Promise of Plenty in the Penny Press!

An exceedingly enjoyable day in the Penny Press, proving once again its unending (one hopes) plenty, its aggregate ability to laughter, stimulation, and irritation to even the dreariest afternoon.  My old standbys could do no wrong today, starting, of course, with the mighty TLS, which this time around had as many quotable little bits as an episode of Deadwood. In Maren Meinhardt's wonderfully clear-headed review of the controversial Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, which does more justice to the book in four paragraphs than most reviewers have managed to do in four or fourteen pages, she sums things up nicely:

Behind the posturing and special effects, the tenets underlying Chua's position are surprisingly sensible and relatively tame: most things that are worth doing need application and tend to become enjoyable once once one gets good at them; it is the job of parents to help their children get to that point.

I haven't yet managed to understand the outrage and commentary this book has produced, but then, my own tenets of parenting went out of fashion 400 years ago; practically every day, I see children launch themselves into utterly abominable public behavior, and they do it in the very consciously calculated certainty that their parents will not under any circumstances simply physically force them to mind their manners. Instead, such spoiled brats get to indulge themselves, scornful of the fact that the worst their parents will do is try to talk to them, to reason them out of their merchandise-destroying tantrum. "Amethyst," as I heard one over-pronouncing young mother say during one such tantrum, "remember what we discussed about social discourse?"

Elsewhere in this issue, P. J. Carnehan turns in a meaty review of a new art exhibit called "Georgian Faces" and wins this week's prize for Best Opening Line in a Review:

It's good to know that, during the latter half of the eighteenth century, the defense of Dorset against the prospect of invasion was in the hands of well-dressed men.

But then, the TLS has always been a showcase for linguistic pith - most often at the expense of the poor authors whose works fail to impress. It's true that Edmund Gordon over-praises Philip Hensher's merely good novel King of the Badgers (his follow-up to his genuinely great The Northern Clemency), but oh, the sweet compensation found in Matthew Adams' demolition of David Baddiel's The Death of Eli Gold! I haven't read Baddiel's book myself, which is about four narrators recalling the life of the title character, but after the working-over Adams gives it, I'd be happy to buy the author a consoling drink:

Ascribing to each character a distinct narrative voice, the novel attempts to offer a picture of their psychological and emotional development as they adjust to the great novelist's passing. It is a potentially effective idea, but Baddiel's frivolous approach to language and characterization, combine with his evident disregard for the reader, means that that potential is never recognized.

... The novel is sore with afflictions of this kind. To a different kind of enterprise, they might not have been so comprehensively damaging. But The Death of Eli Gold is a long, static, ostensibly reflective work, and as such it is almost totally dependent on precision, weight, and authenticity of voice. It has none of these qualities ...

Hee.

One magazine-reading need my beloved book reviews don't fill is my foolishly persistent need for short fiction (well, almost never - the London Review of Books can keep running Alan Bennett's marvellous novellas forever, as far as I'm concerned) - 'foolish' because I'm so often disappointed you'd think I'd have stopped voluntarily long ago. Granted, writing a good short story is devilishly difficult, so I should keep my expectations low. But Penny Press days like today inflate those expectations - I found not one but two excellent stories. The first, "Twin Forks" by Daniel Woodrell, is in the latest Esquire - it's about a man named Morrow who buys a camp ground and general store out West hoping to escape some of the demons he left behind in Nebraska; it's got some very effective imaginings of loss and pain that a very different main character might have called a mid-life crisis, and the central scene, in which Morrow (with a little backstage help from his shop assistant Royce) confronts two machete-wielding drug addicts who pull up in front of his store in a beat-up car with two women in the back seat:

The women climbed from the beater and stood beside it, the elder subdued and expectant of the worst, the younger dark and expressionless, staring at Morrow. He looked back and could not believe how pretty her eyes were - what color is that? - then couldn't believe he'd noticed. He abruptly fired into the air while yet lost in her eyes and presence, said, "One more step."

The men halted at the sound, looked at each other, laughed till they bent in the middle and had to lean together. The machetes fell to the ground. The driver turned to the staring girl, "Toss me the keys to the trunk."

Royce said, "Don't let them open that trunk. You won't want that."

Woodrell is unknown to me, but the bio-note in Esquire indicates his a fairly seasoned writer, which might help to explain how effective most of "Twin Forks" is - although when it comes to short stories, I've seen many, many seasoned hands fall flat. My notorious case in point would be Alice Munro, who has never written a single well-done short story despite having spent an entire lifetime doing nothing but trying. So imagine my surprise when I turned to her preferred venue, The New Yorker, and found - not a well-done Munro short story, of course (what were you thinking?), but an utterly fantastic tale written by a newcomer to the field. The writer's name is Ramona Ausubel, and the story is called "Atria," and if it's any indication of her talent, her forthcoming book of short stories is worth pre-ordering right now.

"Atria" stars teenager Hazel Whiting, an intelligent and quirkily introspective high school student with a dead father and a hapless mother ("Hazel and her father were never in the world together - by the time she entered, he had already closed the door behind him"). Hazel is a fairly dispassionate observer of the world around her, and when she loses her virginity to a convenience store clerk one afternoon, she does so with almost clinical detachment ("This is it?" she thought. "This is the whole entire thing?"). Shortly after, she's raped by a different man and becomes pregnant, although she refuses to believe she's carrying an actual human baby:

She thought of the men who could have created this. "How could you be a person?" she asked her growing baby. She dreamed that night, and for all the nights of that summer, of a ball of light in her belly. A glowing knot of illuminated strands, heating her from the inside out. Then it grew fur, but it still shone. Pretty soon she saw its claws and its teeth, long and yellow. It had no eyes, just blindly scratched around, sniffing her cave. She did not know if this creature was here to help or to punish her.

The story is told in writing so confident and yet loose-limbed that I'm hard-pressed to think of a similar style - maybe early George Saunders, but there's an ease here that he has yet to achieve (and, to be fair, doesn't seem to want to). There's ample dramatic control as well - the final eight paragraphs of this story will have your heart in your throat, and the effect is entirely uncontrived, springing from Hazel's character itself. It was a thrill to read, and it'll be a thrill to add another young writer to my 'must read' list. Going from "Atria" to the next Munro aunt-a-thon will be a harsh thing.

And since today is the first of the month, there's another entry in the Penny Press I naturally want to mention - and since this post marks the 800th entry here at Stevereads, I'm allowing myself a little indulgence! The first of every month marks the appearance of a new issue of Open Letters Monthly, and since it's the best online literary and arts review there is, it not only qualifies as a part of the Penny Press but also stands implicit comparison with the best of its paper-and-staple brethren. I play a part in the creation of OLM every month, but this in no way cheapens my evaluation - I was a periodical reader long before I was any kind of periodical participant, and I'm well able to click on over to the latest issue of OLM on the first of the month and simply encounter it as a reader. It's true that I know the genesis of the pieces with an intimacy I don't have with other magazines (in this case, for instance, I know the title Jeff Eaton's fantastic review of Colonel Roosevelt had before it got the boring-ass snoozer of a title it currently sports - stuff like that), but knowing that kind of thing can't make the reading experience any better or worse, believe me.

So I'm indulging myself here at Post #800 by telling you this: Open Letters is a hell of a good read every month.

The secret, of course, is the strength of the writing - and I know this because the strength of the writing keeps me reading essays on subjects I'd otherwise immediately ignore. In this latest issue, for instance, one review deals with Teju Cole's novel Open City, which I found stilted, canned, and stomach-churningly egotistical. You'd think, therefore, that a review of it would hold no interest for me - but Andrew Martin's piece in the latest OLM is so urbane and allusive and chatty that I found myself reading along and happy, despite anything I might think about its subject:

The darkness and light that Cole describes seem to project themselves back onto the image of the solitary man in a flickering subway car, and forward onto the titles of Mahler’s final works. Moreover, the connections don’t feel forced. They are clearly the work of someone thinking—they are self-consciously essayistic in construction—but the prose is steady, driving. One keeps reading the book for these moments, and there are many of them.

And if I was initially sceptical about any review dealing with a junk writer like Cole, you can imagine what I initially thought about an entire feature on perfume. My first reaction was that a high-priced ephemeral vanity product like perfume didn't deserve even a glance from what is primarily still a literary review - I certainly wasn't willing to grant perfumery the status of an art. But I read Elisa Gabbert's "On the Scent" column avidly each time it appears, and I do so for her agile, confident prose:

An all-natural perfume would stick out like a sore thumb at the perfume counter in a department store, as they smell and behave in a fundamentally different way and lack ingredients found in the majority of commercial fragrances (such as synthetic musks, dihydromercenol, and Iso E Super); perhaps counterintuitively, it’s usually synthetic chemicals that make a contemporary perfume smell “fresh.”

