Books

Judging a book by its cover and other things

Books, Writing

This has been a year of circling back and I’m not sad about it. 

When an L.A. Times editing gig took a delightful turn in March, I gained temporary oversight of book reviews and reacquainted myself with the New York publishing world I left decades ago. Diving back into this world was a treat, alternately daunting (given the high volume of releases and tight review budget at my disposal) and thrilling (reading good books and well-crafted critiques). My editing duties are winding down, but I have savored the gig while it lasted, just as I told myself to do when it began.  

I also discovered a woodsy creek side trail near my new home that’s a lot of fun to run. Canopied by trees and gently rolling, it reminds me of East Coast trails I took for granted before moving to L.A. Running down the hillside trail just like I used to in my younger days has been another Proustian treat in recent months. 

But back to books. My brief marketing job at Viking Penguin (as it was then called) was not right for me in a number of ways, not least its pitiful salary, but it did give me a glimpse into the business side of book publishing, and an oft-repeated anecdote about xeroxing copies of Stephen King’s “It” manuscript along with a less-traveled one about “The Basketball Diaries” author and “People Who Died” singer Jim Carroll hitting on a co-worker’s teenage daughter.  

The actual marketing work? That had mostly faded from memory until my L.A. Times inbox started filling with pitch after pitch for coverage, jackets and titles blurring together in a sea of familiarity even as I reminded myself of the work that goes into individual book promotion. 

Happily, there were plenty of distinctive offerings in the mix. One example: “Pick a Color,” a promising debut novel with a punchy title and jacket to match. 

Souvankham Thammavongsa’s book, published by Little, Brown late last month, takes its title from the question nail salon workers ask customers as soon as they walk in the door. In just one of many amusing details, all the workers go by the name Susan to make it easier for customers while also playing on the fact that many of them can’t distinguish between similarly named and outfitted workers.  

But Thammavongsa, a Canadian Laotian poet who previously wrote a well-regarded collection of short stories, makes it clear that they all have inner lives, as downplayed as they might be for customer consumption. Most vibrant of all: the narrator, a former boxer who revels in the freedom that comes with owning her own shop. The novel didn’t hold my attention to its conclusion but I was knocked out by Thammavongsa’s voice and the world she dramatically conjured in “Pick a Color.” 

Wait, there’s more: Here is a link to my L.A. Times feature about “The Carpool Detectives,” a true crime book that reads like a novel, and guide to of five L.A. area novels released this summer. The authors for the latter graciously explained why they set their novels where they did and supplied their favorite local hangout spots, enabling readers to craft their own literary adventures as desired.

Telegraph Ave.: ‘F— U, Pay Me’

Books, DG Creations, Surf N Pixels

Good news, bad news: There are still two bookstores on Telegraph Ave. But the shopping district is far more depressing than it used to be, with more vacant stores and fewer colorful vendors than visits gone by.

Even on a beautiful Saturday afternoon.

A few hours after our arrival, music-powered proselytizing had given way to an aggressive fellow striding the thoroughfare with a hand-written placard declaring “Fuck You/Pay Me” around his neck. Vendors were packing up before the sun went down; stores closed at 6 instead of 7 or 8.

Thankfully, Moe’s Books was not one of them. Surviving and apparently still thriving six years after neighboring Cody’s closed shop, the store stands out like a beacon in this faded tie-dyed milieu.

With four floors of books and an uncluttered layout, Moe’s evokes an earlier — and happier — era for independent bookselling.

Sure, Shakespeare & Co. is across the street, not far from Rasputin’s and Amoeba.

But Moe’s gave me the most hope for an indie retail future.

Oh snap out of it: Why midlife crises can be so boring

Books, Writing

slipperyyearYou know the saying that happy families are all alike? I’m thinking there should be an addendum: Midlife crisis stories are inherently boring. Vague unease and ennui do not make for compelling drama.

Latest case in point: “The Slippery Year,” by Melanie Gideon. I so wanted to like the book, which got a write-up in today’s NYT in advance of its arrival next week, that I plowed my way through it waiting for the revelation or wisdom that would make reading it seem worthwhile. Sadly, it never came.

Gideon, no doubt a nice person if you know her, makes much too much ado about mundane domestic details and disappointments. Her husband buys a big motor home; she hates it. Her son needs a new Halloween costume; she’s a bad mother for talking him into trick-or-treating as wrongly incarcerated fallen angel. The dog dies. She and her husband can’t find a new bed they can both sleep upon. And so on.

Will this marriage last? Can she shake out of her funk? Do we really care? Gideon certainly isn’t interesting or insightful enough to make me care about her particular blues.

