REVIEW: The Tender Hour of Twilight by Richard Seaver

The Tender Hour of Twilight
Richard Seaver
FSG
480 pp / $35

We usually eat up memoirs of public figures, past or present, loved or loathed, because their lives, quite simply, are more interesting than ours.  Take George W. Bush’s Decision Points, for example (presently loathed): the 43rd president argues that all the decisions he made in the White House, though largely unpopular with the general public, were all “correct.”  Let’s not go there.  But even the staunchest liberal reader must concede that they’re interesting decisions regardless.

Occasionally, however, memoirs are indeed written by “regular” people.  Richard Seaver, for example, isn’t George W. Bush – he was never even president.  But like Bush, Seaver made decisions that affected, and will affect, millions of people.  Like his decision to publish Beckett’s short works in Merlin, Seaver’s upstart French avant-garde literary journal, which catapulted the Irishman to the top of the world literature heap.  And his decision to push Naked Lunch, Story of O, and Last Exit to Brooklyn, among others, through the ignorant hands of the censors ultimately diminished their sway.  And, finally, his decision to record his life in vivid detail (which his wife Jeanette posthumously compiled into The Tender Hour of Twilight Seaver’s vast and intimate memoir), will lead to new insights and new appreciation for the literature that captivated Seaver so very much.
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REVIEW: The Death of Arthur by Peter Ackroyd

The Death of King Arthur: The Immortal Legend
Peter Ackroyd
Viking
336 pp / $26.95

In Monty Python and the Holy Grail – a touchstone for any contemporary retelling of the Arthurian legends – knightly valor and violence are reduced (or enhanced, depending on your sense of humor) to Arthur’s encounter with the Black Knight.  “’Tis but a scratch,” the Black Knight says after one arm is lopped off.  “It’s just a flesh wound,” he again protests as blood begins spraying from both shoulder sockets.  There is no better modern example of the impossibility of chivalry in a time marked by violence and certain death.

Peter Ackroyd calls his The Death of Arthur a “retelling” of Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur.  Here, Ackroyd seeks to rewrite Malory’s tale for current audiences, aiming to render Malory’s version in modern English with greater conciseness and clarity.  Besides simply translating Malory’s late Middle English, Ackroyd does a great deal to reconcile the inconsistencies in Malory’s rambling original.  The “Tristan and Isolde” section, for example, is markedly, and thankfully, shorter.  Ackroyd also adds subheadings to the chapters: “Read of a contest for love” (in “Tristan and Isolde”) and “See a great slaughter” (in “The Adventure of the Holy Grail”). The origins of “see” and “read” seem dubious, but the subtitles do serve to orient the reader when the narrative jumps, as it often does.
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REVIEW: The Fallback Plan by Leigh Stein

The Fallback Plan
Leigh Stein
Melville House
224 pp / $14.95

I first encountered Leigh Stein in a Classics course at Brooklyn College in the spring of 2010.  She sat adjacent to me, and as the professor recounted the Iliad’s instances of aristia, Leigh would write furiously in her notebook any words, phrases, or descriptions pertaining to the text.  I found this technique captivating because, already having knowledge of Leigh’s accomplishments as a poet and fiction writer, I imagined her entries as alternative versions to Homer’s epic, wherein Helen of Troy develops a chronic case of acne after promising to be bestowed to Paris, or Achilles becomes fatally dizzy after chasing Hector around Troy’s walls.

Similar to this fashion, Leigh Stein’s delightful and hilarious debut novel, The Fallback Plan, is a vertiginous rewriting of what do after college when even one’s fallback plan is hardly a sustainable option.  Stein’s narrator, Esther Kohler, accepts this fate as social common sense, i.e., is externally apathetic to moving back in with her parents or watching her capricious boy interest, Jack, fumble with his prettier girlfriend.  She is reservedly jealous of her friend Tierney who writes her letters from Rome, and bemused by her friend Pickle, whose preoccupation with weed and video games starts to rub off on her.  So what does one do when job searching becomes a laughable prospect and one’s Wellbutrin recreation runs dry?  Take a babysitting job, of course, set up by none other than Esther’s assiduously proud mother.
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REVIEW: The Angel Esmeralda by Don DeLillo

The Angel Esmeralda
Don DeLillo
Scribner
224 pp / $24

Don DeLillo has been a powerful presence on the American literary scene for the past four decades, and his latest short-fiction anthology, The Angel Esmeralda, encapsulates some of his lasting concerns and themes. In it, the readers will find the familiar landscape of psychological alienation, sardonic treatment of mass media and western consumerism that absorbs and savages any meager attempts at transcendence.

