Tag: novel

Writer’s Desk: Be a Fool

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The ever-punning fantasy author Piers Anthony has written, oh who knows how many books? A lot. So many that entire shelves at some used bookstores are given over to his well-read work. Not all of it is for the ages. But the man just loves to put words on paper.

So who better to give would-be writers some advice? Here’s what he had to say about the fools who decide they have it in them to write a whole novel:

Consider the first card of the Tarot deck, titled The Fool. There’s this young man traipsing along with a small dog at his heel, toting a bag of his worldly goods on the end of his wooden staff, carrying a flower in his other hand, gazing raptly at the sky—and about to step off a cliff, because he isn’t watching his feet. A fool indeed. Does this feel familiar? It should. You’re doing much the same thing. What made you ever think you could bat out a bad book like that, let alone write anything readable?

Yes, in the end he comes around to describing why it’s still a good idea. Because the world is made livable by its fools.

Reader’s Corner: ‘City of Blows’

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Writer / director / actor Tim Blake Nelson has done everything from play a cornpone buffoon in O Brother, Where Art Thou? to write and direct The Grey Zone, one of the most chilling stories ever made about the Holocaust.

His debut novel, City of Blows, is a gnarly satire about Hollywood, ambition, and how the combination of the two grinds most people into dust.

My review ran in the Summer 2023 print edition of Rain Taxi Review of Books:

…At multiple points, the characters in this clamorous story interlace with Nelson’s background and career; the novel is stippled with the kind of inside takes on Hollywood sausage-making that a veteran like Nelson could use to fill many more books. But City of Blows is less a warts-and-all showbiz tale than a study of what happens when sky-high expectations meet the buzzsaw of reality—albeit a reality radically distorted by an industry awash in outlandish promises, byzantine court politics, and juvenile score-settling…

Screening Room: ‘White Noise’

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Many have said that Don DeLillo’s White Noise is an unfilmmable novel. Well, it’s a film with Adam Driver, Greta Gerwig, Don Cheadle, and even a killer LCD Soundsystem-scored dance number.

White Noise is playing now in limited release. It will be on Netflix December 30. My review is at PopMatters:

Pity the person asking what White Noise, Noah Baumbach’s messy yet fun adaptation of Don DeLillo’s 1984 novel of comic catastrophe and looming portents, is about. The response may take time to compose, arrive in paragraph form, involve contemplative gazing, and include the phrase “it’s about … America.” Such an answer may drive the potential viewer towards something starring Ryan Reynolds. This is a shame…

Here’s the trailer:

Nota Bene: Werner Herzog’s Novel of War and Nature

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In Werner Herzog’s spectacular new novel, The Twilight World, he tells the story of Hiroo Onoda, the Japanese soldier who famously continued fighting World War II on a remote island in the Philippines until finally surrendering in 1974.

Mixing the sublime, the strange, human obsession, and the implacability of nature in his usual deadpan style, Herzog is pretty much made for this story.

Here is how he uses ants to explain the passage of time:

A column of millions and millions of ants arrives overnight and marches through the trees with no beginning or end; the column marches for days and days and then one day is mysteriously and suddenly gone, and that is another year.

(h/t New Yorker)

Screening Room: ‘The Forgiven’

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The latest arch provocation from John Michael McDonagh (The Guard, Calvary), an adaptation of Lawrence Osborne’s novel The Forgiven, opens in limited release tomorrow. My review is at PopMatters:

David (Ralph Fiennes) and Jo (Jessica Chastain), are a nightmarish pair who can barely see past their own privilege to stop complaining. “Very picturesque, I suppose, in a banal sort of way,” David notes while looking at a vast desert vista from atop a horse. He then lists the gay Westerners who famously came to Morocco since Edwardian times (Gide, Ginsberg, Burroughs), “primarily to bugger little Arab boys.” The flippancy of the remark, coming just the morning after his drunk driving killed an Arab boy, is hard to stomach but is placed there not just for discomfort. Swaddled in and bored by comfort, the Europeans seem to appreciate nothing. Until one of them has something to lose…

Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘The Power of the Dog’

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The newest film from Jane Campion is a somewhat tortured and brooding but still surprising drama set on the high plains where Benedict Cumberbatch makes a surprisingly believable rancher.

The Power of the Dog is playing on the festival circuit right now in what looks like a pretty certain play for the Oscars before being released on Netflix in December. My review is at Slant:

Nobody is where they should be in The Power of the Dog, and everybody seems to be searching for something, somebody, or somewhere else. Set in 1925 Montana, Jane Campion’s adaptation of Thomas Savage’s 1967 book tracks the obsessions, miseries, and passions of a group of people who inhabit a cavernous house in the middle of a vast ranchland and make each other miserable until blood is finally shed. The film looks at times like a stiff-jawed period piece, but it ripples underneath with a prickly modern sensibility…

The trailer is here:

Reader’s Corner: ‘The Passenger’

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Ulrich Boschwitz first published his autobiographical novel The Passenger in 1939, basing its tale of a hapless German Jewish businessman running for his life on his own family’s refugee existence.

