BOOKS: JANUARY

BOOKS WE LOVE: In which we editors gush about some recent books that have knocked our respective socks off.

BIG MACHINE
by Victor LaValle
(Spiegel & Grau, 2009)

Take a bunch of “crackheads and criminals”—all black, all poor—and give them a fresh start: idyllic cabins in snowy white Vermont, spiffy retro wardrobes, and scholarly jobs in a library. Sounds like a good way to correct the racial injustices of the past, doesn’t it? Victor LaValle’s BIG MACHINE churns this essential premise into a literary thriller revolving around a janitor named Ricky Rice who’s got a shady past, a heroin problem, and a heap of neuroses. He’s an unlikely hero with a disarming, self-deprecating narrative style. “Don’t look for dignity in public bathrooms,” his tale begins. “But when my boss gave me the glossy envelope, the bathroom was the first place I ran. What can I say? Lurking in toilets was my job.” Antsy with doubts and insecurities, Ricky Rice grabs at the tantalizing prospect of redemption and acceptance: “Some people act like it’s a sign of weakness if you want to belong, but I think most human beings yearn to find at least one open door in their lifetime.” Entertaining and suspenseful (enhanced by the punchy, noir prose), LaValle’s novel is rich with provocative, timely queries: How distinct are faith and delusion? When does an institutional belief system become a cult? Is doubt the reflexive self-defense of the fearful?

Lines we liked: “Before September 11, the skinny, jittery black guy made security think one thing: drug mule. But after the attacks, security only cared about bombs. So it was the Arab guys, the Puerto Ricans and Indians, even white men, that got searched. I was too dark to make people worry on a plane. Still caused fear in elevators.”

—CAF

LET THE GREAT WORLD SPIN
by Colum McCann
(Random House, 2009)
 
Most of the action of Colum McCann’s fifth novel, which won the 2009 National Book Award, takes place on August 7, 1974, the day that Philippe Petit walked on a tightrope between the newly finished Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City. The tightrope walker in LET THE GREAT WORLD SPIN is never identified by name, and the trio of vignettes in which an omniscient narrator zooms in on this impossible speck in the downtown skyline are necessarily imagined and fictionalized to a degree. The writing throughout the book stuns the reader, encompassing a sprawling chorus of twelve voices of various races, genders, classes, and nationalities whose lives intertwine through sadness and loss and the shared search for hope and redemption. But it is the tightrope sections that really stand out for their lyricism, mimicking in language the artful daring of the tightrope act itself and virtually floating, as Petit did, far above the crowd gathered on the ground.

Lines we liked: “He had fallen only once while training—once exactly, so he felt it couldn't happen again, it was beyond possibility. A single flaw was necessary, anyway. In any work of beauty there had to be one small thread left hanging.”
 
Reviewer’s note: If, like this reviewer, you were born a decade after Petit’s iconic stroll a quarter mile above downtown New York, you may be as thrilled as I was by MAN ON WIRE, the 2008 Academy Award–winning documentary about the event. Click here to visit the film’s website.

—SCA

BIG LONESOME
by Jim Ruland
(Gorsky, 2005)

In Jim Ruland’s short-story collection, BIG LONESOME, the words feel like they’ve been electrocuted, and they’re rushing right at you. The prose is urgent as well as nifty— smart sentences of all shapes and sizes criss-cross the pages. He writes with a voice and style that hints at Barry Hannah, in the way that he can create a wilderness of erratic humanity, where anything and everything does really happen, yet Ruland maintains smooth control throughout the hustle and bustle of the stories.

One of the most rewarding features of this collection is the diversity of the stories.  They are inventive, funny, and occasionally somber. No two are remotely similar. Ruland’s risk-taking is evident in each new tale, as he  kicks over the workshop proverb that writers should write what-they-know. Instead, Ruland plunges with ferocity into the darkest waters of human foibles and then emerges with characters far richer and stranger than any we’ve seen before. 

In “The Hitman’s Handbook,” Ruland successfully creates a fast-paced mob hit thriller in a span of ten pages. In the story “Eastwood,” an oddball performance artist pulls off the ultimate show stopper, giving the narrator his laughter back. The story “Still Beautiful” features an unnamed narrator who hides in the crawlspace of her ex-lover’s house, and keeps a diary of her life. In “Red Cap,” a young girl wanders through the ruins of war, only to nearly escape being blown away, and, then, dazed, almost succumbs to an even more horrific fate. 

Lines we liked: “In an age when everyone believes they have something important to say, listening amounts to what most people do while they search for a relevant topic to interrupt you with.”