Likewise I've been mostly uninterested in novelist Ahdaf Soueif's involvement with the recent political upheaval in Egypt, tempted to write it off as Norman Mailer-style opportunistic grandstanding - until I read Rohan Maitzen's exploration of Soueif's activism as seen through the prism of her novels In the Eye of the Sun and The Map of Love. In every piece she writes for OLM, Maitzen exhibits both a joy in meaningful complexity and an explicit faith in the power of literature - it can be an incredibly thought-provoking combination:

“I know there’s an awful lot I don’t know,” Isabel says to Amal. “That’s a start, isn’t it?” Against this epistemological humility, which enables exploration, discovery, and cooperation, run powerful countervailing certainties that, refusing empathy, instead license prejudice, inhumanity, and violence.

Soueif’s novels work against such certainties. Even the heartrending conclusion to The Map of Love is productive, because our mourning prompts us to ask why, to demand a better, more just, more hopeful resolution. Both novels also not only invoke but create their own version of the Mezzaterra: a literary common ground, an optimistic, if endangered, space well served by the novelist’s tools.

Perhaps the ultimate example of this kind of bait-and-switch occurs when a first-rate writer decides to review a book that's not mediocre (like Cole) but outright awful. This contrast is jarring enough when less talented reviewers do it (I myself, for instance, do it all the time) - when really talented people indulge themselves like this, the effect can be surreal. Perfect case-in-point: in the latest OLM, John Cotter (another of those 'Must Read' young novelists on my list) turns in a review of "Alta Ifland"'s 60-page collection of short stories called Death-in-a-Box. The booklet is flyblown garbage in its every pretentious sentence, but something in it caught Cotter's imagination and prompted a beguiling review that's several orders of magnitude more thoughtful and poetic than its subject:

Ifland’s spiky narration turns fables into essays and then into sermons, milking the efficacy of the forms she passes through; just as characters double and blend, so do forms. Not that all of this blending works all the time; generally speaking, these stories begin with strong premises and then escape themselves. Sometimes this is an uroboros (as in “Death-In-A-Box” where the premise with which we begin winds elegantly back on itself); sometimes these endings are fine disappearing acts (as in “Twin Sisters” when one character disappears into another); sometimes these escapes are just French exits, unsatisfying evasions (as in “Uncle Otto,” where a zany character piece decomposes into drunken paperwork).

And the list goes on, in every issue of Open Letters. Part of this is luck, no doubt (magazine editors dislike admitting it, of course, but luck plays a disconcerting role in whether or not a potential freelancer says 'yes, sure' - and whether or not that freelancer then delivers the goods), but a bigger part of it is hard work on the part of OLM's editors, who find, chase, shape, and polish these pieces every month. The process of that finding, chasing, shaping, and polishing is no different at OLM than it is at the TLS or The New Yorker, except in scale and number of available hands on deck, and the results of all that work were among the many Penny Press offerings that pleased me today - so I thought it deserved a mention right alongside the others. Credit where credit's due, and all that.

And for my next 800 entries? Six words: All Paul Marron - All The Time!

Fashionable Do's and Don't's in the Penny Press!

Whatever the current himbo-du-jour James Franco is paying the publicists he claims not to have, it's not enough: as the cover of the latest Esquire truthfully declares, the guy is everywhere (not that I'd expect you to know what that cover declares, considering how unbelievably, amateurishly cluttered it is). This is partly due to the usual reasons – he's got upcoming work (movies and a book) to hawk, or to be hawked around him while he appears not to care. But it's also partly due to the fact that Franco in the last few years been morphing from a fairly assembly-line Hollywood leading man into … well, “an individual” would clearly be going too far, but at least a good simulation of one. Increasingly, his antics – going back to (several) schools, studying baroquely useless things like literature, doing a turn on a daytime soap opera, putting up scandalous art exhibits, the aforementioned book – look like the kinds of things any 32-year-old guy would do if he suddenly found himself in possession of fame and money – if that guy were an individual, or maybe wanted to become one (whereas the New England Patriots, alas, can boast a perfect example of what such a guy does with fame and money if he's got no interest in being an individual: he knocks up and discards his girlfriend, buys the most famous idiot runway model currently available, and carries a man-purse in St. Tropez).

This Esquire “profile” (that's what it calls itself, though it isn't even close to being one – think more “press release with digressions”) is by Tom Chiarella, so you know you're going to get good peppy prose. And he doesn't disappoint:

Sometimes Franco gets a little hypnotic with the eye contact. What starts as a steady gaze generally transmutes into the oddly pleased squint that is his war paint, a look that allows him to play both stoner and supervillain with the same incredulous vacancy. He sighs a little, apologetic. “You probably know I have a lot of projects,” he says. “But that one is way, way off. It's just something I'm thinking about.” He whisks at something in the air then. “Off in the distance. Way off.”

These words are so bloated and vague, they almost bob in the air. Franco knows this. “Okay. I want to write a children's book.” He guts out a laugh, snorting himself off the hook. “Someday.” This is a kind of hedge – people are constantly vetting his agenda, because it is unlike the typical high-quote actor's, because it is puzzlingly arcane, because he isn't notching his belt or collecting motorcycles or figuring out new enthusiasms in laboratory drugs, because that agenda appears to have nothing to do with being a rich, laconic, and ultimately free thirty-two-year-old male.

Chiarella's article starts out with some standard interview-code-speak: we first meet Franco sitting “by a side door near a pail of mop water. There's a paperback, palm-pinched, cover down, in his right hand ...” The reason the famous James Franco is reading a paperback one-handed while standing in an alley next to a slop bucket (though Chiarella never spells it out) is because he's smoking, something he does virtually every minute he's awake. But I'll take code-speak over outright PR, which is what Sam Anderson gave us in his Franco “profile” for New York magazine, in which he hilariously tells his readers that Franco “doesn't drink, smoke, or do drugs” - somehow, Anderson's keen perceptions failed to notice that Franco was drunk, stoned, and chain-smoking during that very “profile,” but at least Chiarella doesn't outright lie.

Or maybe he does – certainly his piece as a whole flirts with being willfully false. The text – and the accompanying little fictional squib by the so-talented-he-really-ought-not-to-do-crap-like-this Ben Percy – is constructed in such a way as to encourage readers to take on faith not only that Franco is sincerely interested in all these “projects” of his (as opposed to being interested mainly in the attention they get him) but that the projects themselves aren't worthless. When a gorgeous young actor/model begins shopping around so openly for a new avenue of self-expression, we can reasonably assume the results will be worthless; if Joe Gordon-Levitt decided to write a book, for instance, that's exactly what we'd assume (although of course such predictions can be wrong; Michael Bergin, with nothing but his washboard abs to recommend him, wrote a book that was actually good) – we'd encourage him to confine his personal reinventions to acting, where at least he's got credentials. Franco in these last few years has seemed rather desperately in need of extracurricular credentials, and it's far, far from clear that he knows what work is.

Then again, it's possible that success has fueled experimentation – that happens even to ordinary non-stars. Franco's forthcoming short story collection is a genuinely good debut, and most of its work predates all this art-installation nonsense. Perhaps he should cancel his four post-doc degrees-in-progress, shutter his studio swannings, and buckle down to that most incredibly arduous of all mortal tasks: writing a second book.

It's unlikely, if only because writing is the least glamorous of all the arts – and Franco, being a handsome young man, finds a certain appeal in glamor: hence the appearance in Esquire, which started out its life exclusively as a men's fashion magazine and still pulls in the latest ads from all the big fashion industry names. We see quite a few such ads in this issue. There's Armani, swathing a distracted model in fog and confusing the known order of the universe by making him put on a pair of Michael Jackson gloves:



And there's Lincs, trying to perpetuate the delusion that young men can look heterosexual while wearing ridiculous “skinny” clothing:



But the normally level-headed Tommy Hilfiger stumbles rather badly in this issue – their latest spread contains what could only be termed a hideous fashion faux-pas:



Can the brand be salvaged? Those outfits can't be.

An Auspicious Debut in the Penny Press!

