THE RETURN of the LATBR THUMBNAIL® - FEBRUARY 5, 2006: THE "THINGS ARE LOOKING UP" EDITION

As promised, we've given new editor David L. Ulin a fair amount of time before checking back in to see what's going on over at our neighborhood book review.  This weekend was the first time we've actually opened up the Book Review since our last LATBR Thumbnail® back in October.  Ideally, we'd like to tell you it was because we wanted a clean break, some time to be able to get some distance before coming back and assessing Ulin's contributions which, presumably, would be more noticeable if we stayed away for a while.  (It's kind of like watching a friend gain weight - if you're there day in, day out, exposed to the gradual change, you don't notice it as sharply as if you haven't seen one another for months.)  But the truth is we're still pissed at the delivery department, and so it took us this long to get it together enough to get a newsstand copy.

Still, whatever the reasons, we've had time away, and so we have a few general impressions coming back.  On the plus side, we think the selection of titles is a bit more interesting, veering away from some of the more predictable choices.  (Occasionally, they veer a bit too far but if we have to have tilt in one direction or the other, we'll opt for avoiding the madding crowd.)  The reviews are generally a bit more thoughtful (although some pretty awful writing still slips through; see below).  But fiction still gets the short end of the stick, at least in this issue - only two novels get full length reviews.  And the cover is still being wasted on horrible artwork.  The NYTBR hasn't gotten a whole lot right in its redesign but starting reviews on the front page, in age of precious column inches for books, is a move worth imitating.

On a grander scale, the LATBR doesn't yet feel - on the strength of this one issue - as though it's got a clear identity yet.  Now, that might not be what Ulin's after, and it might never have one - that's an editorial decision as much deciding what to put on the cover.  But there's nothing here yet that speaks directly to this city and its sensibility, and doesn't seem - again, on the strength of just one issue - to draw enough contributors from some of the heavy intellectual firepower on offer in L.A. 

But is a work in progress, and the good seems to be outweighing the bad.  Best of all, Eugen Weber is nowhere in evidence.  On to the stats:

STATS
Full length fiction reviews: 2. 
Full length non-fiction reviews: 6.
Columns: Discoveries.
Essay:  Editor Ulin himself weighs in on - wait for it - the Frey scandal.  (More below.)
And although we won't pretend for a moment that we had anything to do with it, the pointless Letters section has disappeared.

TITLES, AUTHORS & REVIEWERS
Uncentering the Earth by William T. Vollmann.  Reviewed by Margaret Wertheim Grade: C+
The Book of Trouble by Ann Marlowe.  Reviewed by Marion Winik Grade: D-
Hokum edited by Paul Beatty.  Reviewed by Lynell George Grade: B
Everything I'm Cracked Up to Be by Jen Trynin.  Reviewed by Erik Himmelsbach. Grade: B+
Strivers Row by Kevin Baker.  Reviewed by Allen Barra.  Grade: B-
Legends of Modernity by Czeslaw Milosz.  Reviewed by Robert Faggen Grade: A
Skinner's Drift by Lisa Fugard.  Reviewed by Laurel Maury.  Grade: B
Discoveries Column: Without Roots by Joseph Ratzinger and Marcello Pera; Look at the Dark by Nicholas Mosley; and Letters to a Young Artist by Anna Deveare Smith.  Reviewed by Susan Reynolds. Grade: B
Essay: The lie that tells the truth by David L. Ulin. Grade: B

SCORING THE BESTSELLERS
Once again, the literary tastes of L.A. readers seem to far outstrip those of the country at large, as Arthur and George sits at the Number One spot (up from number 7 after two weeks on the list).  Other literary titles in the top 15 include Lisa See's Snow Flower and the Secret Fan (#3); Memories of My Melancholy Whores (#4 - and how chuffed do you think See is just now, able to brag she's outselling a Nobel Prize winner); On Beauty (#7); and The Accidental (#15).  And Gilead sits happily at the top of the paperback list.  We've said it before, we'll say it again - we love L.A.

