Our man Frank Bascombe, the author of the longest-running book review column here at the site, is back with his September picks, and it’s a nice read as always.
Take it away, Frank.
Fall has arrived here on the East Coast and the winter books just keep rolling in. So far I’ve been impressed with what’s coming out early next year. I’m looking forward to the new Richard Price novel, ‘Lush Life’, along with a few other books that might hold my interest. A quick side note; did anyone notice that in ‘Fracture’ Ryan Gosling does an impressive job impersonating Brad Pitt? That aside...
... It’s Not A Secret Unless I Tell Someone.
The Headmaster Ritual by Taylor Antrim
Mariner
Another first novel and for some reason I seem to be attracted to them; one right after the other. I can’t say why I keep reading them, but I do. This book came with some heavy buzz via Mediabistro.com and the NYC literary scene. Since I’m supposed to be tuned in, at least a little bit, then I guess it’s my duty to read books like this.
Boarding school has been done to death; ‘Old School’, ‘Separate Peace’, ect, ect, and I didn’t think I’d be willing to sit through another tale set in the confines of a blue blood training ground for children of the rich and famous. With nothing more than a few years of life experience under his belt an MFA and persistence Mr. Antrim has delivered a striking novel that should get a lot of people’s attention, or at least for what ever he does next. Clearly another veiled autobiography of prep school experiences, this story has to have come from Antrim’s life or at least somewhere similar to where he went to school. It’s typical for first time authors veil their experiences and call them novels, that usually happens for the first few books, then these writers can start making it up on their own and are somehow released from their past and the maddening desire to write about it.
The Britton School is set comfortably in Massachusetts where the lousy weather plays a part in the story; the snow and cold, turning leaves, and this is a geographical locale where you’ll frequently find turn of the century institutions like Britton tucked away in the vast rolling hills. Dyer is a first year teacher and one of the two narrators of the story, James, the son of the headmaster of Britton is the other and by the end of the story you’ll begin to see several patterns form in either men, or should I say James and his father who seems to around each corner, and Dyer.
Starting from scratch Dyer must teach several classes and find time to nurse his broken heart, his most recent girlfriend left him for a life in Hollywood selling screenplays. He throws himself at the job and a female teacher he finds attractive who ends up seeming like she’s employed at the school only to sooth his libido. Meanwhile James is placed in the dorms by his father who is trying to push him out of the nest; in this case the frying pan would be a much better place to live than the fire. The kids at this school are brutal, one of the hazing rituals they like to roll out on young students like James is called lacquering, where a humidifier is filled with urine and then turned on in the unsuspecting student’s room during the day and when they get back from class…you get the idea. James is unpopular just because he’s an underclassman and the headmaster’s kid. Dyer is an unknown who is given a job of teaching a mock UN council to a clique of students who are all just passing time until their acceptance letters roll in from Princeton and Harvard.
Antrim’s talent is not in weaving these two narratives together, which he does flawlessly, but by peppering these pages with sterling prose, heavy on description of popular kids, their material trappings and a bone crushingly insipid crush that James has on a popular girl who is playing him from the start. My heart bled as I watched James follow this girl around and take her orders like gospel, I knew from the start that she was no good, turns I was right. Dyer is a mildly suspicious creation, surrounded by intelligence, influenced by the headmaster who seems to be holding all the strings, and mildly amused by the social structure of Britton. I disagree with the New York Times Book Review which gave this novel a solid beating a few weeks ago. This publisher took a chance on a book that is basically a stereotypical view of pre-college life with some modern politics mixed in, all told in a narrative style that’s refreshingly urgent. I wish people wouldn’t throw the baby out with the bath water. But it’s their opinion, which they’re entitled to. I’m looking forward to what Antrim does next; this is a promising start, competent in every way shape and form; filled with strong male characters whose Achilles heels are the women in their lives and how they can’t seem to communicate because of it. This book is about a lot of things but it’s ambitious and that says something.
An Ordinary Spy by Joseph Weisberg
Bloomsbury
Is there a spy story that hasn’t been told? Can it be reinvented, should it be turned on its head and dismantled? Or is the old formula so engrained in the subconscious that it’s impossible to write something new with out readers minds falling back on something they’ve read a million times, should they expect whatever is new to be new, and not what their used to? Sadly the old conventions are there for a reason, and this book uses the hinges of the spy business as a start but after that it’s like nothing I’ve read before.
