Review: Patti Smith at the Minetta Lane

Patti Smith at the Minetta Lane by Patti Smith
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I got this one through Audible, but didn’t consider it a “book” until I saw the New York times had reviewed it. If it’s good enough for them, then I suppose it’s good enough for me.

I love Patti Smith at what I think of her as her best, as a kind of punk poet. I admit I get tired of her work (though not her, never her) when she lapses into the heavy recitation rhythm stuff, when she reads a poem mid-concert and seems to ask, implicitly, if we wouldn’t rather be sitting by ourselves and reading. No, no we wouldn’t – not even those of us who do happen to read our share of poetry in other circumstances.

But, on balance, I like Patti Smith very much, and I certainly enjoyed her Just Kids. It’s justifiably celebrated as one of the great rock memoirs.

This, it turns out, is a kind of greatest hits live. It’s her reading excerpts of her two memoirs and then punctuating them with live music. The memoirs are very good – I enjoy those prose breaks more than I do the poetry interruptions – but I’ve read them. And the music is generally great, but it doesn’t really rock here. For the most part, these are late-middle-aged reworkings of the classics, songs that – beyond their excellence – are supposed to matter here because of the context of her memoirs and because of what we bring to them from our past as well. They tend to linger, to move more slowly than the album versions or, presumably, the classic concert arrangements.

This is, in effect, Smith’s answer to Springsteen on Broadway. She isn’t selling out at a major theater, but she is reuniting with her fans. She’s talking through the music, not feeling that rock spirit but capably performing a script.

I doubt I’ll ever find Smith truly boring – and this is certainly not – but I did get the sense I’d heard it all before. She’s one of the rock queens, someone I’m glad to see basking in her well-deserved renown. I’d be interested in a full concert, one where we get to see her rethinking the music as music, slowing it down and drawing new nuances from it.

Framing the music in her strong memoirs makes it something that, live, must still pack a punch. Recorded – as something that we’re supposed to acknowledge as a book – it leaves me hungry for something purer: another memoir or another concert.


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Review: The Little Friend

The Little Friend by Donna Tartt
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I am as big a fan of The Secret History and The Goldfinch as anyone. I think each is a modern masterpiece, and I think Donna Tartt is one of our most gifted contemporary writers on the strength of the two of them. But this one, released a decade after the one and before the other, lacks the dark urgency of The Secret History and the vast canvas of The Goldfinch. It has a powerful kernel at the heart of it, but it’s too small a story to carry the weight of its 600+ pages.

The idea at the heart of this sounds impressive. A little girl, Harriet, comes to understand the inexplicable murder of her brother years before as having been perpetrated by a down-on-their-luck family of drug dealers and dubious evangelicals. With her precocious intelligence, she tracks down what she thinks is the real evil without understanding that evil is ultimately beyond comprehension. It’s a coming-of-age narrative with a twist – a twist of a knife where we can never see the hand behind it.

But there are all sorts of small matters that detract from that powerful central notion. For one, Tartt introduces a number of characters who, in the end, don’t contribute all that much to the story. We don’t need to see so much about Harriet’s sister or about the inner lives of her many aunts. The characters are likable enough, but they blend together somewhat, and they ultimately distract from what seems the central point about exploring the possibility of evil as a child. A little of such characters would have accomplished as much as the couple hundred pages we get of them.

For another, Tartt jumps from perspective to perspective. At times that has the virtue of placing Harriet’s questioning in a different light, letting us see through her eyes as a thoughtful detective and then see her through others as a little girl trying to find her way. At other times, it gets clumsy. [SEMI-SPOILER] In the scene where Danny and Harriet confront each other at the water tower, the action gets slowed as we switch from one pair of eyes to another. Sometimes, to my annoyance, it gets repeated.

There are parts here that venture into noir territory – what else can you call a novel that opens with the awful murder of a 13-year-old boy – but Tartt eventually shows (SPOILER: through the contrived way that Harriet survives the showdown with Danny) she doesn’t have the stomach for that. She blinks, and we get instead something that returns to the safety of conventional narrative.

Overall, I’m afraid I found myself checking how much I had left simply too often for the book to feel like a complete success. Tartt writes excellent sentences, and sometimes I’d linger over a particularly strong line, but the narrative just kept slowing down. I’d be curious to see the “studio-cut” of this, the roughly half-as-long book that would tell the same story with the excess cut out.

