Category: Book reviews

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September giveaway: Isadora by Amelia Gray

*** Winner selected! Congratulations to Isaly in Fort Worth, Texas! ***

I’m one of those people who don’t function well when there’s a lot of drama going on in life, yet I often find myself pulled towards it, and to people who go out of their way to seek it out. I think many people are this way — which explains why Isadora Duncan, with her brief, wayward life, provokes such fascination in the public imagination.

Widely considered the mother of modern dance, Isadora had quite the dramatic life, traveling all over the world to live, teach, and perform, flouting social mores to take on many lovers, and finally, dying tragically at 49 when her scarf got caught in the wheels of a car she was riding.

Many biographies have been written about Isadora, but Amelia Gray’s fictionalized account of Isadora’s life — plainly titled Isadora and published earlier this year by FSG — focuses on a lesser known period — when Isadora’s two young children drowned in a car that lurched into the Seine River. The historical novel follows Isadora through the time after the accident as she grieves, growing unpredictable, ascerbic, and mentally unhinged.

It’s a gorgeously-told story of a downward spiral. Isadora goes to the Greek island of Corfu to recouperate — where she struts around nude, urinates in public, and eats her children’s cremains: “It has come to be that I can eat only when the flavor is attended by the subtle ash of the children in my mouth.”

Yet she retains her wit, and her incisive observations of humanity. Of her skeevy doctor, Isadora muses: “The silver tray of his heart holds two brown tincture bottles, each offering their own opiate. The first is marked Desire and the other Virtue; one clouds the mind and the other turns the stomach, but they have the same general effect in the end.”

The novel is actually written from four perspectives: Isadora, her lover Paris Singer (the wealthy son of the Singer sewing machine magnate), her sister Elizabeth, and Elizabeth’s lover Max. Each protagonist is uniquely vulnerable — and insufferable — preoccupied with their individual hopes and self-pity and senses of entitlement. Yet it’s hard not to be drawn to them, selfish as they may be. Elizabeth’s constant emotional repression, for example, is especially touching. She consoles herself through lonely times by gorging on rich food, “and hid[es] happiness from the others so they wouldn’t suspect her for it.” When she writes a new lover, she edits and re-edits her letter, excising all allusions to desire, herself, to home, until all that’s left is a single sentence: “R — Can you picture the morning?”

Isadora is the kind of book that makes me want to wallow and revel in despair, numbness, unprovoked aggression, self-loathing — all the habits and emotions I generally try to run away from. It also makes me want to live bigger, less afraid of what may become of me. “What use is there to life and love without the mystery of circumstance?” the fictional Isadora says. What indeed?

I’m excited to be giving away a copy of Isadora to my readers! All current email subscribers will be automatically entered to win one copy. Subscribe now if you’re not yet getting my occasional newsletters.

For a second chance to win, comment on this post below with the title of the last historical novel you’ve read. The giveaway closes September 30, 2017 at 11:59 pm PST.

Come back mid-month to read a Five Firsts interview with Amelia Gray.

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August book reviews: Mothers, lovers, and our multiple selves

Brief reviews of books by contemporary authors I read this month — along with photos of what I ate while reading. The list is ordered by the level of my enjoyment:

Person/a by Elizabeth Ellen (Short Flight/Long Drive Books, 2017)

“I click on the link as a way of saying hi. I click on the link as a way of saying I hate you and I love you and I wish we’d never met and I wish you were dead and I am sick and I wish I didn’t love you.”
*
It’s a strange and thrilling experience, reading as a finished book what you once read in rough manuscript form. Last summer, I read a draft of Elizabeth Ellen’s novel-in-progress while at a residency at The Anderson Center. At that time, the manuscript — a highly autobiographical work about a short-lived affair that turns into a years-long obsession — was less than 300 pages long. I devoured the whole thing in a night and sent her some comments. Full review here —

Mothers and Other Strangers by Gina Sorell (Prospect Park Books, 2017)

