It's Monday morning and that means time for the LATBR Thumbnail. Twas a spectacularly disappointing Sunday in the City of Angels as the editorial geniuses at the Book Review took the occasion of the Oscars to run a bunch of reviews on - wait for it - books about Hollywood! Real cutting edge thinking folks. If the Hollywood books in question sounded better or more relevant, we'd be a bit mollified but more on that in a few. It does make our crusade to have all contents of the Book Review made freely available online seem double-edged at best. On to the nitty gritty:
STATS
Full length fiction reviews: 1 (A short story collection by Charles Johnson is also reviewed but in a smaller space than the regular columns.)
Full length non-fiction reviews: 5
Special material: Yet another personal remembrance of Hunter S. Thompson
TITLES, AUTHORS & REVIEWERS
Sean Penn by Richard T. Kelly. Reviewed by Douglas Brinkley Grade: D-
By Myself and Then Some by Lauren Bacall. Reviewed by Eric Lax Grade: D
Bright Boulevard, Bold Dreams by Donald Bogle. Reviewed by Carl Franklin Grade: A
Twentieth Century Fox: Inside the Photo Archive - Photos selected by Rob Easteria, Kevin Murphy and Miles Scott; and The Bad & The Beautiful, photos by Ellen Graham. Reviewed by Matthew Scully. Grade: B-
Beneath the Skin by John Rechy. Reviewed by Susan Salter Reynolds. Grade: B-
Dr. King's Refrigerator and Other Bedtime Stories by Charles Johnson. Reviewed by Paula L. Woods. Grade: C-
Metropolis by Elizabeth Gaffney. Reviewed by Kevin Baker. Grade: D-
Poets' Corner Column: Jack by Maxine Kumin; and Migrations by W.S. Merwin. Reviewed by Carol Muske-Dukes Grade: A
Discoveries Column: Under the Glacier by Halldor Laxness. Reviewed by Susan Salter Reynolds. Grade: C
Essay: The darker side of a night with Hunter S. Thomspon by Roberto Loiederman. Grade: D-
WHAT WE LIKE ...
If you're going to run a bunch of reviews of books on Hollywood, they should all be like Carl Franklin's review of Bright Boulevard, Bold Dreams, a look at "Black Hollywood". It gives an appropriate amount of serious and thoughtful attention to an overlooked chapter in Hollywood's history. It's worth more than a dozen puff pieces on celebrity bios (more to come) ... And Michael Roth's review of the two photo collections is both well-written and manages to make the books in question sound interesting, but as it's the last of four full-page Hollywood reviews, it suffers from "Enough, already" syndrome ... Susan Salter Reynolds' look at John Rechy's essays is also well-written, even if the examples cited do not inspire the same level of enthusiasm in us as they do in her. (There's also sloppy editing, as Lynne Truss' Eats, Shoots & Leaves is noted merely as A Zero Tolerance to Approach to Punctuation, the book's subtitle.) ... And since we confess a near total ignorance about contemporary poetry, we can only apply the "I know it when I see it" test, and say that Carol Muske-Dukes' column is admirably free of jargon and uses thoughtful examples to make us interested in reading both volumes examined.
WHAT WE DON'T ...
Yikes. Where to begin? Well, as we've noted above, we're knocking off a few grade points for the ridiculously obvious "It's Oscar Sunday so we'll review some Hollywood books" approach. At best, it's merely predictably disappointing. At worst, it serves to underscore the cliche that literary L.A. is but a mere shadow of its filmmaking brethren. A ballsy shout of independence here would have gone a long way ... So would some halfway decent reviews, but they're not on display here. In Brinkley's review, both book and review serve as star hagiography, with both author and reviewer stumbling over themselves to canonize the wonderfulness of Sean Penn, while glossing over his violent outbursts (Brinkley calls his arrest for punching a photographer "a minor offense".). It's a nauseating display of fan worship ... Lax's review of the Bacall is merely workmanlike by comparison, but we wonder about the inclusion of a book first released in 1980. Does the inclusion of 79 new pages of material merit the full page treatment? Minimally, the Bacall and Penn pieces could have been condensed into one ... The biggest disappointment of the issue, however, might be Paula Woods' lackluster treatment of Charles Johnson's new short story collection. She displays a near total unfamiliarity with Johnson's work (failing to connect the Allmuseri to his NBA winning novel Middle Passage), and feels the need to translate cogito ergo sum for the Book Review's Hollywood readers. And her assertion that "Executive Decision" is "possibly the first published story on affirmative action" strikes us as unlikely in the extreme (although we admit being too lazy to check it out). It's only our high regard for Johnson and the hope that his work is widely reviewed that keeps this piece from a failing grade ... Kevin Baker's review of Metropolis isn't much better, and if the inclusion of a bunch of Hollywood books is too obvious to bear, this one goes the other way - A "magical realism" tale about old New York gets the only full page fiction review in the place? Couple that with a review that opens up with a needlessly self-referential lede, and which traffics remorselessly in cliche (supporting characters are described as "cardboard"), and it's one poor piece of work. (To be fair, he seems a perverse choice for the gig - a contributor of historical columns to American Heritage, he seems unlikely to look favorably upon the historical fast-and-loose that Gaffney seems to indulge in.) ... We're not quite sure how the Nobel Prize for Literature winner of 1968 qualifies as a "Discovery" but we're willing to play along. More troubling is that, despite giving over the entire column to one book, we don't get a real feel for Reynolds' opinion, just a lot of excerpts and summaries. A book like this deserved more space, and you do feel Reynolds straining under the constraint of the column, running out of space before she can get to her point ... Finally, the HST essay is just lousy, taking a minor incident from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and using it as a launching point for its disgruntled author's narcissistic fifteen seconds.
GRADE: D- This isn't a purely scientific average of the individual review scores but rather an overall grade, downgraded for the aforementioned unoriginal thinking. Too many poorly written, generally irrelevant pieces this weekend. A pretty depressing outing - we look forward to better things once Oscar has rolled up his red carpet.
Metropolis is a magical realist novel? Oh my.
Anyway, it's a fine book —as magical realist as , uh , an Andrea Barrett story.
Janet Maslin's headline is not much better, "PT Barnum's New York" Yuk.
Posted by: birnbaum | February 28, 2005 at 05:27 AM
I'm so glad I read your roundup this morning -- I didn't realize the Bacall thing was reviewing a book. I thought it was a short biographical sketch. Clearly, one shouldn't read the newspaper before noon.
Actually, the LAT's all Oscars, all the time approach to news this past week was overdone. Though the Chris Rock profile was delightfully fluffy. I feel like I don't know the man at all.
Posted by: booksquare | February 28, 2005 at 08:17 AM