Month: June 2009

‘Beverly Hills Adjacent’: Where to begin?

New York Times, Writing

bevhillsadjacentI’ll say this for Jennifer Steinhauer: She definitely writes about what she knows in “Beverly Hills Adjacent.” The L.A. Bureau Chief for the NYT drowns her first novel, co-written by actress-author Jessica Hendra, with knowing details and familiar showbiz figures. Some are so thinly-disguised, in fact, you wonder why they bothered. (Jenna Mills for Jenna Elfman? Couldn’t they do better?)

What I can’t understand is why Steinhauer decided to write such a frothy piece of chick lit. It seems strange for a journo charged with directing hard news coverage to go in such a direction. Sure, other newspaper reporters write: Mary McNamara contributed a similarly frothy tome titled “Oscar Season” a year ago, but she’s an entertainment reporter, now TV critic, for LAT, and does not oversee hard news. Male reporters have written their fair share of genre fiction over the years, but those have tended toward mystery novels with some death to add a harder edge. I can’t think of anything this fluffy from a newspaper journo of her stature. Maybe I’m just forgetting.

Steinhauer further muddied the waters by letting Jamie Lynton, wife of Sony Pictures honcho Michael, host a book party at their house. When Gawker called her out on it, the scribe brushed aside any suggestion of conflict of interest, parrying, “Do I cover the movie beat?” She pointed out that she has nothing to do with cultural coverage, and reports to the national desk. Her husband Ed Wyatt, however, is a TV reporter for the paper.

To make matters worse, the book isn’t that good. There are funny moments, and compelling enough characters to carry readers through, but overall the material’s very thin. Like many beginning novelists, the writers mistake brand names and established regional haunts for character development. Of course the exercise moms prefer Sprinkles cupcakes to June’s hand-crafted ginger cookies! And they wear stretchy yoga pants everywhere! Maybe this will seem fresh to outsiders, but it’s very obvious to anyone who’s spent time in, or around, showbiz. Would that the writers spent a little more time on creating characters rather than types and oppressive scene setting.

As McNamara noted in her LAT review, the book “is so front-loaded with details it almost collapses: It’s not just a cupcake from Sprinkles, it’s a red velvet cupcake from Sprinkles; a character didn’t just wait tables when she came to L.A., she waitressed at Kate Mantilini.” A little local accuracy adds flavor, McNamara writes, but the volume here threatens to consume the story line.

The two main characters, UCLA prof June and her character actor husband Mitch are the most fully realized. The book follows their tandem career crises — his comic battle to get cast during pilot season and her struggle to remain faithful as she vies for tenure. Naturally, there’s plenty of second guessing about their move to L.A. from New York, where Mitch pursued theater, not big bucks.

The writing improves toward the end, becoming more fluid and less epigrammatic. Perhaps Steinhauer’s next novel will take up where she left off, and not head down the same tired road again.

Writer’s divorce stings LAT media critic

journalism, L.A. Times, Writing

Some gall of Sandra Tsing Loh to turn her back on marriage! All those zany tales about parenting and she has the nerve to question the notion of wedded bliss? Why, her Atlantic story doesn’t even serve up juicy details about her affair! 

LAT media columnist James Rainey takes her defection VERY personally, writing in Wednesday’s paper that Loh’s case against nuptials left him dismayed and “oddly defensive on behalf of her husband.” He claims that her essay goes too far and doesn’t reveal enough, calling it “thoroughly provocative and strangely bloodless.” His issue: that she uses her experiences and that of a few friends to make a sweeping case against marriage without outlining the specifics of her marital breakdown.

Rainey really wants it both ways. He questions whether “the personal necessarily must become political,” yet clamors for more details so that — what? — he can better assess her argument? Make sense of  her marital breakdown?  He seems appalled Loh would mine her private life for public consumption, but that’s what she does. It’s just that usually she does so for comic effect.

I actually found her Atlantic essay bracing. Her radio bits and prose have always seemed self-satisfied; she’s very intent on conveying how wacky and boho her life is.  “Mother on Fire,” as her last book is prophetically titled, chronicles one comic adventure after another as she tries to get her children into good schools, often circumventing her kind, but relaxed, musician husband. Oh, and she also writes about her chronic insomnia, another tell-tale sign of her unhappiness in retrospect, but as per usual she makes a joke of it. 

