Category Archives: Rants and Raves

Here’s where my thoughts go.

Thinking About Thinking #13 – Theft – A Love Story

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Could you love a thief if you knew what she did? Here’s my book review of Theft: A Love Story by Peter Carey.

Theft is about art and art fakes, love and betrayal. The notions of both kinds of fraud are intertwined. Thank you Peter Carey for an idiosyncratic writing style – actually, two first-person styles, one for a tormented love-stricken painter Michael, aka Butcher Boone, and the other for his mentally challenged brother Hugh.

What would you do if you were in love with a psychopath and realized you didn’t care what sins that person might or might not have committed? Main character Butcher Boone is a famous abstract painter who lives in a rural area of Australia with brother Hugh. Butcher fears his career is nearly over. Into his life comes beautiful art dealer and appraiser Marlene, who happens to stop by looking for a famous painting by Jacques Leibovitz, the painting owned by Butcher’s next-door neighbor, except the painting goes missing. And it turns out that Marlene is the daughter-in-law of Leibovitz and just about the only expert on the planet who can tell which of the paintings attributed to the dead artist is actually a fake. It shouldn’t be too much of a spoiler to say that in befriending Butcher on the same evening, the Leibovitz is stolen.

Marlene has some serious conflicts of interest!

This novel is also fascinating for the interwoven facts and culture of the real art world. I used to own a Tom Wesselmann, and I agree that his marketability might have exceeded his talent.

In Clifford’s Spiral a stroke survivor tries to piece together the fragments of his memories. Was he the victim or the perpetrator? 2020 IPA Distinguished Favorite in Literary Fiction.

Thinking About Thinking #12: The Goldfinch – What price loyalty if no love back?

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What price loyalty if no love back? Here’s my book review of The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt.

This is a story about art theft and romantic obsession. Main character Theodore Decker is very much the boychik – a young man with more ambition than brains. So it’s a coming-of-age story, as well, full of his personal introspection and psychological turmoil.

Be warned – plot spoilers ahead.

Young Theo and his mother duck into a New York museum in the rain and are caught in a terrorist bomb blast. His mother is killed, but he is one of the few survivors. Another fatality is a cultured old man named Welty, who was at the museum with his pretty young ward Pippa. She’s close to Theo’s age and also survives, but with some debilitating injuries. She will become the unrequited love of his life. Before Welty expires next to Theo in the rubble, he gives him his signet ring and tells him to take this small painting – The Goldfinch – a Dutch Master picture of a bird chained to its perch. Theo takes on the mission to keep the painting safe.

That’s as much of the story as I’ll give away. There’s a lot more – this is a big book. The novel owes a lot to Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past and Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, and it mentions both. The underlying philosophical questions are broad and deep: Why is there evil in the world? What is the point of living? And what do we owe to history? to future generations?

A literary agent told me that author Donna Tartt refuses to be edited. Like I say, it’s a long book. It topped the bestseller lists for a while, and clearly many of her readers hoped it would be worth the time invested.

As for me, I applaud its ambitions, but I do think less would have been more.

In Clifford’s Spiral a stroke survivor tries to piece together the fragments of his memories. Was he the victim or the perpetrator? 2020 IPA Distinguished Favorite in Literary Fiction.

 

Thinking About Thinking #11: A Small Town in Germany – Historical fiction is all about today

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Here’s my book review of A Small Town in Germany by John le Carré. Written decades ago by the recently deceased author, its plot has chilling parallels to today’s news.

A Small Town in Germany is one of le Carré’s first novels, written not long after he left the employ of the British Foreign Service in 1964. One of his first postings was in Bonn, the postwar capital city of West Germany, and the small town of the title. In the past, I’ve been effusive in my praise for le Carré’s writing style. My one criticism of this book is its occasionally strained efforts at poetic imagery. At times in his later career, the novelist’s prose has been to spare. But in this early work, he’s reaching for colorful analogies. The results too often come across as overwritten:

No dawn is ever wholly ominous. The earth is too much its own master; the cries, the colors, and the sense too confident to sustain our grim foreboding.

