Category: Reviewed

I've seen all sorts of reportorial disclosures in my day, but Salon book editor Hillary Frey unleashes a curveball in her complete evisceration of James Frey's A Million Little Pieces. Two paragraphs in, she says the Oprah-crowned memoirist "shares my father's name but is no relation." Shares my father's name? Are we working towards a minimum word count or something?

At any rate, her trashing of the book is an interesting about face for Salon; two years ago, Louis Bayard called A Million Little Pieces "the most scalding account of addiction in recent memory" with "a rolling, pulsing style that really moves -- an acquired taste, perhaps, but undeniably striking." Hillary Frey, on the other hand,just sees James Frey's prose as "a Kerouacian, expletive-laced, bare-bones kind of writing that eschews punctuation and radiates machismo," and asks, "Is this even writing?" She also sneers at his now-legendary interview with the New York Observer, which Bayard quotes more extensively, tempering his criticisms with literary sympathy.

The bigger problem for Hillary, though, is that she just can't get as excited about Oprah chatting with a nonfiction writer as she did when novelists were invited into the studio. Is Oprah's book club "losing its identity as a literary feature," or is one book too little data to predict a trend? What do you think?

Over at The Book Standard, Adam Langer assembles a motley crew of newspaper book editors to talk about -- oh, the usual stuff: how many books they get a week, how many get ignored, and what they really, really don't want to see ever again:

Adam Langer: What sorts of books do you receive that you would never, ever, ever assign for review?

Arthur Salm: Self-help. Romance. Self-published (don't EVEN get me started). Business guru. Thrillers with covers depicting a dagger plunged through either a swastika or a hammer & sickle.

Greg Langley: Self-help.

Sam Hodges: We get a lot of diet, health, exercise and business books, though we never review them. If the author is local, I might do a column or feature.

Jeff Salamon: I receive plenty of Harlequin romances and other tawdry-looking mass-market paperback romance lines, self-help books, business advice books and narrowly targeted religious books that I have never assigned and have no plans to assign. But I am loathe to say “never, ever, ever, ever, ever” because if one of my freelancers said to me, “Hey, I’d really like to look at the state of the modern Harlequin romance novel (or business advice book or ‘How to organize your life’ book),” I’d probably tell him or her to go for it.

John Mark Eberhart: 99 percent of self-help books evoke no critical response from me at all. I think many of them are poorly written and some are actually dangerous. Some people are interested in them, though, so what tends to happen at this newspaper is we try to find other ways to cover the high-profile ones, without doing a review. In short, though, I don't spend my freelance money on them.

I guess the self-help romance novel would make their collective heads explode on sight.

"Herewith, in consultation with my fellow scribes, I offer a cheat sheet to some of the worst reviews that a critic can write. Let's call them 'The Seven Deadly Reviews.'"

The London Times talks to writers about their most vicious reviews, written or received. John Banville recounts being reviewed by a critic who "would review books on the basis of the author’s photograph on the back cover"; Ben MacIntyre, the victim of a cruel review by John Carey, remembers "plotting complicated ways of murdering [the] Professor"; and A.N. Wilson recalls meeting a writer he reviewed who could quote the entire nasty thing by heart.

The real fun, though, comes at the article's end, where Michiko Kakutani votes writers off the island:

WHAT KAKUTANI SAID ABOUT...

The Spooky Art
by Norman Mailer

The effect of reading the book straight through is like going on a very long bus ride over a bumpy road, sitting next to a garrulous raconteur who never takes a nap and never pauses for breath and who seems to have no internal editor or censor in his head.

Magic Seeds
by V. S. Naipaul

Mr Naipaul's contempt for all the people he has created in this novel makes for a mean, stingy book — a book full of judgmental pronouncements and free-floating rage, and sadly bereft of insight, compassion or wisdom.

Now Is The Time To Open Your Heart
by Alice Walker

If this novel did not boast the name of Alice Walker, who won acclaim some two decades ago with The Color Purple, it’s hard to imagine how it could have been published. It is a remarkably awful compendium of inanities.

The Historian
by Elizabeth Kostova

Praise abounds for Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian, the "Dracula-da Vinci Code hybrid" that purpotedly landed its first-time author a whopping $2 million advance. Salon's Laura Miller tacitly approves the high cost, calling the debut "a fine Bordeaux to Dan Brown's overcaffeinated Diet Coke." USA Today, meanwhile, asserts that "Kostova may have outdone Stoker." And the Boston Globe assures "lovers of the new genre of bibliophile mysteries" that they "will find much to cozy up to."

Occasionally, though, critics find that Kostova's prose amounts to nothing more than a (requisite vampire joke; sorry) pain in the neck. "The vampire's power to inflict misery pales beside that of the book's contorted narrative structure," writes the Times' Janet Maslin. Weighing in at more than 600 pages, "even the undead," apparantly, "can be talked to death."

A Long Way Down
by Nick Hornby

Either to ban the material to another medium entirely, or to help bump readers' cultural trajectories just a couple degrees shy of future impact, reviewers can't refrain from calling Nick Hornby's latest "a screenplay on dry ice, disguised as a story-device novel" (Slate), or, more straight-forwardly, "a formulaic idea for a cheesy made-for-television movie" (the NYT).