DeLillo has the rare gift for capturing the linguistic verve of advertizing (he had worked as a copy writer), while simultaneously sabotaging it. He achieves the muscular rhythm of his prose by often using punch lines and refrains, with sentences whose content sometimes sounds so truistic that it has led some critics to accuse him of hollow existentialism. His technique can perhaps be likened to that of the American post-pop artists, who appropriate the objects and the language of mass culture, to manipulate them.

His use of postmodern/new-agey zeitgeist can be seen in the story “The Starveling.” The narrator comments on his drifting apart from his wife:

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REVIEW: Randy Bradley by Jake Bohstedt Morrill

Randy Bradley
Jake Bohstedt Morrill
Solid Objects
40 pp / $14

It would be easy to dismiss Jake Bohstedt Morrill’s Randy Bradley. A 40-page epistolary novella, Randy Bradley can be read in a single sitting, the reader arriving at the last page before even realizing it. Presented as a letter from a well-meaning but deranged woman named Lucy to her brother-in-law Richard, the text alternates between inspired mania and misguided vulnerability. It would seem that after years of strange behavior on her annual summer visits, Lucy has been summarily banned from her sister Miriam’s home. What follows in Lucy’s letter to Richard are a series of charmingly alarming evasions and justifications for what has truly been happening during stays as a houseguest. Seeing Lucy fall down this rabbit hole of her own making, the reader could be forgiven for mistaking this piece for a rambling character study. But underestimating either Lucy or Jake Bohstedt Morrill would be a grave error—Lucy’s cheerful dementia is merely the facade for the much larger questions that Morrill means to pose. As slight as it may seem on its surface, dig a little deeper and Randy Bradley reveals itself to be a philosophical treatise packaged so sweetly and deftly that one hardly notices when it slyly shifts towards becoming a case study in Wittgenstein’s private language argument. In the end, Lucy resembles no one so much as Charles Kinbote, part of that unique category of the mentally ill whose methods surpass their madness.

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REVIEW: Zone One by Colson Whitehead

Every age seems to get the monsters that reflect its deepest anxieties.

In the Late Victorian era, an age of sexual repression and widespread, often fatal sexual diseases, it was the vampire and the werewolf. In the Fifties , when our  two biggest fears were nuclear annihilation and Communist takeover there were body snatchers and a series of monsters created by atomic radiation. In the late Sixties and early Seventies, at a time when it seemed like our society was abandoning traditional religion and losing its moral compass, it was the devil (Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist, The Omen).

In the new millennium, teenagers may be vampire-crazy, but the monster of choice seems to be the zombie. In the last ten years, we have had remakes of Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead, 28 Days Later and its sequel, 28 Weeks Later, zombie comedies like Shaun of the Dead and Zombieland, even erotic zombie movies. The biggest hit on cable is The Walking Dead. And now Colson Whitehead, the author of rarefied novels like The Intuitionist and John Henry Days, tries his hand at the genre with the novel Zone One.

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REVIEW: Ghost Lights by Lydia Millet

Ghost Lights
Lydia Millet
W.W. Norton & Co.
256 pp / $24.95

A question for the gentlemen – what would you do if your wife was cheating on you?  Would you confront her, raising a domestic scene worthy of COPS? Or, would you keep quiet, letting the betrayal turn into a lifetime of passive aggression?  If your name is Hal Lindley, and you’re the protagonist of Lydia Millet’s new novel Ghost Lights, your reaction would fall somewhere in between: a drunken offer to rescue your unfaithful partner’s obnoxious boss from a tropical jungle.