The fictional premise is that Dr. Klaus Karfeld, a crowd-pleasing politician, is rising to power on a wave of renewed German nationalism. A younger generation resents economic malaise and their parents’ having lost the war. Karfeld promises to break off ties with the Common Market, predecessor of the European Union, and pursue a new alliance with Russia.

The principal characters in the story are diplomats stationed at the British embassy, who are bewildered and threatened by the impending power shifts, including possible retaliation against the English occupiers. Most worrisome to these Brits, one of their employees, Leo Harting, a Polish-born German, has gone missing. Apparently, he took some secret files. They worry that the information in these files might not only embarrass the Queen’s government, but also help Karfeld in his rise to power and repudiation of NATO.

Welshman Alan Turner, an undercover operative, is summoned on an official mission to find the missing man and the stolen files. Turner has all the skills, along with the surly and irreverent personality of the classic noir detective. (As far as I know, he doesn’t reappear in any of the other le Carré novels.)

Turner runs afoul of almost everyone at the embassy, especially when he learns that, far from being a spy, Harting was hunting war criminals. He had uncovered Karfeld’s secret past as a Nazi scientist. Turner’s job changes from searching for a presumed defector to trying to prevent Karfeld’s goons from finding and then killing Harting.

The cynical Turner begins to realize that the Brits want the missing files, but not the man who took them. And most disturbing of all, they don’t want Karfeld’s crimes dredged up, even if it means Harting’s death. The Karfeld movement has gained too much popularity. The pragmatic diplomats are apparently ready to embrace the election’s expected winner even though they know he once supervised a laboratory that tested the homicidal effects of poison gas.

It was a coincidence that I picked this book up again recently. Perhaps you’ve guessed by now why I think this story resonates with today’s headlines.

In Clifford’s Spiral a stroke survivor tries to piece together the fragments of his memories. Was he the victim or the perpetrator? 2020 IPA Distinguished Favorite in Literary Fiction.

Thinking About Thinking #10: It’s not young love – What is it?

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Here’s my book review of Purgatory Gardens by Peter Lefcourt. This comic novel centers on a love triangle in a retirement community. If you don’t think that’s ridiculous in itself, you’d better develop a sense of humor about old age before it sneaks up on you.

Although this is a fur piece from Lefcourt’s first rodeo, he’s not quite ready to hang up his own spurs yet. In his previous books, the protagonists are typically male, and almost always misguided. I’ve said in print before that he’s a master of a genre I call boychik lit – wise stories about young men with more chutzpah than brains. And although his heroes have tended to be middle- rather than teenaged, these men are all charmingly hapless, clueless, feckless, and frustratingly clueless. Consider, for example, the narrator of another of his books, Eleven Karens. He’s a young man who ages too rapidly through eleven disappointing relationships, each with a different female name, Karen. Then there was the presumably more mature Senator Woody White in The Woody who has trouble with his, uh, drawers. My personal favorite has been the failing-ever-upward Hollywood producer Charlie Burns, who goes from failing to make a bad movie in The Deal to creating a truly horrific TV series about a family of terrorists in The Manhattan Beach Project.

This time out, Lefcourt’s protagonist is an older but hardly wiser, New Jersey wiseguy, Salvatore Didziocomo. He’s ratted out his boss, changed his name to Sammy Dee, and moved into a condo in Palm Springs, courtesy of the Feds. Lounging around the pool and hobnobbing at homeowner meetings, he gets partially aroused at the sight of the still-comely Marcy Gray, a fading Hollywood starlet who yet aspires to do any script Jane Fonda might turn down.

