Hi, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab...
If you don’t know why those two names deserve a headline, then you probably shouldn’t be reading a column on books. Today’s edition of Frank Bascombe’s long-running column here at AICN has him discussing two of the biggest names in the book business, and he couldn’t be more frank about his feelings for both of them. Today’s column is a perfect example of why I first started publishing Frank’s column in the first place. Great read, man.
As I mourn the end of ‘Rescue Me’ and begin to accept the fact that summer is gone I must advise you on two new releases from Doubleday. Walter Kirn, author of ‘My Hard Bargain’, ‘Up In the Air’, ‘She Needed Me’, and most recently translated to the screen, ‘Thumbsucker’, has delivered a new novel, ‘Mission to America’. On the other foot, Aimee Bender has been hard at work on a new collection of short stories, ‘Willful Creatures’, which has enjoyed a nice solid run of good press, that combined with a successful author tour should keep Ms. Bender strapped to the typewriter. Mr. Kirn should be enjoying a successful career, and up until this point he’s gotten good press, some of it in this column, but I’d like to see him make a big splash in the book world and maybe this new novel will do it for him. Due to time constraints I honestly didn’t have time to review both of these books in my column and when I do get around to reviewing them they’ll both be in paperback. There is a logjam on my desk and I’ve got to get some reading done.
Next month, look forward to A.M. Homes and Rod Liddle.
THE GOOD LIFE by Jay McInerney
Knopf
If you read this column then you know how I feel about this author. That being said, I feel it necessary to take back some of the rough talk I’ve spewed over the years towards this gentleman... some of it. It’s been a long while since Jay Mac has written anything new. He’s dividing his time between sordid missives encapsulated in ‘Model Behavior’ and writing rave reviews for the New York Times Book Review, (see Mark Costello and Benjamin Kunkel) and then attending book parties thrown by the publisher of at least one of these two authors. As luck would have it, I was fortunate enough to be in attendance and watched Mr. McInerney in action, which left my opinon on him slightly skewed. Since I was lucky enough to be sipping soft drinks alongside Jay Mac as a reviewer who’d also given Mark Costello a rave review, I suppose that puts us in the same professional bind. But like my views on Bret Easton Ellis, my piss and vinegar barbs thoroughly eviscerated these easy targets and their lame books of the past, until I realized some years back that these guys are trying to write novels, which is no easy task. What Jay Mac delivers in this new book is more Gil Grissom like in his dissecting of the facts and details of everything that wealth affords in Manhattan. He never wastes the opportunity to mention a popular pair of shoes, or a blouse, scarf, coat, or suit. It’s not like the details in ‘American Psycho’; it’s more to put the reader on notice that Jay Mac knows from where he speaks.
‘The Good Life’ picks up with Russell and Corrine from an earlier novel, ‘Brightness Falls’, but you don’t need to know that to read this story. Actually, it helps if you don’t. Sure, there is a feeling that a back-story exists, a shared past between Jay Mac’s fans (whoever they are) and his old soul New York characters. Perhaps you’ve wondered why or how the wealthy of this country exist. Let me tell you, I hardly ever think of it, but Jay Mac has a finger on the pulse of said opulence. But this story isn’t about the Vanderbilts, or the Rockefellers; it concerns the ordinary, wealthy New Yorkers you read about in the pages of Vanity Fair. So if you’re curious to know what happens to them when things go bad, or things around them go bad, and what exactly is “the good life”, then look no further than this highly readable and wildly enjoyable new novel from someone who’s made his bread and butter writing about people who don’t have to work for a living and can afford to take a cab around the island, always.
His first novel, a coke-laden thrill ride written in the present tense, or so it seemed, was the book that put him on the map. Like ‘Less Than Zero’ for his pal Bret Easton Ellis, ‘Bright Lights, Big City’ made him a household name - if not common at first, then more so after the movie hit the big screen when he surely became an overused topic of conversation. When this new book hits stores (Feb.’06), ‘Lunar Park’ will be on its way to paperback, (almost), and it might be a nice touch of synergy to have Bret Easton Ellis and Jay Mac tour together. I know Mr. Mac blazes his own trail on book tours, but these two authors have a lot in common. Both New York literary legends of days long since past, rethreading the styles of yesterday if only to appease the minority of fans that hold together the east coast literati that they call a ‘fan base’. Their books maintain a heavy hand when it comes to explaining in detail what the rich have that you and I don’t…
Money. It’s not everything you know, just the only thing.
