Hi, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab...
I realized as I was putting together the headline for today’s column that many of you may never have clicked ona link for one of Frank Bascombe’s articles because you didn’t know what they were about. I added the AICN BOOKS! to the front of the headline to see if I could bait a few more of you into taking a look at the 25th edition of one of our great eclectic columns. Bascombe’s our man in New York, right there in the middle of the publishing world, always browsing the stacks of galleys in search of something worthwhile, something worth mentioning to all of you. He’s back today with the latest edition of his column, and as always, we’re damn glad to have him...
After a horrible start, it seems that summer is finally here. You’re tired of hearing people say it’s too short, or that it’s finally arrived, well too bad. The season is here, and it’s nice to have sunshine again. Baseball covers the thoughts, hopes and dreams of all, even the fair-weather fans. A movie about a racehorse comes to theaters, and a flick about a plagued nation becomes a surprise hit, even with multiple endings. A good friend of mine had enough foresight to grab two hard to come by seats to the Paul Thomas Anderson/Phillip Seymour Hoffman hosted Q&A; accompanied by a screening of the splendid Punch-Drunk Love. What a treat that was. PTA (as I lovingly refer to him) seemed perfectly out of his element, but famished for questions from an obviously ravenous crowd. The movie itself, upon repeated viewings owes more to Cassavettes, as does PTA, than anything else. PSH could have skipped this little “chat”, and stayed on Broadway, his cell phone kept his OCD busy while PTA entertained. The movies discussed at this little get-together reminded me of a writer whose work I wanted to revisit, both holding that epic scope and passion for the grandiose. Jonathan Franzen has more in common with PTA than he does Hemingway, Faulkner or any other modern day prose artist. They both accept the challenge, (a challenge they usually give themselves) to create something massive and far-reaching. Franzen with ‘The Corrections’, PTA with ‘Magnolia’. Franzen with his first ‘The Twenty Seventh City’ and PTA with ‘Boogie Nights’. Both are a wonderful distraction from a country that seems to be riveted to a 900 page document that basically reminds us all once again how poorly the CIA and FBI reacted in the years prior to 9-11. As if we needed a reminder.
It’s Not A Secret If I Don’t Tell Anyone
The Twenty-Seventh City by Jonathan Franzen
Picador; 515 pages
In a recent ‘Book’ magazine piece, Stephen King wove a nifty yarn that was filled with more bullshit and rotten road apples than a day spent walking through Belmont Park. Of course he made up a bunch of his facts, he admitted it, and even roasted Franzen along the way for being overly intellectual, with too much New York inspired intellectual snob’ese. Why would ‘Book’ magazine allow Stephen King to write this bizarre little piece of journalism? Didn’t he retire? He promised he would. Right! I forgot none other than Barnes & Noble bookstores has snatched this little magazine from obscurity. This super chain, pretending to be “for the common man”, is living and breathing mostly because of Stephen King, among other over paid, over appreciated, all thumbed purveyors of the lowest common denominator,( James Patterson, Janet Evanovitch, John Grisham, Danielle Steel, the list goes on and on). They are now the proud owners of their own publicity machine. They own the very magazine that at one time showed a glimmer of hope by actually creating something interesting. It must be great to advertise for yourself, especially when no one else will. King is wrong. Always will be, and for a has-been, he’s just not relevant to anyone any more.
Stephen King can only dream of writing something as wildly imaginative, and fiercely brilliant as ‘The Twenty-Seventh City’. What Franzen has done with this book is throw everything at the wall to see if it would stick. At some point in the nineteen-eighties he decided that a novel about America was over due. He dreamt of St. Louis, took all of his powers of persuasion, his detailed prose, and tossed it along with the cat, the dog, cow, the hens and the kitchen sink into the wind. Added some racially spectral hate and developed a massive concoction that will make you drunk with awe.
