Review: Year of the Monkey

Year of the Monkey by Patti Smith
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A little more than three years ago, the Chicago Cubs won the World Series. That seemed like a kind of dream, a fulfillment of something my family – in particular my father – had imagined since (in his case) the early 1930s.

Three days later, my beloved cat – Tobi – was killed in an accident with the garage door.

Two days after that, Donald Trump was elected President of the United States. And nothing since then has felt quite the same.

It’s hard to think of that strange succession of events as having actually happened, or as having happened in such a way, with them seeming somehow connected. I’ll joke sometimes that the price of the Cubs’ victory was both my personal loss and the nation’s great self-inflicted insult, but it’s less direct than that. Those days were probably more or less ordinary, excepting those three events and the anxiety we all felt as the election loomed, but looking back on them makes them seem darkly poetic – seem as if it’s only fiction that can capture them.

In Year of the Monkey, Patti Smith traces her own build-up to the harrowing Trump victory. She takes the whole year, not just a week, and she weaves in her own great losses: long-time musical collaborator Sandy Pearlman of Blue Oyster Cult, and her on-again, off-again great love, the playwright Sam Shepard.

This book – it’s not quite memoir and not quite fiction in something of the model of Sergio Pitol – opens with her arriving out West to see Pearlman, among others. She learns right away that he’s suffered a cerebral hemorrhage, though, one from which he will never recover. And Shepard is struggling with ALS, the rugged figure deteriorating before her.

She is immediately taken by the sign in front of the cheap motel where she’s landed, the Dream Inn. It’s evocative, and she photographs it. (The book is full of such photos, and this is the first.)

What follows is hard to describe both because it’s often self-referential and because it’s occasionally self-indulgent. She meets a couple of men, Ernest and Jesus, in a dingy diner who are taken by the work of Roberto Balano. Then there’s a strange episode with candy wrappers that wash up to the beach and seem to be connected to the disappearance of a handful of children – all returned unharmed within a day or two. As Smith reads noirish detective novels, the line between what’s happening and what she’s imagining, blurs.

The book is loosely broken down into a series of months, with Smith moving from place to place, seemingly without a fixed itinerary. We are occasionally reminded that Smith is a major rock star – she explores the possibility of a tour in Australia which would allow her to visit a mountain that she and Shepard had always dreamed of climbing together – but mostly she’s an anonymous figure in the landscape. Everyone in the grey landscape of the America she explores seems to be a kind of artist; they all listen to interesting and distinctive music or read esoteric Latin American fiction. Still, no one ever seems to recognize her even though she’s just the sort of artist who’d be a touchstone for that sub-culture.

In the end, she reaches the discouraging denouement of Trump’s election, the sense that, as she puts it, “Twenty-four percent of the population had elected the worst of ourselves to represent the other seventy-six percent.” The experience feels unreal in the same way the deaths of Pearlman and Shepard – and the long-ago deaths of her husband, parents, and so many others – feel unreal. She wants to deny it all, to deny the truth of where we have found ourselves. She wants to counter at least some of Trump’s peculiar capacity to distort the real, his power to make his untruths have a cultural power even for those of us who recognize them as untruths. But she can’t.

At least not entirely, that is. She’s a writer and a poet, after all, and this memoir emerges as a strange space negotiating the real, the feared, and the remembered.

In the end, there’s a bit of a let-down in the “it was all a Dream [Inn]” reveal we get at the end, and I remain frustrated at times by the many references to Brooklyn hipster touchstones. At the same time, I love the crescendo that she reaches in the closing pages.

When you listen to Smith live in concert, there are often long stretches of self-indulgence, of periods when she drifts outside the structure of song into spoken-word or too out-there instrumentals. But if you stick with it all, there comes an end. There comes a great build-up of intellect and emotion. And, if you do it right – if you dance to what she’s playing – it’s overwhelming.

This ends with a couple of masterful bits – for my money the best writing of the entire book.

There’s this, “This is what I know. Sam is dead. My brother is dead. My mother is dead. My father is dead. My husband is dead. My cat is dead. And my dog who was dead in 1957 is still dead. Yet still I keep thinking that something wonderful is about to happen.”

Or this, “I saw myself with Sam in his kitchen in Kentucky and we were talking about writing. In the end, he was saying, everything is fodder for a story, which means, I guess, that we’re all fodder.”

As I read all that, as I listen to the eventual music of her work, I find the best way to appreciate it is to “dance” as well, to write along with her and to remember that ugly not-so-long-ago end to the Year of the Monkey.

In other words, what Smith accomplishes here is a solid draft toward living in Trump times. As I reflect on the book as a whole, it begins to feel more and more like a post-punk effort (like Jonathan Lethem’s A Feral Detective) to confront the strange Trumpian power to destabilize the real and the true.