WHAT WE LIKE ...
Although we thought Lynell George's review of Hokum was a bit long and dry, it was also serious and thoughtful and surely worthy; it's the sort of thing we're glad to see covered, even as we marvel that in a four-column review of an anthology of African-American humor, George barely got a chuckle out of us ... Although it's a book we'd never pick up, Erik Himmelsbach's review of the Jen Tynin memoir made it sound engaging and fresh ... Allen Barra's review of Striver's Row was a bit workmanlike but didn't offend with the exception of this one ridiculous remark:

Does a white writer have a right to go there?

Where "there", in this case, represents a novel about the pre-X days of Malcolm Little.  It's a stupid question with an obvious answer.  Of course he does.  Any writer has to the right to write about anything he or she wants.  Some people might not like it but hard cheese.  Still, Barra manages to make Baker's "City of Fire" trilogy sound like a work worth seeking out ... Robert Faggen's review of the Milosz essays and letters was more or less perfect ... bracingly intelligent, commanding and worthy of its audience ... Bravo ... Laurel Maury's review of the Lisa Fugard novel doesn't constitute a terribly close reading but she conveys enough of the flavor of the book to have it added to our "seek out" list ... Matthew Price's review of A Godly Hero is surely the strangest "A" we've ever given ... there's much in his review we disagree with and find suspect but we finished it thinking furiously, puzzling over just what the hell he was after, and we were still thinking about it hours later.  That's what a book review should do, and so we awarded it an "A" even as we challenge some of its thinking.  (For example, Price fails to draw obvious connections between the religious progressives of the 1930s and the religious right of today; he also doesn't comment on what seems to us some fairly blatant anti-semitic imagery in Bryan's famous 1896 Democratic Convention Address) ... And, finally, it's nice to see Susan Reynolds back in good form, although she'd have scored higher if her review of Without Roots would have given us a clearer sense of what she thought of it.

WHAT WE DON'T ...
We went back and forth on Margaret Wertheim's review of the Vollmann ... One the one hand it's marred with some truly terrible writing - overreaching, overwritten, just plan silly.  To wit:

Quantities of ink have been expended by historians ...

OK, a bottle of ink is a quantity, as is a barrel.  Then, right on the heels of that one:

... have variously interpreted the Copernican system as everything from the last gasp of medieval obscurantism to the shining dawn of modern scientific rationalism.

Which sounds to us, you know, like the same fucking thing!  You might be able to slide an onion skin between that "from" ... We've always wondered just what kind of editing really goes on up there, and this does nothing to allay our worries.  That said, she does manage to get to the heart of what we find annoying about Vollman (earning brownie points by tying him to David Foster Wallace).  So it was a tough one, but awful writing trumps insight this time around ... But she's James Wood compared to Marion Winik's review of The Book of Trouble, to which we can only ask:  why?  Why this book?  Why this review?  Why didn't someone say "awful and pointless on all fronts" and round file it?  Why, why, why?  ....   Still, only two outright clunkers whispers "progress" to us ...

THE EDITOR SPEAKS
Which leaves us with Ulin's own essay on the James Frey scandal.  He admirably uses it as a jumping off point to try to think a bit bigger, and it's a thoughtful effort.  We disagree with some of what he says, and some of how he says it but we approve of the impulse to have the discussion and to raise the bar a bit.  Some quibbles:

Ulin says in the first paragraph that ours is a "culture that seems willing to believe anything as long as it comes in a neatly digestible package."  We disagree.  We think one of the lessons of all this - and the bigger problem - is that our culture doesn't really need to believe anything.  That's immaterial - entertainment and emotional pulls are the draw, and truth, non-fiction, fiction, those are all easily ignored labels.  But he goes on to score a bullseye with this:

... what's at issue is emotional truth, the need to re-create the sensibility, the tenor, of an experience in a reader's mind. This is the essence of literature, which like all art, operates at a level beyond the rational, according to rules of its own. In literature, truth is not so much known as it is felt, and empathy is as important as understanding. In literature, the logic of the story can sometimes trump the logic of the world. If this sounds disingenuous, it's not meant to — on the contrary, it's what makes art resonate.

