Review: Under the Big Black Sun: A Personal History of L.A. Punk

Under the Big Black Sun: A Personal History of L.A. Punk by John Doe
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Review of John Doe’s Under the Big Black Sun

I know a music memoir is working for me when I find myself streaming songs I didn’t know or listening in new ways to things I thought I knew. The gold standard is Patti Smith’s Just Kids. I always enjoyed her music (her music, not her spoken word stuff which I still feel is mostly self-indulgent) but hearing her tell her story made me love it all the more. I was too late to catch her the first time around, and I had a couple periods later where it meant a lot to me, but I don’t think I became a real Patti Smith fan until I read the way she described what she’d been trying to do as part of it.

In this case, I admire that John Doe, in his history of the L.A. punk scene, refuses to let it be a story told from one perspective. Instead of writing it himself – he was, after all, a key member of one of the top bands of the time – he invited a bunch of his old pals to share their memories as he weaves his own around them. His basic thesis is that the scene was so broad and so welcoming that no one story can tell the whole of it, so it makes sense to let it be a memoir told in mayhem-style, several voices doing their own thing in each other’s neighborhood rather than in lock step.

The result, though, is a tangled, repetitive narrative. I’d never heard of Darby Crash, for instance, and barely knew The Germs. We get pieces of his story from seven or eight different people who remember him, but we never get it in full. We get an early chapter from Jane Wiedlin about her move from wannabe fashion designer to co-founder of The Go-Gos. Then, most of the book later, we get a chapter from Charlotte Caffey about her early Go-Go years. The stories don’t quite talk to each other, though, and there’s an unsatisfying open-endedness to it all.

At the same time as the stories don’t amplify each other, though, there’s the mood that Doe sets in curating the whole experience. Tough as he is, he wraps much of this in a nostalgia that I suspect his younger self would have found weak and clichéd. He and others recall an early scene that had room for punks as hard-edged as Black Flag as roots-rock as The Blasters and Los Lobos, and as proto-pop as The Go-Gos and the Plimsouls. Then, many of the narrators lament the way that space hardened into an angry, masculine, mosh-pit scene.

In Doe’s wake, too many of these speakers talk about a “meaningful” time that was somehow “special.” Sure, there were some good bands that came out of it. I was a big Blasters fan, and my roommates and I were particular fans of Chicago’s local answer to them in Hi-Fi and the Roadburners, and I admire Los Lobos as well. But, really, the self-congratulation of the larger feel of this, starts to sound too much like the way any middle-aged guy looking back would talk about his youth.

But the biggest problem for me here is that, for much of this collection, the speakers all acknowledge the centrality of X – Doe’s band – and note time and again how it depended on the electricity of its lead singer, Exene Cervenka. Doe talks about her often, warmly, without quite exploring what it means that they were once famously a couple and are now split.

As far as I’m concerned, Cervenka’s brief chapter – one of the shortest in the collection and one that deals with her sense of herself as an artist rather than in what might seem like the gossip of the scene – is the best part of the whole. In one brief reflection, she gets at what may be the fittest skeleton key to understanding the L.A. scene. New York punk, she said, grew out of the art scene. (She doesn’t say it, because she’s cool enough to assume we’ll get it, but she’s talking Andy Warhol, the Velvet Underground, Television, and the New York Dolls.) London’s had a great and feisty reggae influence. But L.A.’s had only rock and roll. In its way, because it was finding itself from the rock that had come before, it had a purity of focus. And then, because it was so self-taught, it had a broad range of possibilities.

I’m not doing Cervenka justice in that paraphrase, but I end with it because she – and perhaps she alone – accomplishes what I most want in a rock memoir. She makes me want to go back to X, a band I’ve enjoyed sometimes but never fully appreciated. Because of what she says, because of the voice that Doe finds a too-small place for here, I think I’ll be able to hear that music in a new way.

In that small way, too small to make me recommend the whole of this, mission accomplished.




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Review: Vineland

Vineland by Thomas Pynchon
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is, as far as I can tell, middle-period Pynchon, maybe, excepting Mason & Dixon, the only middle-period Pynchon. There’s the late stuff, the fun genre send-ups of Inherent Vice and Bleeding Edge. And there’s the early stuff, V and Gravity’s Rainbow, that developed a new model of fiction and established him as a potential Nobel laureate. I haven’t read a few key ones of those, particularly Gravity’s Rainbow, but I still have a sense of where his career started and ended.