There’s still a lot to work out in all of this approach, and I think others will eventually exceed Smith as she does it here, but she’s pointing the way. It’s good to imagine a world where the deaths of those we love unsettle something larger than ourselves. And it’s good to imagine a world where the esoteric things we value turn out to have a currency wider than they can in the real world.

To sum it up, our charged political moment, one where truth has been eviscerated, needs a reminder in the power of the imagination. Smith has been exploring art that resists the narratives of power for forty years. She’s still at it, and the music she makes is enough to get me out of my seat. Getting off your butt is a necessary step in fighting despair. The dancing can follow from there.


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Review: Rolling in the Deep

Rolling in the Deep by Mira Grant
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

From what I understand, this novella is a prequel to a successful horror series. That’s not my genre, but this one was free with my Audible membership, and I was curious to see how it did what it did.

On balance, as horror, it works as a kind of textual Blair Witch Project. (It even references that film as part of the story.) We get a lot of detail about a film crew that boards a mid-sized cruise ship in order to film what they expect will be a schlock documentary trying to prove that mermaids actually exist. We get a series of characters from the ship’s and film’s crew, and we also get a group of “mermaids,” attractive women outfitted with artificial tails who usually perform in aquariums.

In the end, though, no one emerges as a fully formed character. They’re all types, all victims-in-waiting.

And we know they’re victims because a prologue tells us that everyone on the ship has been killed.

If that sounds like complaint, it isn’t. I don’t know Mira Grant’s work, but I respect her craft. She knows her business, and she knows what her readers are expecting: it’s going to get gory, so why pretend otherwise.

The chief trick here is an old one. For most of the early parts, we don’t see the actual, monstrous mermaids of the Marianas Trench. Instead, we glimpse them just outside the frame. There are hints of what happens – which Grant’s retrospective structure allows – but we don’t get the full-on horror until the end. We know it’s coming; the thrill is in wondering just when and just how it is.

And then we do get the horror, full-blown. [SPOILER:] The final pages here are entirely bloody with everyone we’ve seen killed in some vicious manner. It’s basically a slaughter, and not my thing.

I’m sure I’d have grown tired of this if it were a full-length novel. That’s fine, though, because I’m not a horror guy. For what this is, I’m glad to have the chance to see how Grant employs a basic strategy to make this work within the conventions of a genre that has never really worked for me.


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Review: Machines Like Me

Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

It took me a while reading this to realize it’s a great book, but I think that’s part of its greatness.

This novel begins slowly when Charlie Friend decides – somewhat irresponsibly – to be among the first purchasers of “an Adam,” a fully functioning robot. Then his relationship with Miranda, his attractive upstairs neighbor, begins to grow more serious. Then they cooperatively provide the information – the character DNA as it were – for Adam’s personality, and Adam begins to experience the world and form a self. As a final ingredient, the couple (trio?) begin to take an interest in Mark, a five-year-old boy neglected by his parents in the neighborhood.

As my quick summary suggests, that all felt disconnected and mildly arbitrary. I was looking for the novel to explore some facet of Charlie or his relationship or the developing Adam , but it felt as if was just adding ingredients.

And then, in a kind of wave, I realized that we were getting “programmed” in the same way Adam was. Ian McEwan – who really is one of the world’s great writers – feeds us a succession of basic concepts. Charlie is a kind of dull normal, an upper-middle-class underachiever who mostly realizes he can interest Miranda only because of the predictable and comfortable stability he embodies. Adam begins as an entirely blank slate, but he gets shaped by the preferences they select for defining his personality.

Each decision the characters make sharpens what we see of every one of them, though. Charlie’s decision to purchase Adam begins to define him as a self; it makes him more aware of his limitations and eventually pushes him to become more fully human in his capacity to care for others. At the same time, it alters his relationship with Miranda which further pushes Adam into a character torn between seeing Charlie and Miranda as pseudo-parents and pseudo-lover/rivals.

As a result, even though it starts with basic premises, this novel gets deeper and deeper. It becomes, by the middle third, a sustained inquiry into one of the fundamental questions: what does it mean to be human? Adam is clearly the product of a kind of programming – though he evolves as a self from his initial programming – but in some ways, so are all three of the others. Charlie “programs” Miranda as he tries to win her into a romantic relationship. Mark, as a child, is still subject to being shaped by the way the others treat him. And Charlie himself gets reshaped by the way others respond to his desires. In a telling scene, when Miranda introduces him to her father, her father mistakes him for the robot and finds Adam “better” at being human.

At a broader level, the novel does the same thing in the way it constructs an alternate history of Great Britain in the post-war years. Most significantly, the brilliant codebreaker and student of artificial intelligence, Alan Turing, does not die as a consequence of homophobia. He survives, with dramatic results for the progress of computers and robotic science. It’s a single event – one item in the basic “computer code” of history – but it’s sufficient to change the world as we know it; enough, for instance, for us to have robots in the midst of the Thatcher Administration. (A separate event has the British lose the Falklands War, changing its status as a world power.)