At the same time, I know what Tartt did before this and after, so I think the smart play remains to leave her to her own devices. This won a lot of awards when it came out 15 years ago, so maybe it’s just aged badly. In any case, with Tartt seeming to take a decade between books, I continue to look forward to the next one she rolls out, presumably in five more years.


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Review: Killing Commendatore

Killing Commendatore by Haruki Murakami
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I have read most of Murakami’s work by this point, and all of the would-be masterpieces: Kafka at the Shore, 1Q84, Wind-Up Bird Chronicles, and Hardboiled Wonderland. I obviously enjoy the guy’s work, or I wouldn’t keep coming back to him, and I am as excited as anybody else at this newest bid for greatness.

On balance, I think this one delivers yet again. It’s got the familiar tropes of a main character who slowly sheds his all-around-nice-guy persona to reveal peculiar darknesses; a secondary world that may or may not be distinct from what we know everyday; sustained reflections on the nature of art in a world craving for certainty denied it; and even, though not until the end and then only in small bits, cats as totems.

The more I read this, though – and I believe it’s Murakami’s first to deal so extensively with painting – the more I began to see some parallels between Murakami and painters in general. Above all, I found myself thinking of Murakami as a kindred spirit to Marc Chagall. Both had a tendency to reuse mystical tropes, and both worked on either medium-sized or vast canvasses. Both eschewed strict realism but neither embraced anything like full-blown abstraction.

Thinking of Murakami in such a light made me realize that there may not be all that meaningful a difference between his works. That’s not criticism; it’s just an effort at explaining why a single writer has shown he can write at least five different novels sized to be career-defining works. What I’m suggesting is that Murakami is less about plot or arguments and more about arranging a variety of tropes, images, and motifs into ever-fresh ways. His imagination is so deep and his feel for balance so strong that the real question seems to be how a specific composition fits together.

In such a light, it may be that this is somewhat weaker than the other top Murakami’s. Still, I think I’ve felt that about each of them since Kafka at the Shore (which was the first I read). I’ll finish, decide it’s good but a little less good, and then, as I reflect on the whole of the novel in the following weeks. I’ll find it ultimately as satisfying as the others.

That’s certainly my experience here. In the midst of my deep enjoyment of the novel, I was looking for reasons to be skeptical. I was troubled by the inelegant telegraphing of our protagonist’s friend, the son of the great painter, who has some news about his involvement with the protagonist’s ex-wife. I was frustrated that the opening pages essentially reveal the final key images – the faceless man, the idea of portraiture, and the penguin charm of the little girl – and take away some of the joy of narrative suspense. And I was bothered that some major tropes seem to get introduced only late.

And yet, as I reflect on all of this, it’s not so much that those images and tropes are out of balance as that they are out of the balance I would have anticipated. As the novel comes into focus as a whole, I find myself appreciating all at once again that Murakami hasn’t merely recycled his old stand-bys; he has instead reappropriated them for this new literary canvas.

We get a few more explicit articulations than usual of the fundamental Murakami method. At one point, the mysterious Menshiki says, “Instead of a stable truth, I choose unstable possibilities,” and “I choose to surrender myself to that instability.” Our protagonist can’t quite embrace such uncertainty but – and this is the dimension of the novel in which he is like the Nick Carraway to Menshiki’s Gatsby – he does indeed go partway. He’s willing to accept that we can’t know truth entirely but that we have to embrace something. As he puts it near the very end, “Maybe nothing in this world can be certain, but at least we can believe in something.”

In the end, though, I’m less interested in why Murakami does what he does or even for why it works. Instead, I am happy to enjoy the peculiar blend of symbol, fantasy, and melancholy that he finds a way to paint in fresh fashion over one after another of his massive canvasses.


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Review: Mao II

Mao II by Don DeLillo
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I’ve read this book seven or eight times, and I long ago decided it’s a modern masterpiece, but – as I read it yet again for a class – it feels fresh yet again.

If you’ve never read DeLillo and want to start, I think this is the one to begin with. It’s less ambitious than Underworld, but then so is almost everything else. I find White Noise vastly overrated; I didn’t enjoy it in its time when it was cutting edge enough to explore the early implications of image-is-everything postmodernism. Now, with that phenomenon old news, I think that book is even less interesting.

In contrast, Mao II is a book that seems to stay new, that seems to reveal new insights as we move ever deeper into the dystopic future DeLillo saw more than 25 years ago.