What’s new to me is the degree to which Pynchon seems committed to celebrating the aesthetics of the counter culture. You see traces in the early novels, I suppose, and in the way he famously declined the National Book Award, sending Professor Irwin Corey in his stead. They get amplified in Inherent Vice, where our middle-aged ex-hippie hero takes a turn as a private investigator.

I read Vineland around the time it came out, but I simply wasn’t mature enough to recognize how flat-out funny this is, how relentlessly it plays with the stereotypes and expectations of the late 1960s stereotype. Then, I tried to see it as a sort of sequel to V, as a novel experimenting with post-modern form. Now I see it as what reviewers of the time suggested it was: a slighter version of what Pynchon had been doing in his early novels, a book from a writer who’d seemed to resign his station as great-American-novelist in favor of over-the-top entertainer.

This is entertaining, and it does seem to be exploring the form of what I like to call the rhizomatic novel, but above all it seems to be insisting – in the middle of the Reagan era – that the ideals of the original counter culture weren’t as misplaced as contemporary opinion had it. The political revolutionaries of the time may have been sell-outs, the gurus may have “died” in some form, the rock and rollers may have turned out to be little more than lounge singers with worse haircuts and tackier suits, but something in their aesthetic remains valid.

The more I read, the more I got the sense of Pynchon seeing himself in some perverse way as a kind of “Milton of the Movement,” a true-believer (though in this case a true believer in a kind of studied nonsense rather than in Protestant predestination) who set out to write enduring literature within the aesthetic of the cause.

In other words, I think that’s what Pynchon’s middle career means – an abandonment of his early literary ambition but a renewed claim on the legacy of the 1960s rock-and-roll moment. I reserve the right to change that opinion if I ever do read Mason & Dixon or Against the Day, but that’s what stands out to me here: an unironic embrace of Zoyd as the stoner-innocent, a gesture of affection if not quite respect for what must have seemed the wave of tomorrow when he was a young man trying to find his own voice.

It doesn’t bother me that this one is a mess, not when it’s as funny line by line as it is, but I am somewhat bothered by the easy sexism of making Frenesi, the angel of the early movement, a woman who can’t resist the cruel sexuality of a jack-booted government agent. (And, to make things worse, [SPOILER] that her daughter Prairie ends the novel discovering the same shameful impulse.) Zoyd gets to carry the banner of the better-the-world-through-rock-and-dope belief, but the women in his world fall short of that.

So, yeah, this is enormous fun, but it feels dated too. Pynchon was better when he was younger, and I think he was probably less restrained in his later years. Here in his transition, he mostly got it right, but I think he’s also learned something since this as well.






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Review: Love Stories Are Too Violent for Me: The Definitive Rerelease of the Cult Classic

Love Stories Are Too Violent for Me: The Definitive Rerelease of the Cult Classic by Will Viharo
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I’m not technically friends with Will, but I do “know” him in a way that makes it tough to have too much critical distance. I had a novel accepted by the press that was bringing him out, we corresponded a little about that, and I felt awfully good about myself to be on the same team. (The sad end to the story is that the press went out of business before it could bring my book out, sigh.) In any event, I’ve remained Facebook friends with him since, and I’ve enjoyed the nonfictional real-time descriptions of his “Thrillville” life.

What strikes me most about knowing Will is that he walks a fine line between an ironic and an authentic appreciation for Rat Pack/B-movie/’50s-pinup-girl culture. He’ll admit there’s something anachronistic and even cheesy about a tiki-lit bar, but then he’ll also make clear he enjoys the aesthetic in a genuine way. And part of his gift is that he opens that experience up to the rest of us, to those of us who’d have ‘squares’ to Sammy Davis, Jr., but who, by virtue of working to appreciate a tradition/cultural moment that most have moved past, are finally worthy of it.

I’ve read a couple of Will’s other books – which I enjoyed – but this is his greatest hit, the one that almost got made into a movie starring Christian Slater and that started Will’s longest-running detective series.

Vic Valentine narrates his detective experiences in the first-person, feeling half-sorry for himself and half-accepting the blame for his own decisions. You’ve read the situation a hundred times – the booze-addled detective who takes on a client looking for a dangerously beautiful woman – but the fun this time around is that Thrillville aesthetic. In other hands, I’d be bored when our narrator tells people that “Vic” is short for “victim.” Here it’s funny, funny the way a Dean Martin joke about being an alcoholic, unfunny from someone saying it today, still works if you’re in just the right mood and just the right place.

