Recently Reviewed: From Artists to a Dancing Detective
Highlights from our Monday Book Review newsletter.
PRIVATE I, BY LYNN HERSHMAN LEESON
Multimedia artist Lynn Hershman Leeson’s memoir, Private I, is also “a diary, an addendum, a manifesto—but perhaps most of all…another art piece,” explains Alta Journal senior editor Lydia Horne. Leeson takes readers through not only her own story—from her early interest in machines to the more recent past, when she still faced periods of financial struggle—but also the collective history of California conceptual art from the 1960s to the 2000s. Leeson discusses the stories behind some of her best-known work.
“Private I is Leeson’s testimony,” Horne concludes, “and it’s also crucial work: documentation of a watershed period in feminist art history and proof of Leeson as the consummate futurist interested in nascent technology, as well as the posterity of physical objects, cultural movements, and a generation of female artists.”
SHADOW TICKET, BY THOMAS PYNCHON
Thomas Pynchon’s latest, his first novel in 12 years, is a convoluted detective novel set in 1930s Milwaukee. Private eye Hicks McTaggart, also a dancer, is sent to track down Daphne Airmont, the “wayward heiress daughter” of a multimillionaire, the “Al Capone of Cheese.” Daphne, who has run off with a clarinetist to Europe, has a “clandestine history” with Hicks. The action moves to Hungary, which is showing significant signs of fascism.
Alta contributing editor David L. Ulin writes, “For Pynchon, technology provokes an essential, and perhaps irresolvable, set of tensions, between humanism on the one hand and fascism on the other, between counterculture and control. As Shadow Ticket progresses, however, such commentary grows increasingly pointed; it is impossible not to recognize some discomforting parallels.”
WE SURVIVED THE NIGHT, BY JULIAN BRAVE NOISECAT
We Survived the Night blends genres as diverse as memoir, reportage, traditional storytelling, and Indigenous oral histories and origin tales. Author Julian Brave NoiseCat tells of his Native artist father’s abandonment of the family and of his early life, during which he and his Jewish mother found a home in Oakland’s Native community and on the Canim Lake Indian Reserve, in British Columbia.
“One of the remarkable strengths of the book is how NoiseCat manages to hold emotional complexity at the core of his storytelling,” critic Ilana Masad observes. “He acknowledges the emotional pain he’s suffered at the hands of both of his father figures.… And at the same time, he is capable of loving them, even with their flaws, and recognizes where their behaviors might have emerged from.”
ONLY WAY OUT, BY TOD GOLDBERG
In Only Way Out, Tod Goldberg, well known for his desert noir, sets out for the Oregon coast. This hilarious crime novel involves a law firm employee, Robert, who steals safe-deposit boxes from his workplace with the aim of sailing to South America with his sister, who has a genius IQ. Robert’s van spins off the road, and he is decapitated. The wreck is discovered by a corrupt cop, who wants to make off with cash, jewelry, and incriminating evidence in the safe-deposit boxes. Robert’s sister and an ex-con get in the way.
“Goldberg is a consummate pro at juggling the back-stories and present actions of his multivarious cast of losers without robbing them of their humanity or the over-arching sadness the reader feels about their dead-end plights and schemes,” comments critic Paula L. Woods.
A LONG GAME: NOTES ON WRITING FICTION, BY ELIZABETH MCCRACKEN
In A Long Game: Notes on Writing Fiction, ostensibly a craft book, novelist Elizabeth McCracken acknowledges that there are no surefire prescriptions in the art of writing. Reviewing the book, critic Mark Athitakis observes, “What she offers instead is an atmosphere, a sense of what achieve-ment looks like, a reminder of the possible.” She provides her opinions on certain elements of writing fiction and shares guidance on the writer’s life, incorporating both her successes and her failures.
Athitakis explains that this is more than an advice book: McCracken gives permission. “This is a canny approach if you’re peeking at the market,” he notes. “It works because her brand of inspiration isn’t cheap uplift, just clear reports from the trenches about the sorts of things that can waylay a writer, both on the page and in life.”
SCAVENGERS, BY KATHLEEN BOLAND
Novelist Ruth Madievsky interviewed Kathleen Boland about her comic novel, Scavengers, in which an estranged mother-daughter duo go west to search for $1 million in buried treasure. Madievsky asked how Boland, who previously worked at a hedge fund, had threaded the needle of writing a romp that was also a “nuanced exploration” of what it means to plunder the American West. “In the Southwest, you hear all the time about people who go on hikes with half a bottle of water and expect it’s going to be fine. That combined with the legacy of manifest destiny, the legacy and history of the American West, and a lot of ideas going back to when I was working in commodities on the desk, like how we value land and natural resources,” Boland replied. “What prices it, who values it, and who gets to decide how valuable those things are?”
Lives of the Poet
Permission for Writers
Time and Tide
The Physics of Grief: Aja Gabel’s ‘Lightbreakers’