As I like to put it, this is probably the best post 9/11 novel I know of, even though it was written a decade before the disaster. It must have been eerie in the 1990s to read the reflections of terror that he wrapped around the image of the Twin Towers; from this vantage, it’s all the more striking. In a novel that talks about the nature of the future – as a time when crowds overwhelm the capacity of the individual and when terrorists encroach on the imaginative authority of the novelist – it’s all the more striking to see it after the fact.

There is a bit of woe-is-the-author self-pity that animates this – something I can’t help finding a bit funny as I re-read it and think of DeLillo bemoaning his own late-middle-age fate – but I forgive it. There’s so much skill, I have to write it off as a rare joke from one of our least humorous great writers.

What most compels me on this reading, though, is that we live in a moment where terrorists really are trying to wrest narrative authority from our writers. Our President’s cries of “fake news” are an unsubtle effort (one disturbingly successful) to assert that he, and he along, has the power to narrate experience to us. That’s often consisted of his self-aggrandizement and boasting – sometimes crassly harmless and sometimes dangerous for its justification of harmful policy. In this moment of election campaigning, though, his narrative has become a drumbeat of fear. Today it’s his imagining of a caravan of miserable refugees as something worthy of a military deployment. Tomorrow it will be something else.

But at bottom it will always be about stoking fear, about exaggerating a threat so that, to those inclined toward him, he can exaggerate his own power to defend.

And, of course, the fear he unleashes has the power to hurt in directions he cannot control. It’s barely a week since the massacre at the synagogue in Pittsburgh, but I can’t help seeing DeLillo’s prognostication in effect. The gunmen – and the mail bomber barely two days before – were working to make real the story our President is telling. They wanted to bring into the real world the terror born of his fantasy.

Mao II is more sophisticated than anything so simple, but its bedrock question still resonates. When the terrorists determine they will shape the consciousness of the world with their violence, what place is there for the writer? If you know the end of this, the answer is a very bleak one.


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Review: The Last Pass: Cousy, Russell, the Celtics, and What Matters in the End

The Last Pass: Cousy, Russell, the Celtics, and What Matters in the End by Gary Pomerantz
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I picked this one up because I read a great excerpt of it in Time. As Pomerantz describes it, this is basketball great Bob Cousy doing something remarkable, let alone for a 91-year-old who’s lived most of his life as a celebrity: reflecting on his own role in race as it played out in his lifetime.

I don’t regret picking up the whole book, but I do feel marginally misled by that excerpt. This book does deal with Cousy as he reflects on his friendship with Bill Russell; the two of them were the twin stars – Russell clearly the greater one – of the first NBA dynasty, one electric and one rock steady, one white and one black. It deals with that friendship, or strange lack thereof, in a beautifully written opening section, and then somewhat less satisfying at the end.

In between this is a different book altogether, also a good one, but not quite what I’d been sold on.

The heart of this is a biography of Cousy, and it’s certainly well done. Pomerantz has great admiration for the man, and he certainly persuades me to share it. Cousy himself felt like an immigrant, felt like a child of the ghetto who experienced a fraction of the native distrust that so haunted Russell.

I had no idea Cousy was, essentially, French, that he was the child of two French immigrants and that English was his second language. (I got to thinking that, alongside Tony Parker and, maybe someday, Frank Nkitlina, the French have a lot to boast about in their point guards.) I’d taken his name for Irish and that, of course, would have made him royalty in Boston. Instead, he could never quite overcome a combination of accent and speech impediment, and he could never quite be home in the world of celebrity athlete that he had a real hand in creating.

Pomerantz has a number of fine passages where he gives a sense of what it must have been like to watch Cousy play in his early days. He was, after George Mikan, the second inventor of modern play. And, where Mikan brought a combination of low-post precision and brute size, Cousy brought flair and creativity. Cousy is the forerunner of the basketball wizard – the Houdini of the hardwood. I think his Youtube clips probably don’t show the great panache of his original moves. Next to the greats of today, to Step Curry to take the exemplar, he must seem drab. In context, though, as Pomerantz describes it, he was a revolution.

This does begin to drag a little in the second half. Pomerantz has some great material, but he recycles the best of it. I think, in the end, the book would have been just as effective, and a little sharper, if it were about 20 percent shorter.