It’s an opening that would sit more comfortably at one of our estimable sister-blogs like PopWired or Pink is the New Blog, but nevertheless, it must be stated up front: actor James Franco (whom some of you might remember as the world’s bitchiest Green Goblin, or the world’s mumbliest Tristan, or the world’s least animated American WWI fighter ace, or as Robert DeNiro’s most hysterical co-star, but who is, nonetheless, a better thespian than you give him credit) is a nice guy. This is worth mentioning because a) he’s very handsome, and that can stop young men from bothering to be nice even if they remain obscure bank employees in Carol Stream their whole lives, b) he’s famous, which is a state notoriously lethal towards any kind of genuine niceness. Franco has avoided the pitfalls of nature and nurture and remained the nice guy I suspect he’s always been.

Which isn’t to say he walks on water; he can be filthy, and he does his requisite time as a partygoing lounge lizard, and more endemically, he routinely tries on and discards all the usual ridiculous rags of reinvention intellectually curious young men have always wasted time on throughout the ages – in this he’s no different than Alcibiades was at his age. Young actors are particularly vulnerable to this chameleon phase, and it’s never helped – or shortened – by having an excess of money.

That chameleon phase has lately prompted Franco to make some idiosyncratic movie-role choices, and, in a move that’s flatly baffled the Entertainment Tonight crowd, it motivated him to go back to school (his fellow actor Martin Sheen – with whom he has more in common than he’s so far allowed himself to see – did the same thing). Not to pursue acting, but to write fiction. And the fact that he’s famous – coupled with the fact that he’s not only nice but largely perceived to be friendly – creates a blurring cloud of preset reactions among those who will be the critics of that fiction: either they’ll like it because Franco’s a star, or they’ll like it regardless and be called sycophants, or they’ll hate it because he’s a star, or they’ll hate it regardless and be called jealous. It can make you feel sorry for the guy: he’s got to be wondering if this stuff he’s sweated and labored and cared over creating can get a fair hearing anywhere.

And it’s not just a question of venue, it’s a question of timing. His world-debut short story “Just Before the Black,” comes out this week in Esquire, which arrives in subscribers’ mailboxes at the same time as the 22 March issue of the New Yorker.



This would ordinarily be just another coincidence of publishing – after all, no matter when it arrives, it’s going to overlap with an issue of the New Yorker. But the 22 March issue of the New Yorker is one of those rare issues I’ve mentioned here in which every single thing goes right, in which the dreams of countless editors and sub-editors and fact-checkers and subscribers for the last hundred years all fulfill simultaneously. The New Yorker has been called the greatest magazine in the history of the world, and in issues like this one, it’s actually true.

Nobody makes a misstep, in the whole length of the thing, and we’re forced to realize that, like them or not, these writers are giants – and they’re creating an almost spooky synergy by working together right at this time. Showboating main editors come and go – several of these writers have worked for several of those editors – but quality like this is, or ought to be, eternal.



There’s the moodily evocative cover by Jorge Colombo; there’s Hendrik Hertzberg writing about nuclear power (“Converting mass to energy by atomic fission in order to achieve temperatures normally found only on the surface of stars like the sun and then using that extraterrestrial heat to boil water – well, it smacks of (to borrow a term from the nuclear dark side) overkill”); there’s an essay – doesn’t really matter on what – by the already-legendary John McPhee; there’s a piece by Jeffrey Toobin, the greatest living chronicler of America’s highest court, this time profiling Justice Stevens (“He’ll say something like ‘This is probably obvious, but I have this one question. Could you help me with this one point?’ An experienced advocate knows that you have to be on your guard, because he’s probably found the one issue that puts your case on the line”); there’s a hilarious, wonkily paranoid cartoon by Roz Chast; there’s a masterful theatre review by Hilton Als; there’s an exhibit review of the weird German artist Otto Dix by one of the greatest working art critics alive today, Peter Schjeldahl (“To truly appreciate Otto Dix, the most shocking major artist, against stiff competition, of Weimer Germany, it may help to loathe him a little … By disliking Dix, you may balance a sense that he dislikes you, too.”); there’s a great overview of the recent ‘unofficial orchestral Olympics’ recently held at Carnegie Hall, all in the mad pursuit of a nonsensical ranking as #1:

Not long ago, the British magazine Gramophone asked music critics to rate the world’s orchestras, and when the results were published there were whoops in some places and laments in others. The burghers of Amsterdam took quiet pride in the fact that the Concertgebouw placed first; their rivals in Berlin and Vienna fumed at being second and third; and Philadelphians were scandalized to find their honey-toned group nowhere in the top twenty. (I participated in the poll, but I am not about to reveal my list, for fear of being detained by the Austrian or Pennsylvanian police).

There’s even stuffy old David Denby, turning in his usual rock-solid dissection of some new movie starring one of his weird bête noirs, the cinematic non-event known as Ben Stiller (like a critical version of Stiller’s grandmother, Denby keeps urging the star, in review after review, to be more Jewish).



And perhaps best of all, perhaps the most tell-tale signal of the strength of this particular issue, is the luminously, almost sloppily brilliant short story by Junot Diaz, who in this kind of company we’re forced to consider as one of our finest living practitioners of fiction. The short story in this issue, “The Pura Principle,” is a wonderful return to form for Diaz, an utterly unsentimental account of a young man dying of leukemia and the predatory girlfriend he marries during a recuperative stay at his mother’s place. The prose is a marvel of sure control and funny as hell – an exciting experience utterly unlike the usual New Yorker angst fest.

So its appearance is great news for readers, but perhaps a bit bittersweet for Franco, because his own debut short story in Esquire is very, very good and would look dominating if it weren’t appearing in the same week as one of our greatest writers at the top of his game.

That’s just unlucky timing, though, and it can’t be held against “Just Before the Black,” which is, on the surface, noticeably Junot-esque: depressed, distracted, down-market characters talking lingo and getting wasted and bullshitting as they aimlessly wander through their lives. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this type of fiction – and it’s lucky there’s nothing inherently wrong with it, because it seems hard-wired to be the kind of fiction attractive young men write first, before they start writing the far more individual stuff that will be their literary mark on the world (before they even know if they can write that stuff). Booth Tarkington, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jack Kerouac, Richard Farina, Ernest Hemingway … the list is a long one (for all I know, Alcibiades belongs on it), and again, there’s nothing inherently wrong with that. It’s a legitimate enough sub-genre, and only very, very few writers can successfully mine it for longer than the one book, although many try. Nothing becomes derivative faster than simulated anomie and the reason for this is simple: there’s a waiting line a mile long behind every such author. It hardly seems like Bret Easton Ellis has time to sprout a single gray temple-hair before Nick McDonell is elbowing him out of Disaffection Central, and that’s as it should be.

Franco’s story (the whole forthcoming collection from Scribner’s unless I’m much mistaken) is firmly in this mode: two young guys, Michael and Joe, are just hanging out doing nothing at night. Michael is the narrator, and his almost inarticulate dissatisfaction with his life suffuses the whole story almost to the choking point (“I am friends with a slug,” he thinks, “and my other friends are pigs and wolves. I never make friends with nice things. Just the shit”). The portrait of Michael is alarmingly accurate of a certain type of aimless young man who wonders if he even feels anything. His reverie while driving is one many such men have had (indeed, it’s one not-so-young men have had and perhaps shared with the poor saps trapped in the car with them):

I love driving down an empty dark freeway, lit up intermittently by the lights at the side of the road, and when I see the lights, I think of all the little worlds out there, all the little animals living in their habitats out there, and how we could pull over and have an adventure at any one of those forgotten pockets of the world, just nothing zones, backwash refuse property in the wake of the great freeways, and I like passing all of them, racing down the freeway, like a tunnel into the night…

Eventually, Michael and Joe end up getting high with their dealer friend Hector, and in the drifting conversation that follows, Michael introduces into a series of hypotheticals the one hypothetical most young men couldn’t get high enough in their lives to introduce, and it stops both Joe and Hector, and it cracks open a light of revelation on Michael, and the whole of it is accomplished with a sure, caring hand. There’s some very good imagery here, and a palpable sense of longing to change.

Naturally, it’s tempting to read this story and ascribe something of that longing to Franco himself, but the story – and its companion pieces in the upcoming book – is not a psychological hypothetical, it’s a fact. And it’s not some air-thin Hollywood vanity project, as young male movies stars are unfortunately prone to perform (the hollow efforts of Ethan Hawke, the twee little curiosities of Crispin Glover, the shudder-inducing poetry of Craig Sheffer, etc.). Don’t get me wrong: Franco’s celebrity status no doubt made some aspects of this whole process undeservedly easier (getting your first story published in Esquire, for instance), but those things don’t define the end product – readers would have to take a story like “Just Before the Black” seriously no matter who wrote it.