From the halfway point of this forward – even through a denouement that runs on longer than I’d have imagined – I found this doing some of the best work that fiction can do. It leaves us without comfortable answers about the ethical differences between seeing a child as a blank slate who will grow into a full self and the same consequences for a robot who will, after a day or two of electrical charging, do the same.

The questions here are powerful, and so are the materials we get to answer them. And so, in the end, is the careful, steady novelistic strategy that McEwan uses to share all of them with us.

This one is going on my list of novels I’ll consider teaching in my Introduction to Fiction classes. It’s that richly imagined, and that richly depicted.


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Review: Meyer

Meyer by Jonathan Lang
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I’ve been “off” graphic novels for a while now, without quite knowing why. This one is not going to change that trend.

As someone who writes about Jews in organized crime, I figured I almost had to read this one. It’s described as a late-career imagining of Meyer Lansky, and it’s even blurbed by Lansky’s grandson, Meyer Lansky II. So I figured it had to be interesting as history.

Well, no. It isn’t.

Apart from a handful of references that you might get out of a Wikipedia article, there’s little insight into the nature of Lansky’s long and intriguing criminal career. Our fictional Lansky here spits out clichés about how to be tough and how to outsmart others, but none have any particular links to the particular experiences of the man.

There’s even a small point when, talking to a young Cuban Jewish immigrant he’s befriended, he says, “You look a little like Bugsy.” The reference is to Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, but – as anyone who’s read Robert Lacey’s masterful biography of Lansky should know – Siegel’s friends were scrupulous in calling him “Ben.” That’s minor, I know, but when a man is as secretive as Lansky was, it seems we ought to respect the handful of quirks we know about when we try to imagine him in history.

And, besides, I figured, this didn’t have to be history. If it were a good story, it wouldn’t matter if it departed from the historical record.

Well, it isn’t.

For reasons we never learn, Lansky opens the novel living incognito in a retirement home. Then, for reasons that we learn only vaguely, he determines to take part in some crime (is it recovering a sunken load of heroin? Is it taking out the local “Godmother” of Cuban smuggling? Is it accomplishing something for his one-time protégé “Legs” Friedman?) which will obscurely qualify him for citizenship under the Israeli Law of Return.

As all that suggests, I’m unpersuaded by the premises and ultimately uninterested in the outcome. It makes no sense to me why this character had to be Lansky – why not an invented aging Jewish gangster – and then it makes no sense to me that he’s doing what he does.

With all that, I’m not in love with the illustrations either. I like the way they evoke a time and place – Miami in the early 1980s – and I like the story’s general evocation of that world as well.

In the end, though, I’m just not hooked by this one, and I think it may be a while before I give another graphic novel a shot.


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Review: The Age of Living Machines: How Biology Will Build the Next Technology Revolution

The Age of Living Machines: How Biology Will Build the Next Technology Revolution by Susan Hockfield
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I’ll say this for this book: it would have made an interesting magazine article in an alumni magazine. As a book, well, its core idea is spread awfully thin, and it’s all the more troubling that Susan Hockfield doesn’t do more to interrogate the risks and costs of the technological promise she explores.

Hockfield begins with a thrilling claim: just as the different fields of physics, chemistry, engineering, and math converged to create the rise of electronics and the technologies that have transformed our world, we are on the brink of another convergence with the way the biological sciences are marrying those earlier ones. We are, she claims, close to knowing how to use viruses to build more efficient and less environmentally taxing batteries, close to new devices that can purify water at little cost and with portability, and close to fashioning medicines that can treat us in targeted and personalized fashion.

It’s an exciting notion, and it does make me perk up my ears and imagine the possibilities. At the same time, she repeats her thesis over and over in this fairly short book. We get the idea quickly, but we get told it far more often than we need.

What’s worse, as far as I’m concerned, is that the whole tone of this book is of a college president trying to sell her faculty’s accomplishments to a group of donors. We get some of the science, but never its intricacies. We do get the names of individual researchers, but I always hear a small “and we’d be happy to assign this young scientist a professorial chair with your name on it” in the background. And, even more loudly, I hear a “and these people are creating start-up companies that, with an angel investor or two, could make someone an awful lot of money.”

In other words, there’s more sizzle than steak in support of that core thesis, and it gets old.

Worse than such condescension, as far as I’m concerned, is that we never hear about the risks of such technologies. There’s a brief acknowledgement that we want to be careful before we release genetically modified crops into the world, but I’d like to hear more. There’s no consideration of the risks behind wanton distribution of vaccines. You don’t have to be an anti-vaxxer to know that the HPV vaccine – whatever benefits it might legitimately have – has harmed a great many who’ve had it. We may still want to go ahead with that sort of aggressive mass-vaccination, but we ought to recognize the need to monitor its effectiveness and its hurts. There are potential health benefits, but there are profit certainties as well.