Let’s take a few steps back.  Hal works for the IRS and has settled into a complacent suburban life with Susan, his ex-hippie of a wife.  She works for Thomas Stern, or “T.” as he prefers to be called, who vanished during a trip to Belize.  Since T.’s disappearance, things start to fall apart for Hal, particularly after he catches Susan sleeping with the young sexy paralegal at her office.  Later, Hal gets a little too libation-happy at his daughter’s dinner party, and as the conversation moves to the subject of T., he blurts out that he will fly to Belize in search of the mercurial businessman.

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REVIEW: Pulphead by John Jeremiah Sullivan

Pulphead by John Jeremiah SullivanPulphead
John Jeremiah Sullivan
FSG
384 pp / $16

About once a year, you find a book that you can unimpeachably recommend to everyone, like Cloud Atlas or Beat the Reaper. This year, and just in time for holiday gifts and small talk, John Jeremiah Sullivan has given us that book in Pulphead.

A collection of essays and long-form journalism published, over the years, in GQ, The Paris Review, Oxford American, Ecotone, and Harper’s, the book touches on topics as diverse as these publications: Axl Rose’s best dance, the unexplained giant ocean noise known as the Bloop, a tragedy in Sullivan’s family, the Tea Party, and the quintessential Real World bro, among others.

But there’s a common thread connecting the touching personal essays for The Paris Review with the sexy, weed-soaked assignments for GQ: Each is a lesson in generosity.

To be a great magazine journalist, you have to be likeable, both in person and in print. The former because you have to convince strangers to spend long hours with you and share their stories. And you’re starting out at a deficit—everyone knows journalists have a knack for making decent people look stupid. Some journalists overcome this by stealth, like Joan Didion; Sullivan does it by being a good guy.

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REVIEW: Mule by Tony D’Souza

Mule: A Novel of Moving Weight
Tony D’Souza
Mariner Books
304 pp / $14.95

A common narrative of this recession is the “unlikely criminal:” A middle-class person, usually white, turns to crime to survive hard times. Most of these stories are on cable: Weeds, Hung, Breaking Bad. But Mule, a compulsively-readable new novel from Tony D’Souza, takes the genre down to the nitty-gritty: How do you actually go about building a criminal empire?

Mule is Scarface for readers of The New Yorker: It plots all the emotional points on a man’s rise and downfall, while explaining everything you need to know to avoid getting caught while driving $50,000 worth of marijuana from California to Tennessee.

D’Souza’s book is the most satisfying in answering the details that cable skims over. Our hero, James, is an out-of-work freelance journalist with a new family and no safety net. When he gets an opportunity to make some quick cash, he researches the business of driving drugs like a long-form journalist: How do you convince a bank teller to hand over your $7,000 savings account in hundreds? What are your rights if a cop pulls you over in Texas versus Nevada? And, as James asks of a buyer he meets on his first run: “How much does an ounce weigh?”

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REVIEW: badbadbad by Jesus Angel Garcia

badbadbad
Jesus Angel Garcia
New Pulp Press
240 pp / $14.95

Taking after the old pulp tradition, badbadbad starts off on a sharp note: A man has been left by his wife, taking their son along with her. The prose is as razor sharp as you’d expect in old hardboiled paperbacks, with the same juxtaposition of opposites creating the same tension we’ve come to love from the genre, and the cover is designed with the same campy grittiness in mind. badbadbad, however, isn’t a pulp novel, but a taut psychological examination, a blueprint into madness, all wrapped up in a nice pulp package. This is an important distinction to note because the novel is shot through with this sentiment, this idea of covertness, of hidden layers, of people masquerading as things they’re not.

The Artifice of Media

Jesus Angel Garcia, the narrator, has just been left by his wife, who took their son with her. Looking for money in order to hire a divorce lawyer, he’s hired by the Reverend Puck to be webmaster for the First Church Before Church, helping build their online presence. The community grows so large that he’s picked up by other area churches. Around this time, he meets Cyrus, the ex-communicated son of Rev Puck. Cyrus and JAG bond over music on almost a molecular level. They are fluent in punk, jazz, soul and communicate through in the innate language of aesthetes. He also introduces JAG to fallenangels, a website forum created as a safe haven for fetishists. It’s this site that triggers a revelation for Jesus, that it is his calling to be a sexual messiah for these broken women, fulfilling their needs.

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