“My father proposed to my mother at gunpoint when she was nineteen, and knowing that she was already pregnant with a dead man’s child, she accepted.”
*
How can you read that first sentence and not read on? This tiny tidbit of Gina Sorell’s debut novel Mothers and Other Strangers gripped me when I first read it nine months ago and kept me in anticipation until the book finally came out in May — after which I devoured it in two days! Full review here —

So Many Olympic Exertions by Anelise Chen (Kaya Press, 2017)

“Eating, writing, sleeping, swimming. My vocation has all the features of vacation for most people.”
*
Anyone who mostly drives herself through goal-setting — and relatedly, struggles to enjoy downtime even as she procrastinates — will be able to relate to the hilarious but depressed protagonist Athena’s challenges. Read my full review at Los Angeles Review of Books’s BLARB.

South and West by Joan Didion (Knopf, 2017)

“I had only some dim and unformed sense … that for some years the South and particularly the Gulf Coast had been for America what people were still saying California was, and what California seemed to me not to be: the future, the secret source of malevolent and benevolent energy, the psychic center.”
*
Which contemporary authors are overrated? I got into a conversation about this with a couple other writers at a recent Pen Center USA event. Joan Didion’s name came up — and though I haven’t read enough of her oeuvre to come down on a side on this question, I do very much feel the heft of her reputation weigh on me whenever I pick up one of her books. Full review here —

The Sky Isn’t Blue by Janice Lee (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2016)

“If there ever was a city in which every inhabitant could tailor their existence and experience of that city completely, it is LA. Your LA is very different from my LA. My LA from a few years ago is different from my LA today.”
*
This poetic, evocative work by Korean-American writer Janice Lee will make you nostalgic for the Los Angeles you’re in now, the Los Angeles you want the city to be, and the Los Angeles that never was.

Drenched by Marisa Matarazzo (Soft Skull, 2010)

“In my dream I know that he remembers me, but forever we do not talk.”
*
Marisa Matarazzo’s short stories are dreamy and surreal — linked tales about young love tinged with fantastical elements: a boy with hot teeth of quarts, a girl with ashtrays for breasts. Drenched recalled for me Aimee Bender’s work quite a bit.

Doing Nothing: A History of Loafers, Loungers, Slackers, and Bums in America by Tom Lutz (FSG, 2006)

“My sense of my own laziness may simply be the perverse guilt engendered by a work ethic that digs its dominatrix heel into my back and rarely lets me up.”
*
So my own sense of aimlessness earlier this summer convinced me to pick up Tom Lutz’s book — and I could totally relate to Tom’s description of feeling simultaneously lazy and productive! The personal parts of this book about Tom’s own life engaged me the most, though this is primarily a historical survey through the times of attitudes about work, productivity, laziness, and the meaning of a life well lived —

The Japanese Lover by Isabel Allende (Atria, 2016)

“I was unable to give up my security, and so I was trapped in convention.”
*
I picked this book up for the West Hollywood Women’s Book Club and tried to like it — but just didn’t. This tale of a secret relationship between a rich Jewish woman and a poor Japanese gardener was marred by flat stereotyped characters, history dumping, and underdeveloped / implausible plot details. All of this did make for a lively book club discussion though! I’ve heard other books by Allende are better — Anyone have one to recommend?

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The Many fictions of Elizabeth Ellen’s Person/a

It’s a strange and thrilling experience, reading as a finished book what you once read in rough manuscript form. Last summer, I read a draft of Elizabeth Ellen’s novel-in-progress while at a residency at The Anderson Center. At that time, the manuscript — a highly autobiographical work about a short-lived affair that turns into a years-long obsession — was less than 300 pages long. I devoured the whole thing in a night and sent her some comments.

This summer, I finally read the completed novel, Person/a — a 600+ page tome published in February by Elizabeth’s own press, Short Flight/Long Drive Books. And reading the book this time, I was so conscious of the act of reading that I’m not sure I ever gave myself over to the experience of the book itself.