I’ve recently read Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano, his first novel in which he characterizes a nostalgia for an American “can-do” attitude as somehow missing the very point of human existence. Here, I see Hockfield making the very claim that Vonnegut mocked more than half a century ago.

I do like optimism, and this book is filled with it, but I think it’s crucial to temper our sense of what technology can do with the toll it exacts on the world and on us. Hockfield is selling us something, but she’s not quite letting us see the price tag.


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Review: The Buried Giant

The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Sometimes the rules of a genre aren’t clear until someone manages to break them.

Fantasy, especially quest fantasy, is supposed to be center on the young and on memory. Telemachus is still almost a child, but he remembers his father and sets out on what becomes the beginning of The Odyssey. Bilbo’s too old, so Frodo has to go, and they know to go on the quest in the first place because Elrond and Gandalf are the only ones who remember the old lore.

In this remarkable fantasy, our protagonists are a compelling older couple, Axl and Beatrice, and they are motivated to embark on a quest to find their son because they cannot remember anything. The two have recently been told by their village elders that they can no longer be trusted to keep a candle burning in their home at night. They are otherwise almost blissful in their life together.

And put the emphasis on “together.” The two are deeply and touchingly in love. He calls her “Princess” most of the time, and she both supports and depends upon him. They seem the idea of what it means to grow old alongside someone who complements you.

They learn before long, however, that the reason they have forgotten so much is that a dragon has been breathing out a mist that produces a kind of amnesia.

In the end, two characters come to embody different philosophies for confronting that fact. One (SPOILER: Wystan, the Saxon warrior) believes that killing the dragon will end the amnesia and free everyone to a fuller experience of the world. Another (SPOILER: Gawain) argues that the forgetfulness is necessary. In its absence, he fears that old memories and old hatreds will erupt, shattering the peace and happiness of the country.

SPOILER FROM HERE ON OUT: As it turns out, the preponderance of the evidence suggests that it’s Gawain who’s right. With the dragon dead, it’s likely the Saxons will recall the awful slaughter the Britons perpetrated in an earlier generation. He and Arthur, with Axl as a key envoy, brokered a peace across the land. Then, in a deep betrayal, they killed Saxon elderly, women, and children in a war crime, and Merlin enchanted the dragon to produce the effect.

Wystan is a young hero, one who knows only that he should hate the Britons even as he comes to appreciate the old couple (who are Britons themselves). In his youth, he believes that full knowledge, full memory is just and right. He’s motivated in general by good intentions – though his hatred erupts every so often – but he risks a war that will consume the countryside.

We never see that great war – which is a skillful move by Ishiguro – but we do see how it affects the old couple. As the dragon’s mist slowly evaporates, they remember the painful – staggeringly painful – truth that their son died long ago during a plague. Even worse, they’d quarreled before his death, and Axl had forbidden Beatrice to go and pay her respects to his grave. Their quarrel was so deep that, at one moment, Axl left her to sleep with another woman.

Memory reveals, then, that the two have had a difficult life together. Once they recall it all, they vow to remain together, but they are left at the conclusion with the challenge of proving to a mystical boatman that they are a rare couple that knows true love. They insist that they are until the very end, but I read the final, gorgeous scene, as showing us Axl forgetting her on an enchanted isle that represents a kind of death.

It’s a beautiful and harrowing end, but it implies the dark philosophy that we have to be prepared to forget if we are ever to allow ourselves true happiness. That’s a vision of the fantastic that flies in the face of what fantasy has held as a kind of axiom, and it’s memorable and powerful.

Kashiguro is a chameleon of a writer, someone who seems entirely to reinvent himself at every turn. I admired Remains of the Day very much, but found it somewhat flawed. Unlike most people I know, I did not like Never Let Me Go, which I found overly contrived. This, so far, is my favorite of his work, and I feel I’ve learned a great deal from reading it.


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Review: Havana Nocturne: How the Mob Owned Cuba & Then Lost it to the Revolution

Havana Nocturne: How the Mob Owned Cuba & Then Lost it to the Revolution by T.J. English
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A couple points of preamble, I suppose. The kind of organized crime history I write is in more or less direct conflict with what English writes. I take it as an axiom that we can never genuinely know what happened among men who, literally, lied as part of their everyday professional lives. Not only that, but they often depended on those lies having currency. As I like to put it, gangsters worked to make people believe they had power and influence at the same time as they worked to keep proof of that power away from anyone who might be able to prosecute them for it. They misled everyone as a practice, so how can we hope fully to untangle the true story decades later.

As a consequence, I am always at least as interested in the footnotes of a gangster history as I am in the main text of it. As a result, then, I’m not doing this book justice since, in listening to it, I couldn’t indulge my habit of looking for (and evaluating) the quality of the source for each controversial claim. If I’d read this on paper, I might have better things to say about it…or possibly worse.

