Zeroville / by Steve Erickson

Ike Jerome, nicknamed "Vikar", arrives in Hollywood in the summer of 1969 with nothing but an extremely odd tattooo on the back of his bald head. The image shows a silhouetted image of two movie stars: Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift in a rendering of a scene from the film A Place in the Sun. As a man haunted by a severely restricted, irregular past and largely unfamiliar with his own identity, Vikar is a curious character even amidst the counterculture of the day. He's a bit edgy too, erratic at times, confrontational and frequently violent (especially when it comes to misunderstandings about his tattoo). He's coherent enough though and at times ironically intellectual, his psyche seemingly held together by a curious mixture of conviction and fascination over his passion in life--the world of the movies.

.

Vikar is an obsessive, almost possessed devotee to the movies, having only seen his first real film at the age of 16--his rigidly pious, overbearing father disallowing all forms of popular entertainment. He has since become enraptured by all things silver screen; the actors, directors, cinematography, production design, etc. all drawing him almost trance-like back to the the theater, often multiple times in one day. Now in Hollywood, a place Vikar is sure he will find people to share his love for the cinema, he discovers the world around him to be oddly clueless. The hippy landscape on which he's landed is largely disassociated from moviemaking, instead focused more on drugs, sex, music and progressive activism. In addition, it's a culture now targeted by the authorities owing to the recent Manson family murders. Vikar, ever conspicuous with his peculiar appearance and vagrant status living as a tramp in the Hollywood Hills, has even been interrogated on suspicion of his own involvement with the crime even as he's never heard of Charles Manson or his "family"

.

Zeroville is an exquisite literary experience. Reminiscent of Don Delillo or Thomas Pynchon with its unconventional structure--terse 1 or 2 paragraph chapters and idiosyncratic subject matter--the novel is a refreshing work by a talented writer, equally provocative and entertaining at every turn. The author of award-winning novels like Amnesiac, Arc d'X and The Sea Came in at Midnight, Erickson's work has been described as apocalyptic for its rendering of themes involving dysfunctional societies and isolated characters. Zeroville carries this notion to a new level with a familiar place and time inhabited by quite a unique individual surrounded by a world seemingly on the edge of destruction. (FIC ERICKSON)

Best first lines from books

American Book Review just published their list of 100 best first lines of novels. I found it interesting to see how many of these books I've read -- and how many I haven't read but still know the first line. Do you have any first lines you'd add to this list? Any you'd take off? Check out the list here.

Rock Bottom: A Novel / by Michael Shilling

"We were the next big thing once." (p. 55). That about sums it up for Blood Orphans. Not so long ago, they were on top of the charts and on top of the world as one of the most talked about hard rock bands around. Back in the day in the midst of the always overcrowded LA music scene, the Orphans were the darlings, one group deemed by everyone to break it big. All of the necessary pieces were in place: Shane the edgy, charismatic and spiritually-attuned lead singer; Darlo the all-out libertine for a drummer; wonderboy guitar prodigy Adam; and a soulful bass player, Bobby, the unspoken glue holding together the foursome. And of course they had the all-important recording contract with a reputable label, a booking agent, the right A and R people and the backing of loyal fans.

.
Then everything went south. Their dreams turned to mush just like Bobby's hands which, in eerily corresponding fashion, succombed to a particularly virulent strain of eczema. Like anything else which falls apart, it wasn't just one thing which caused the burgeoning supergroup's crash back to oblivion. Through a series of ill-fated concert expeditions, bad management moves by drugged-out agents, multiple personal indiscretions as well as scandalous incidents both public and private, Blood Orphans took an irreversible nosedive. Now in Amsterdam, their last stop of a flamed-out Euro tour, the Orphans muster what they can from their rapidly fading rockstar ambitions, rehashing any verifiable good times of old while clinging to their last days of alcohol/sex/drugs/rebellion, all the time trying to pinpoint just what went wrong.
.
Where Spinal Tap (DVD THIS) lovingly parodied the the world of faux rock stardom through the farcical comeback tour of an aging, washed-up and thoroughly delusional heavy metal band, Rock Bottom pulls no punches in its more hard-edged pursuit of a tragic truth. It decries, derides and downright defames the built-in romanticism of Rock n' Roll riches, revealing a largely undignified world of despair, exploitation and self-destruction. Though at times humorous and witty, nothing seems very lighthearted about the story which is really a backstory of the band's rise and fall, retold in parts by each of the four members during one 24-hour period. It's an honest rendition by a quartet of tired, disappointed, angry and thoroughly disillusioned musicians on what they feel has been the anti-climactic pinnacle of their young lives. As a "recovering rock musician" himself, Shilling knows his subject matter. Having lived the Seattle grunge scene as a bit player for numerous bands, he tells a story worth hearing about a band which never quite made it. Simultaneously and to his credit, he manages to avoid any of the smarmy, over-the-top portrayals similar platforms (VH1's Behind The Music) have dispensed with in the past, instead delving into the very human, very visceral, thoroughly flawed but perhaps not totally irredeemable worlds of his characters. (FIC SHILLING)