To add insult to injury…

Closing Time: A Mean Machine Explains How He Got That Way

Books, Writing

closingtimeWanna know why Joe Queenan’s so mean? His Dad was a nasty drunk. And they lived in the projects! What a salve that must be for the stars he has so relentlessly skewered over the years. 

Queenan attempts to come to grips with his father’s legacy in “Closing Time,” but refuses to forgive him or apologize for his own nasty streak. Mostly he piles on the punishing details, describing in graphic detail his father’s beatings and his mother’s apparent indifference. And let’s not forget the family’s shameful slide into poverty in 1950s Philadelphia. 

“No afterglow accompanies these experiences,” Queenan writes a couple chapters in. “Nothing good ever came out of living in that project. One might argue that the degrading experience of poverty taught me to be ambitious and self-sufficient, but it would be more accurate to say that it taught me to be ruthless and cruel, indifferent to other people’s feelings, particularly if I was writing about them.” 

Pretty insightful. But Queenan immediately pivots blame on Hollywood for romanticizing the poor. It’s up to the reader to connect the dots between his previously stated impatience with the supposed problems of the non-poor and his evisceration of indulged Hollywood stars.

How cruel can he be? Sony was so outraged by Queenan’s vicious early 1990s takedown of Barbra Streisand that it threatened to withhold advertising from Movieline for a year. This pleased the editors tremendously — oh, how they cackled when the publisher told them about it — but I could see Sony’s point. Parts of “Sacred Cow” may have been wickedly funny but the article was undeniably mean. Queenan specialized in such pieces for the mag, then in its heyday of snarkiness, and has made a tidy sum wielding his poison pen for a series of major publications over the years, as he reminds us more than once in his memoir.

And to think he seriously considered entering the priesthood! But hey, there’s more money in sarcasm. 

Queenan does have a nice eye for telling detail: He vividly evokes Philadelphia’s modest Quaker-infused ethos, and the clannishness of its Irish Catholic enclaves in those eras, some of which overlap my stints in the city and its suburbs. The names were familiar, if not the particulars. 

orangecountyAlas, Queenan’s wicked wit is mostly absent in “Closing Time”; he’s too focused on chronicling the horrors he survived. It’s too bad he couldn’t have taken the page out of much younger Mexican-American satirist Gustavo Arellano’s recent memoir cum history, “Orange County.” Arellano’s father also battled the bottle, albeit more successfully than Queenan’s dad, and his family also lived in wretched housing, but the twentysomething scribe does not hold a grudge at his family, preferring to lampoon the county’s racist past and present.  

What would a younger, snarkier Joe make of his brutalizing march through the past? Hard to say. It’s also unclear whether Queenan successfully exorcised his demons with this tome; he admits that incidents from his past haunt him still, citing “beatings, lies, gruesome dental experiences, hijacked piggy banks, being sent to bed on an empty stomach.” Fortunately, the epilogue offers a brief ray of hope that, some 10 years after his father died, he’s found some peace through a satisfactory relationship with his own children. 

So maybe the cycle won’t repeat itself.

They didn’t get it then, don’t get it now

book reviews, Books, Writing

indecentFaced with proof that then Columbia prexy David Begelman forged checks, what did the company do? Throw him out on his ear? No, the board pressured top exec Alan Hirschfeld to keep the repentant former agent on staff, arguing that he was a good leader, and besides, the amount of money he stole wasn’t really that much.

Never mind the fact that Columbia, then as now, was a publicly traded company and the news was sure to leak out eventually.

“Indecent Exposure,” David McClintick’s absorbing chronicle of the late 1970s check kiting scandal, unfolds like a slow train wreck.  Reading it today, the parallels between the board’s arrogance and the banking industry’s recent behavior is hard to miss. 

The same type of moral relativism that financiers like Herb Allen employed informs today’s arguments that those AIG execs really deserve those retention bonuses despite having helped bring down the global economy. At the time of the Begelman scandal there was much tut-tutting over Hollywood’s laissez faire attitude toward such ethical breaches — supposedly Judy Garland waved off talk that Begelman had embezzled her while her agent — but the East Coast moneymen on Columbia’s board at the time seem to be just as tone deaf as producer Ray Stark, a tireless advocate for his pal Begelman.

Quite simply, they acted as if the normal rules did not apply to them. And this, McClintick reminds more than once, was but a few years after the Watergate scandal brought down the similarly arrogant Nixon administration. “All the President’s Men” had hit theaters the year before.   

Remarkable.