What English does here, and also in Paddy Whacked which, while never reading in full, I’ve read in often over the years, is flesh the myth of the Mafia into a larger, at least semi-documented story. He’s a storyteller, which is something I admire, but I’m not always convinced that he’s on top of the latest findings of others who – at the price of not telling their stories as smoothly – tell them more accurately and with a greater a awareness of what the sources allow us to say with confidence.

There’s a spot here early where English talks about what’s been called “The Night of the Sicilian Vespers,” a supposed wave of killings that knocked off the old time “Mustache Petes” of the Mafia in favor of the younger generation of mobsters personified by (and purportedly headed up by) Lucky Luciano. Those “Vespers” are a central part of Mafia lore and are acknowledged in FBI accounts as well as in most popular histories of the mob.

The trouble is that, as academic historian Alan Block has shown, there were no such murders. With one possible exception, there are simply no records of potential Mafiosi killed in the months following Luciano’s taking out of Joe Masseria and Salvatore Maranzano. Joe Valachi may have reported it before the McClellan Committee, but it was either hearsay or myth. It didn’t happen, and English ought to be aware of that.

Or, later, he’ll often quote Luciano’s “last testament,” a quasi-biography he dictated to reporters near the end of his life. Like Meyer Lansky’s interviews with Israeli journalists in the early 1970s, though – interviews that English cites several times – such autobiographical works were highly contextualized. Luciano was trying to interest someone in making a film about his life (and in bringing substantial rights fees with it) so he both glamorized his experiences and downplayed his own crimes. Lansky meanwhile was trying to get the Israeli government to grant him citizenship under the Law of Return that guaranteed it to any Jew who requested it. As a result, he played up his Jewish identity and worked to cast himself as someone who’d always been an outsider.

In the sort of gangster history I value, those accounts do matter, but they matter as part of the larger, contested stories in circulation about each man. They don’t tell us what happened, but they do tell us something about the way these men were trying to shape their own reputations.

To be fair, though, English has a different agenda. He has a version of organized crime history that comes out of the “great man” school. For him, the major players – Lansky above all – had a vision and went on to realize it. I don’t especially buy that Lansky scoped out the situation in the 1930s that would develop in the 1950s, but there is evidence that he did. I read it that Lansky was always looking for opportunities, that he likely explored dozens of other ventures going way back. English can’t be entirely wrong in asserting that Lansky eyed the possibility of taking over the nation of Cuba decades before it actually happened.

And English has an appealing way with words and narrative. I know firsthand how hard it is to tease a narrative out of a range of characters who are working simultaneously toward a mostly shared (but sometimes contested) end. He does a nice job of moving his story forward and then back-tracking to give the biography of some new and essential figure: Batista, Luciano, Lansky, Trafficante, and Castro. No one of those chapters is as strong as the books dedicated to each individual, but those other books don’t weave so broad a story.

In the end, I did enjoy the well-defined scope of the narrative here and, tip-of-the-hat, he even managed to dig up a detail that I wish I’d had for my own book. And that I could have had if I’d read this sooner – Chicago Jewish gangster David Yaras, with, I would claim his partner Lenny Patrick – ran the San Souci casino in the early mobbed up years. I knew that detail, though the FBI gives them a different Mafia partner (Detroit’s Joe Massei according to the FBI, Pittsburgh’s Sam Mannarino here), but I wish I’d known this claim that Yaras was part of first wave of short-sighted thugs as opposed to the subtler, long-term thinking of Lansky and his crew.

So, if you’re curious about this era of Cuba – and it’s often fascinating for the way it helped invent a music and a style that defined much of the era – and if you’re not as hung up on the footnotes as I am, there’s a lot here to enjoy.


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Review: Bossypants

Bossypants by Tina Fey
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Reading this has helped me realize much of what makes Tina Fey so exceptional a comedian.

First, her basic shtick is to take the everyday and amplify it just a little, like turning the volume up from five to seven.

Her most famous Saturday Night Live moment, of course – even though it happened after she’d left the show as head writer and Weekend Update host – is her Sarah Palin impersonation. Magnificent as that was, it really was mostly a matter of tweaks and exaggerations. In a crazy world where an utterly unqualified Alaskan governor found herself put forward as a legitimate candidate for major federal office – something that seems almost quaint now that we’ve seen how things can get even worse – all Fey had to do was exaggerate some vowel sounds and add peculiar hesitations to her impersonation, and she laid bare the absurdity of it all.

In 30 Rock, a terrific show that serves as the key link between Arrested Development and The Office, Parks & Rec, and Brooklyn 99, she took what she knew from her SNL life and made it just a bit kookier. We saw blowhards and divas who still managed to be mostly human and, in the middle of it all, Liz Lemon gave us a barometer of what could almost be “normal.”