But clouding Sammy’s prospects for shining through is a tall, sophisticated African, one Didier Onyekachukwu. This charming fellow knows his fine wine and cuisine, dashing dance-floor moves, and art-curatorial arcana. And it doesn’t take such refined taste or imagination for him to judge that Ms. Gray is the hotter number in the Paradise Gardens complex, also known as “Purgatory” to the residents who are willing to acknowledge their own mortality. So here we have the ultimate in male-centered comic frustration – two old guys who think about sex as often as teenage boys do, with the same result. They might get laid if by some miracle the moon turns as blue as their nether parts.

And they fight over Marcy’s attention like two doofuses at a prom. I’ll end the spoilers here by simply letting on that Sammy reverts to form and puts out a contract on Didier. Oh, and to make matters even more interesting, the intended victim may be at least as ruthless. At one time, his import-export business involved more nefarious commodities than old knickknacks.

Again, if you fail to see the comedy in all this, perhaps you should take out a long-term care policy and get on with life. Enough said about the plots.

Besides his honored rep as a writer of funny books, Mr. Lefcourt’s career has also included writing and producing movies, television, and plays. His novel The Deal and his play Sweet Talk have already made it to the big and small screens. The rumor in town now is that The Dreyfus Affair, his comic novel about a gay baseball player, is in development. Please note that I predicted early on that Purgatory Gardens will follow suit. Think The Odd Couple meets Grace and Frankie – or, as Lefcourt fans will understand – CSI Desert Hot Springs.

In Clifford’s Spiral a stroke survivor tries to piece together the fragments of his memories. Was he the victim or the perpetrator? 2020 IPA Distinguished Favorite in Literary Fiction.

Thinking About Thinking #9 – What century-old fakery still incites the mob?

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Here’s my book review of The Prague Cemetery by Umberto Eco.

This novel is no less than an attempt to trace the origins of anti-Semitism in Europe over the last two centuries. Author Umberto Eco’s story is a partially true but barely believable plot behind the multiple versions of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a racist tract that inspired Naziism. Eco’s account is narrated by the one character he admits to being fictional, Simonini, a master forger who made a living not only creating official documents but also fabricating the facts and stories they contained. The plot suggests that this man was hired to create the The Protocols as a deliberate hoax to incite hatred and build a political power base.

Eco has been a lifetime student of occultist movements and secret societies, including the Knights Templar, the Rosicrucians, the Freemasons, and various anti-clerical, anti-Papist, anti-royalist, anarchist, and, yes, anti-Semitic political and religious groups, including their agent provocateurs.

Behind this story is a general conclusion about the nature of conspiracy. In this web of loosely woven plots, conspiracy is not a masterfully directed and highly coordinated effort. It is, instead, a monstrous disease that has no direction other than its own propagation. It has no head and no permanently governing body. Spanning generations, it goes wherever it feeds best, and it serves whomever will feed and sustain it. It likewise destroys, not a specific enemy, but any person, group, or ideology the persecution of which will benefit, even for the short term, the feeders of conspiracy.

In short, it has been convenient for various groups at various times to promote hatred of marginalized social groups. But as Eco demonstrates, this agenda has  much more to do with consolidating power than with persecuting or exterminating the  victims.

Ultimately, it’s about political expediency and rousing the emotions of the masses – not to destroy an enemy but to enrich their persecutors.

In Clifford’s Spiral a stroke survivor tries to piece together the fragments of his memories. Was he the victim or the perpetrator? 2020 IPA Distinguished Favorite in Literary Fiction.

Thinking About Thinking #8 – Do forgotten stories affect you more?

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My Voice Will Go with You illustrates vividly the power of a story to transform thinking and behavior – immediately. The accompanying commentary by author Sidney Rosen tells why each story is effective in changing behavior.

Psychiatrist Milton Erickson is regarded as the father of neurolinguistic programming, or NLP. This book is a collection of very short stories he told clients who were in a trance state as a means of reprogramming their thinking about a problem they brought to him. Erickson believed that stories heard and then forgotten have the most power over future actions. That’s because, once the conscious, censoring mind has ceased analyzing the experience, the persistent memory of the story can percolate in the unconscious.

