Super-Exposure in the Penny Press!

Readers who might once have been irritated by the sight of a topless Rob Lowe on the cover of Vanity Fair (the top item in a strong Penny Press week) will, like all right-thinking individuals in the world, instantly recall his fantastic stint as Sam Seaborn on the still-intensely-missed The West Wing and crack a grudging smile instead. Lowe, it appears, has written some kind of book about his various adventures in Hollywood. I haven't checked yet to see if it includes any wistful anecdotes about his tenure on one of the best TV shows of all time; the excerpt in this month's VF is about his much younger days, when he starred in Francis Ford Coppola's "The Outsiders" with a whole team of fellow Hollywood he-boys, all under the watchful gaze of their passionate (and self-evidently insane) director. While it's fun to watch Lowe contort himself to be nice-guy diplomatic rather than outright calling the young Tom Cruise a robotic authority-douche, neither the grossly overpraised book nor the soppy, ham-handed movie has ever interested me, so I quickly roamed away in search of greener pastures.

Luckily, this month's issue had plenty. There was a bitterly, sinus-clearingly angry shout-piece by Joseph Stiglitz about the gigantic gap between the top wealthiest 1 percent of Americans and everybody else. This is by a wide margin the angriest piece I've read in Vanity Fair in many, many years. Stiglitz rehearses the starkest inequities in America's financial landscape:

Economists long ago tried to justify the vast inequalities that seemed so troubling in the mid-19th century - inequalities that are but a pale shadow of what we are seeing in America today. The justification they came up with was called "marginal-productivity theory." In a nutshell, this theory associated higher incomes with higher productivity and a greater contribution to society. It is a theory that has always been cherished by the rich. Evidence for its validity, however, remains thin. The corporate executives who helped bring on the recession of the past three years - whose contribution to our society, and to their own companies, has been massively negative - went on to receive large bonuses. In some cases, companies were so embarrassed about calling such rewards "performance bonuses" that they felt compelled to change the name to "retention bonuses" (even if the only thing being retained was bad performance). Those who have contributed great positive innovations to our society, from the pioneers of genetic understanding to the pioneers of the Information Age, have received a pittance compared to those responsible for the financial innovations that brought our global economy to the brink of ruin.

He ends up sounding a warning to the super-rich that their days might end in a public uprising of a kind not seen in America since Shays' Rebellion - the warning is the only major flaw in the piece. It forgets that sage line from "1776": Most people with nothing would rather protect the possibility of becoming rich than face the reality of being poor." Comparatively few Libyans or Egyptians want to be military despots (I hope, anyway), so they have no ideological restraint in rising up against military despots. But virtually everybody in America - especially every young person - wants to be a plutocratic bastard who can buy a jet but can't quickly recall his kids' names. As long as that's true, the super-rich in the United States have nothing to fear from the common folk they're disinheriting.

After the fire and brimstone of Stiglitz, it was curiously peaceful to wade into Christopher Hitchens' piece on the debt Western society owes to the stately cadences of the King James Bible. It's a piece without surprises (we've read many similar things done on this, the anniversary of the publication of that epochal work), unless its own existence counts - these new long pieces from Hitchens can't help but be viewed as extremely literary progress reports on the state of Hitchens' illness. Encouraging progress reports, since for a while there last year it looked as if he wouldn't be doing much of this kind of work again. I hadn't realized until I saw this piece and his last one just how much I'd miss them if they were gone forever. And it's interesting that he's keeping up with his reading, although I imagine that would be the last thing to go in any case:

The rack and the rope were not stinted for dissenters, and eventually Tyndale himself was tracked down, strangled, and publicly burned. (Hilary Mantel's masterpiece historical novel, Wolf Hall, tells this exciting and gruesome store in such a way as to revise the shining image of "Saint" Thomas More, the "man for all seasons," almost out of existence. High time, in my view. The martyrdoms he inflicted on others were more cruel and irrational than the one he sought and found for himself).