My review of the new translation ran in Rain Taxi Review of Books:

Silbermann is on the run in a country crawling with Gestapo, brownshirts, and Gentile citizens all too eager to volunteer their services to the National Socialist dragnet, and he is reaching the end of a rapidly fraying rope. In desperation, he riskily reveals his identity to the attractive woman sharing his compartment, setting into motion a quasi-absurdist chase narrative in which the man on the run is knocked from one dead end to another by forces not only out of his control but beyond his ken…

Screening Room: ‘The Life Ahead’

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In this Italian-set adaptation of Romain Gary’s novel The Life Ahead, a Holocaust survivor (Sophia Loren) and a 12-year-old Senegalese orphan (Ibrahima Gueye) find common cause despite a rough first meeting when he steals her pursue.

The Life Ahead will be available on Netflix this Friday. My review is at Slant:

The Life Ahead transfers the story from Paris to the southern Italian seaside town of Bari, whose palm trees and buttery sunshine contrast with the hardscrabble realities of life for the characters. The star of the piece is ostensibly Sophia Loren, who brings a combative hauteur to the role of Madame Rosa, an Italian-Jewish survivor of Auschwitz and former streetwalker who runs a kind of ad-hoc nursery for the children of her colleagues out of her apartment. While presenting herself as diamond-hard, Rosa is beginning to chip a little around the edges, and more in need of a friend than she would admit…

Here’s the trailer:

Writer’s Desk: Shape Matters

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A Lesson Before Dying Book Cover - typographic layout with author name and book title with small image of an African American man standing beneath a wooden structure

In 2010, Ernest J. Gaines—the late author of A Lesson Before Dying and The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman—talked about how part of his fiction grew out of listening to the stories of the people he grew up around in Jim Crow-era Louisiana.

But, he emphasized, writing is not just about having good material:

Content is probably only 40 percent of it, no more than 50 percent, as far as I’m concerned … If a book doesn’t have form, then damn, it ain’t no novel. We can go down the block right now and find a guy on the next corner who’ll tell the biggest and truest story you can ever hear. Now, putting that story down on paper so that a million people can read and feel and hear it like you on that street corner, that’s going to take form. That’s writing…

Screening Room: ‘Where’d You Go, Bernadette?’

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Cate Blanchett stars in Richard Linklater’s adaptation of Maria Semple’s beloved novel Where’d You Go, Bernadette?, which opens this week.

My review is at The Playlist:

Once upon a time, Bernadette was a rising ingenue in the architecture world, with a knack for quirky science-fiction designs and looking dazzling in old photographs (the bangs and artfully dangled cigarettes help). Her career was then sidetracked by a catastrophe that the movie withholds until far too late in the process. By the time we catch up with her, she has become a fierce recluse. Living in a damp and vine-riddled hilltop Seattle manse that she keeps up like some horticulturally-minded relative of the Addams Family…

Here’s the trailer:

Reader’s Corner: Don’t Give Up

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Novelist, poet, and writing professor Chuck Kinder passed away recently. Known in many circles as the inspiration behind Michael Chabon’s glorious novel Wonder Boys (and its highly underrated film adaptation), Kinder sometimes had a hard time finishing things.

Per Shelf Awareness:

Chabon, who studied under him in the 1980s at Pitt and published Wonder Boys in 1995, spoke with the San Francisco Chronicle in 2001 about Kinder’s role in inspiring the character played by Michael Douglas in Curtis Hanson’s 2000 film adaptation: “I remember peering into his office and seeing this monolithic pile of white paper–the inverse of the monolith from 2001–under his desk lamp. In my memory, it was 4,000 pages long. He was proud of how big a bastard it was…

Kinder eventually wrangled the beast into the quite svelte 360-ish page novel Honeymooners after a mere two decades or so.

Never give up.

Reader’s Corner: ‘Lake Success’ is a Picaresque Journey to Nowhere

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My review of the new Gary Shteyngart novel is at PopMatters:

One gets the sense from the start of Gary Shteyngart’s Lake Success that this is going to be something of a status report on the nation. And it’s not just because of Trump. Barry Cohen, the doofus we’re stuck with throughout, stumbles into Port Authority bleeding from his head and trying to get a ticket out of town. A fund manager with $2.4 billion in assets wearing a Citi-branded Patagonia vest over his Vineyard Vines shirt, he’s not a bus station type but nevertheless is feeling like he needs to go off the grid. No NetJet from Teterboro or Acela train for Barry…

One of the book’s chapters was excerpted at the New Yorker.

Writer’s Desk: Immerse Yourself

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Michael Ondaatje doesn’t work fast. He spent six years on his seminal novel The English Patient—which actually just won the Golden Man Booker Award (meaning it was the Booker Award-winner of the past 50 years). That is in part because he likes to drown himself in the material.

Per this interview from BookPage, Ondaatje prefers to get outside of himself and what he knows:

That’s how you learn. You don’t want to write your own opinion, you don’t want to just represent yourself, but represent yourself through someone else. It doubles your perception, to write from the point of view of someone you’re not. To write about someone like myself would be very limiting…

He was talking about his novel Anil’s Ghost. That one took seven years. Escaping into a new character and a new world takes time. But the immersion is worth it if you want to write something great.

Reader’s Corner: ‘Heather, the Totality’

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In this novel from Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner, the lives of a spiritually deadened uptown Manhattan family intersect with the downward trajectory of a New Jersey convict who never had a chance.

My review of Heather, the Totality is at PopMatters:

Nobody will finish this novel remembering a sublime fillip of dialogue or splash of lovely description. They are more likely to snap the book shut about three or so hours after picking it up—and they almost certainly will fly through it at that speed, because this thin blade of a book has a wicked magnetic pull—and pour themselves a couple fingers of something strong. To steady the nerves…

You can read an excerpt here.