Our hero, like all Franzen characters is a man. In ‘The Corrections’ it was the father, a flawed man to say the least. But righteous in his flaws, the only way to be. Come on, if you’re wrong, be proud of it. He does no injustice to Martin Probst in this story, but he does reveal to us that he must have communication issues with women. Franzen professes a great deal. He does scare you with information, but he must not get along with his mother, or at the very least is scared witless by here. Martin Probst is the man who built the St. Louis Arch. He didn’t design it, that would be to Ayn Rand like. But to have built something as colossal as that, and at such a young age, will inspire years of awe from everyone in your immediate company. Martin’s wife is a bore, and their daughter starts this tale by running away from home. Martin is so wrapped up in his world of construction is takes him one hundred and fifty pages to realize she’s gone. She’s a younger version of his wife who is a kept woman to say the least, and a really bad role model. Meanwhile, we learn that the Indian police chief Jammu is behind his daughter’s disappearance and eventually his wife’s. Jammu is at the heart of the story and for more than ninety percent of this book Martin and Jammu, polar opposites, never meet. Jammu is trying to combine the suburbs of St. Louis with the city. Make the place one big mall. Safe, sound, and completely taxable, while moving the undesirables out. To give you an accurate portrait of all the goings on in this story would be fruitless. Franzen covers race, religion, and faith in the system, paranoia, and identity in a country during a time of frenzied spending. Jammu is a bizarre character study in subversion. She’s got the world on a string, but forgets that sometimes-dumb luck saves the day. Some of the terrorist tactics she enacts upon an unwitting city is very relevant even today. What is interesting to me about this book is to see how Franzen shapes a story that has far to much going on. His talent is raw in this book, but the road to ‘The Corrections’ is very clearly drawn.
Built in a Day by Steven Reinhart
Doubleday; 256 pages
I hesitated before picking this book up, and the reason is lame. Years ago Reinhart wrote a collection of short stories for Doubleday called ‘Kick in the Head’. I so hated that cover that picking it off my shelf to read became a challenge, not to. There’s a piece of paper taped to the back of a guy who looks like Doug Liman, commonly enough the piece of paper reads ‘kick in the head”. Sorry. That’s a bad cover. Do over. Anything would have improved up that. Elwood Reid’s collection of stories, ‘What Salmon Know’, (wow, now that guy is an incredible writer, really) would have been okay, something like that. Short stories are brutal enough, why curse them with a lousy package. Doubleday almost missed again with a slacker’esque cover for ‘Built in a Day’, but after you’ve read the book, it seems to make sense.
Reinhart reminds me of an early Ray Carver, albeit sober. His story telling is sort of self-effacing and focused, with a dash of self-inflicted trauma to spice it up. Carver went along like this for years, and then suddenly his stories got these weird colors coming out of them, sort of made you stare off into space after you read them. They captured you, took you in, ‘Built in a Day’ has that same quality. Sure it’s a heavy comparison, easy to. Forgive me. How about Madison Smartt Bell’s ‘Straight Cut’, same sort of tone, same inner dialogue. How’s that? Reinhart evens has his misguided self-rationalizing anti-hero stumble through sobriety. Getting sober and staying that way are two different things.
When we first meet Andy, he’s a drunk, and things can only get worse before they get better. He’s a barfly, it’s starting to become standard issue storytelling, and then suddenly Reinhart’s prose turns on a dime. He brings two teenage kids into the picture to confront Andy, at his place of work, and they basically want to pay him to stop seeing their mother. I was so shocked by this passage that I stopped to look away for a moment and played the scene over and over in my mind. Something about kids doing very adult things sort of scares me, and these kids have to be adults for the entire story. Andy is dating (and eventually marries, in a strange flash back forward) a woman who is violently ripped from the picture early on. One of her kids (sort of her kid, not really) is a stone cold fox named Jule. You can imagine a teenage girl, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen wandering around the house, your house perhaps, flat belly showing, clothed lazily, sort of curious and bored, a personality that wants attention. Any kind of attention. Andy starts circling this poor girl right from the start. But Reinhart keeps it from being a kid touching situation, thankfully. What seems to even out the story, for us and for Andy is that our hero, if you want to call him that, runs a teen center, aptly named the “Teen Scene”. It’s a sort of after school hang out, a place that is just barely standing up right, run by some good hearted, but ultimately shady people.
Reinhart makes you think it’s ok that he’s got a grown man sleeping with a teenage girl, almost ok. Andy see’s the world through his eyes and with a healthy dose of rationalization, actually he’s making everything “okay” after much thought. Jule get’s pregnant, Andy didn’t do it, but he’s got a solution to fix it. The only down side to this novel is the conclusion, which I never saw coming. Neither does Andy. Great way to screw your hero, really it is.