So congratulations are in order for our new young author! A fine inaugural effort, and I, for one, am hoping there’s lots more to come.

Fact and Fiction in the Penny Press!

With a post title like that, you're all probably expecting me to turn right away to this week's People magazine, which features a corporate hack-job "profile" of Gossip Girl rancid tobacco addict boyequin Chace Crawford as one of the summer's "hottest bachelors" ... since the piece hyperventilates quite earnestly about how hot Chace is, how funny Chace is, how romantic Chace is, and how straight Chace is (and since the profile never alludes either to the stench of tobacco or the fact that Chase is life-splittingly hung over every single morning, that he wasn't even blow-dryably close to photographable for the first two or three hours of the shoot), it certainly qualifies as an example of the grey nether-ground between fact and fiction.



But no, I leave such vitriol for others (including the good folks at IHateChaceCrawford, who've certainly got their work cut out for them with this vacant-brained piece of pork rind)! We've got slightly bigger fish to fry in this installment of In the Penny Press, and we'll start with the Fiction end of the spectrum, which brings us to the latest issue of Esquire. This issue has some other interesting stuff in it (although it's once again simply loaded with stupid mini-articles giving tips about grilling, and once again simply loaded with full-page ads for cigars, for all the world like we lived in an alternate reality in which none of the magazine's hip young go-getter subscribers know that smoking causes mouth, lung, heart, kidney, throat, brain, and skin cancer, not only in you but in all the people you smoke near)(top-notch habit, that - ever so attractive), but the clear highlight from a marketing perspective certainly has to be the short story by Stephen King. It's called "Morality," and it's a big-boy work - as its title implies, it's a little morality play about normal people facing abnormal moral choices, with not the slightest hint of the supernatural anywhere to be seen.

Quite apart from its merits or lack of them, "Morality" only solidifies in my mind a conviction that's been growing for some time: sooner or later, American readers are going to have to figure out what to do with Stephen King.

It was one thing when he was just churning out progressively unreadable schlock horror novels - plenty of people do that, and it's easy for those so inclined to ignore. That got a little more complicated when he bought a picturesque mansion, let Sunday magazines photograph his enormous library, and most of all started donating serious amounts of money to worthy causes. These are literary warning signs, the kinds of things a schlock horror novelist does when he's beginning to want to be taken seriously as a writer.

Uproarious laughter is the proper response from the publishing industry, accompanied by a brayed version of the rhetorical question, "If you wanted to be taken seriously, why'd you write about friggin killer clowns?" But it's been a long time since the publishing industry had what's known in bull-riding circles as "a pair," and so King's steady encroachment on the lower slopes of Parnassus hasn't been endured stoically - it's been actively encouraged. In 2003, the National Book Foundation gave King a medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, and psychics from every state in the Union were bombarded with the same message from Nathaniel Hawthorne: "What the fuck?"

There's been a book of essays on the craft of writing; there's been a couple of novels with only nominal horror-elements (if you don't count the prose); there've been straight-up fiction stories in mainstream quasi-literary magazines, and now there's "Morality" in the latest Esquire.

Reading the story doesn't help us know any better how to think about this new, emerging Stephen King. It's the story of a struggling young couple in New York - Chad is a substitute teacher who never gets enough work to pay the bills, and his wife Nora is an in-home care-provider for a wealthy stroke victim named Reverend Winston. The two of them are living a life of quiet desperation, always on the edge of solvency, when Winston makes Nora an offer she at first wants to refuse: all his life, he's been a perfectly good, moral person, but before he dies, he'd like to know what it feels like to commit a sin. Since he's recovering from a stroke, he's not really able to do the actual committing himself, and that's where Nora comes in. If she'll perform his sin by proxy, he'll pay her an enormous sum of money, enough to solve the young couple's money problems. She agonizes over the idea, Chad agonizes over the idea, and then they decide to do it.

The sin? Nora is to enter a playground, walk up to one of the little children, and punch him squarely in the face, while Chad films the whole thing for the Reverend's viewing pleasure. Nora does it, they collect their money, and then King hauls in a rather predictable array of moral aftershocks. And by that point, any reader of short fiction that isn't by schlock horror novelists with Nobel aspirations will see more problems than can be readily counted, starting with the biggest three: 1) the entire story is based on coincidence, 2) all three main characters in the story behave in ways no real person would ever behave, even for a moment while very drunk, and 3) the act the good reverend chooses for Nora to perform might be a crime, but it's sure as Hell not a sin.

1 & 2 are the real problems here, though: King might want to try his hand at mainstream fiction, and certainly everybody in America is entitled to try a little self-reinvention, but there's no getting around the fact that King's apprenticeship for writing conventional fiction is nearly 40 years of writing schlock horror novels in which lazy, shopworn contrivances of the worst ilk are standard reading fare, in every book, on every page. You can't snap your fingers and suddenly be a writer who didn't learn his trade that way - and no matter how many high school water polo teams King underwrites, he doesn't strike me as having one-thousandth the humility necessary to re-learn writing from the ground up.

And if he's not willing to do that, we're all going to see more variations on "Morality" from him - in Esquire, in The New Yorker, and who knows where else - "serious" tales of ethics and suburbs and characters lunging at three-dimensionality. None of it will be any good - how can it be, when all of it was learned in a candle-lit House of Wax? - but all of it will want to be, and when one of the top-selling novelists of the 20th century so loudly wants something, every reader is pulled into the melodrama of it.




And really, that same theme of overreaching finds its way into the "Fact" portion of the Penny Press this time around. In the latest GQ (the with a naked Sacha Baron Cohen on the cover, advertising his upcoming film, the most-hyped/least-funny film since, come to think of it, Borat), John Jeremiah Sullivan (think of that wedding! talk about schlock horror!) does his level best to write a serious, probing piece about a subject who was a walking punch line from the moment he first shuffled onto the public stage: Levi Johnston, the wavy-haired lantern-jawed bo-hunk who impregnated Bristol Palin, the idiot daughter of Sarah Palin, the idiot Alaska governor John McCain, in a desperately irresponsible gimmick-trick, picked to be his vice presidential candidate in the last election. The pick alone forced the majority of voters to confront the fact that McCain was just plain insane, and that probably cost him the election, and the entire world stepped back from the edge of an unthinkable abyss - but even before then, Levi and Bristol were "on the rocks," as the tabloids say, and once the votes were counted, the Palins pried him off the skin of their family like a bloated tick.



Cast off, cast out, no longer part of the apparently ongoing story of the Palins (Jeremiah Sullivan makes a horrifying offhand reference to a "2012 run"), and, touchingly, no longer allowed to be much part of the life of the child he engendered with Bristol - that's where this article finds young Levi. Jeremiah Sullivan meets up with him in small-town Alaska, where Levi does what can only be referred to as a sinful amount of bear-hunting but appears to have no job and no job prospects (beyond the offhand mention of a possible reality-show about hunting)(all these heart-stopping offhand mentions combine to make this piece considerably more frightening than King's story). Our author does a wonderful job of conveying what virtually every small town in Alaska makes a visitor feel:

It is a shithole surrounded by such loveliness. Stand there and blink back and forth, shutting your left eye, then your right. Left eye: spit of highway, aggressive proliferation of half-abandoned strip malls, a few roads dwindling off to little houses. Right eye: the mountains, the expanding sky, the shadowy crevasses, a bald eagle. Highway, strip malls, little houses; mountains, sky, crevasses, eagle. Highwaystripmallslittlehouses; mountainsskycrevasseseagle.

Both eyes: Wasilla.

And he's equally evocative on that sharp, nauseating moment in American history when all these various Wasilla people suddenly threatened to matter:

It takes some mental effort to recover the feeling of how much he seemed to mean at one time, and practically yesterday. Obama has made him seem kitschy already, has stolen his power to signify. Not presuming anything about one's politics - referring instead to the sheer dynamism of events since the election. We are a couple of beads further along the necklace of cultural time from Levi. We are post-Levi. It's decadent to think of him now. But the chemical traces remain of a plausibility structure inside which his very face seemed full of information and even warning. Something was happening to the country, it was splitting in two. Levi looked like a place where the ripping might start. We were laughing at him then too, of course - that was largely it. If McCain's choosing Palin had been cynical (as born out by their recoiling from each other in defeat), not until his embrace of Levi did it become farcical. .... We knew he was there only because it had been deemed worse for him not to be there. That gave him a curious magnetism. And John McCain, fine, he was trying to win a campaign, he's an opportunist. He's also a United States senator and a war hero, and there was something in how he greeted Levi - how for a second it mattered whether he greeted this boy, and in what manner - like an acknowledgment. Not of one man to another, exactly, but of one force to another. It was either the beginning or the end of something. Briefly recall when you didn't know which.

