Hi, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab...
As always, Frank’s had his nose buried in books just for you. I’m halfway through the new Irving, savoring it a little bit at a time, and loving it. Not Frank, though. He’s devouring books for you, and here’s what he’s got this time:
As of this moment gas prices continue to soar towards three dollars a gallon, I’m obsessed with this, but that obsession is certainly based on the fear of no more oil. The Red Sox are still leading their division and as fall approaches the world of new fiction has been declared anemic by several of the finest New York editors. I beg to differ by reminding everyone that Christopher Sorrentino and his new book ‘Trance’ is out there on the shelves and it’s as good a novel as anything published this year. I’ve given some space to this book in this column and next month will give the wonderful people at Knopf my thoughts on ‘Incendiary’ and ‘No Country For Old Men’.
Until Then…It’s Not A Secret Until I Tell Someone.
Human Capital by Stephen Amidon
FSG
Amidon’s last novel, ‘The New City’, focused in on a very interesting cultural phenomenon: suburbia blended to perfection and embodied by a group of forward thinking suburbanites. That novel crashed and burned despite Broadway Books most valiant efforts. Not Amidon’s fault, his writing on the suburbs is crisp and sharply critical with a very subtle and evocative blend of naturalism. It’s like he was born to set up shop in these towns, find the social structure, discover a loop to slip into and then turn out a critical essay on the people he’s surrounded himself with. Amidon can write, and this new book flows nicely for a while but then takes a sickening turn for the worst when things need to end for his characters, and as we all know things wouldn’t end if they didn’t end badly.
Money. It’s all about the money. (See Sean Penn in ‘The Assassination of Richard Nixon’; and his speech on money, that’s a really disturbing performance.) And Amidon’s characters are focused on getting ahead of the curve of life by attaining as much of this money as they can. Our story revolves around three men: Quint, master of the universe and a hedge fund genius, Drew, a down on his luck real estate mockery, and David, the stand-in father of a careless, darkened soul of a nephew. Amidon weaves things effortlessly and it’s a wonder he’s not a more popular writer because these characters move along a fault line perfectly without ever detonating like the wet dynamite they all turn out to be. What binds these men besides money? Their kids. Quint has a boy who’s run amok with booze and the easy life his father’s money provides, and a heavy heart for Drew’s daughter. David, a lost soul when it all comes down to it, has a nephew who comes between Quint’s son and Drew’s daughter. What happens in between? Quint allows Drew to invest in his hedge fund. Mistake number one. Drew is a liar about his wealth, a shortcoming that will turn out to be his Achilles heel in the end, even though it offers him a touch of underhanded smarts. Their children attend a private Connecticut breeding ground, which provides the proper training and education to become future leaders of America. Their kids don’t know what life is like. They live in a world where the rose colored glasses provided by their parents hard work fit comfortably upon their vapid heads. The bottom drops out of Quint’s hedge fund, shocking, and Drew is left with nothing. His inherited real estate firm is threatened, and he’s got a second wife with twins on the way, and a lot of explaining to do to the local bank which he had to trick into allowing him the hedge fund start up money. Along the way and towards the end of this sordid tale of woe, is a hit and run mystery which will give you tired eyes and make you wonder why a writer as talented as Amidon would be reduced to relying on such formulaic nonsense.
But there’s something else here to chew on. Quint’s wife, Carrie.
Now I think we’ve all met the people in this book, the moneymen, the desperate men, the devious men; but the women, their other halves, well that’s another story. Carrie wants to run a second chance movie theater in an old building in this fairy tale town she lives in. Show ‘Blue Velvet’ and ‘Mean Streets’ and have David Leans movies run endlessly. A good idea if you’ve got unlimited money, which Carrie does. She’s a trite little barnacle that has glommed onto Quint and his money, and enjoyed the spoils of his hard work. She speaks in a derogatory tone to the reader and a patronizing fashion to everyone she surprisingly finds her self surrounded by, but she coats it with an educated manipulating charm. She’s a failed actress who met Quint when he was nothing, gave him kids, and made the beds. All while staying out of the way and providing Quint with a stable home life. She fails with the theater. Rolls in the hay with a cineaste, because? Who cares! You won’ and I didn’t. This is women is an annoying diversion! She’s helplessly desperate for affection and inhabits a home that is nothing more than a high priced prison. Although, I didn’t see a gun to her head. I don’t like Carrie and I think Amidon is creating characters he knows are despicable (which is one of his great talents). I didn’t like her constant interior monologue about her past life, pre-Quint, and how desperate she’s become. In the end she buys her family’s freedom and then Amidon has the balls to invoke 9-11 as a catalyst that got Quint’s hedge fund back in black. The end of this book made me want to scream. Amidon fearlessly eviscerates the upper class in this flawed narrative about how money divides ‘us’ from ‘them’. I just wish he would have left the crutches out of this story and focused in on the wealthy and their copious gilded eccentricities.
Blood on the Moon by James Ellroy
Vintage
This is a sparkling, repacked release of a fantastic early Ellroy classic. Chip Kidd, once again, you humble the most seasoned observer. Sweet cover. Wow!
I stumbled upon this little gem and thought for a fleeting moment that Ellroy had taken the blasting caps off his dynamite prose and released this microcosm into the atmosphere as a trade paper original. But only for a moment. This book sits early in Ellroy’s career like a shut out or a one-hitter. This stuff is vintage Ellroy before he became vintage Ellroy, you know, before the riffs and the wild vernacular, the hip and the jive, and the politics. For my money, ‘American Tabloid’ is probably one of the finest books ever written. That’s an easy statement to make, up there with ‘The Corrections’, ‘Incandescence’, ‘Sportswriter’, et cetera, et cetera, dot.dot.dot. I see early Pete Bondurant, really. This is stuff that will turn your hair white, and these nightmares are ass kickin’, like you read about.