They say, after all, you can never read the same book twice — since you are inevitably a different person by the time of the rereading. This is doubly true if the book too has changed — significantly. I couldn’t help but be hyperaware of what Elizabeth chose to keep or change, judging the merits of her decisions, evaluating her choices. Add to this the fact that Person/a is an extremely self-conscious text — one that explicitly grapples with issues of autobiography, authorship, truth-telling, and fictionalizing — and the act of reading began to feel like a surreal, multilayered experience with no solid center —

I mean, the book begins, first of all, with rejection letters from agents to whom Elizabeth submitted the Person/a manuscript (“The inventiveness of the prose, which you have in spades, needs to be hinged on something, even if the form is played with”). Then comes an eviscerating email from Elizabeth’s own mother (“My personal opinion though is that it was so self-absorbed and so self-serving that frankly it was boring…. I feel sorry that at 40 you seem to be stuck.”) — the sort of cruel note that makes me glad I’m estranged from my own mother.

Then the novel proper begins. On the surface, the plot is fairly simple. The character Elizabeth, who like the real life Elizabeth is 40-ish with a teenage child, has a brief fling with a 20-something guy called Ian, whose real life identity, if you can call it that, can be figured out fairly easily since he too is a writer with a public profile. And on the surface, the fling seems inconsequential, since the two really see each other in person only a few times and never have sex.

Yet somehow Elizabeth the character becomes obsessed with Ian, stalking him online, sending him nude photos, and even driving hours to his town unannounced in an effort to see him — all while Ian keeps pushing her away, first by refusing to talk on the phone, then rarely returning her texts, keeping his address a secret and outright refusing to see her. This sends Elizabeth into a years-long spiral in which she nurses a highly romanticized form of anguish: “I was constantly torn then between feelings of extreme melancholia and feelings of heightened eroticism. I cried and masturbated and drank with increased frequency.”

Person/a recalls, in many ways, Lydia Davis’s The End of The Story — one of my favorite novels of all time — which is also about obsession and memory and the aftermath of a relationship. Lydia’s female protagonist also debases herself in many ways in her efforts to try to get her lover back. Elizabeth makes the influence explicit, often quoting Lydia’s books and even including an email exchange between the two of them.

But Elizabeth’s novel is also at once more explicitly autobiographical and more explicitly about the fictionalizing process. The book is divided into volumes, but there are three Volume Is, each dissecting the relationship from slightly different perspectives. In the first Volume I, for example, Ian is an unnamed writer, Elizabeth has a daughter, and the relationship between the two begins its denouement when Elizabeth takes a trip to Jamaica. In the second Volume I, Ian has become a musician, Elizabeth’s daughter a son, and the trip is to Mexico. Later the novel melds the perspectives: “Ian was a writer a musician.” And Elizabeth the character muses often about the fictionalizing choices she’s made:

I realize now I seem to have left out the majority of ways in which he contacted me or said things to me each time I tried to stop talking to him so that I have presented myself as the woman in the movie who has an unfounded obsession when in reality it was more a mutual obsession, a mutual inability to cease communication.

The result is, at its best moments, riveting — at its weakest, highly repetitive. There’s the endless dissection of why Ian might have distanced himself — to what extent it might have to do with her age, her money, her motherhood or a whole host of other factors. Often, I wanted to shake the protagonist and say, “Let it go! He’s just not that into you!”

Yet so much of the book fascinates. Person/a is especially telling about the strange, distanced ways we communicate with each other in the internet age. In one scene, Elizabeth the character — now married to another man — realizes that Ian can see by looking at his web stats how often she visits his website, and through what path. So she decides to send him a message:

I search “Ian Kaye ily” and “Ian Kaye faggit” and “Ian Kaye murder you” and click on the link to his blog when it appears. I click on the link as a way of saying hi. I click on the link as a way of saying I hate you and I love you and I wish we’d never met and I wish you were dead and I am sick and I wish I didn’t love you. Every time I click on the link to his blog now I am saying each of these things. And I am still holding true to my marital vow not to talk to Ian.”