The eventual plot seems to me borrowed from, among other places, Devil in a Blue Dress. Vic gets hired to track down a woman who turns out to be his ex-girlfriend, so he’s interested in her as much for himself as for his client. There are a lot of coincidences, or near coincidences, but my inclination here (if not from another writer) is to accept it all. At one point, for instance, Vic opines that Frank Sinatra believed everyone was either a “bum” or a “punk,” and he puts it forward as a significant moral concept. There’s an absurdity to that claim, and we aren’t supposed to take it seriously, but we’re also supposed to see it as a kind of guide. If we are all indeed losers of a kind, there are different ways to be losers. We can either be the sort who get pushed around and feel sorry for themselves, or we can be the kind who acknowledge their culpability. We ‘re all still losers – except Sinatra himself, of course – but we have some power over our condition all the same.

In the end, though, the reason to read this is because it’s a good bit of fun. For all the attitude that Will flashes in his prose and in Vic’s ironic/sincere perspective on life, things move quickly. There’s a fundamental competence underlying everything.

I’m biased, but give it a shot. Will is a distinct voice, and he’s a legit underground, undiscovered artist.

Plus, like his favorite entertainers, he’s a swinging cat. And I mean that ironically. But also sincerely.


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Review: Spinning Silver

Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

For a genre that’s supposed to be – at some level – about unfettered imagination, an awful lot of fantasy is lock step and frozen. I grew up with a generation of Tolkien wannabes, like Stephen R. Donaldson, and then watched as the whole concept got frozen into something called “high fantasy” where some generic kingdom, governed by some gradually less obscure set of magical laws, played host to an apocalyptic showdown between good and evil. The “rules” of the game got so predictable, that we could hold it against the writers who broke them.

Meanwhile, the best of the genre – like Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell or The Night Circus – is all about imagining fresh new contexts for fantasy, about taking original contexts and coming at them with fresh eyes and genuine originality.

Naomi Novi’s Spinning Silver falls between those two, but it’s closer to the genuinely original side of things, and I’m glad to see it. On the one hand, this does turn out to be a collision between fire and ice, an idea that goes only so far in this summer of Game of Thrones.

On the other, this is both distinctly Jewish and feminist in a context where it’s almost always male and Christian. Our heroine, Miryem, isn’t merely identified as Jewish, but her powers grow out of the stereotypes of the Jew. She is so gifted in commerce, in the ability to “spin silver” into gold through her transactions, that she turns out to be a “vessel of high magic” in the fair kingdom. And, analogously, this is not merely a story with female protagonists, but also with a feminist sensibility that prizes the acquisition of answers – the solving of riddles – over the quests and battles that conventionally follow acquiring wisdom.

This starts a bit slowly – know that if you give it a shot – but even that can be forgiven because you don’t ordinarily see this sort of novel set in a Russian-Pale-of-Settlement modeled world. It also becomes clear after a while that this is a fairy tale that’s playing out, so it falls short of a complete interrogation of its principles. That is, it refreshingly holds up different looking models for fantasy hero(ines) but it doesn’t do much to break the good/bad dichotomy that plagues the genre.

At a bottom line, though, I not only appreciated the ambition here, but I also enjoyed the story. It may be possible to do better in the genre, but with so many falling far short of this, I’m definitely considering the next one.

(As a final note, I have read an earlier Novik, which I recall mostly enjoying as well. In that one, she reimagined a Napoleonic wartime era with warships replaced by dragons so large that they require dozens of human crew members. This one seems so different that I didn’t initially realize it was the same author.)


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Review: A Legacy of Spies

A Legacy of Spies by John le Carré
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Review of John Le Carre’s A Legacy of Spies

In some ways this is two books, one of which is vital and timely and the other of which adds another wrinkle to one of the great extended literary corpora (corpuses?) of the last half century.

In order to appreciate the second of those, you have to have a sense of John Le Carre’s work from his magnificent The Spy Who Came in From the Cold forward. If you don’t know it, let me just say that it’s to the spy genre as The Maltese Falcon is to the detective genre. It’s the book that showed it’s possible to make literature out of a set of clichés.

Le Carre was an actual spy (just as Hammett was an actual detective) but what distinguishes him is his moral imagination. He wrote in implicit contrast to Ian Fleming who gave us a contemporary amoral portrait in his James Bond. Where Bond is a kind of Superman, someone impervious both to physical danger and to the moral implications of what he does, Le Carre’s Alec Leamas, George Smiley and, here (in full for what I think is the first time) Peter Guillam, are deeply vulnerable as they go about the dirty work of defending the West.