That's just about as good as hopped-up Red Bull deadline-prose gets, and the whole article shines with it. For the brief span of its pages, we can indeed recall when we walked around every day wondering very dark things about our own countrymen, urgently asking ourselves the same questions over and over again: Can't they see what's happening here? Can't they see what's at stake here? Are they REALLY going to treat the most important presidential election in modern memory like an evening of 'American Idol'? "Hey! The grumpy old guy picked a hottie hockey-mom who's JUST LIKE US!"

Then you stop reading, and you close the magazine, and reality reasserts itself. Fact separates from fiction and both start behaving themselves again: John McCain will never be president, Obama is alive, in charge, and still enjoying popularity in the polls. Sarah Palin will not, cannot ever be taken seriously as a candidate for national office, and apart from reading a very entertaining magazine article by John Jeremiah Sullivan, none of us needs to think about Levi Johnston at all.

Man's Men in the Penny Press!

The latest issue of Esquire features a six-page article on 26 skills every man should have, and I ask you: how could Stevereads be expected to ignore such a thing? Here's the list:

1. How to skin a moose (or any slaughtered game animal)
2. How to bet the horses (or any animal tortured into running around a track)
3. How to get a busy bartender's attention
4. How to give a good massage (to a woman, of course)
5. How to fell a tree
6. How to fillet a fish
7. How to buy a woman clothing (their suggestion: don't even try)
8. How to make eggs four ways (scrambled, baked, poached, and sunny side up)
9. How to Google efficiently
10. How to sew a button
11. How to console a crying woman (LOTS of wordage about handkerchiefs)
12. How to look good in a picture
13. How to calm a crying baby
14. How to curse well
15. How to parallel park (they specify 'like a man')
16. How to wire a ceiling fixture
17. How to make pancakes from scratch
18. How to stop a running toilet ("trip it"? Hee. Snort)
19. How to rock the man in the boat (hint: it's not about boating, although you can do it in a boat)
20. How to make a drink, "just for her"
21. How to carve a turkey
22. How to pick a ripe one
23. How to jump-start a car
24. How to get a table in a restaurant
25. How to kill an injured animal
26. How to shine a shoe

And there you have it, according to Esquire! Naturally, the list gave me some grave misgivings, and you can probably see why, right? There's the bigotry involved, of course: the implication couldn't be stronger that the one thing you've got to be first, in order to have ANY skills as a man, is heterosexual - if you're gay, the list implies, you really shouldn't even bother (except maybe for #7). This is annoying, certainly, and counter-factual: two of the seven most famous male TV chefs are gay ... they can probably handle # 1, 6, 8, 17, 21, 22, and 24 better than any Esquire reader; I'm pretty sure the fashion industry sports a couple of the gays - so # 7, 10, and 26 are probably co-opted; if I had to guess, I'd say more gay men than straight men can handle # 3, 4, 11, 12, 20, and 24 than straight men can; and # 19 comprises a full 75 % of any gay man's waking life (as opposed to 56 % among straight men).

But the problems with the list go deeper than this, because as bigoted as it is, it's one thing even more: stupid. Nowhere on this list is there even the faintest hint, the most distant suggestion, that a man, in order to BE a man, should be able to think. Hell, even feeling is absent (you merely have to simulate it for # 4, 11, 13, & 14). I know I should count my blessings that "How to smoke" and "How to fire a gun" weren't on the list, but still - surely an outline of manly criteria 99 % of which could be accomplished by a well-trained chimpanzee is off the mark? The country just elected a talented writer and genuine intellectual as president, and it doesn't look like Esquire even noticed: their list is situated squarely in the "from the gut" W. years, now hugely and damningly discredited.

So, without further ado, Stevereads presents an alternate list of 26 skills every person should have!

1. How to talk on a cell phone in public (hint: don't, ever, even in emergencies)
2. How to read a book (honestly, open-mindedly)
3. How to ask for directions
4. How to admit an honest mistake
5. How to embrace new things
6. How to uproot and discard old routines when they're no longer working
7. How to pay attention
8. How to CARE about things, rather than just riffing on them, douchebag-style
9. How to cultivate potted plants (NOT marijuana, dude!)
10. How to embrace a male friend (full-on clavicle-to-crotch! Bro-braces are for WIMPS)
11. How to listen to classical music
12. How to hate (virulently, with your balls, like you'll never need to take it back)
13. How to write (the REAL manly thing Hemingway did, dude)
14. How to threaten an SOB (calmly, matter-of-factly, and only once)
15. How to love (race, gender, age, species ... immaterial; completely blind)
16. How to be silly
17. How to needle and insult your friends (daily, lest they get ideas)
18. How to give a present (freely, with no thought of receipt)
19. How to give thanks for a present (verbally and audibly, not telepathically or mumbled)
20. How to board a subway car (AFTER the passengers get off, dammit)
21. How to respond when a car almost hits you (the finger, given slowly and solemnly)
22. How to respond when a car almost hits a friend of yours (kick the car. hard.)
23. How to eat meat (don't)(it had to suffer, a LOT, to become meat)
24. How to be a friend (go ask a dog)
25. How to help a friend move (the whole day, dammit - 3 hours is a gesture of contempt)
26. How to give a compliment (never hold one back, and always mean it)

Screeds and Hayseeds in the Penny Press!

The February issue of Esquire has that by now iconic Obama image on its cover, and more enjoyably, it has another crackerjack piece by Scott Raab, this one titled "Someday We'll All Look Back on This and Laugh," about the hyperkinetic financial analyst Jim Cramer.

The best thing about Raab's magazine pieces how hyperkinetic they are - he's one of only a handful of prolific periodical writers who remembers he's telling stories ... stories that have, or are supposed to have, a dramatic arc and impetus all their own, independent of their respective subjects. Way, way too many magazine pieces - even good ones, even ones I've praised here over the years - tend to overlook this first duty of any narrative, but Raab always remembers.

This particular piece, being about a guy who predicts market trends so he can advise people in how to invest their money, has, therefore, absolutely nothing to recommend it to my attention - nothing except the most important thing of all: a good writer can make anything interesting.

Raab is given some jealously-guarded time with Cramer (our writer is, as always, at his withering best when writing about the various PR flunkies doing the guarding), and Raab does a scrupulous job of profiling the man, but even so, the article left me with one impression clearer than all the others: Jim Cramer is insane. Not business bro-speak 'insane' (meaning 'intensely competitive' or 'wildly energetic'), but actually, clinically insane. I've never understood the allure of gambling, so financial investing has always been a walled-off mystery to me ... but even so, I finished the piece wondering how anybody could be dumb enough to take Cramer's advice on anything. If Raab's portrait is accurate, the guy free-associates self-aggrandizing thought-tidbits all day long, and what's worse: he never stops to think, about anything, ever. Who'd want to talk with such a person, let alone seek investment advice from him?


At one point in the piece, Raab buys a copy of John Kenneth Galbraith's The Great Crash 1929 and is properly awestruck:

So I buy and read the Galbraith book and almost wish I hadn't. It's all in there — every freaking thing that's going on right in front of my eyes, from the death plunge of overleveraged brokerage juggernauts to the assurances by the leaders of government and business that we've turned the corner and aren't really speeding our way to the poorhouse. The final paragraph — first published in 1955 — about how ignorance, self-interest, and complacency may someday, as in those years of fiscal carnage, enable a new group of free-market purists "who know that things are going quite wrong to say that things are fundamentally sound," spooks me bad enough that I start to stockpile daily ATM withdrawals from our credit-union savings account just in case.

(of course I urge all of you to buy and read all of Galbraith's books ... future generations will, so why shouldn't you?)

I was smiling and nodding through the entire piece, delighted once again to have my Esquire purchase price validated by this one essay ... nodding and smiling, that is, until I got to this:

The main lounge of the Iowa Memorial Union is packed so full that when the Mad Money crew tries to bring in some of the overflow crowd — dozens of sad sacks in a nearby room watching a TV monitor — the IMU manager orders them back out again. And even as the city-britches CNBCers protest — heaven forbid an empty span of bleachers finds its way into a TV shot — the overflows dutifully shuffle off, back to their exile, still smiling.