Like most fiction today, good fiction that is, it could always be another hundred pages or so. His editors Deb Futter and Anne Merrow did a great job getting this story tightened up, and should be applauded. Steven Reinhart is definitely in the right place at the right time. What he does next is completely up to him.
Los Alamos by William Eggleston
Scalo; 175 pages
From time to time I like to look around the world of photography just to make sure that there isn’t something that’s slipping through the cracks. Fortunately the nice people at Scalo were able to send me a copy of William Eggleston’s latest collection of photographs. To be honest, the background I have never included Eggleston, even in my years at art school did I do more than give him a passing glance. Winogrand, Robert Frank, Friedlander, these were the guys I latched on to. Color photography can be tricky, and your taste for it particular, since black and white run’s through my veins, color prints have to work pretty hard to impress me.
Between the years of 1966 and 1974 William Eggleston captured Los Alamos, New Mexico with his camera and on the film a collection of images that perfectly describe a place, even though it seems that time is standing still. Using an outdated die transfer process used primarily in advertising in the 1950’s, Eggleston’s images bleed into your mind, thanks to this visually stunning process. As a viewer you can honestly say, and with out hesitation, that you are shocked to see these pictures all collected in one place. The book starts out with a brief description of why Eggleston drifted through Los Alamos and opens with a beautiful sky-space, one that every photographer wishes for, a collection of clouds shielding a setting sun, overwhelming the miniature landscape below. The highway and the telephone poles under the cloud formation disappear in your minds eye, as the image of the blue sky set against the white clouds sucks you in. There is a sense of spatial indifference, a loss of gravity and a flatness that his images capture of the landscape he’s traveling though. Eggleston uses colors, his tricky process of getting them, and a forgotten post apocalyptic landscape to tell the story of Los Alamos. Some of these images capture places, very few people, and the things they’ve either discarded, left unused, or the places they passed through. One page 27 we’re treated to a strange entrance to an unidentified building, with a wild palm plant growing in a brick surrounded garden. Floating on the glass door to the far right is a small American flag, you’ll miss it, with its spec of red awash in the overwhelming saturation the plant and the red bricks give off. Again, on page 31 a small radio hangs on a lime green wall, the kind of radio you’d find in a diner. It doesn’t work, and it looks like it’s been years since it has. On the following page a clock hangs on a pegboard next to a children’s Halloween mask, time frozen, sending a chill up your spin. Orange and black of the mask, bouncing off the lime green of the Weston clock, 5:20 and 58 seconds never felt so long. Eggleston captures people in these images, but only rarely. Women smoking, men looking bored, playing games meant for children.
The book takes a decidedly somber tone about half way through, starting with a confusing horizon less image on page 47. A swatch of brick, a wall with what appears to be two palm trees stuck to it, on fire. Closer inspection, a demand of the photographers, and you’ll realize your looking at a close-up of two metal bars, used to secure a window, set against a white building, with the brick wall making a tiny fleeting appearance. Move on, and you’ll see glowing cotton candy for 25 cents and 20 cents for a mug of beer along with a giant pitcher of beer for a dollar and a quarter. Remember Happy Hour is from 4:30 to 6:00. Is that pm or am? I like the kid handling the snake that’s five times his size. Or the family froze in a billboard above a chapel, praying to the horizon that never appears in most of Eggleston’s work. How about the Wisk bottle used on a fence line, helping you visually identify the gate before you drive through it? You may never notice these things, but Eggleston does, thankfully.
Sometimes it’s geometry, subject matter or color that attracts his eye. The woman in a pink checkered blouse, graying salt and pepper hair, pink fingernail polish and matching lipstick walking in front a wall covered with a color swathed rainbow squares, in nowhere USA. She’s panicked gripping onto her pick sweater, thrown carefully over her shoulders. Eggleston is a particular editor of his own work, crops tightly and leaves nothing outside the lines. He’s maintained purposeful eye matched by an endless imagination. I’ve got only two questions for him. Who’s the woman with the glass of sparkling scotch on the airplane, over looking an unlimited cloud dotted horizon? And do they really chain their cars to telephone poles in Louisiana?
Got something to say? Drop me a line
Thanks for all your hard work on the first 25 columns, Frank, and I look forward to publishing them for as long as you keep turning them out.
"Moriarty" out.