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold really is a magnificent novel, one I’ve read half a dozen times and have taught to college students as an example of how a thrilling story can be about more than simply whether its hero survives. It built on some of Le Carre’s earlier novels (or so I understand since I haven’t read those), and then Le Carre built on it with a series of mid-career novels exploring extensions of its premises and characters. The “Karla Trilogy” of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy; The Honourable Schoolboy; and Smiley’s People is also terrific, and I think I have also read and enjoyed another in the period after.

In that light, this book goes back to the same Cold War skirmishes, really to the plan to deal with the terrifying Stasi agent Hans-Dieter Mundt. Where that conflict set the stage for Smiley’s showdown with Karla, in this case we get to see much of the detail leading up to it as an aging Peter Guillam reviews old files and his own memories of what took place before Leamas’s daring operation.

If all that’s confusing, it should be. That element of this novel works only for people who have taken the worthwhile time to read all or most of Le Carre to this point. It’s a kind of after-dinner aperitif, one that takes us back to the very beginnings of the dense and thoughtful world Le Carre established.

And, to be blunt, that part of it seems to me a slightly diminished work. Much of what’s retrospective in this comes in clunky transcripts that Guillam reads, and all of it requires an intricate knowledge of The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. It retains the moral inquiries of the original, but it doesn’t extend them. It simply asks us to be struck afresh by what took place.

This is, in effect, two novels, though, and the other half of it is very much worth celebrating. The frame narrative of Guillam’s re-examination of the past is that a new generation is challenging the decisions he and his contemporaries made in those dark days of the Cold War. Leamas’s son is suing for damages, but more troubling is that current British intelligence officers are sympathetic. There is, in other words, an urge to judge the actions of our protagonists by the standards and implicit moral purity of today.

In doing so, Le Carre is crystalizing a much broader debate about how we judge the actions and mores of the recent past. The #MeToo movement has accomplished wonderful things, but there are complexities to it that we’re only just confronting. What are to make of a Joe Biden who, notable mistreatment of Anita Hill aside, has generally been a supporter of women’s rights but who, like a too-much-aftershave uncle-in-law, hugs a little too long and touches in the face of please-don’t?

Some of the recent Bond movies have sought to soften Bond’s fundamental misogyny by showing him working with strong women. It never quite works, though, because Bond is reprehensible. And Bond’s sense of women as objects is only one aspect of his thinking that we should utterly reject.

Le Carre’s characters have always stood in contrast to Bond, though. They too mistreated women, used them as pawns in their games, but Le Carre always questioned that premise. His characters used everyone, even one another, and they did so in the belief that they had to make moral compromises in order to accomplish the greater good. And then, because Le Carre holds himself ever accountable to the highest standards, they realized their greater good was still well short of perfection. The sum power of the novels is that these men have to continue living with themselves even as they see how compromised they are.

The animating point of the parts of this novel that really matter, then, is the sense that today’s “children” don’t have the full range of perspective to judge these characters. It’s easy to condemn James Bond, and it ought to be easy to condemn, say, an anti-feminist like Donald Trump or Phyllis Schlafley. It ought to be more difficult – though still perhaps necessary – to condemn a Joe Biden or a Peter Guillams. And that challenge is what Le Carre sets up for himself in this part of the novel. He defends his spies not because he sees them as fundamentally good, but because he has spent a powerful career already condemning them. He has done so with a studied complexity, though, and not with the easy good/bad designations he sees other inclined to apply. He is, in other words, defending nuance in an age when it’s in short supply.

As a bottom line, then, this novel is vintage Le Carre – “vintage” in the sense of its being animated by questions of history that resonate with our moment. I’d say read it for that element, but recognize that it’s probably too tied to his earlier novels to stand entirely on its own.


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Review: Pachinko

Pachinko by Min Jin Lee
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Review of Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko

I love the ambition of this novel, but I don’t love the way that ambition swells a good story (or possibly good stories) into something that becomes more tedious than I could have imagined.

In other words, there’s something remarkable about a five-generation saga of Koreans living and working as second-class citizens in Japan. The historical scope is moving all by itself, and the glimpse at a history not defined by American-centered interests is refreshing.