Laughing Boy by Oliver La Farge

Although this book was first published in 1929, it still has resonance as a novel commenting on the fate of the native American Indian tribes when their lands were invaded by the settlers from European countries. Oliver La Farge, the author, was an anthropologist who studied the Mayan culture in Central America and the Indian population of the American Southwest.

The story concerns Laughing Boy, a young Navajo man who meets another young Navajo woman, Slim Girl, at a native dance ceremony, and falls in love with her. She actually seeks him out, but is not as smitten with love as he is. Her motives are more self-seeking, as she is determined to use him to remold her life into an Indian one.

What we know about Slim Girl is her resolve and her anger against white people. She was reared away from her family in a missionary school. As a young woman, she had embraced the Christian faith and the American culture, when something happened that caused her to abandon the whites and all that they offered her. When she meets Laughing Boy, she has renounced her upbringing, and is trying to find her way back to her people and their values.

Right away, Slim Girl finds that her course is not so simple, and that she could not foresee the complications that present themselves. She herself falls deeply in love, and finds herself in sway to a “real” Navajo brave…one who can order her to wait when an adventure calls him. Tension in the story arises from Slim Girls’ hidden strategies to have an Indian life, but one without undue hardship and sacrifice.

The story is as much a love story as a story of Slim Girl’s “hubris”, and how her ruthless planning will rend the two asunder. With vivid descriptions of the Navajo religious ceremonies and of the beautiful desert setting, the book is a testimony to how the Indian’s tribal life managed to linger on, before the white man’s civilization fully encroached it.

Fail Nation: A Visual Romp Through the World of Epic Fails / Failblog.org Community, eds.

The word "fail" has taken on a different meaning in this new millenium. No longer does it indicate a mere lack of success, limited achievability or inadequate results. Nowadays it's become a hip term in the American slang vocabulary, connoting mishaps, mistakes and other ironical human failings of extraordinary imbecility or of an otherwise ludicrously tragic nature. Something or someone may deemed a "fail" or even an "epic fail" in situations when the circumstances are absurdly ridiculous to the point of being just plain pitiful (see image at right). An extensive network of online contributors has taken it upon themselves to maintain an interactive website, a blog actually called failblog.org, which chronicles the world of fails, epic fails and other occasions of humanity's inglorious shortcomings. The book Fail Nation offers a generous sample of the blog's material though certainly only a small portion of the website's multitude of funny anecdotes. (818.602 FAIL)

The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story Of The Company That Is Connecting The World / by David Kirkpatrick

.

It started off simply enough. In 2003, 19-year-old Mark Zuckerberg was a sophomore at Harvard when he hacked into the university database and devised an interactive website which invited students to compare the looks of their fellow classmates. From this slightly sordid endeavor sprung the brainchild that would become Facebook. In roughly five years, Zuckerberg and a small assortment of business partners grew the company to its current monolithic status, influencing the development of online communities and connecting people all over the world in the process.

.