The jokes are gone in the Atlantic essay. Sure she serves up telling, if disguised, details about her pals in “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off,” but the self-satisfied tone is absent. Loh honestly seems to be grappling with the issue of modern-day marriage in the wake of her own failed 20-year partnership, melding  her personal views with readings from marriage books. I don’t share her bleak conclusion, but I don’t begrudge her attempt to make sense of it all.

Then again, my manhood isn’t being called into the question, so maybe it’s easier for me to be sanguine about her sour take. Rainey admits he “couldn’t help but feel the pain the latest production must have provoked” for Loh’s long-suffering mate. “How many times can you be labeled a ‘great artist and loving father’ and a ‘worthy man’ before you feel like an emasculated chump?” He further bristles at the way she depicts friends’ mates as “domesticated sexless drones.”

Strangely, he suggests that her marriage would have been better off if she had only moved to South Pasadena, as she once wished. “The little city where I live might not be perfect, but it seems to me that most of the couples we know enjoy much better than the joyless ‘companionate marriages’ Loh dreads,” he writes. Now, I’ve lived in South Pas, and I like it there, but the city has no greater guarantee of happy marriage than other Los Angeles suburbs. Suggesting it, Rainey’s guilty of the same sort of sweeping generalization he criticizes Loh for making.

Rediscovering Sunset

media, Writing

sunset1973 There are times I feel frightfully middle-aged. Like when I watched my classmates shimmy alongside much younger alums at our reunion a couple weeks back. Today I was thrown by how much I enjoyed the latest issue of Sunset magazine. How could this be? I’ve always considered Sunset a mag for California housewives… and I’m definitely not that.
 
When I first checked out Sunset in the early ’70s, we were new to California, and the magazine seemed as exotic as the Birds of Paradise in our backyard. There were layouts on lanais and Asian-inspired recipes unlike anything in McCalls or Better Homes and Gardens, two of the other mags Mom subscribed to back then. Even though we didn’t stay long in SoCal, my mother relied on the Sunset recipe for potstickers for years, serving them up where ever we were living at the time. (We moved a lot as my Dad climbed the corporate ladder.)  

Today’s Sunset doesn’t seem nearly as exotic, but it’s refreshing  in its focus on home, travel and outdoor living. No giddy sex tips, parenting tribulations or couples counseling. There’s enough of that elsewhere; believe me, I don’t miss it.

Graveside rewards

Books, Surf N Pixels, Words+Pixels, Writing

I’m not big on graveyards, but on my quick jaunt through New England, couldn’t resist a visit to the Sleepy Hollow cemetery in Concord, Mass., where many a famous writer is buried. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve grown to appreciate the engravings on those markers, the appeal of which escaped me as a kid when my Dad went through his embarrassing gravestone rubbing phase. Walking through the cemetery, I couldn’t help but imagine the families so lovingly memorialized  on these markers.

But I was even more amused by the modern offerings up on Author’s Ridge. My favorite: the Obama pin nestled next to a well-thumbed copy of “Walden” at Henry David Thoreau’s marker. The first shot is of the Thoreau plot, the second a close-up of H.D.’s marker, with the blue Obama pin barely visible.

thoreauplotthoreaucloseup

Ben Bradlee: Burying his own lede

memoir, Writing

bradleememoirSuppose you’re one of the best known newspaper editors of your generation, revered for your role bringing down a presidency. Wouldn’t you play that high in your memoir? 

Ben Bradlee did not. The long-time WaPo editor instead chose to craft “A Good Life” as a straight-forward chronological narrative, moving on from childhood illnesses to Harvard hijinks and so on. One third of the way through it, he’s still recounting his friendship with JFK, Watergate several chapters in the offing.

Somehow, I can’t imagine him letting a reporter get away with this approach in the paper. He’s burying the lede.

Bradlee, who wrote this a few years after his 1991 retirement from the Post, should have known better: You never want to lose your reader before you get to the really good stuff.