Ah, Iowa. Folks hereabouts play strictly by the rules — except, of course, for the athletic department. I know this because I used to live here. And work here. For seven years — seven years that felt like seven hundred. This lounge, with eleven hundred full-throated Cramericans roaring, jumping to their feet on cue, pumping their black-and-gold pom-poms, glowing with love, pride, joy, and sheer relief that somebody has come, even for one day, to relieve the soulless boredom of living in Iowa City ...

And suddenly a Star Trek-style wormhole opened up, and I found myself once again in that old, familiar position: agreeing to disagree with Scott Raab. Because of course he wasn't the only person living and working in Iowa City for seven years way back when, and some of us found it anything but 'soulless boredom.' How many times did I sit in that same IMU lounge, across a table from some earnest, well-muscled undergrad, urging him to read Herodotus or Tanizaki or Frank Conroy (and perhaps going to the bookstore next door and buying him copies)? And sadness, too, isn't boredom: I was sitting writing in a nearly-empty IMU lounge one morning idly half-listening to the big TV when Challenger was lost - the few of us sitting there just looked at each other, not knowing what to do or say.

And there were snowstorms, and indescribably beautiful high summer days, and road trips to tiny towns and to Chicago, and there were endless, rambling conversations, and there was the velvet air at sundown, scented by the richest soil on Earth ... there was the sloppy-oblivious Daily Iowan, and there were good friends. So it wasn't all 'soulless boredom.'

But that's just nit-picking! Raab's piece is fantastic - you should go to Esquire.com and read it in all its feisty, judging glory.

In the Penny Press!

Our reactions are all over the map in this week's Penny Press, ranging from delight to dark despair, with lots of local stops.

Sometimes the little things gave a spurt of delight. For intance, Esquire's new guide to casual style has a comment it's almost impossible not to like: "Justin Timberlake doesn't look quite as good as he thinks he does." Hee.

Other times, it's much bigger things that take the topspin right off the serve, as is the case in the latest New Yorker - it features two appalling things instead of one, probably because it's a double issue. The lesser of the two is John Updike starting off his review of a edition of the works of Flann O'Brien in pidgin Irish. Because, you know, Irish writers really don't have much to distinguish them other than how odd they talk. Jaysus.

The bigger of these two big things was yet another short story by Alice Munro, this one called 'Free Radicals.' Some of you may have noticed over the years that Munro is not one of our favorite authors. In the last decade, this contempt has become all the sharper (and all the sweeter) as more and more lazy critics have taken to calling Munro some variation of 'the greatest short story writer alive today' or (Gawd help us) 'a modern-day Maupassant.' We've had fewer and fewer converts to our age-old contention that Munro owes her fame to two factors that have nothing whatsoever to do with talent: she's stuck to just the one genre, and she's a woman. We guarantee you: if some talentless schmuck had started writing, say, really sucky one-act plays in the 1950s and was still doing it six decades later, he'd be called 'the greatest' too, even if his one-acts had grown even worse.

Such is not the case for Munro; her short stories have always been just exactly the same level of awful, and one presumes they always will be. 'Free Radicals' is exactly the same as every other Munro short story: it's plodding, soggy, doggedly quotidian, over-long, and completely void of any catharsis, insight, change, climax, or plot. Every character sounds the same as every other, and the whole thing is swathed in an amnesiatic fog that absolutely defies recall. If you can read 'Free Radicals' and then - right then - tell me what happens in it, I'll give you the hat off my head.

But don't just take our word for it! Here's the fourth paragraph of the present story, centering on a wife who's just lost her husband:

She hadn't had time to wonder about his being late. He'd died bent over the sidewalk sign that stood in front of the hardware store offering a discount on lawnmowers. He hadn't even managed to get into the store. He'd been eighty-one years old and in fine health, aside from some deafness in his right ear. His doctor had checked him over only the week before. Nita was to learn that the recent checkup, the clean bill of health, cropped up in a surprising number of the sudden-death stories that she was now presented with. "You'd almost think that such visits ought to be avoided," she'd said.

Even the most indulgent freshman composition teacher would feel compelled to savage such prose. Just look at all that's wrong with it, all the junk that's left hanging around the prose, all the equivocation, all those endless, suffocating pluperfect constructions. She hadn't had time to wonder about his being late - in other words, it never crossed her mind, so why mention it? And since some deafness in one ear isn't in any way life-threatening, what does its inclusion do except make a tedious sentence even moreso? And what's with the vaudeville impossibility of somebody draping themselves over a sidewalk sign to die? Ever hear or read of anybody doing that? And what about those last two sentences? At the beginning of the first sentence, Nita's learning about sudden-death stories is in the future, and by the end of the same sentence it's in the present. And by the end of the next sentence it's in the past. And Nita's final sentence has not one but two brake-locks on it, the almost-think and the ought-to-be. This is very, very bad prose - tortured and sloppy and obscure - and it goes on forever in 'Free Radicals,' and yet sure as sevens there are readers out there who'll slog through it and say, "Munro has done it again!" Actually, we here at Stevereads would say the same thing, but we'd mean it in a different way.

But our outrage over yet another Alice Munro slogfest is nothing compared to our outrage at Tom Chiarella's latest piece for that same issue of Esquire. It's called "Learning to Smoke," and it chronicles the author's first foray in the world of smoking, at the age of forty-six, as a story-gimmick.

We've seldom read a more disgusting piece of periodical literature, because Chiarella finds smoking wonderful, even the few bad side-effects he bothers to mention. The whole piece could have been ghost-written by an ad man from Big Tobacco (we're 100 percent sure it's emailed to every single person in the industry), only this is worse, because Chiarella is a very good writer.

His friends - even the tobacco addicts, especially the tobacco addicts - are horrified by his decision and warn him that it's not a game, that he'll become addicted. He happily assures them that even if he does, he's only going to pursue 'the lifestyle' for a month - after which, he'll just quit. He's aware that this quitting might be difficult and might involve some unpleasant symptoms, but that's OK - he wants to experience that too. The possibility that once addicted he might not be able to quit, even if he wants to, isn't mentioned in the piece. The possibility that, faced with the flat fact of that failure, he might start to rationalize, equivocate, and outright lie about this new thing in his life, sits on the piece like wet fog but is never addressed. Instead, the essay is a long love-letter to the oh-so-adult sublime pleasures of burning your own lungs. Take as one example a scene from the 'second week' of his experiment (the semi-quotes only come off if some completely impartial observer can tell me Chiarella no longer smokes - but such an observer would be lying, so it hardly matters). He and his girlfriend have just had a nice restaurant dinner, and suddenly, for the first time, he feels 'a faint pinging sound in the center of my chest.' His girlfriend asks if he's OK.

"I'm okay," I said. "It's just, I feel like, I don't know ..." I paused and swallowed to be sure this wasn't just some weird new need for more food. "I think I need a cigarette." She smiled and stood, held out her hand, and we went to the exit, stood on the handicap ramp, and smoked two American Spirits. She didn't like my smoking any better now, but she accepted it and even allowed herself to enjoy it in moments like these. Up and down the street, now blanketed by darkness, the streetlamps formed friendly circles of light, so it looked like a kind of orchard. People stood, one or two per light, out there smoking cigarettes, looking up quietly at the stars or the cars or the windows of houses and stores. "Wow," I said.

Yech - disgust prevents further quotation. The whole thing is like that, pretty prose enslaved in the praise of the ugliest thing humans have yet devised doing to themselves. Nowhere in the article is there any mention of some of the worst non-lethal effects of the addiction: the way hard mucus clogs the vocal chords and flattens the vocal register until all addicts have the same android raspy monotony; the jumpy, incessant clock-watching between doses (the addicts who breezily say something like 'oh, I don't even think about it most of the time' are lying their asses off); the sticky, chelatinous yellow armor-plating that coats the tongue; and most of all the pervasive reek that surrounds the addict in a ten-foot sac of nauseating stench at all times. Chiarella doesn't mention any of this stuff - his piece makes it seem as though smoking isn't much different from, say, chewing gum: easy to take up, easy to do lots of, and easy to stop. Revolting, that Chiarella would shill like this for a freelance gig.