There is also a shot at the publishing world in this book, just like ‘Lunar Park’. Jay Mac takes us on a much too brief trip to the apartment of super editor Nan Talese and her husband, Gay, for a cocktail party. An evening that is worthy of an entire book, sadly, we’re short-changed with only a few pages in this story. Russell is cheating and he gets caught, as cheaters always do (at least in movies and books), while his wife bounds off with a man she’s just met, an Upper East Side millionaire named Luke. It’s not a meeting you’re likely to forget. You see, they meet on September 12th, 2001. Luke is walking away from the ashes of the World Trade Center buildings, after spending hours digging for a man he was supposed to have met at Windows on the World for breakfast the previous morning. Luke dodged the big casino; he cheated the devil, now he wants to live life to the fullest by cheating on his cheating wife. (There is a great line in this story, when Corrine asks Russell what his girl on the side has that she doesn’t. His reply is worth a thousand words. I’ll let you discover it.) But his heart is heavy with regret, having gone out to slay the dragon for years, bringing home the bacon for his family while never really enjoying the benefits he’s worked so hard for. He’s retired and wants to be a man again. I can’t imagine Luke. I can’t picture him (even though Jay Mac describes him as Cary Grant), but his thoughts haunt me as I read his story. The narrative up until this point is sharp and in flux. Prior to 9/11, Russell and Corinne throw a party in their downtown loft, names are dropped, and someone even suggests that Paul Auster should take a lesson or two from Stephen King on how to construct a good plot.
Funny stuff. Jay Mac is right. This story is good. This story has legs and Paul Auster could learn a thing or two from SK (and you know how I feel about him).
But this is supposed to be a sad story; the empathy you feel is for the people who lived, not died. The survivors have guilt on their minds while they’re gasping for air. Jay Mac doesn’t cover the post 9/11 New York City: the downsizing, the layoffs, and the terror on the streets. But in a sense he does. Sure, he works the story through the sorrow of the soup kitchens set up at Ground Zero. Yes, he shows the real pain, but is it enough? Will it ever be? How long will Luke, Russell, and Corrine go before they tune out the pictures of the dead and missing plastered on every street corner? Are they all consumed with the jealousy created by infidelity or the challenge that cheating presents? Or are they too distracted to see the human scale of the tragedy surrounding them? It was a very overwhelming time for most New Yorkers, and tuning it out wasn’t something to be ashamed of; it’s just that the event itself was of such enormity that you couldn’t actually absorb it, ever. The good life just got a dose of reality at the hands of Jay Mac. A writer whose work, up to this point, has been a thorn in my side. Dare I say I wish he’d write more, not Joyce Carol Oates prolific, but a stronger output than he’s currently keeping. Maybe I missed good opportunities to read Jay Mac’s books years ago, maybe I was young and full of too much bullshit or petty jealously. This book is worth it. And if you like dazzling cover art, then you’ll be pleased to know that Mr. Chip Kidd gives us another A+ cover design, which carefully and tastefully infuses the 9-11 themes of this novel.
Which leads me to this... A recent New York Times piece on Chip Kidd was a wonderful but brief insight into the man behind the man, what his apartment looks like and briefly describing this book, which puts his work front and center. In this new book, he’s showing for the first time how his work as a graphic designer has changed the medium of book jacket art forever. (Why he made decisions that he did, how he came to make the choices he made. He’s showing the artistic process at the core, a rare insight for any artist to share with the public). He’s revolutionized it to the point of making each cover a vibrantly relevant work of art, more times than not breaking new ground and leading the way towards a fully symbiotic piece of two-dimensional art that acts as three-dimensional illusion. I’ve raved before about Mr. Kidd, and there is no real way to adequately review this book. You just need to buy it. Christmas is here. It’s worth it, every penny.