Okay, I’ll be the first to admit it; I haven’t read EVERY spy book ever written but I’ve gotten through enough to know what’s quality and what’s groundbreaking; and ‘An Ordinary Spy’ suspiciously drift’s between the two. This book is a strange solitary story, especially the confessional tone of the narrative. You feel like you’re the only one reading it, lost in this mundane world, trapped in a room with a co-worker you don’t hate or like, but listen to because like him you’re someone who has to go to work.
Written as a memoir that’s been submitted to the CIA for vetting and they go through it with their black magic marker and black out forty percent of the book. Really, that’s what it is. You’ve seen those declassified documents on the news where the letterhead reads CIA and then there are these long breaks in the paragraphs, between sentences where black bars replace the words, and the sentence reads, The Minister of (black bar) negotiated a shipping contract between (black bar) and (black bar) culminating in the hiring of seven hundred (black bar) nationals which revitalized the economic growth of (black bar).
So Mark Ruttenberg drifts through the CIA as the story begins, (full of black bars) and gets sent out to (black bar)(which leaves you guessing where it is he might be stationed and who he’s recruiting, a great, great device as it turns out). While there he hears about another disgraced agent named Bobby Goldstein who worked in (black bar) before him and recruited the wrong (black bar) before getting retired. Then Mark recruits a woman of questionable origins and subverted ethics while bedding her endlessly, not a good way to start a career at the CIA. He’s sent back home to Washington before he can say “I think this is getting serious.” He’s fired from the CIA, and is pushed out to find Bobby who is living somewhere on the East Coast. Mark tells the story like I would tell you about the year I lived in the South of France; candidly, with gallows humor and heavy on the mundane details. Bobby tells Mark of his fall from grace, which takes up two thirds of the book and Mark tells this story to us after Bobby tells it to him.
Intrigued? I was floored by how good this book was, start to finish, the brilliantly dry narrative and the intimate nature I felt while reading this came across to me in waves. This is a procedural story about being an employee of the CIA. Cars don’t blow up; there are no high speed chases, or scantily clad vixens with ulterior motives who eventually warm up to our hero only to be whacked in the final act to atone for their sins. This book doesn’t come out until 2008 but it’s something you can safely pre-order via your preferred vendor and be stunned with joy when it arrives.
Uncovered
Photographs by Thomas Allen
Foreward by Chip Kidd
Aperture
I first discovered Thomas Allen when the paperback for ‘Blood on the Moon’ came down the pipeline and I was still a certifiable James Ellroy fan (still crazy for his books, but he’s taking an awfully long time writing the third installment of the American Crime Trilogy, or what ever it’s called, it’s been almost 10 years since ‘The Cold Six Thousand’), and just couldn’t believe my eyes at what stared back at me. The cover was so incredible, moving, magnetic and ground breaking that I couldn’t believe it actually existed. Chip Kidd used Thomas Allen’s photographs for the cover and if you’ve seen the Ellroy repackages then you know what I’m talking about. Kidd gives a nice intro for ‘Uncovered’, a little gem from Aperture which is getting ripples of praise from Entertainment Weekly and other non mainstream media outlets.
Allen takes the covers of old pulp novels and lifts them from the two dimensional surface over to the three dimensional world through a stunning photographic process which makes them rapidly shoot of the page. The book itself is made of a heavy duty board material which is complimented by a neat trim size and creates a level of permanence that compliments these photographs which at times are campy but provokingly injected with countless dramatic urges and remain edge of your seat serious in tone and subject matter. My favorite is still the cover of ‘Blood on the Moon’, a man being punched and flying back over the edge of the book while the aggressor is frozen in time throwing the punch. The back of the book is a beautiful shot of a girl in a tight outfit in blurring background doing a pseudo cheer while a boxer is collapsed in the foreground with his hand raised in mock victory over his head. The image is framed by the spine of the book, (priced at 25 cents) and the boxer’s gloved fist while appropriately titled, ‘The Last Round’.
With this masterful collection Thomas Allen has developed a timeless set of images that howl back to our collected past most notably the endlessly fascinating 1950’s with all it’s socially inept, politically incorrect and wild sexual narrative’s that seem to leave an impression on anyone who even sniffs the edges of that period of American History. But what’s most important is that he’s taken a two dimensional object and created a three dimensional image by eliminating the material’s, sanding down the edges and presenting an illusion worthy of Houdini.
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