Fortunately, all is not lost in the Penny Press! Over in the latest issue of New York magazine, Sam Anderson turns in a spiffy, first-rate review of Toby Barlow's wonderful new verse-novel called Sharp Teeth. Here's the opening paragraph of the piece, to give you a sample of the joys to come:

Let's say that you've recently polished off your local library's collection of vampire sonnets, and perhaps even flipped, with a melancholy hand, the final page of your older brother's three-volume haiku sequence about a marauding colony of Minotaurs - that you've exhausted, in other words, the literary exploration of monster subcultures written in obscure forms. Well, take heart. Toby Barlow's first book, Sharp Teeth, is a verse novel about werewolves. This makes it not only a decisive answer (nay!) to the age-old question 'Is long-form monster poetry dead?' but also a perfect marriage of form and subject: Both the werewolf and the verse novel (which lopes across the centuries from Pushkin to Browning to Vikram Seth) are shaggy hybrids that appear once in a blue moon and terrify everyone in sight.
Hee. As fun as that is to read, it's even more rewarding to re-read; that final sentence is the funniest damn thing we've read so far this year.


The whole piece is just as good, and to make matters even better, it's not misplaced praise: Sharp Teeth is a wonderful, fizzy joyride of a book, well worth your time when it comes out in paperback next year. We'll be sure to remind you.

Shot and incident in the Penny Press!

Much shot and incident, in the latest examples of the Penny Press to cross our desk!

In the letters page of the latest Esquire, for instance, there's a great deal of response to the profile of Robert Downey Jr written in the previous issue by none other than Scott Raab. One letter writer, Rocky Marcelle, has this to say:

Now I know why I have always lost women to guys like Downey. It's not just the clothes, it's the stories. So much fun and imagination. And Scott Raab, what a madman. The farting contest? I want to party with that cowboy.

As we here at Stevereads might have mentioned here or there, once upon a time, while most of you reading this were crawling around diapers, Scott Raab was delightedly throwing around rollicking pieces just like this Downey profile, in a po-dunk little corner of nowhere, settled comfortably amidst the cornstalks. And he was joined in the happy sunlight of all that fire-throwing by none other than yours truly - and our frequent commentator Locke. There's thinking, and there's writing, and then there's the absolutely habit-forming thrill of doing both in full public view, daring all and sundry to take their best shot. To those of you who've never done it, we can tell you this: there's nothing like it in the world (even back then, when responses came by something called 'snail-mail').

Scott was even then our great prototypical writer-at-large, savaging everything as he saw fit and cowing editors into whatever his latest hairbrained scheme was. In that same bygone era, Locke of course was our movie-guy - writing more perceptively and more hilariously about movies than anybody was then doing (how were we to know that movie-writing, as a genre, would steadily decline into inanity and prepaid boosterism? How were we to know, way back then, that we were publishing the last best movie criticism in the West?). And I? I don't know - even thirty years ago, Locke was calling my reviews 'ciceronian' (and not in a good way) ... I always managed to natter on and on about about something.

Like for instance an insufferable new book called Brother One Cell by a young American punk who got caught selling drugs in Korea and sentenced to a jail term. In the latest issue of GQ (which ran an excerpt from the book), there's an irate letter from yours truly:

You know what I looked for in Cullen Thomas' piece about his prison time in Korea? Guilt. Not frustration about getting caught. Not irritation with himself for being 'stupid.' Not self-congratulation about being 'strong' when he had to be. Guilt, over selling a drug that destroy's people's lives. Guilt, over trying to sell more of it. Some sense that what he did was not just risky but WRONG. I found no trace of what I was looking for. Thomas' judges were too lenient: they should have thrown away the key.

Elsewhere in the same issue, subject matters verge closer to our principal bailiwick here at Stevereads, namely reading. The magazine's editors ask five young writers to name their favorite books, in an attempt to 'update the canon.' This naturally smelled of blood in the water, so we sidled up close to the feature called 'The Seven Books Every Man Should Read.'

Of course the first name on the roster is Jonathan Lethem, the go-to guy of the Sudoku age. Although he has yet to write a good book himself, he's here free to re-shape the canon. His seven picks are these:

Dhalgren by Samuel Delany
The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead
The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro
The Black Prince by Iris Murdoch
Desperate Characters by Paula Fox
Light Years by James Salter
Neighbors by Thomas Berger

To give Lethem due credit, this is a very odd list, obviously a genuinely personal one. Largely misguided, but personal. The Black Prince is a decidedly off-key Murdoch novel, conceptual and not at all successful. Likewise Neighbors, not nearly Berger's best work. Desperate Characters and The Unconsoled are each, in their very different ways, elaborate pieces of junk. But Dhalgren is a weirdly intelligent masterwork of science fiction, and don't even get us STARTED on Christina Stead, whose magnificent, acerbic works are just begging for a major revival. The Man Who Loved Children is a book every single one of you bloodthirsty little ewoks should rush right out and read.

Next up is Jennifer Egan, who, like Lethem, has yet to write a good book (although she's come closer than he has, and with a lot fewer tries). Here's her list:

Underworld by Don DeLillo
A Flag for Sunrise by Robert Stone
The White Album by Joan Didion
The Known World by Edward Jones
Sometimes a Great Notion by Ken Kesey
Field Notes from a Catastrophe by Elizabeth Kolbert
Random Family by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc


This is a very confusing list - confusing because it, like Lethem's, is so obviously heartfelt ... and yet so hugely wrongheaded. Unlike Lethem, Egan doesn't manage even accidentally to include a genuinely good book (although Robert Stone's A Flag for Sunrise almost makes the grade), but you have to give her points for actually thinking about her choices.

The next name on the list is Patrick Somerville, whose short story collection Trouble is well worth your collective attention, being a very well-done debut story collection about ... well, about all the things young writers write about these days: angst, disillusionment, horniness, and the elusive suppleness of hope. He's a genius, but he's a YOUNG genius, and that curiously informs his list:

Jesus' Son by Denis Johnson
Music for Torching by A.M. Homes
Like Life by Lorrie Moore
The Book of Daniel by E.L. Doctorow
Masters of Atlantis by Charles Portis
Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World by Donald Antrim
Civilwarland in Bad Decline by George Saunders

If we ignore the obligatory genuflections to Homes and Moore, this is a fairly optimism-inducing list. Not only does Somerville give individual write-ups to Johnson's curious little book and Saunders' great one (about Civilwarland in Bad Decline he writes: "...I was introduced to an entirely new kind of fiction, one that seemed to be both extraordinarily literary when it had to be, yet unlike what I had read in college, clearly steeped in our time and culture and dedicated to a rich satirical tone that concealed its political acuity with enormous humor"), not only does he mention Doctorow's The Book of Daniel, one of that author's best books, but how grateful can we be for that nod to Charles Portis, one of the 20th Century's greatest neglected geniuses?

Our next young luminary is Sam Lipsyte, whose list is doubly disappointing - he's either intentionally picking obscure authors of modest weight or else he's following the hipster party line:

Airships by Barry Hannah
Florida by Christine Schutt
Last Evenings on Earth by Roberto Bolano
George Mills by Stanley Elkin
Dog Soldiers by Robert Stone
Stories in the Worst Way by Gary Lutz
Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy

Nothing there to really detain us, except to point out that when Lipsyte becomes the 9,788th person to parrot Harold Bloom's misguided veneration of Blood Meridian (a decidedly minor work), he's not doing his own intellectual credibility any favors.

The last name of the list of canon-revampers is Arthur Phillips, who more than anyone else on this short list bids fair to become a great writer in due time. His list has decided highs and lows:

The Assault by Harry Mulisch
The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster
Et Tu, Babe by Mark Leyner
The End of Faith by Sam Harris
Disgrace by J.M. Coetze
Pastoralia by George Saunders
The Engineer of Human Souls by Josef Skvorecky

This last list is notable for two amazing inclusions: The Assault, which is short and harrowing and one of the best works of fiction to come out of World War II, and Pastoralia, a genuinely fantastic short story collection by a sinfully young author.

So we can infer from all GQ's shennanigans that the canon is relatively safe from revamping, since the Visigoths are mostly busy getting stoned.

And speaking of which! Our last port of call in this installment of In the Penny Press is a happy one: in the latest issue of the Atlantic, Christopher Hitchens reviews Zachary Leader's new biography of Kingsley Amis, and the piece is a gossipy, erudite delight. It serves, as nothing has in a very long time (he'll be living down that 'Why Women Aren't Funny' fiasco of a piece for some time, we think), as a reminder of why we all liked Hitchens' writing in the first place.

Here is a Hitchens completely at ease, straining at no gnats, phoning nothing in. Perhaps it helps if he personally knows his subject matter - it certainly helps this piece: it's heavy-laden with quotable anecdotes and reveries (Leader's book is hardly mentioned, and as gentlemanly payment for this abuse, Hitchens roundly praises it when it does come up).