Hear, hear!  Which makes it all the greater shame when he takes this tack:

For a lot of people, the very phrase "creative nonfiction" is an oxymoron. There's nothing creative, they would say, about the truth. But the more you think about it, the more such an argument becomes specious or (worse) unsophisticated, a misunderstanding of how creative writing works.

... where he simply loses good manners points for condescension to those who don't feel truth is quite so elastic.  But that's little more than bad manners.  The real problem for us lies in this assertion:

The decision to tell a story is a fictionalizing impulse: to take the chaos of reality and shape it, looking for order, meaning, where none inherently exists. This is as true of memoir as it is of the novel.

We disagree with this on many levels.  We suspect plenty of non-fiction writers would bristle at the notion that conveying a true story is animated by fictionalizing impulses.  But on a deeper level, Ulin's just described the plight of both philosophers and physicists as well as writers, and the notion that looking for order somehow goes back to a fctionalizing impulse strikes us as wrong turn.  We suspect that his underlying idea is that to erect a narrative framework sometimes requires a bit of literary spackle, but that's a far cry from a "fictionalizing impulse."

But check it out - the L.A. Times has got us thinking and talking and arguing.  Hence the positive grade of "B" even if we disagree with some of the finer points ...

GRADE:  B.  It's starting to gel.  We'd like to see more fiction, the last of the terrible writers, and some real thought given to the identity of the publication ... But things strike us as being much better than they were last October when we checked out.  Watch this space for more.  (Note: The Sunday LATBR webpages have now been moved inside of the registration-heavy calendarlive.com.)

Comments

[Kit Stolz]

Thanks for bringing back this feature. The Times book reviews have changed for the better, I think, but the change so far is more evident during the week than on Sundays, as big hitters like Ronald Brownstein and Ulin (an acquaintance) have cleaned the clocks of big books by the likes of Fred Barnes and Stephen King. Overall, the reviews seem tougher, less adjectival, not as mealy, and that has to be a good thing.

But Ulin's "emotional truth" defense of creative nonfiction didn't work for me either. It did seem a little condescending to people outside the literary establishment, for one, and the problem is, a lot of ordinary readers feel flat-out duped by the "emotional truth" argument.

It's not just ordinary readers who feel duped. Fans of Annie Dillard such as myself felt duped when it came out that she never mentioned incongruous facts (that she was a smoker, for example) and that she borrowed without attribution a melodramatic anecdote about a cat scratching her during the night. How can I trust her stories about natural history--not all of which ring true to me-- after that deception?

And another of the examples Ulin cited, Hunter Thompson, is a different kettle of fish entirely, because Thompson is a "character" famous around the world for telling wildly funny tales tales while hopelessly intoxicated. Of course he's not reliable! Are all creative non-fiction writers comparable to the rantings of a hallucinating peyote eater?

I distrust memoirs for all the reasons that have emerged in the wake of the Frey debacle, but think there is such a thing as creative non-fiction, and think we would be better off defending non-fiction writers who can be trusted (such as John McPhee, to take an obvious example) and not lumping together all memoirs with all creative non-fiction.

If that means that memoirs are less trusted; well, maybe that's the way it should be.

[Adrienne]

re review of Striver's Row review
since i'm probably one of the few people of color who reads your lit blog, I'll take the "hard cheese" you proffered and respond to your reaction to Barra's comment "Does a white writer have a right to go there?"

The issue isn't about a writer's ability to cast his imagination into the bodies of characters who may be outside his immediate realm of experience. Of course, she or he can. That is the empathetic nature of art.

Nor is the issue about political correctness or essentialism. Just because a storyteller has the ability and power to distribute your vision, in this case, a black man's story, doesn't mean he should without some sensitivity to the politics of appropriation and exoticism.

Barra was right to acknowledge this issue. Baker incorporated Malcolm Little's story into his larger narrative because the leader Malcolm became is still notorious and provocative. A historical narrative about Malcolm X will attract more attention, and readers, than the simple tale of a bi-racial resident of Strivers Row.