Facebook is now the largest social network, having recently overtaken Myspace and Twitter and maintaining a steady lead over the rest of the pack. Despite its drawbacks including urgent claims about invasion of privacy, allowances for potentially harmful situations, borderline illicit content and matters of intellectual freedom, it grows larger everyday with multitudes of newer converts added to the directory hourly. It's rare to find high school or college students, and increasingly more adults who do not maintain a personal account and routinely visit the site. And while its potential pitfalls are readily pointed out, most won't argue over its staying power. Facebook has demonstrated a flexible attitude of adaptability to accompany its progressive innovation, becoming a thoroughly "familiar and ubiquitous part of the Internet." (p. 85). Furthermore, the impact of the site is so profound that it's influencing lives offline as well as online, re-envisioning the world of who our "friends" really are and how we connect.

.

Veteran technology journalist and author David Kirkpatrick investigates the phenomenon which has revolutionized the concept of social life, and indeed altered the nature of marketing and communications. With the full cooperation of the company's executives including founder and current CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Kirkpatrick dissects both the role and function of Facebook, examining the remarkable rise of the company which is now among the world's fastest growing corporations. The author also does a good job tying everything together well enough for technology novices and persons outside the social networking clique to grasp. So for anyone unfamiliar with the site, the general concept and pertinent details are provided in solid, plausible explanations. The movie The Social Network, which appears soon in theaters, chronicles essentially the same story albeit without Zuckerberg's cooperation who has since claimed that he'd "just wished that nobody made a movie about me while I was still alive."* (338.7 KIRKPATRICK)

.

*Fried, Ina. "Zuckerberg on the Hotseat at D8". Beyond Binary. CNET.com. June 2, 2010.

Tongues of Serpents by Naomi Novik

The latest book in the Temeraire series, book 6, finds Will Laurence and his dragon Temeraire in Australia, at the time of the Napoleonic wars. The author Novik is a history buff and writes convincingly of the details of war as waged at that time. However, this is an “alternate” history, and these Napoleonic wars, while covering much of the same territory as their real counterparts, differ significantly in events, such as Napoleon actually invading England in Victory of Eagles, Book 5. While many praise Novik for her realistic portrayal of historical settings, and others imply that readers who simply love dragons are lining up at book signings, in my opinion the strength of these books goes far beyond possessing those two elements. Her ability to pull you into the action and circumstances of each chapter, without your noticing it, shows what some reviewers have commented on – prose that carries no excess weight or dreary detail. What I have found tremendous is her consummate skill in ending chapters, so that just as you feel as despairing of circumstance as Temeraire or Laurence might be feeling, in one stroke all is changed.

The two are in New South Wales, a British prison colony, since Laurence was condemned as a traitor to Britain and Temeraire along with him. Neither are prisoners, however, since Laurence’s sentence was changed to being deported. While they continue on adventures with British forces, their status has changed and they might, if they wished, leave it all behind and retire to a farm in the interior. Somehow you know this will not happen. Novik likes showing the underside of politics --- how fine or not so fine intentions of leaders or countries end up being implemented with consequences brutal to both soldiers and civilians. This book has struck some readers as dreary, as there is a long overland passage involved, as in Book 3. In my view, Novik is depicting how tiring and numbing such journeys can be. And if I can’t actually be there, I appreciate feeling as if I am. (there are some nice excerpts of an interview with Naomi Novik at io9.com/5634183)

Catch-22: A Novel / by Joseph Heller

For readers accustomed to novels possessing a linear structure and straightforward narrative, Joseph Heller's Catch-22 may seem an incoherent, jumbled series of confusing characters and disconnected episodes. Many critics said as much upon its publication in 1961. But to the more enlightened audience, the novel is nothing short of a literary masterpiece. Born in Brooklyn in 1923, Joseph Heller grew up the only child of Russian immigrants. In 1941 at the age of 19, he joined the Army Air Corps as a bomber pilot in training and subsequently flew over 60 combat missions in the European theater. Upon his return stateside, Heller worked as a copy editor while crafting his concept for the story which would become Catch-22. The satirical wartime novel chronicling the individual's place amid an erratic institutional bureaucracy swiftly became a classic and remains so today.

There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind . . . Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle. "That's some catch that Catch-22," he observed. "It's the best there is," Doc Daneeka agreed. (p. 46)

Capt. John Yossarian is an American bomber pilot in the final months of World War II. Having already flown well over the designated 40 flying sorties, or missions required by the Army, Yossarian is nonetheless kept around on active duty by his seemingly idiotic superior officers who see to it that the quota number of sorties are repeatedly raised. It's not just the number of combat missions. The entire squadron is certifiably crazy, it seems to Yossarian, who finds common sense and logic nominally absent from the base's operational system, the entire chain of command appearing to function with a misplaced agenda.