But the culmination here is the profile of Cousy in his waning years. Pomerantz lets us see him as a man unafraid to ask himself a difficult question: how was it possible he could have enjoyed such spectacular on-court chemistry with Russell yet not known the extent of what he endured as an African-American in Boston. (In one harrowing scene – one we get at least three times – vandals broke into Russell’s home, painted racist graffiti, and defecated in his bed.) Cousy seems to have been well ahead of most of his contemporaries when it came to race – he roomed with the Celtics first black player, and he served as a Big Brother to a handful of adolescent African-American boys – so he could easily plead his own documented good works. Instead, he probes his conscience for times he failed to ask the necessary question, for times he might have been even braver than he was and put his hard-earned reputation at risk.

And, while there is a lot to chew on in those culminating reflections, the somewhat disappointing truth is that they’re unresolved. Outside of a powerful scene in which Cousy, in a live television interview, began crying when asked about his relationship with Russell (another scene repeated multiple times) Pomerantz isn’t able to show us too much detail in Cousy’s reflections. I’m persuaded to admire the basketball player, admire the dignified way he’s aging in a world slowly forgetting the magnitude of his innovations, but I don’t quite have a sense of how I should admire him.

Cousy, that is, deserves admiration for his intention to ask himself deep questions at a time most of his contemporaries have faded or died. Pomerantz deserves credit for laying out those intentions as clearly as he does (and for the loving and attentive biography he works around that project). In the end, though, we see only the first half of the play – the pass as it’s leaving the hands of thoughtful man Cousy and careful writer Pomerantz. Good as this is, I’d like to see the second half of the play, the part where we see the pass get caught, the part where we see the reconciliation with Russell. And that, I’m afraid – both in life and in this otherwise fine book – we do not get to see.


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Review: Siddhartha

Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

When I was in high school, freshman and sophomore era, I first discovered Kurt Vonnegut and then – at the instigation of some older cousins – Herman Hesse. They were the two “serious” writers I first came to, and I can still see their books intermingled on an adolescent book shelf. (They were those thin, cheap mass market paperbacks, probably $ 1.75 or $1.95 each, and I recall the Hesse as being a sort of yellow, though I have a self-diagnosed color amnesia and can generally not remember the color of anything I’ve seen.)

I remember enjoying the Hesse, but I think I enjoyed it more for the idea of myself reading Hesse than for the Hesse itself. I liked the sense of myself as a 15 year old casually paging through a book that college students were struggling over. In any case, I don’t think I understood the context of what Hesse was saying. To me it was a kind of self-help manual. Now, revisiting – still somewhat casually – it seems to me a broadside against more established European philosophy. I must have seen that Siddhartha was “for” the power of the individual experience – the necessity of traveling ones own path – but I’m sure I had no sense that it was arguing against a philosophical tradition that saw itself as building upon those experiences that preceded it.

I admire what Hesse is saying here – that you have to look yourself for wisdom, that relying on teachers will always necessarily subordinate you to the experience of an other. I plan to spend more time chewing on the intriguing notion that our Siddhartha found even the Buddha wanting, not because the Buddha’s spiritual growth was suspect but because, if the Buddha had found a way out of Sansara into Nirvana, the “chink” he found in the great chain of existence was himself. Our Siddhartha (because, of course, the Buddha shares that name, though Hesse uses a different one for him here) believes he has to find his own path. His answer will never be as powerful as the Buddha’s, but it will be his, and that is a necessary component for him.

I’m not sure how sold I am on the image of the voice of the river as that ultimate answer. Listening to the river teaches him that it’s possible to move beyond time, teaches him that – as much as there is to enjoy in the physicality of the world – there is a blessing in recognizing that all things pass and we are part of them.

I read this because I am excited to take on the sequel that my friend William Irwin has just brought out. (Check out Little Siddhartha when you get a chance. I have my copy sitting at home in the kitchen, and I can read it now that I’ve revisited the original for the first time since 1981.) As I reflect on it now, though, I can’t help putting it in conversation with Vonnegut, who lives very much in my consciousness at the moment since I have re-read his work recently more fully than at any time in those same 37 years.

I got to see Vonnegut speak in college, and he said something that’s hung with me. He was very cranky about meditation – as I understand it, his first marriage dissolved in part because his wife found her way into Eastern spirituality, and he felt it estranged them. He told us in Ann Arbor (though it was a canned speech, and I’m sure he made it on many other occasions) that he understood some of the appeal of meditation, of the desire to lose oneself within a larger space of consciousness. He felt there was a Western equivalent, though, one that wasn’t getting the same contemporary publicity.