Much less satisfying was James Wolcott's tired screed against superhero movies, which consists of him whining about how loud and confusing they all are, for all the world as if he were a crotchety 90-year-old who just wants the grandkids to settle down:

For all of the tremendous talent involved and the technical ingenuity deployed, superhero movies go at us like death metal: loud, anthemic, convoluted, technocratic, agonistic, fireball-blossoming, scenery-crushing workloads that waterboard the audience with digital effects, World War IV weaponry, rampant destruction, and electrical-flash editing.

This quintessential complaint of the elderly - wanting things to be different from the dictates of their own natures - is unlikely to yield a Bergman superhero movie any time soon; I'll just have to hope that instead Wolcott regains his sense of fun in time for the onslaught he's so correct in predicting.

The New York Review of Books, as always, provides a corrective to that kind of complaining. There's nothing quite as restorative as literary journalism done really, really well, and since I myself gravitate toward all things historical, The NYRB can often get my tail wagging - as in this latest issue, where the indomitable Gordon Wood reviews two books on John and Abigail Adams and Sean Wilentz reviews Edmund Morris' Colonel Roosevelt. Both pieces are thoughtful, detailed, and wonderfully assured, which is tough enough to do when reviewing a contemporary novel that any schmoe off the street might pick up and enjoy ("what's it about" will usually cover 99 % of their readerly needs) and is bloody murder to pull off when writing about history, about which the average reader neither knows nor knows to care. Reviewing works of history is doubly tricky: you've not only got to give your review-readers enough background on the book so they'll appreciate your observations about it, you've also got to give them enough background on all of human history so they'll know what the Hell you're going on about. Both Wood and Wilentz do a great job at this every time they turn out a review - it's an inspiration.

Of course, since nobody reads history it's those fiction-reviews that keep the show on the road, and they, too, very often elicit inspiring performances. Over in the London Review of Books, for instance, Adam Mars-Jones (easily the coolest reviewer-name we'll see today) out-does every other writer in the issue by turning in a fantastic piece on Philip Hensher's new novel King of the Badgers. This is a classic case of the review being every bit as interesting, fun, and well-written as the book it's reviewing, a contemporary novel about a crime that might have been committed in a benighted seaside town. Mars-Jones concentrates a chunk of his review on the novel's gay characters, a discussion he opens in the most inviting way, by highly literary rambling:

For a straight writer to have a gay hero is highly unusual ...The most famous and successful venture in homosexual ventriloquism by a novelist is still Anthony Burgess's Earthly Powers. I had doubts about the book when it came out in 1980, disliking the easy equation of homosexuality with cowardliness, even though this was an equation accepted by many homosexuals of the generation of Burgess's octogenarian narrator, Kenneth Toomey. Terrence Rattigan was surprised to find during the war that he was brave in an ordinary way. Out of this realisation came his interest in such non-cowardly homosexuals as T. E. Lawrence and Alexander the Great.

Mars-Jones returns to this subject of 'writing gay' all through his long and fantastic review, including a great little bit on the imagined popular reception of the 1950s novels of Angus Wilson:

Wilson was running the risk of having his novels labelled sordid and unwholesome. Awkward breakfast-table conversations were on the cards, with the brigadier's wife saying brightly, 'Doesn't he do all those spivs and pouffs well?' and her husband muttering: 'Damn sight too well, if you ask me.' If he had put more homosexual reality into the book [Anglo-Saxon Attitudes], it would either have been rejected by publishers or else approached by reviewers with gas masks, pomanders and tongs.

And it's entirely fitting that right there in the midst of the best review in this issue of the LRB there's a big, beautiful ad for ... none other than Open Letters Monthly! Where readers will find many excellent reviews every single month! The ad was superbly designed by Greg Waldmann and features a generous quote from the always-discerning Scott Esposito ... and best of all, it's sitting right there, in the middle of another great review journal. The air of confraternity is salubrious, to say the least - and if the appearance of such an ad should move writers like Adam Mars-Jones and his most talented peers to peruse Open Letters, well, so much the better.

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!