The trouble, though, is that there’s no real center to this. Characters emerge, things happen to them, they make choices that – often as not – seem determined by what will most help the overall plot, and then they recede. I can well imagine enjoying a novel without a central main character, and that is the case here with most of the early main characters peripheral or long dead or by the end.

To pull something like that off, though, requires giving us something else, something thematic, to tie it all together. Occasionally, but too late in the novel to have the necessary effect, Lee gives us the concept of pachinko – the notion that our separate fates are shaped by a seemingly random but actually manipulated set of levers and pins – as an explanation for how lives unfold.

Outside of a few explicit conversations, we don’t really get that theme working. It’s a concept thrown in once or twice, but the rest of the novel becomes a long unspooling of our story. Worse, much of this comes in clumsy exposition: whenever we get a new character who will prove consequential, whether someone who will marry a descendant of our original characters or someone whose friendship will tie in for the next decade or so, we get a long back story delivered in fashion that would work as a Wikipedia entry. And then, when things have already begun to take on the feel of a long-running soap opera, we get the old soap opera trope of the mysterious gangster who loves – against all odds and with distant and pure love – one of our protagonists.

My wife read it at the same time as I did, and I agree with her suggestion that this would have worked much better as a series of linked short stories. That would have cut out the far-too-long expository and move-the-action-forward passages that we do get. At half its current length and with more focus on the particular dramas of the different generations of the individuals here, this could have packed real power. As it is, attenuated and digressive as this approach makes it, I can’t recommend it beyond saying that I did finish it.

I’m struck by the praise this one has gotten, and I’ll be happy to have others tell me what I’m missing. The back cover makes this sound magisterial; I agree that much. I can’t see how this got anything like serious consideration for a National Book Award, though.




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Review: True History of the Kelly Gang

True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I expected I would love this one – I mean, it’s a Booker Prize winner and it deals with a gang of Australian outlaws – so it’s mildly disappointing to say I merely liked it very much.

On the one hand, I admire what Carey is doing with this novel. He’s taking what we know of the historical Ned Kelly and wrapping a story around it. We get an individual whose frustrations and passions lead him to quasi-insurrection, and we get a sense of the larger social and ethnic tensions roiling late 19th Century Australia. After all, this is an Aussie-Irish under-class dealing with the same global oppression as the victims of the Famine and the Thomas Nast-caricaturing of the United States.

And, above all, Carey finds a remarkable voice in which to tell the story. I looked up a bit of the original writings of Kelly, and it’s amazing to hear him on the page. In an interview appended to the novel, Carey talks of discovering Kelly’s voice and imagining the outlaw as a kind of proto-Joyce or proto-Beckett, someone tearing familiar language into strips and then weaving them back into a fresh whole.

So, yes, I did love all that, and I can mostly see how this won the Booker.

At the same time, though, I suspect much of the power of this novel turns on an awareness of how Carey is manipulating the known fragments of Kelly’s history into a whole. I’ve done a little digging, but I can’t “know” Kelly in the way of an Australian who sees him as perhaps the country’s most famous individual. That is, Kelly represents something in Australian culture, something crucial as a point of contrast with what Carey is doing with him, but that doesn’t come through within the novel. It takes a familiarity with the Australian experience.

I am certain this happens in reverse all the time. There must be elements of Gatsby that don’t translate because the touchstones are so tied into distinctly U.S. culture – don’t get me started, but I remain convinced that only a handful of Gatsby readers recognize the cultural significance of the Jewish gangster Meyer Wolfsheim against the backdrop of the East and West Egg socialites we meet.

As a bottom line, then, part of the very success of Carey’s novel diminishes my pleasure in it. His story is so compelling, it seems so whole, that it’s easy to lose sight of the full way in which he has woven the different known chapters into his larger imagined history. In his interview, he even says as much; he was disappointed with some of the early, positive reviews that didn’t seem to realize the depth of his authorial project. It took later reviewers to point out the extent to which he’d added depth to the source material, to note how dramatically he was consciously reshaping a foundational myth of Aussie culture.

Even as I recognize the scope of that ambition, I find I’m like the first-wave of those reviewers. I enjoy the story and characterizations here – though I’m mildly frustrated that Carey condenses the best-known incidents (because his Aussie readership would already know them) into newspaper-style re-retellings – but I am aware that perhaps the highest ambition of the work falls outside what I can see of it.

I’m loosely working my way through significant contemporary Australian literature, with my current favorite being Richard Flanagan. I’d heard Carey was the current heavyweight champ in that field. Good as this is, I have to score this round for my man Flanagan.


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