.

It all seems a big muddle from the outside looking in. But is it? Though everyone and everything seems ludicrous to a T, bent on insanity and lunacy, the self-perception within the squadron isn't so drastic. Visibly, the atmosphere is relatively docile with the men seeming to accept the way things are. The absurdity of incidents like a captain promoted to major simply because his last name is "Major" (so he could be called "Major Major"), a discharged private who's continually given the most important duties, a colonel's reason for action based solely on what others think of him, or the company mess officer orchestrating the bombing of his own men are accepted as perfectly permissible activities or otherwise inconsequential dealings. What really matters, it seems, isn't quite what really matters.

.

More than anything else, Catch-22 embodies its title phrase--the self-contradictory, circular reasoning evoking a no-win situation. The structure and style of the novel itself are like this, the prose always repetitive and paradoxical, reiterating themes of irrationality and nonsensical logic all purported as sound doctrine and ingenuity. Yet it's this seemingly ridiculous pattern of disjointed incoherency which makes the book so profound. For within the double-speak and literary hodgepodge is a deadly serious diatribe on war, peace, life and death, brilliantly illuminating the ordered chaos of military combat which inevitably subjects individuals to disorientation and futility. The 1970 film version (DVD CATCH) of the book starring Alan Arkin, John Voight and Orson Welles received lukewarm reviews but has garnered an appreciable fanbase and "cult" status in subsequent years. (FIC HELLER)

The quest for substantial reading

Check out Wall Street Journal journalist Cynthia Crossen's suggestions to a reader who wants to commemorate a milestone birthday by reading Important Literature that can double as a door stopper. Read her article here.

The Book of Air and Shadows / by Michael Gruber

Michael Gruber holds a Ph.D. in Marine Biology, has been a federal official for the Environmental Protection Agency and was a political advisor and speech writer for the Carter administration. Before banking off his own name as a novelist, Gruber was generally acknowledged as the primary ghostwriter for his cousin Robert K. Tanenbaum whose "Butch Karp" novels became worldwide bestsellers. His 2007 literary thriller The Book of Air and Shadows explores the possibility of an undiscovered Shakespearean work and the madcap race to claim the prize.

.

.
When an antiquarian bookstore in central Manhattan mysteriously burns down, store clerk and film student Albert Crosetti thinks he's out of a job. But while sifting through the rubble, he finds a strange book inside of which are remnants of an ages-old, handwritten manuscript. Though the writing on the parchment is English, it's very old English ("Of the lodgeres heere the greater parte be drovers & some plaiers," p. 214) and Crosetti spends the remainder of his day trying to decipher the oddly composed document, soon reaching the determination that he's reading a correspondence piece authored by an Elizabethan-era soldier acting as an aid-de-camp to the royal throne.

.

Meanwhile Jake Mishkin is a frightened, paranoid and somewhat cranky intellectual property lawyer currently hiding out from a gang of Russian mobsters. A few months previous, Jake had agreed to advise a panicked English professor on how to secure the rights to 17th century letter which may pinpoint the location of an unknown Shakespeare play. Two days after their meeting, the professor was found tortured to death and Jake was being pursued by the same menacing assortment of perpetrators. But when fate brings Jake into contact with Albert Crosetti, who ironically knows about another similar old letter, the pair escape New York and begin their own daring adventure to follow the case's trail to England and claim the prized manuscript.

.

Gruber's first standalone novel (he's published a detective-mystery trilogy and a short story collection previous) is a great literary thriller, effectively and comprehensively meshing the genres of classic literature, worthwhile history, epistolary intrigue and contemporary suspense into one fascinating story. It's a book equally dominated by both the past and the present, coupling the legendary William Shakespeare, his life and times, with the conventional hurly-burly of New York City, London and further quagmires of modernity. As well, it alludes to the current legal matters involving intellectual property, an author's rights and public domain--all relevant ongoing issues of today which inevitably tie us to the world of the past. (FIC GRUBER)