Jonathan Lethem is currently one of those young favorites of the East Coast literati crowd who, like Michael Chabon, was influenced early by genre fiction. And unlike Chabon, Lethem keeps a much tighter reign on this influence in his own works, although he did edit the popular Library of America reissues of Philip K. Dick.
CHRONIC CITY, Lethem’s latest, is by no means a genre novel. Yet a few of those influences seem to creep along its edges. It’s narrated by Chase Insteadman, a former child star of a hit TV series. Chase hasn’t acted since the show ended production, and subsists these days mostly on residual checks and as a popular fixture at upscale dinner parties in New York City.
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Huh? I think that sums up the reading of PECKINPAH: AN ULTRAVIOLENT ROMANCE. D. Harlan Wilson’s work is not a novel in the sense of a traditional story. It’s more of a collection of bizarre, brief sketches, all of which revolve around “ultraviolence,” as the author likes to state.
But as soon as something starts, it ends. The longest piece is three pages and, trust me, it reads like just a couple of paragraphs. I really can’t explain what goes on in these pieces, other than that they just start with some violence of some sort, the end.
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Don’t take Tod Goldberg’s OTHER RESORT CITIES as some fun-loving travelogue. These 10 stories are populated with people who live in resort towns, but they are not what the local chamber of commerce wants you to see.
I had read the story “Mitzvah,” dealing with a rabbi in Las Vegas before in the LAS VEGAS NOIR anthology, but the other nine were all new to me, even though some have been printed in different forms. The one unifying connection between them is just how dark of a writer Goldberg really is. These are no media tie-ins, folks (although he does those well).
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Thomas Pynchon is one of America’s greatest living writers. His THE CRYING OF LOT 49 should be required teaching in high school, and his MASON & DIXON is one of the truly great underrated masterpieces. But his recent dip into genre fiction, INHERENT VICE, may lead some readers to worry: Will it be as literarily obscure as GRAVITY’S RAINBOW, or could there even be a level of condescension present?
Well, no worries, chaps. INHERENT VICE is one of the author’s most accessible and books, all while maintaining the expected Pynchonian level of description, misdirection, humor and undeniably intricate plotting. The novel is set in the Los Angeles of 1970, at the tail end of the psychedelic ’60s and the beginning of the brand-dominant ’70s, all the details of which Pynchon spreads liberally throughout, referencing TV shows, California idiosyncrasies and historical milestones, thoroughly submerging the reader into the stoner culture of his characters.
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In JULIET, NAKED, Nick Hornby has created a story about three lost individuals, and how they come to find themselves and each other. Annie and Duncan, a stagnant couple, have been together for 15 years. Annie loves Duncan — or at least thinks she does — but soon discovers she’s fallen out of love with him. Duncan loves Annie, but he cares about singer/songwriter Tucker Crowe more. I’m talking an obsessive, big-time man-crush.
Tucker, who’s compared to Bob Dylan, reached his peak in the 1980s, and promptly quit the business, walking away without a trace. It was hard for me to understand Tucker’s music since he’s a fictional character. It helped when I pictured a 50-year-old Kurt Cobain or Jeff Buckley, the only difference being that Tucker is still alive and kicking, albeit in self-imposed seclusion in Pennsylvania.
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