Second, Fey works best as part of a team. She’s up front about that in this book, but it’s also obvious in retrospect. She came up through Second City with a sketch comedy background; others came the stand-up route. You can see her being especially good at respecting other people’s ideas even if it means tossing her own. A highlight of this book is her quick summary of the rules of Second City improve technique: always say “yes” – always acknowledge a partner’s suggestion – and always say “and” after that “yes.” That is, always see what possibilities can follow from such a proposal.

So, I not only enjoy Fey’s comedy, but I appreciate her as one of the central architects of American comedy in the last couple decades.

I picked this book up by design because I’d haphazardly found and then read a couple of other SNL memoirs – Chris Kattan’s and Norm MacDonald’s. Just as Fey was arguably the best of the cast/writers of that era (maybe Will Ferrell has had a better performing career and maybe Adam McKay has had a more illustrious writer experience, but she excelled at both), this book has been heralded as the best of the SNL memoirs.

My sense is that, while it’s always going to be a pleasure to hear Fey do anything, this ultimately isn’t as interesting I’d imagined it would be.

On the one hand, my first hope for a comedy memoir is to get a sense of how a comedian came to think about the nature of comedy. Steve Martin is terrific in Born Standing Up for the way he describes a half-conscious, half seize-the-opportunity move he made from the political comedy everyone was doing to a silly, almost pratfall style that he recognized from silent movies and early television performers. Chris Kattan is surprisingly interesting in how he describes what it was like to explore physical comedy in a world geared for the television camera.

It’s fine that Fey does very little of that – she should write the book she wants to write – but I’m sorry that so influential a voice hasn’t given more thought to the mechanics of what she does so well. There’s a moment when she talks about a Lorne Michaels lesson that stands out: she says that Michaels taught her that you need a balance between (in the SNL/30 Rock context) Harvard nerds and improv veterans. Left to their own devices, Harvard nerds will write too much to please themselves while improv types will work too hard for the quick and easy catch-phrase or audience pleaser. She calls the former the equivalent of classic military strategy and the latter like fighting in Vietnam. The point is to work toward the balance.

But such comedy mechanics and insights are rare. Instead, we get a kind of conventional this-was-my-life backdrop, and it works only intermittently.

It’s nice to hear her talk about her family, but those sections point out the limits of her comic method. If she excels at exaggerating the familiar, it doesn’t work that well to exaggerate a childhood that the rest of us don’t know anything about. I believe her when she describes her father, lovingly, as a Clint Eastwood type. It just doesn’t work all that well as humor since we don’t know the extent to which she is tweaking her picture to her storytelling temperament. And it doesn’t work all that well as memoir because she doesn’t push for much depth or fresh insight.

It’s compelling to hear her talk about the persistent outrage she has felt about the way women are marginalized in American culture – and it’s great to see her alchemize what could have been justified anger into comedy – but, since this is a book, she’s talking alone. Funny as she is, her gift is to make others funny and then to become all the funny in the course of such interactions. Here, we lose that space of reaction. I love the Liz Lemon sigh when she stands in front of the irresponsible writers’ room (shout out to Judah Friedlander). She may be alone in the camera, but she’s responding to a mass of unrestrained craziness.

In this book, she’s alone on the page, all alone. Her one-liners land often enough, but that’s ultimately not her genius. In the absence of others interrupting her and helping her hone her insights, this rarely soars above a pleasant conversation with someone who’s trying a little too hard to be entertaining.

I remain as admiring of Fey as ever, but I don’t think this stands out among memoirs of comedians.


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Review: Based on a True Story

Based on a True Story by Norm Macdonald
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Norm MacDonald has a line in here – and I paraphrase – about the mixed blessing of having a cult following. It’s a good thing, he says, if you have a cult following and you are a cult leader. Then you get all the money, and you can sleep with whomever you want. It’s not so good if you’re a comedian, though, because a handful of people really like your work while everyone else doesn’t get it.

Every so often, I do get MacDonald’s work. He can be razor sharp with some of the work he did on Saturday Night Live’s Weekend Update. He shares some of his best lines from that show in this book, and many hold up. His perfect joke may have been, “Lyle Lovett and Julia Roberts are having marital problems. Insiders report the trouble developed from the fact that they are Lyle Lovett and Julia Roberts.” As he observes of his own joke, what makes it effective is that the punch line is so close to the set-up. The space between ordinary and funny is razor-thin, but it’s there.

You might call that dry humor. You might call it deconstructed humor, as MacDonald suggests at one point. And you might call it humor with a punk aesthetic, as MacDonald quotes others saying. In any case, it works, but it works in small, concentrated doses. It works best in that Weekend Update format, with a guy reading cue cards – as MacDonald repeatedly describes it – and grinning into the camera to show he’s in on the joke.