Chip Kidd
Work: 1986-2006
Book One
I’ve been a fan of CK’s since I first started working in the publishing business. Back in the day, I would Xerox his covers and hang them up in my cubicle to admire as I talked on the phone to people who wanted to buy books.
Here’s how Mr. Kidd started, reared in Lincoln Park, PA, schooled at Penn State in graphic design (why not an art school?), and at 22 years of age was hired to work for Sara Eisenman at Knopf, an imprint of Random House, Inc. In this book, before we get to the gold, we must know where he came from and how he got his first real break at the hands of John Updike. Some of the prologue is neat, but most of it is an exciting glimpse into the beginnings of his life as a book jacket designer. He’s the first to tell you that he never wanted to be the most famous book jacket designer in the world, but it sort of worked out that way, and now he’s got this book to show us. What really is most important is that he’s got an incredibly edgy and darkly creative side to his book jackets. (For those of you paying attention you’ll remember my review of CK’s novel, ‘Cheese Monkeys’. As an object, it’s an incredible piece of design; as a book, it lacked a certain narrative flow. I wanted it to be twice as long, but when all is said and done it’s a very precise description of his formative school years and reminded me of my time at R.I.S.D.)
The book itself is a hefty proposition in the time it takes you to read and study it. CK did most everything for this book, and it shows, really, it’s a stunning object. He mentions early on in his prologue how a hardcover book never gets thrown away, and that in a year’s time it will be half the price, so in its original form it becomes a luxury item (and in my opinon a highly valued piece of any book collection). The first cover is for John Hedgecoe’s book, ‘Sourcebook of Creative Ideas’. Not a stunner by any means, but still interesting in the choice of photographs on the cover. CK’s inspiration seems to be television, like all children of the 70’s and 80’s, and here it shows more than anywhere else. Further into the book we find ‘The Day Room’ cover for the play by Don Delillo, a startlingly effective black and white image of a man who appears to be in a straight jacket. But it’s split down the middle; the subject is a man in an insane asylum. Then comes ‘My Hard Bargain’ for the Walter Kirn book of short stories, a cover that I’ve touched on in my column here on AICN, and an image that still sends shivers down my spine. But now we see what he really had in mind: a lonely man in a car, very much like a Garry Winogrand photograph with the title running vertically, which got nixed before press time.
Further on we discover that books of poetry are where it’s at for designers. Author Marie Ponsot is the recipient of some his more stunning creations, from a method dubbed by Kidd as his ‘continuous-tone Photostat and watercolor dye phase’, which gives off shocking results. Mr. Kidd begins to show how he can take a book over in its entirety (check the inside design, page by page) with Thomas Glynn’s novel, ‘Watching the Body Burn’, a book I bought at The Strand just because of the design.
Before we go any further, I need to remind you that Sonny Mehta, editor extraordinaire, selector of many of the “hits” at Knopf over the past few years, is a silent guide to Kidd, and without his guidance Kidd does feel that his work could have gone in another direction. Even when he gets called on the carpet for changing the colophon on the spine to match the cover for ‘Geek Love’, (who cares, if you ask me), it’s a jacket that still holds up to this day. But then CK gets into the big time with Crichton and ‘Jurassic Park’, a jacket I don’t care for but ‘Rising Sun’, on the other hand, says more to me than most anything else from this period of his work. It’s scary, seems like prostitution may be involved, and that you’re risking the stability of adulthood by gazing for too long at the Melissa Hayden photograph that was taken from a random television broadcast, which makes it even more eerie. I do like seeing the process that the ‘Disclosure’ jacket took to get to the final image, but of all the jackets in the Crichton list, I really only find ‘Airframe’ to have captured the manic quality of obsessive loneliness that haunts all writers. Since I hated ‘Timeline’ as a book (except for that paragraph about time travel, somewhere in the first 50 pages), the jacket never really appealed to me, although it glowed something fierce when the finished copy was given to me.
After you see how involved with Donna Tartt Kidd became in discussions on the cover design of her two novels, you start to realize that jacket art is a far more involved process than you may have previously thought.