Short and sweet? Lloyd Hopkins, detective dick, L.A., circa Watts riots. This happens, then that, then a little more of this, and suddenly Lloyd is abusing the abuser, shoots one of his own in the riots, and skates. He’s a man dead set on adjusting the odds and making life easier for the innocent. Meanwhile? A little poet is going about his business of _expression when a few sadists in training, well, they make him their own. Cut to a few years later and Lloyd has a taste for crime; he can think from the inside out, gets tagged as a genius by his peers, and an older, wiser cop takes him under the proverbial wing and shows him the ropes.
Cut to years later and Lloyd has developed a very strong taste for women. He’s got a wife, plus a girlfriend, and nearly every woman he meets is a potential lay. Lloyd is intense, knows the streets, and becomes his own prey, very Vincent Hanna-ish. There is much to admire about this story, Ellroy’s ear for cop talk and his procedural is down to brass tacks. The poet is something else; he’s doing what he thinks is best, lovin’ and leavin’ them hanging, serial style, mashed up, ground up and spit out. He’s got an axe to grind with the kids who did him wrong in high school and the girl he pined for has a very special abuse waiting for her. Ellroy spans an incredible amount of time with this story in a relatively short page count, 261. He’s done more in this book in fifty pages than most every other book I’ve read has accomplished in two hundred. Lloyd has reasons for his actions and towards the end of his book, as the cat and mouse game trickles on like a babbling brook, we get an insight into that past. It is by far one of the most brutal childhoods I’ve ever had the displeasure of seeing described on the page. This book is a serious piece of work. The last ten pages tend to go a touch operatic, but Ellroy knows his stuff and uses it sparingly and with good measure. Of course this book was written in 1984 and is nothing like his new work, but still hot to the touch, incredible. Someone caught me reading this and asked if it was a good as James Patterson. My response? James Patterson is an altar boy compared to Ellroy. There are bad days that Patterson could dream up that are as bad as Ellroy’s good days. Mr. Ellroy, please, I’m begging you, write the third book behind ‘Tabloid’ and ‘Six-Grand’, please.
Trance by Christopher Sorrentino
FSG
To read this book, you need to know a little about Patty Hearst. Daughter to the Hearst fortune, but that’s all you need to know. Now go out and buy this amazing novel this very instant. Christopher Sorretino will be a household name after a few of the right people get their hands on this little gem. Jonathan Lethem can already be counted as a fan, but I’m thinking more like Kakutani, or Maslin, maybe even Rick Moody, but he’d probably slam it since it’s better than anything he’s ever written and dare I say will ever write. What Sorrentino has done here isn’t that groundbreaking, or new, it’s just done so damn well. Sure, DeLillo did the very same thing with ‘Libra’; Oswald, reimagining his existence and the days leading up to his historic act. Hell, Ellroy did it with ‘American Tabloid’, so we’re not knighting Sorrentino just yet, but hell, he’s done some incredibly heroic things with this book.
Patty Hearst, she goes by another name in this story. Actually, it’s her nickname that you’ll have to deal with, Tania (her real name is never used, or her parents), and she’s not even the center of the story. You’d think that it would be impossible to write a book about the 70’s, Nixon, and the end of Vietnam, and before I read this book I would have agreed with you. SLA, that’s right, a band of revolutionaries that roamed the back streets of this great country, L.A., New York, a little Vegas, and a lot of California. What’s most intriguing about the narrative is that it’s not completely free flowing, more like a stream of conscious thought, non-linear here and there but mostly a straight shot. Sorrentino does a wonderful job blending the narcissism of the time period, the casual willingness to conform and the ignorance it creates. He brings into focus a band of marginalized radicals who are nothing more than a batch of free loading hippies with no talent and a lot of banal hypotheses about the way government should be. We’re treated to everyone’s perspective, from Tania’s parents, to some of the supporters’ sidekicks and their stuck-in- the-Fifties parents. Guy Mock, a sort of supporter, and his brother are so perfectly rendered throughout this book that it makes me wonder why Sorrentino doesn’t write a book about these guys. You all know the ending of this story, it’s a true/fiction book, something you wanna believe in but can’t because most of it didn’t happen this way. Sorrentino goes to great lengths to make the reader aware of the blatant facts of the time. (The Nixon rant by a comedian is brilliant) People were lazy, government took advantage of everything and out of this boredom came splinter groups like the Symbionese Liberation Army, crazies, robbing banks and dressing up like the mod-squad. We’re also lead to believe that Patty Hearst knew exactly what she was doing, stepping out of her gilded cage to rebel against her daddy, or in this case, mommy. Lethem has a nice quote on the back cover of this book; he’s right on, sums it up perfectly. My two cents? Take the SLA and Patty Hearst out of this book and you still have a very well told narrative. That’s not an easy thing to accomplish when you’re a writer, especially when you put a historical event like this in your wheelhouse. This book soars on almost every level and takes almost no short cuts. It never cheats the reader out of a great scene, payoff, or interrogation. It also gives a very clear picture of the myriad of nuances that were the 70’s, from cars to clothes to music to the bullshit of it all. In that sense, it does for the American literary landscape what few books have even come close to doing over the last twenty years.