After I finished reading Person/a, I felt that intense mix of sadness and pleasure and longing that I get whenever I come to the end of a book I love. And I simultaneously wondered if the book might have been better had Elizabeth the writer persisted in her agent search, and through him or her, landed a firm editor to invest in and refine the work, like Malcolm Cowley did for Kerouac’s On the Road.

Yet would that have killed the raw beauty of this book?

I can’t wait to read what Elizabeth writes next.

Earlier: Five Firsts: Elizabeth Ellen on writing from life, creative freedom, and other gray areas

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The terrible secret of Joan Didion’s South and West

Which contemporary authors are overrated? I got into a conversation about this with a couple other writers at a recent Pen Center USA event. Joan Didion’s name came up — and though I haven’t read enough of her oeuvre to come down on a side on this question, I do very much feel the heft of her reputation weigh on me whenever I pick up one of her books.

Meaning: When I read a book by Joan Didion, I find I’m less interested in diving into the subject matter of the book than into the thoughts and impressions of Joan Didion on said subject. I care less about what IS important and interesting — than what Joan found important and interesting.

Of course, the two can’t really be separated. This is especially true when it comes to a book like South and West: From a Notebook, described on the book jacket as “two excerpts from one of her never-before-seen notebooks” — a phrase that promises a peek at Joan’s heretofore private thoughts more than anything else. Composed of edited notes from two occasions — Joan’s month-long trip to the Gulf South in 1970 and her efforts to cover the Patty Hearst trial of 1976 in San Francisco — the slim volume purports to be less a fully-formed book than a behind-the-scenes look at Joan’s writing process.

That’s not to say we don’t learn about the South or the West of the 70s. Joan’s description of the South is especially thick, palpable: The dirty mattresses and empty lots, the sullen girl at the gas-station cafe, the slow heat and sluggish time, the ubiquitous graveyards. The overall mood of that section is one of ominous boredom. And throughout, the prose is punctuated by keen observations of race, class, and gender: “To be a white middle-class child in a small southern town must be on certain levels the most golden way for a child to live in the United States.”

One gets the clear, intimate sense of living in a place and just how much doing so can shape the trajectory of a life. Reading South and West made me curious to visit the Gulf South — to see how much it is today as Joan described then — and also eminently grateful not to have grown up there, with its stagnant traditions and possibilities. “It occurred to me almost constantly in the South that had I lived there I would have been an eccentric and full of anger, and I wondered what form the anger would have taken,” Joan writes. “Would I have taken up causes, or would I have simply knifed somebody?” The brief California section, in contrast, mostly explores Joan’s keen sense of her own privilege growing up well-to-do in Sacramento, in a house with beloved gold silk organza curtains from 1907.

But the aspects of South and West that really grabbed me were the parts that, in subtle ways, struggle with what it means to write, to be a writer. The fact that Joan went to the South without a clear sense of topic in mind, simply to explore the possibility that she might find something to write about the place, is in itself intriguing:

“I had only some dim and unformed sense, a sense which struck me now and then, and which I could not explain coherently, that for some years the South and particularly the Gulf Coast had been for America what people were still saying California was, and what California seemed to me not to be: the future, the secret source of malevolent and benevolent energy, the psychic center.”

This sense she goes in with is never fully explored, certainly not enough so to hint at a sort of thesis. After all, Joan never completed this essay — just published her notes forty years after the fact. Interesting as they are, I doubt Knopf would have published these notes were Joan Didion not already Joan Didion.

Which is to say: Reading Joan’s not-quite-organized thoughts brought up a lot of writerly questions for me. What must writing accomplish to be called complete, to be worth publishing, to be worth reading? There’s a sudden, telling page in South and West where Joan seems to grapple with this: “At the center of this story there is a terrible secret, a kernel of cyanide, and the secret is that the story doesn’t matter, doesn’t make any difference, doesn’t figure.”

It’s unclear which story Joan’s referring to here — the story of Patty Hearst she was ostensibly covering, or her own story of growing up in California that occupied her thoughts. Perhaps she meant both. The passage goes on to describe things about the world that go on regardless of us (“The snow still falls in the Sierra. The Pacific still trembles in its bowl.”), yet the secret remains. None of the stories figure.