Then comes the Ellroy covers; shit, this stuff is smokin’. I’ve gushed about it before, but ‘Blood on the Moon’, ‘The Cold Six Thousand’, ‘American Tabloid’, and ‘White Jazz’ could not have any other cover design. The prose is dirty, staccato, and sharper than a knife, and CK captures it perfectly each time. It’s as if by using a picture of dead men on a sidewalk or pulp figures leaping off the page, he’s trying to relentlessly infuse the unforgettable images of a text that refuses to leave the reader’s mind anything but jangled and shaken. He repeats the process to smaller acclaim, and as much as I loath Elmore Leonard’s writing, the repacked covers for the Dell list that CK did a few years back remind me again of how he adores modern street photography and works it into many different covers even at the most subtle of times, like ‘Glitz’ or ‘Stick’. Leonard novels have never enjoyed such brilliant packaging (note the quotes on the cover, how tricky is that?).
Things take a turn for the modern with his work on Brad Meltzer’s novel ‘The Tenth Justice’, a book which caused such a stir upon its release that I have to believe it was due in part to the jacket. CK does it again with Meltzer’s ‘Dead Even’, keeping the eyes of the portraits hidden behind the title, causing you to wonder just what is behind this cover? CK’s work seems to be everywhere, and I’ve looked over my own collection for years and still find books that I never realized were his: Simona Vinci’s novel, ‘What We Don’t Know About Children’ or Rupert Thomson’s ‘Soft’. I feel ashamed to admit it now, but both books are at eye level in my book room, and I stare at them almost every day. A designer friend of mine and I were talking about new book jackets when I told him to check out Thomson’s latest novel, ‘Divided Kingdom’, as its cover is so stunning, effectively using the montage of Thomas Kellners to suggest the compartmentalization of London.
I don’t think CK’s work could be mentioned without Barbara deWilde getting some coverage as well. Their work was displayed in a small antiquarian bookshop in East Hampton, NY, in the early 90’s, which is so rare that it’s almost like it didn’t happen. Who would believe book jackets alone could be the focus of an exhibit?
To think of the writer David Gates, you must focus on the cover of his short story collection, ‘The Wonders of the Invisible World’: a girl wading through a lake, trench, or a stream. And of course ‘Jernigan’, the book that is so reminiscent of ‘The Sportswriter’ in every way, save for the stunning cover; David Gates should thank Kidd every chance he gets.
As we come to a close in this book, we’re treated to his magazine work. What a treat the Granta “Family” issue is, with its type dancing across the cover just above the photograph of the people on the beach; an all-white American cast, a lady in the background (she’s got a skin tight black one piece bathing suit on) surrounded by her lover and husband, I’d assume, if I could be so bold as to read into the underlying message of this picture. Even the John Gregory Dunne jackets touch on a certain unspeakable quality of a frozen horrified ambience that almost repulses you as it draws you in. Of course, who could forget ‘Glamorama’ and ‘Lunar Park’, along with ‘Model Behavior’, and the Augusten Burroughs covers for his books, which look even better in the ‘comp’ form - especially those that never made it through to the finished process. The ‘Dry’ cover has been praised for its illusory quality, over and over again, justifiably.
I’ve touched on only a few of the covers that appear in this stunning collection. Don’t forget the Border Trilogy or the Updike covers, the work on Batman, or the book itself - which is half-bound and half-loose leaf. Book jackets inspire you to pick them off the shelf and what’s inside keeps them in your hands. There are many designers out there in the book world, but none with a staying power like Chip Kidd. This review gives you a glimpse into his work; most of the covers are magical and some are darkly brilliant, but all of them will enlighten you to the incredibly talented designer working in a field that never forgives bad design. What graphic designers tend to applaud is bottomless creativity and boundless energy to push the limits of what can be put on a book jacket. With so many books being published today, you sometimes forget how powerful they are to look at, especially when Chip Kidd designs the cover.
Got something to tell me? Whisper in my ear right here.
And until next time...
It’s Not A Secret Until I Tell Someone.