—MB

THE MOMENT OF PSYCHO: HOW ALFRED HITCHCOCK TAUGHT AMERICA TO LOVE MURDER
by David Thomson
(Basic Books, 2009)
 
In this dedicated single-topic essay, Thomson explores the advent of pop-culture murder-philia—evinced currently in the thousandth forensic gore-fest-cum-cop-show franchise—arguably having begun with Hitchcock’s comparatively clean 1960 masterpiece, PSYCHO. Opening gently with a history lesson, Thomson sets up the “making-of” with some juicy backstory regarding the pre-production and casting of the rule-breaking film.
 
Thomson dispatches an occasionally tedious blow-by-blow analysis of the film’s first tricky forty minutes, a dissection that reads at times like fanboy retelling, complete with speculation on Janet Leigh’s bra size. The real thesis appears after the murder of Leigh’s Marion Crane, when Thomson reasonably argues the movie’s effectiveness dissolves by abandoning its two most delicious characters, the formidably piteous Marion Crane and Norman Bates.
 
The book closes with a practically bulleted list of films that immediately succeeded the PSYCHO throne of murderer-worship. This quick little study serves less as a movie-and-culture-buff’s handbook and more as a primer for a burgeoning Hitchcock scholar, but a bright and informative resource, nonetheless.
 
Lines we liked: “So we are afraid for Marion Crane, in case she is caught or exposed, yet we want her, too—in the sense that we want her exposed further to our desire. You can hardly consider the first section of Psycho as anything other than an exploration of the process of voyeurism—the building of sexual excitement through watching.”

—NE

SNARK: IT’S MEAN, IT’S PERSONAL, AND IT’S RUINING OUR CONVERSATION
by David Denby
(Simon & Schuste paperback, 2009)

In this strange, new-ish world where “blog” is synonymous with “legitimate resource” and the impatient, computer-on-your-phone accessibility amps up the prized populism of the Internet media, we all might agree that there’s bound to be some quality deficit in popular critical dialogue. While there might be some genius producer of Mencken-worthy tweets somewhere out there, the general philosophy seems not to reach beyond a “fire at will” mentality. This shortsighted, from-the-hip approach David Denby calls “snark,” and he’s over it.

Opening his polemic with reference to the Lewis Carroll poem “The Hunting of the Snark,” Denby partakes in an amusing argument against the rampant trend of petty, unfounded, and typically ad hominem criticism founded in pop culture and boundlessly perpetuated on the Internet. Denby attacks snark and its unjust omnipresence in keeping with his Carrollian metaphor: some mythic and undefined beast that terrorizes, basically, everything. The narrow volume is presented not in chapters but “fits,” presumably aware of both its epigraphically explained synonym for “canto” and its contemporary implication of “tantrum”—Denby acknowledges his own answering to nit-picking with nit-picking.

After a brief and spotty history of snark, ranging from the Roman poet Juvenal (in a kind of convoluted assertion) to the snippy Tom Wolfe, Denby finally devotes an entire “fit” to The New York Times’ divisive columnist Maureen Dowd. In Dowd, Denby has possibly found his strongest example: a critic who is respectably shrewd, funny, and engaging, but who more or less attacks without any reason seemingly other than to attack, contradicting herself with hubristic regularity. In closing, Denby separates the good from the bad by listing a few of his favorite non-snarky (but ruthlessly scathing) personalities: Keith Olbermann, Stephen Colbert, and his long-worshipped Pauline Kael, rather predictably, among them.

SNARK is a light and enjoyable read that, despite a few moments of muddled reasoning, will leave the reader warily conscious at their next attempt to cleverly critique.

Lines we liked: “Like the ravenous Cyclops, snark sees with one eye. And then it complains that other people lack dimensions.”

—NE

GREATER ATLANTA
by Mark Steinmetz
(Nazraeli Press, 2009)

Simple in presentation, spare on text (no captions, no essay, no biography), Mark Steinmetz’s recent book of photography wins our vote for most beautiful book of the year. GREATER ATLANTA presents Steinmetz’s black-and-white photographs from the last two decades (one shot appeared in The OA). Most of the images, he explains in a brief afterword, “were taken along a line from Athens, my hometown, to the behemoth Atlanta.” Apart from this artist’s note and a poem about American relics set in the year 3006 by Linh Dinh, which opens the book, there are only photographs: a driveway filled with cats, a woman in a sweatshirt and hairnet at a cash machine, a man reading a women’s muscle magazine, leaves floating across a highway—to describe his subjects is to rob them of their pictorial essence. There are endless ways to represent the world around us, countless opportunities to resort to sly jokes and stereotypes; as a photographer, you can look up to—or down on—the people and places you “capture.” Steinmetz chooses a steady gaze, both tender and straightforward. He renders black-and-white warm and intense. It is so easy to walk around without really looking; this book reminds that seeing is a conscious activity—and an act of connection.

—CAF

Photographs by Southern Girl