That is, he said he understood reading as “Western meditation,” as proudly part of the tradition that Hesse implicitly broke with. The goal in reading as he saw it wasn’t to merge with the godhead; it wasn’t to find ones way out of a sense of self and to merge with the divine or another conception of the mechanism of the universe. Instead, he said, the idea is to find oneself within the conversation of one consciousness with another.

That’s stuck with me for a long time and, given the choice, I think I’ll always embrace the experience of my fully aware self shaking hands with another mind over the impulse to lose my mind within something larger.

Meandering as all this is, my point is that I find those two “serious” writers of my adolescence much more at odds than their mixed place on my shelf would suggest. Siddhartha, as I read it, advocates for fleeing the self through a journey dependent on the self. Vonnegut gives us characters who are alien, but pushes toward a sense of recognizing the self as a distinct someone in a lonely universe.

That’s probably too pat to do either justice, but it’s how things look on this morning, some 35 years after I last really saw those two authors as talking to each other, and talking to me.


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Review: Hi Bob!

Hi Bob! by Bob Newhart
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

If you’re watching The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel – and if you aren’t you should be – then you know that Lenny Bruce appears as the comic lodestar of the early 1960s. He’s the one pushing the envelope, the one who’s both a model for and a provocation to Midge as she figures out her own comic voice.

If you look closely, Bob Newhart is there as well. It’s his routine that Midge’s wannabe comedian husband steals and performs as his own. (It’s the skit where he’s on the phone, as Abraham Lincoln’s press agent, counseling him about how to speak to the nation about Gettysburg.) It’s funny, even in the show we see it’s funny, but it’s also safe.

So, as we allow the history of American standup to solidify into a canonical narrative, that seems Newhart’s place in it. He’s the epitome of that formative moment’s notion of solid and safe. He is, to take a later era’s players, the Jay Leno of the early to mid-1960s, someone who reliably delivered laughs but didn’t leave behind the ripples of the more influential David Letterman or even Gary Shandling.

I think this book is Newhart’s answer to that implicit, whispered sense of his legacy. In it, he interviews – or, really, converses with – a series of today’s heavyweight comics. It’s loosely organized around topics, with the interviews broken up and spliced into something like a coherent whole, but the essence of it is to remind us that Newhart’s voice still resonates in the way he’s influenced this impressive wave of comedians. (And it is impressive: Will Ferrell, Conan O’Brian, Judd Apatow, Sarah Silverman, Jimmy Kimmel, and Lisa Kudrow.)

And, while if it ever comes to Team Lenny Bruce vs. Team Bob Newhart I’m all in for Bruce, I think that’s a good thing. If the Bruce school of comedy is all about making comedy a weapon to go after the hypocrites who are – and always will be – in control, Newhart’s is simply about taking the sting out of the discomforts of the modern world. He sees hypocrisy too, and he looks at it with his eyes open, but he takes it on by gentling it. He isn’t angry, and that anger isn’t born from the ashes of a frustrated idealism. Instead, he’s amused by the human condition. Bruce wants to get us out of our seats and agitating the status quo. Newhart wants us to see that the status quo is us. It isn’t revolution, but it is a small step toward making us all a little better.

This is an audiobook, which is a good way to hear Newhart’s voice. There’s perhaps a little more warble than there was in The Bob Newhart Show days, but his impeccable timing is still there. He is, at age 88, still a very funny man, and part of the charm of this book is to remind us that he has always appreciated comedy as an art form, that he was one of the boosters of the generation (and possibly generations) that have followed him.

There are some good insights into how comedy works. Silverman, Ferrell, and O’Brian in particular talk with him about some of the art of standup. There are also some nice nuggets about the comedy world of five or six decades ago. I mean, who else alive can talk about headlining in Vegas in the mobbed-up moment of the Rat Pack’s preeminence.

But the real reason to listen to this is that it’s a lot of very funny people telling stories and jokes that, with few exceptions, hold up. Lenny Bruce was incandescent and, if you buy into the narrative around him, that very incandescence meant he was doomed to a brilliant but short career. Newhart always cast a gentler light, one that’s directed the way for more comics than he gets credit for, and, remarkably, it’s still shining.


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