Anthony Powell once said great men of letters can never be friends with each other. His own life contradicted this (a free book - shut up, Kevin - to the first of you who can volunteer the name of the great man of letters with whom Powell was himself lifelong friends), and Amis' life certainly did: Hitchens' piece is so shot through with boozy, nostalgic love for his subject that the reader comes away wishing HE would write a biography of Amis - or at least write a hefty memoir of his own, if fifty or sixty different weekly hackwork deadlines didn't preclude it.

Here's a sample, one among many:

Any dolt can see the connection between the mother-smothered Amis and the later unstoppable tit-man who was also a slave to Bacchic overindulgence. (Patrick in 'Difficulties with Girls' has a reverie about the ideal female: 'wise, compassionate, silent and with enormous breasts': If this young lady had lived in a single bedroom upstairs from a pub, Amis might have questioned his own stiff disbelief in God).

Say what you want about Hitchens - and we here at Stevereads have said plenty -but that very nearly rises to the level of song. We want so bad for ALL of Hitchens to be like this - scrupulously honest, endlessly confiding, knowledgeable in ways only somebody on the front lines of the events in question could be, and above all humble in the face of history.

The high-paid right-wing puppet/commenteer version of our hero appears to have put paid to that more faithful version, but you never know. The urge to make a living and keep making one is, by and large, a thing of youth - or at least of desperate, misspent middle age. Despite his disasterous personal habits, there's hope yet that we will all be treated to the wise old age of Christopher Hitchens.

in the penny press! dodos and Ramsey Clark!

Interesting tidbits in the penny press this time around, starting with the latest issue of Esquire.

We here at Stevereads have a certain fond indulgence for Esquire - it's resolutely moronic and reductive in tone (its endless style tips and lifestyle guides only reinforce what the rest of us have suspected all along: that all those interchangeable-looking young business-suited drones we see crowded at the crosswalks on our way to work really ARE interchangeable - not that they're extremely similar to each other, but that they are, in fact, the SAME PERSON, cheaply mimeographed hundreds of times), but it has the financial clout to commission some first-rate pieces. And since hunting for first-rate pieces is the first duty of truffle-sniffing in the penny press, we must go everywhere, even to the depths of cash-and-titty-worshipping magazines like Esquire.

And it's not all uphill! Every issue of Esquire is guaranteed to produce something eminently worth reading. Fortunately for the rest of you, we here at Stevereads do the soup-straining.

One quick bit of fun comes from the always-reliable Answer Fella, who gets a peculiarly theological question: a reader asks if a cloned human being would have a soul.

The Answer Fella gathers testimony from various experts and comes down in the affimative. To quote one of them: "If humans have souls, then clones will have them, too."

Well, not hardly. As many of you know, we here at Stevereads were trained in our youth by Jesuits - and so we are, in young adulthood, completely atheistic. There are no gods, and all their appurtenances are and always have been mortal folly.

But.... that having been said, if we allow the premise, the Answer Fella and his experts are still well and truly wrong.

The problem lies in an all-consuming faith in the powers of science, alas. These experts say that if you reproduce the biology with complete fidelity, the soul must surely follow. The fallacy of this is obvious: it mistakes the soul for being a PRODUCT of biology.

Of course, from a theological standpoint (we have our own experts on this, in addition to knowing the enemy's territory quite well in our own right), this misses one crucial point: the soul is not a product of biology. It comes from God - it is the singular gift that God gives to human (and, according to Holy Scripture, only human) beings. It's not biological - it, like God, stands outside the biological process.

Fortunately, not everything in this issue is fraught with theological implications. For instance, John Richardson's wonderful piece "How the Attorney General of the United States Became Saddam Hussein's Lawyer" is purely secular, a delightful piece of research and extrapolation regarding former attorney general Ramsey Clark.

Before reading this article, we here at Stevereads would have assumed the present age had long since forgotten Ramsey Clark. Once upon a time, in a long-lost age, he was one of a brace of fearless greyhounds in the kennel of the Kennedys. He caught from them the bug of doing good work, and he pushed on with that good work even after they were gone (and new boss, Lyndon Johnson, was, shall we say, considerably less interested in doing good work).

Surprised therefore at finding Ramsey Clark in the latest issue of Esquire, of all places, we dispatched one of our Stevereads interns to conduct a thorough search of the Interweb in order to confirm the stuff we read in the article.

Turns out it's all true. He's been defending Nazis, the PLO, Lyndon Larouche ... and Saddam Hussein. And there in the article is Clark's face, once matinee-handsome, now suddenly old. Through the rice-paper skin can be seen one last flickering of the light that was Camelot.

Ramsey Clark is a virtuous man, but this has become an almost unbelievably wicked world. He looks like an anachronism, jetting from one self-evidently guilty client to another, always self-effacing, always quietly reposing his deepest faith in the rule of law. Robert Bolt's Thomas More in 'A Man for All Seasons' was written with a different person in mind, but his most famous bit of dialogue might well have been spoken by Clark.


It's no mystery in our current world that pundits and commentators would feel free to mock and malign Clark. We live in a vicious, 'Mission Accomplished' world in which the powerful routinely break the law, where they're the FIRST to break it, and then sneer transparent lies to a fawning media.

We here at Stevereads wish him well. There's nothing he can do about the way of the world, except keep doing what he's always done, even though virtually nobody believes in doing it anymore.

We took that slight feeling of disenchantment with us when we moved over to the latest issue of New York magazine, which (amidst its usual gathering of great stuff) featured an article in which writer William Georgiades tries Allen Carr's celebrated 'method' to quit smoking. Georgiades is a smart, savvy writer, so we were happy to watch him explode the manipulative myth that Carr's book has been slinging since its publication.

You don't need to do much more than attach 'the easy way' to ANYTHING to make it bestseller in America. 'Lose Weight in 10 Days - And Eat as Much as You Want!'- and such titles crowd the bookstore shelves and trumpet the quintessentially American mindframe that results should never be bought at the cost of work - surely nowadays, a pill or a program will suffice?

Contrary to the jejune speculations afloat here at Stevereads (that we were tormented with cigarettes as a small child, or even that we ourselves were once addicted), our hatred of tobacco addicts stems from the particular TACK they've always taken in rationalizing their addiction, the particular TACK the 10 billion-dollar tobacco adverstising industry always takes - i.e. that tobacco addiction is the THINKER'S addiction, that standing outside philosophically dragging on a cigarette is somehow synomymous with ... well, with pausing, with re-assessing, and most of all with ADULTHOOD. Those bitter minutes we adults take outside, burning our own lungs and bestenching ourselves for hours afterwards, are what SEPARATE us from more shallow thinkers, goes the advertising. We're not callow anymore; we realize that THIS is the price we pay for being adult, artistic, realistic, REAL.

Needless to say, any pretence that presumes superiority is guaranteed to tick us off (the typical pothead assertion that they hear music 'better' when high comes close to being the same thing). So we were glad to read Georgieades tear the program to pieces. It doesn't work for Georgiades, and his backgrounding for the article reveals how many others have been similarly let down. This only makes sense: tobacco addiction is the fiercest of all addictions to even barely control, much less 'beat.' Now if only 'The Easy Way to Stop Smoking' would stop selling so well ...

And lastly, over in the New Yorker, there's an interesting article by Ian Parker on the long, strange afterlife of the famously extinct great Mauritius dodo. Parker very gently, very forgivingly writes about the eccentrics and, to speak plainly, the lunatics who staff the 2006 Mauritius Dodo Expedition.

The picture is that of a hopeless muddle, a pathetic tangle of island politics, petty scientific rivalries, and of course the money-guys getting everything wrong (at one point they half-seriously joke about cloning a dodo, and you can just hear all the scientists within earshot cringe).

The story is ultimately sad - reading Parker's piece, you get the distinct impression that it's way, way too late for any kind of clear-eyed science to take root on Mauritius. But then, the dodo's story is a sad one anyway - you picture these big fat birds so docile and unaccustomed to mankind that they were all dead within just a century of their first contact with humans.

But there's one silver lining in the story: it gives us here at Stevereads a chance to offer a shameless plug for one of the best science fiction short stories ever written: "The Ugly Chickens" by the criminally underrated Howard Waldrop. We have yet to quiz our interns on whether or not this gem of a story is available on the Interweb, but if it is, oh, you should all read it! It's a smart, playful, pitch-perfect exercise in adumbration and irony.

Needless to say, if the story ISN'T available online, we here at Stevereads will provide as many copies for my little guppies as they require ... I am, as always, their humble servant ...