Harvey, Alex: Song Noir: Tom Waits and the Spirit of Los Angeles (Reverb)
This is a good overview of Tom Wait's career up to around "Swordfishtrombones." Waits is an interesting enough guy, and Alex Harvey a skillful enough writer, that one isn't really disappointed that the book is about eighty-five percent Waits and only fifteen percent "the spirit of Los Angeles." Likewise, one isn't too bothered by odd errors that suggest that Harvey is much more interested in and up to speed with Waits than in the metropolis and its literature, the raw materials that made Waits possible. (Homer Simpson—no relation to the character of the same name on a popular animated TV series—is an important character in Nathaniel West's classic LA novel, The Day of the Locust, but he is not an artist or the protagonist of the book as Harvey claims.) There's no evidence Waits or his partner and collaborator Kathleen Brennan, who, Harvey rightly recognizes, reinvigorated Wait's work and perhaps even saved his life, talked to him at all; Harvey did a good job with what he had.We're left eager for their version, but maybe they've been giving us their version all along, in the art.
Miskowski, S.P.: Knock Knock (Skillute Cycle)
I haven't read a horror novel since . . . maybe I've never read a horror novel. (Surely Frankenstein doesn't count.) I heard about this one from an acquaintance on Twitter, and thought I might as well try something different. I'm not sorry I did, because in addition to the, well, horror, there's an excellent picture of life in the Pacific Northwest and—if a man can get away with saying this—what seems like an excellent depiction of what it's like to grow up and live female. The novel follows three girls in the small Washington town of Skillute from the time they innocently perform a half-understood ritual in the forest (this is a horror novel, after all) in the late 1960s up through the present day, though actually not all the girls make it that far. We come to know and care about these girls and then women through alternating sections devoted to each of them. Most interesting, perhaps. is the dreadful thing that is at the root of the horror Miskowski gives us: an alien life invading and then emerging from your body: pregnancy and childbirth. That's what the initial ritual is meant to ward off, and it's from this that the horror emerges.
von Reinhold, Shola: Lote
To misquote Eliot Weinberger, this is not a novel about someone "getting divorced in Connecticut [written] by someone . . . getting divorced in Pennsylvania." That is, it is not conventional lit-fic. It is, instead, a work that is informed by literature, art, and theory. The protagonist, Mathilda, is a black Briton fascinated by the bright young things, a group of flamboyant and mostly gay socialites on the scene in the 1920s and 30s. She notices that in their milieux, and among the somewhat more restrained Bloomsbury bunch, people with her pigmentation are, to say the least, underrepresented. She begins to look for them and, finally focusing on an (imaginary) black poet named Hermia Druitt, sets out in search of this Afro-Scottish artist who, Shola von Reinhold convinces us, hobnobbed with BYTs and Bloomsberries alike. Mixing actual scholarship with historically grounded fiction, von Reinhold lets us follow Mathilda on her quest. Mathilda's efforts to bring attention to the forgotten Druitt remind us of actual black artists whose lives and works have been suppressed.
West, Nathanael: The Day of the Locust (New Directions Paperbook)
The Day of the Locust is one of those novels that gets better with every reading. Thanks to West's ruthlessness and the clarity of his vision it is certainly the best Hollywood novel we have seen or are likely to see. And in the great mob scene that closes the novel can any contemporary reader fail to see a Trump rally?:
" . . . the cultists of all sorts, economic as well as religious . . . all those poor devils who can only be stirred by the promise of miracles and then only to violence. A super 'Dr. Know-All Pierce-All' had made the necessary promise and they were marching behind his banner in a great united front of screwballs and screw boxes to purify the land. No longer bored, they sang and danced joyously in the red light of the flames."
For "Dr. Know-All Pierce-All" read, well, you know who.
Cross, Amanda: In the Last Analysis (Kate Fansler)
Amanda Cross was the pseudonym of Carolyn Heilbrun, a professor at Columbia University—the first woman to obtain tenure in the English department there—who specialized in modern British literature. She tried to keep her mystery-writing alter-ego a secret, but a fan ferreted out the truth, and one can see why that fan was suspicious. All of the many entries in this series are set in academia, and the detective is a professor in the English department of a university not unlike Columbia. I should know by now that I don't do well with insufficiently hard-boiled mysteries, but the literature jokes and references made this one a bit less of a slog than it might have been for this one-time English major and incessant reader. Maybe I'll read another one someday?
Babel, Isaac: Collected Stories (Penguin Classics)
I'm not the first to note the similarity between Isaac Babel's stories and the paintings of Marc Chagall. In that both rose out of the Russian Pale of Settlement, the similarity is unsurprising. As much pleasure as we take from Chagall's work, though, for all its similarity with Babel's fiction, we can't help but note that the violence among which Babel's stand-in, "with spectacles on [his] nose and autumn in [his] heart," moves in the stories gives his fiction a harder edge, a conflict—Babel, the consummate Jewish intellectual, rode with Cossacks during the Russian Civil War—that seems absent from the nostalgia of Chagall's canvases. For that reason, the stories seem to evoke a level of existence that Chagall's work neglects. In the laconic detachment, too, Babel's creations seem quite different from those of the Russians we have known. Those of us fortunate enough to discover the Russians in our youth will always return to them and always be rewarded.
Celestin, Ray: Dead Man's Blues: A Novel
Dead Man's Blues is as good, or maybe better, than the first in the series. Author Ray Celestin continues to trace the black diaspora North from New Orleans to Chicago, and uses history effectively (rather than drowning us in fustian).
Louis Armstrong, who was, history attests, on good terms with Al Capone, reappears, and the mobster, too, takes a turn. I'm eager to move on with Celestin and his characters, to a new city, New York City, and a decade further on to the place and time where the next novel is set.
Ames, Jonathan: The Wheel of Doll: A Novel (The Doll Series, 2)
Happy Doll, having lost his private eye license after his shenanigans in the previous book is now a "security consultant." His new calling takes him to the Pacific Northwest, but there are still lots of good LA moments, including a bit in Marina del Rey where my parents lived for a while. One understands, somewhat in advance of detective Happy Doll, who the villains are in this book, but that doesn't matter. The fun is watching him find out, and then react. I wonder when book 3 will be out.
Ames, Jonathan: A Man Named Doll: A Novel (The Doll Series, 1)
I'm a sucker for LA noir, so when I heard about Jonathan Ames's Doll series I dove right in. In this, the first of the two Ames has written so far, Doll spends a lot of time close to my old neighborhood, so it was fun to read things like "went up Hillhurst and made a right on Los Feliz." The action is action, and the plots are well-wrought, but the main attraction is the pot-smoking dog-loving detective named Happy Doll. He sometimes uses the name "Hank" in this book, but by book two (spoiler alert) he's decided to own his given name.
The implausible enters the book in how Doll manages to commit the many crimes he does in solving the big crime with few or no repercussions. But in this kind of book one waves that sort of thing away and buckles in for the ride. Also implausible was Doll's beloved dog George (spoiler alert) coming back to life after having been poisoned and presumed dead. But I was willing to accept this, because George is one of the book's most compelling characters.
Erskine, John: The Private Life of Helen of Troy
This odd novel, written mostly in the form of conversations between the characters, was published just five years after American women got the vote. One imagines the "radical" women who made this happen were an object of interest at the time, and perhaps that's why Helen, in Erskine's account, seems more like a modern and progressive (circa 1926) woman, and also why the novel seems to be as much about the mid-1920s as it does about the ancient Greeks, who were surely much too different from us to be slotted into the sort of family drama that Erskine has written. Still, it's an interesting retelling of the story of Helen and those around her.
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