But members of the cult that enjoys MacDonald’s humor insist there’s more to it than that. He’s not merely a sophisticated gag writer, they say, but he’s also challenging the very nature of comedy. He’s mocking the premise that we are supposed to take it seriously that someone is about to make us laugh.

The result is often a calculated sloppiness. There may never have been a less competent actor or impersonator in the history of SNL. He couldn’t deliver a line without a self-aware smirk, couldn’t inhabit any identity but his own. The only character I remember him having any success with was his Burt Reynolds, and that worked only because it was so transparently bad, because Burt Reynolds was a more or less has-been by that point, and it was funny to see his diminished sex appeal yoked to MacDonald’s disinterest.

I’ve never watched MacDonald’s TV shows, but that’s only because I’ve never been tempted. I get that people like his good friend and long-time supporter Adam Sandler trumpet his successes – and laugh at what feels like a sustained inside joke built around the dare to see just how much he can deconstruct the premises of conventional comedy – but it often feels to me like a self-defined group of cool kids laughing at the simple fact that the rest of us don’t get the joke.

Anyway, most of this book is of that kind of humor. On the one hand, I admire its audacity. This is less a memoir than an anti-memoir. Near the start, MacDonald reflects on the notion that memory is always flawed, that nothing can ever be entirely true, so his story will be Based on a True Story. From that fairly thoughtful premise, he spins a story of how he and his sidekick, Adam Eget, proceed on a cross-country trek to win or lose a million dollars in Vegas. And then there’s a thread about a disgruntled ghost writer who interrupts the narrative with his frustrations about working with MacDonald.

On the other hand, very little of this is funny.

I can see MacDonald hoping for laughs, and I can see him – or one of his supporters – pointing out that the joke is that it’s funny precisely because it isn’t funny. But there’s a persistent sloppiness and a persistent changing of premises that ultimately just tires me out. I did listen through to the end, and I generally found myself interested to see if the ultimate joke would land, but I was almost always disappointed.

And through it all, I found myself questioning the fundamental taste of the project. It’s supposed to be funny that MacDonald pretends to a morphine addiction, and that his ability to supply morphine to Lorne Michaels is what got him the gig with SNL. I believe Michaels himself had an addiction, but we know that John Belushi and Chris Farley, to name just a couple, died of their addictions that were fueled by the show. If this were funny, genuinely funny, I’d forgive it. The Producers and (so the reviews say) Jojo Rabbit make fun of Nazis, but they’re funny enough to get away with it. Bad Nazi comedies are doubly bad. So unfunny stories about addiction at SNL – or about prison rape on a later occasion – are doubly unfunny.

As a bottom line, then, I guess you already know if you’re a MacDonald fan. If you are, you’ll probably enjoy this. If not, well, join me in the majority who finds this a little daring and a lot dragging.


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Review: Baby Don't Hurt Me: Stories and Scars from Saturday Night Live

Baby Don't Hurt Me: Stories and Scars from Saturday Night Live by Chris Kattan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I was never especially a fan of Chris Kattan in his Saturday Night Live days. (OK, so I bought the book because it was on sale and because I have been working my way through a lot of comedy memoirs.) I suppose I wasn’t really a fan of the show at all back then. Once Adam Sandler and his backup band left – and I hadn’t loved a lot of their stuff either, though they did pave the way for a pattern of regular and ever-more-exaggerated characters to become the backbone of the show – it felt like “this year’s cheaper model.” It took me years to realize that Will Ferrell really was a deeply talented comedian, and by that point he was gone and Tina Fey and Amy Poehler were already going.

In any case, Kattan always annoyed me, even when all I did was see him on movie posters or in 10-second promos for his Roxbury guys. He seemed to be playing off the fact that he’s a funny-looking guy, seemed to think it was sufficient just to mug for the camera.

To my pleasant surprise, though, this is a mostly thoughtful and revealing memoir. Yeah, it gets into the controversy about how he broke his neck while performing a skit – and it actually become a weaker book as he dances around trying to blame anyone while also getting it out there that he was a real victim – but its best parts are early and middle when he reflects on the nature of comedy.

As a member of the Groundlings (and the son of one of the founders of that comedy troupe) Kattan explored a raw, physical comedy. I hadn’t really known his Mr. Peepers character – a simian figure who clambers over straightmen/women, licks faces, chomps apples, and breaks everything in his way – until this book, and now I find him fascinating to think about.

Kattan describes the experience of creating Mr. Peepers at the Groundlings, and it seems a lesson in comedy. In workshops and then in early skits, he kept pushing the limits of the character. As he did it live on stage, he fed off the energy of the audience. The physicality of the performance made it urgent, made it something that felt dangerous not just for its stunt work but for the sense that something could go wrong. It was live theater, and I suspect I’d have loved it.