More insulting, still, to A Long Way Down's credentials is how much air-time -- and glee -- each review devotes to the possible adaptation's casting. Hugh Grant and Keira Knightley? suggests Slate. And maybe the ever-tasteful Brenda Blethyn as Maureen? The Times, even less a fan than Slate is, proposes "a younger Tom Selleck," "Shannen Doherty on speed," and -- here's the real blow to the nuts -- "David Schwimmer."

Only the L.A. Times likes the book well enough ("[It conveys] an earnest, sincere belief in the humanity of others without becoming [...] fake.") to glance at its accompanying media kit. If only others had been so thorough, they might know an adaptation is already underway, starring Johnny Depp.

Specimen Days
by Michael Cunningham

Depending on your reviewer, Specimen Days is either an "unsettling hodgepodge" (The Plain Dealer) filled with "the kind of choices people make only on the planet Literature" (Newsday) or a "brave new novel" (USA Today), "as ambitious as it is generous" (The NY Observer), and "overflowing with smartness" (Boston Globe).

Critics find themselves especially divided over Cunningham's appropriation of Walt Whitman. "Leaves of Grass feel like [an afterthought] grafted onto the tales ... in an effort to lend them extra philosophical weight," writes the Times' Kakutani. Newsday agrees that "Cunningham, a congenitally melancholy writer, has no affinity for Whitman":

Some characters appear to have a form of Tourette syndrome that causes them to declaim Whitman involuntarily. But these quotations stick out of the delicate prose like a tuba in a string quartet.

L.A. Observed has the goods on Steve Wasserman's resignation from the L.A. Times Book Review, confirming rumors previously posted on GC.

According to an in-house memo from higher ups at the L.A. Times, "Steve ... informed us of his decision several weeks ago, but characteristically offered to remain through the recent Times Festival of Books." Furthermore: "The search for Steve's successor already is under way, and an announcement regarding that appointment will be made soon."

According to a press release also posted by L.A. Observed, Wasserman will be relocating to NY, where he will become Director of Kneerim & Williams at Fish & Richardson P.C., a literary agency whose rep'd authors include Brad Meltzer, Stephen Greenblatt, Joseph Ellis, and E.O. Wilson.

Background Reading:
-"L.A. 's Challenge to The New York Times," Columbia Journalism Review
-"L.A.'s Battle of the Books," Salon
-"Book Journalist Roundtable," bookreporter.com

Is Harry Potter doing it with Ron Weasley?
You might well ask ... if you're NAMBLA. Fan fiction might be the more appropriate medium for NAMBLA (short for the North American Man/Boy Love Association), but the website mostly occupies itself with book reviews that -- like a twisted session of Recovered-Memory Therapy -- unearth authors' "repressed" storylines, buried desires, and bested intentions.

Thank God I'm not a guy, because the thought of NAMBLA reviewing my semi-autobiographical debut would never let me write one.

Web rumors of Steve Wasserman's imminent departure from the Los Angeles Times Book Review are, it turns out, more hopeful than factual.

LA residents have been grumbling for some time about Wasserman's Book Review; and, as expected, rumors of Wasserman's departure prompted a number of online hallelujah's. Writer Tod Goldberg blogged that "Wasserman's exit from the LA Times [might] auger a shift towards a more vibrant sense of reviewing." Similarly, TEV's Mark Sarvas called the possible departure "a golden opportunity for the LA Times to seize and to refashion this section into something that reflects the vibrant and burgeoning literary culture in this city."

"Once a week," Mark continues,

the LA Times hits our doorstep with a truly sickening thud (we only take it on Sundays), and once a week we extract this limp, anemic, gasping thing that claims to be a Book Review.  But it isn't really, hasn't been one for as long as we've been reading.

But he told me that he felt the mission of the Book Review was to educate people about what they should be reading... which wasn't mysteries and thrillers.

His smug superiority might have been easier to take if he didn't spend most of our lunch drooling over the fact that Brian Grazer was at the next table.

Wasserman came to the LAT eight years ago after a career at Times Books and NY publishing, bringing a flash of intellectualism to the paper. But he has also reportedly had a number of run-ins with supervisors who saw the section he ran as being overly highbrow. With the recent announcement that Wasserman would report to longtime Times-er Tim Rutten, sources describe conditions which could precipitate a departure. "If this did happen, I think a lot of people wouldn't be surprised. Some might even ask why it didn't happen sooner," said one literary insider.

But it sounds like even PW finds its fact-checking dispiriting, as it goes on to insist that Wasserman has actually "[left] the door open."

Asked whether he would predict that he would be at the helm of the L.A. Times Book Review in three months, he said, "I live in Southern California. The sun shines every day. The palm trees stand all. But a Magnitude Eight can strike at any moment. It would be reckless in the extreme to make any predictions."

Occasionally, a reviewer's wit makes it hard to distinguish between a bad book (unintentionally ridiculous) and a good book (self-consciously ridiculous). So, yes, we know Choire Sicha's a good writer, but what I want to know is if JT Leroy isn't. (I could read Leroy myself, but my shrink says I can cut my daily sessions down to weekly if I stop reading writers in my age group.)

From Sicha's Washington Post review:

In Leroy's bitty new novella, Harold's End, a wary, hopeless boy named Oliver is plucked from San Francisco's infamous Polk Street hustler huddle. Plumped up in the Castro district, in the home of an older man named Larry, he is given hamburgers, the best heroin available, and a pet snail named Harold [... intended for ...] an evening of non-negotiated scatological play.