Barra is questioning whether Baker is just using Malcolm's story to spark controversy or add spice, rather than using the character to illustrate one of the many hard journeys of American citizens. As the author of bestsellers, Baker has access to promotional and distribution systems that a writer of color may not and, therefore, can't get his own side of the story into the record. The same discussion can apply to Doctorow's The March and Ragtime.

I think both Doctorow and Baker have written works incorporating the stories of Black Americans with verve, accuracy and sensitivity.

[TEV]

Thanks for the usual thoughtful commentary, Adrienne. I appreciate your taking the time to weigh in.

I do understand the points that you're making but I'm not sure I agree on a few points. First and foremost, I've been accused of being reductive, and I know I can go that way, but I do strip a question like "Does a white writer have a right to go there?" to its core, and to me there can only be one answer. I thought the whole notion of women writing as men, men writing as women, whites writing as Asians, etc., had all been laid to rest long ago. To even address a notion of "right" seems unnecessary and loaded. Not to mention a bit tired.

I do agree that sensitivity is the key, and Doctorow's a great example, I agree. But I think it's also dicey to impute motive to Baker; that's another slippery slope for me, assuming one can really suss out the motives of another writer. Barra might question it but it's wholly academic since only Baker can say one way or another (and depending on motives, a writer can't be counted on for honesty, as other recent events demonstrate), unless the writing is demonstrably exploitive. I prefer to take a perhaps more obvious and less nuanced tack - We accept he has the right to do so, did he do so with any distinction? That brings the talk down to talent, execution, sensitivity (and perhaps intentions) but leaves out the question of "right".

I agree with you wholeheartedly that the publication and distribution systems are weighted against writers of color but I do wonder if you're not overestimating the impact of a novel like Strivers Row. Mightn't it be argued that the considerable historical record presents the other side of the story - and has considerably wider reach? Not sure, just thinking out loud ...

But as I freely admit, I can take a reductive view of these kind of things. I appreciate your posting this perspective here and think it's valuable for myself and others to consider.

When are we going drinking again?

[Steven Augustine]

I say we establish an art-diminishing precedent when the use of a black character or theme in a work of fiction by a non-black writer answers by default to black sensitivities (as though these are uniform!)...and this goes as well if you exchange 'black' for any and all other identifiers. A novelised Malcolm X should be no more hallowed a figure (or trope) than George Washington, the Virgin Mary, Humbert Humbert or Allah him(it)self...these characters are just tools in the writer's tool box, not public property.

I think the distinction that is not being drawn in this case goes right to the heart of the general Oprah's-book-club misunderstanding of what fiction (at the high end, at least) is good for. When the best fiction uplifts us, it does so almost heartlessly, mercilessly, by verging on the miraculous...simply because it's the work of artists who are so good at what they do that we surrender ourselves to their Authority. Which is in stark contrast to our response to the sort of mediocre books (often best sellers) that comfort us by very carefully presenting no opposing, elitist, offensive, dangerously new or vaguely challenging ideas. It's this sort of middling book that IS answerable to the full-spectrum of sensitivities of American Identity Politics, the result being 'literature' that is filtered through so much PC cheesecloth that it ends up about as daring and concept-stretching as a gubernatorial candidate's platform or Super Bowl advertizing.

When Art answers to the sensitivities of anything other than the artist's own aesthetic, it becomes less than Art and little more than harmless entertainment. Which is precisely what's happening out there...lots of technically 'okay' and blandly tasteful or cute little books these days (Chabon, Foers, Vida, Franzen, Proulx, et al, take a bow) and very very little of diamond-hard, uplifting brilliance. Lots of Starbucks-cookie-cutter-MFA-workshop-prose from good looking young spokesmodels bending over backwards to do 'nobody no harm' and, gee, MOVE people. Snore.

A brilliant book answers only to the judgments of its own hard-won mechanism; it is not a well-mannered thing. Let straight black novelists write about Hmong transvestites; let Chinese-American yuppies write about deaf Scotsman; let blind Navajo Republicans write about dirt poor German pederasts; and let them write however they chose! Just let the writing(please) be GREAT.

DESPITE all the PC cheesecloth.