“I never wrote the piece.” That’s the short sentence with which Joan ends her notes on the South. Yet, she did write the piece. I just read the whole of it, in book form. It felt incomplete, and unmoored me. And it made me think.

Elsewhere on the web: Belletrist exclusive interview: A discussion on South and West with Emma Roberts and Joan Didion

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August Giveaway: Mothers and Other Strangers by Gina Sorell

*** Winners selected! Congratulations to Evann in Lake Tapps, Wash., and Simone in Bloomfield, N.J.! ***

“My father proposed to my mother at gunpoint when she was nineteen, and knowing that she was already pregnant with a dead man’s child, she accepted.”

How can you read that first sentence and not read on? This tiny tidbit of Gina Sorell’s debut novel Mothers and Other Strangers gripped me when I first read it nine months ago and kept me in anticipation until the book finally came out in May — after which I devoured it in two days!

The story follows Elsie, a thirty-something woman in Los Angeles who learns her estranged mother — a beautiful, self-absorbed, and secretive parent — has died. So Elsie goes on a journey to discover the true story of her mother — a story that takes her all over the world, from Los Angeles to Toronto to Paris to Cape Town.

This novel was especially poignant for me because I grew up in three different continents too — and am estranged from my mother. The similarities between my life and Elsie’s end there though. What I found most compelling in Mothers and Other Strangers is the complex tension of emotions Elsie has about her mother: A mother who tells fabulous stories of her past, not a word of which may be true. A mother whose glamour and beauty Elsie craves, but hates constantly competing against. A mother whose approval Elsie desperately seeks, yet whose cold narcissism Elsie finds repellent.

But Mothers and Other Strangers covers much more ground than just the mother-daughter relationship, touching on everything from the financially predatory nature of spiritual cults (the mother belonged to one) to the punishing demands of creative ambition (Elsie is a dancer). Part psychological thriller, part coming-of-age story, and part redemption narrative, the book does sometimes feel like it’s trying to do too many things as it meanders into a whole range of varied hot topics — eating disorders, fertility treatments, rape, mental illness, Jewish identity, you name it — before suddenly coming to the end with a hurried wrapup. Still, the energy of the plot and the ambitious scope of the story made this novel a real page-turner.

I’m excited to be partnering with Prospect Park Books to give away TWO copies of Mothers and Other Strangers to my readers! All current email subscribers will be automatically entered to win one copy. Subscribe now if you’re not yet getting my occasional newsletters.

For a second chance to win, comment on this post below with your mother’s name. The giveaway closes August 31, 2017 at 11:59 pm PST.

Come back mid-month to read a Five Firsts interview with Gina Sorell.

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July book reviews: Marlena, Sarah, and other girls with drama

Brief reviews of books by contemporary authors I read this month — along with photos of what I ate while reading. The list is ordered by the level of my enjoyment:

The Sarah Book by Scott McClannahan (Tyrant Books, 2017)

“Perhaps we love what we never know most of all.”
*
This novel is a crazy ride — a mostly true story about Scott and his relationship (and the end thereof) with one Sarah — starting off with his alcoholism and her bulimia and related chaotic antics — like living for days in a Walmart parking lot and destroying a computer with a ten pound sledge. It’s so messy and honest — I seriously couldn’t put this one down. I got it via The TNB book club, which I strongly encourage you to join.

