’t have to include a guy with a gun. When the males in Austen’s Pride and Prejudice are off to London trying to track down 16-year-old Lydia Bennet, who has eloped with the evil Wickham, the Bennet women are reduced to waiting at home for reports to arrive by mail. By now, they’re aware that what Wickham intends for Lydia doesn’t include a wedding. If she’s not rescued quickly, she’ll be lost to the family forever, undoubtedly to suffer degradation, abandonment and a lonely death. Austen’s description of powerless waiting and worry, interrupted only by news of leads followed to dead ends, could serve as a model of suspense writing — properly proportioned, plausible and urgent. When we learn that Lydia has been found, we want to cheer.
Read the rest of Perry's essay here:
http://www.laweekly.com/art+books/wls/in...
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