When it translated to TV, though, it was a different phenomenon. There was a studio audience, one I gather was farther from the actual stage, but the real audience was the millions on TV, and it couldn’t play the same way. If the directors kept the camera pulled back far enough to see the full scene – as Kattan says he wishes they did – then we home viewers could get a sense of the physical possibilities and other actors’ reactions, but the performers’ faces would be diminished by distance. If they went with the directors’ preferred close-ups, then we couldn’t see the reaction shots, couldn’t see the way the real energy of the character affected others. And that’s where the humor lay.

That got me thinking – and following the thoughts of Kattan – that TV sketch comedy is often necessarily safer than the kind of comedy that brings SNL performers to the attention of the producers. It’s a different sport, almost as if Major League Baseball players had to prove themselves as softball stars before they could join the big leagues.

In any case, Kattan writes the first parts of this well as he weaves back and forth between chapters about his unusual childhood – he lived weekdays with his mother on Mt. Baldy with Carlos Castenada as a neighbor and weekends with his comedian father – and his discovering how to be a better comic in his years on SNL. Unlike some memoirs I’ve seen, this one has a structure, one that turns it into an argument supported by the particulars of Kattan’s life rather than a narrow recounting of that life.

There are a lot of spots where you can feel Kattan pulling his punches; it’s a little moving to hear him take responsibility for the bad choices that cost him most of his friendship with Will Ferrell, and there are times he expressly refuses to name someone whom he thinks might be hurt or offended by being revealed. But the through-line for much of this is a persistent hunger to understand what makes something funny.

Kattan himself isn’t always funny, and it’s surprisingly effective when he offers a lame gag in the writing – like his persistent reminders of the ways technology like answering machines has changed. That’s not funny, or not quite, but we know it because we see a comedian exploring how his medium functions. I’ve read some fairly weak memoirs, but this one mostly works. I not only enjoyed it, but I went looking for some of that era’s SNL shorts on-line and find more to like in them than I remember.


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Review: Player Piano

Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I’ve thought about Vonnegut a lot over the last 3-5 years, and I’ve re-read most of what I’d once read multiple times in high school and home from college. His work was my intellectual comfort food and then, all at once, I’d decided I was beyond him.

The big insight that launched my re-interest came when I realized the extent to which we can trace his coming to terms with the trauma of his war-time experiences, culminating in Slaughterhouse-Five. I found real power in the early novels as we watch him inching ever closer to confronting what it meant to witness what the Allies did to the Germans at Dresden, a story more ironic and horrible than anything he could ever invent himself.

For me, Vonnegut gets really good with Mother Night, his third novel, though we can see some interesting things happening in Sirens of Titan, his second. This one is his first, and, coming back to it, I see some glimmers. But, by comparison with what was coming just a couple years later, this is close to a failure.

Among other things, this is badly plotted. Our hero, Paul Proteus, does have a fascinating experience. Unable, in Vonnegut fashion, to share faith with either of the sides in conflict – he’s born and trained to belong to the engineering elite, but he’s temperamentally unable to join them or the active resistance – he eventually gets fired in order to be sent as an undercover agent of the rebels. Everyone assumes he’s someone he is not. (It’s clumsy here, but Vonnegut does it elegantly in Mother Night.)

That section should be the heart of this novel. Instead, it comes something like two-thirds of the way through with the earlier parts all an extended comic sci-fi/dystopia. It’s apprentice work for the excellence that would follow, but at first it’s spread out too slowly and then it’s rushed. In retrospect, I think a good editor could have saved it, but first he or she would have had to know the voice and style Vonnegut would later develop.

This does interest me, though, for the glimpses we see of what I’ll call the proto-revelations of trauma. This is still loosely in the “Harrison Bergeron” phase where, in a kind of libertarianism, Vonnegut seemed to fear the power of unbridled government more than, as he eventually settled into, the unbridled power of late capitalism. In this moment, we see a poignant yearning for some of what the war made possible. Multiple characters, no more ironic than others, seem nostalgic for the shared purpose of battle.

We do get an early sense of the pointlessness of war. One character recounts winning a major medal because, moments after a Nazi attack, he got a generator working again and electrocuted a thousand Germans who’d managed to make their way to an electric fence that was temporarily disabled. That is, we get an acknowledgement that war is pointless and anti-human, but that doesn’t entirely overwhelm the sense that the narrative of war has a power to bring humans together.

There’s a send-up of corporate life that involves inventing a series of pointless Blue/Green/White teams with strong patriotic self-definitions – that is, there’s a sense of the phoniness of what Vonnegut will call Granfalloons in Cat’s Cradle – but he doesn’t seem all the way able to dismiss the “foma” of patriotism.

In other words, I see a residue of his claiming that what he endured had some purpose to it. That residue is eroding – I think it may be mostly gone by Sirens of Titan – but this marks a fascinating glimpse at the man Vonnegut was before he made himself into the Vonnegut we know.

Don’t bother with this one unless you’ve done the other early ones first, but it’s valuable because of what it shows of an artist slowly forcing himself to become himself.


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