Marlena by Julie Buntin (Henry Holt, 2017)

“I love this wildness. I crave it. So why, when something in me asks if it’s worth ruining my life over, do I hear No?”
*
Marlena has a thrilling wild car ride of a beginning that got me hooked right away. This novel follows the dangerous friendship between two teen girls — through a year of drugs, desire, and recklessness that leaves them ineradicably changed. It made me think a lot about what the defining moments or friendships of my own formative years were — and honestly I can’t pinpoint any one thing definitively — which I guess is how life is, all the cause and effect less obvious, more muddied, the loose ends still loose and irreconcilable. I picked this book up on Belletrist‘s recommendation —

The Blue Hour by Laura Pritchett (Counterpoint, 2017)

“When do we get the crazy notion that our life has a predictable trajectory? That it’s not just one crazy winding story?”
*
If you’ve ever wondered what it might be like to live in a small mountain community, Laura’s The Blue Hour is the novel to read. The interconnected stories follow the lives of these neighbors — through their quiet longings and secret affairs and small hopes — to paint a richly textured, kaleidoscopic view of what it means to live and love. A lovely introspective book.

Big Lonesome by Jim Ruland (Gorsky Press, 2015)

“Their desire to know was a substitute for another kind of longing.”
*
I don’t know how to even start describing this story collection by my friend Jim, best known in the L.A. area for his reading series Vermin on the Mount. The stories are so varied: Hard drinking, sensitive men given the job of killing animals in a zoo before the German army takes over their city. A portrayal of Popeye’s character from the perspective of his abandoned love child. A spurned lover spending his days spying on his ex by hiding in her closet. The stories really capture the bewildering experience of being in this beautiful, violent, unpredictable world.

The Rules Do Not Apply by Ariel Levy (Random House, 2017)

“Daring to think that the rules do not apply is the mark of a visionary. It’s also a symptom of narcissism.”
*
Ariel’s memoir was somewhat different from what I’d expected — but I did enjoy going through the unexpected twists and turns of life with her — and liked how she described this sense of untetheredness and uncertainty I especially love the way Ariel Levy describes the ambition of the 90s — the sleek ferociousness of it, the unabashed self-interest, the eagerness to redefine how best to live — the last of which I suppose is a constant throughout history.

I Have the Right to Destroy Myself by Young-Ha Kim (in English translation from Harcourt, 2007)

“C imagined the green liquid going down her throat and spreading throughout her body. He could see her body turning green, the kiwi juice seeping into her capillaries.”
*
Aren’t those the perfect lines to read right before drinking a green smoothie? I picked out this book on a whim from the library shelf and was really sucked in by this moody Korean novel — about two brothers in love with the same listless woman — who hires a suicide whisperer of sorts to help her end her life. It’s a strange, disquieting, yet oddly peaceful story.

She by Michelle Latiolais (W.W. Norton, 2017)

“You have to be able to be a little delusional to live, it seems to me, to be a little devil-may-care.”
*
Michelle’s story mostly follows a runaway teen girl through her first day in LA who tries to survive in Santa Monica by offering to do random little errands for rich people. Her story is intercut with chapters featuring other colorful LA characters, from a cake decoration artist to a volunteer at the LA Times Festival of Books. There was a part of me that wanted the stories to interconnect more, but I enjoyed the kaleidoscopic view of LA. It made me want to revisit all my old haunts in a state of nostalgia —

Girl With a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier (Dutton, 1999)

“I could not explain it, but I felt something was to change soon. I just did not know how.”
*
I had an odd sense of deja vu reading this novel because the setup is so similar to Hemingway’s Girl, which I read recently. Both are stories told from the perspective of a maid who works for a famous male artist — in this case Vermeer — with whom she develops quiet confidences and acts as inspiration for his art while also having her own coming of age experiences. Girl With a Pearl Earring preceded Hemingway’s Girl — so I wonder if the latter’s author used the former as a model…. In any case, I did enjoy immersing myself in the richly painted details of this novel, which focuses more on the proscribed lives of the servants and working class than the upper class Vermeer family.

The Unseen World by Liz Moore (W.W. Norton 2016)

“Humans are not incredibly creative as a species; their questions tend to become repetitive.”
*
A smart girl loves her smart dad — who’s working on a computer that can converse like a human. Then the dad gets Alzheimer’s — and the girl starts to discover her dad may not be who she thought he was. The last chapter of this novel is written from the computer’s point of view, which I thought was a cool touch. I picked up Liz Moore’s novel for the L.A. Girly Book Club —

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