Sam Shepard, Rolling Thunder Logbook

[review forthcoming]

Technorati Tags: Books, Nonfiction, Sam Shepard, Music, Bob Dylan

Rex Pickett, Sideways

Substituting Pinot Noir for the New York Giants (without jettisoning the alcoholism), and an unsold novel manuscript for a love-hate obsession with Frank Gifford (without skimping on the existential despair), the opening of Sideways has all the woolly charm and seductive pessimism of Frederick Exley's A Fan's Notes. Before long, however, the novel veers on to a somewhat more predictable path: two buddies taking a road trip into California wine country as a last hurrah before one of them gets married.

The aspiring novelist is Miles, a screenwriter barely hanging on at the fringes of Hollywood, and the soon-to-be-groom is Jack, a TV character actor and sometime film director. Each has a self-imposed burden of custodianship over the other: Miles to prevent Jack from cheating on his fiancee, Jack to keep Miles from despondency over his ex-wife's new marriage and his fast-crumbling dream of becoming a published author. Both men fail miserably, but Pickett, although never taking us deeply into either character, displays a smart ear for dialogue, a gift for gallows humor, and a subtle poignancy that enables him to make a touching story out of their friendship and fears.

Technorati Tags: Books, Fiction, Rex Pickett

James Salter, Last Night

Salter is frequently tagged with the label "writer's writer," which is usually just another way of saying that an author's crystalline prose style and/or chosen milieux are more appreciated by fellow artists than his or her storylines are appreciated by general readers. In the case of this collection of ten short stories, the label is apt. Salter's sentences are swift and savage, beautiful when not biting and often both at once. His protagonists typically display a certain sophisticated decadence; they are the sort of people who disrupt carefully calibrated social situations while in the process of ruining themselves with drink or marital infidelity, yet are still able to lash out cleverly at one another. But the incidents in these mostly brief pieces are too quickly sketched to make much of an impression—even the impression, so beloved of short story writers, that more is being left unsaid than appears on the surface. The one exception to this less-is-less quality is "Arlington," which has a military setting and a sudden, early change of narrative viewpoint that causes the story to turn itself inside out, elegantly, like a fine glove. The effect is exhilarating.

Technorati Tags: Books, Fiction, James Salter

Howard Sounes, Down the Highway: The Life of Bob Dylan

The primary challenge facing any comprehensive biography of Dylan is to trace a consistent path through each of his many musical incarnations, uniting the high and low points of his career into a convincing portrait of the artist. Sounes succeeds at this for a while, but seems to lose the thread somewhere after the mid-1970s. So, while the raconteur of the Rolling Thunder Revue still feels connected to the mischievous early folksinger, the playful acoustic poet, the electric rabble-rouser, and even the gloomy, defeated minstrel of Blood on the Tracks, the progression from Rolling Thunder to holy roller and beyond marks a rupture in the narrative from which the book never quite recovers. By the end, Dylan has become a barely coherent shadow, a figure who, strangely unconnected from his own past, deserves a measure of empathy but otherwise hardly seems to warrant the reader’s interest. Still, Sounes has unearthed many new details about Dylan’s private life that were either overlooked by or unavailable to previous biographers, and that plus its captivating first half does make this book worthwhile reading for Dylan’s many fans.

Technorati Tags: Books, Nonfiction, Howard Sounes, Music, Bob Dylan

returned to the library, unfinished

John Fowles, The Journals (Volume I: 1949-1965)

After taking six weeks to get through about one-third of this massive tome (the first of volume of two), I had covered only a little more than three years in the young adulthood of Fowles, who in the early 1950s was about as far as one can imagine from being the world-famous author of The French Lieutenant's Woman. To go by these published journals alone—which are but a fraction, its editor tells us, of the extant manuscripts—Fowles spent most of his time during this period complaining about his parents, whom he lived with after graduating from Oxford University; rhapsodizing about landscape; teaching school in France and Greece; mooning over a childish, mercurial young woman while on a trip to Spain; and claiming to be a misunderstood literary genius, despite very little supporting evidence. I admire his self-confidence, but I lost patience with the braggart Fowles was in his twenties and, as a consequence, will probably not bother to pick this book up again to see how he developed into one of England's finest contemporary writers.

Technorati Tags: Books, Nonfiction, John Fowles