 

My Voice Will Go with You. I sincerely hope it does!

In Clifford’s Spiral a stroke survivor tries to piece together the fragments of his memories. Was he the victim or the perpetrator? 2020 IPA Distinguished Favorite in Literary Fiction.

Thinking About Thinking #7 – A Curious Mind – What’s More Important? Curiosity or Imagination?

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Here’s my book review of a curious mind by Brian Grazer, Hollywood mega-producer.

Brian Grazer is well known for his commercial and artistic successes, but I don’t believe he has any particular academic credentials as an educator. Nevertheless, teachers and parents everywhere should adopt the mantra of A Curious Mind:

Encouraging and stimulating curiosity should be the first priority of education.

Now, you’d think such a notion would be obvious. Apparently, it’s not – in this country, at least. The emphasis on standardized test results necessarily limits the permissible range of student curiosity. Teachers have to go by the book, as well. There’s the risk of embarrassment. Teachers and parents may not be comfortable with student queries, for which they have no ready answers:

  • What was before the Big Bang?
  • How many termites would it take to eat a house?
  • How can I get an agent?

Grazer admits he never finished law school. He took a job as a legal clerk at Warner Brothers. His duties involved running contracts to the offices in private homes of agents, producers, directors, and stars. He made a deliberate decision to use these meetings for what today we’d call networking. He’d insist that he was under strict instructions to hand-deliver the documents to the high-powered addressee. More often than not, he’d be received warmly and invited to sit and chat. And that’s when he says his curiosity took over. He engaged moguls and celebrities in conversation by asking them questions about themselves. And they were usually more than happy to talk.

Grazer cautions in the book that he never asked any of these new acquaintances for favors. He simply learned their likes and dislikes, their foibles and their fantasies. He thus learned the business from the inside, by politely asking question after question after question. So it was that exercising his genuine interest in people gave Brian Grazer the ability to work a room – and eventually a company town in a global industry.

But his curiosity didn’t stop there. He came to realize that the entertainment business was too confining to feed his curious mind. “For thirty-five years,” he writes, “I’ve been tracking down people about whom I was curious and asking if I could sit down with them for an hour. My only rule for myself was that the people had to be from the outside – from outside the world of movies and TV.”

A Curious Mind is essentially a celebrity autobiography. Grazer discloses that coauthor Charles Fishman wrote drafts based on a series of in-person interviews with him. It is an engaging story. And its scope extends beyond the basic notion of investigation is education to include the arc of a producer’s remarkable career and open-minded outlook on life.

As for Fishman, co-writers, ghosts, and editors face a difficult task in subordinating their own personal styles so they can capture their client’s unique voice. He is to be commended for capturing both Grazer’s still-boyish enthusiasm and his Hollywood savvy to generalize from all this. If you can stimulate curiosity in a child, you don’t even have to point it to the library.

There’s this new thing called Google. I wonder, was the Bing search engine name for Crosby or that sound you hear in your head when the light comes on?

In Clifford’s Spiral a stroke survivor tries to piece together the fragments of his memories. Was he the victim or the perpetrator? 2020 IPA Distinguished Favorite in Literary Fiction.

Thinking About Thinking #6 – Ballad of the Black and Blue Mind – Is EVERYBODY crazy?

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It’s understandable that people in lockdown go stir crazy. But some brain specialists believe that mental stability is a delicate balance for everyone, all the time. Here’s another work of literary fiction that will get you thinking about thinking.

I offer for your thoughtful consideration Ballad of the Black and Blue Mind by Anne Roiphe.

If you’re in therapy or considering it, you may find this novel unsettling. But perhaps also strangely comforting. It’s about Manhattan psychiatrist Dr. Estelle Berman, and two of her colleagues – middle-aged men identified only as Dr. H and Dr. Z. Most of the other characters in the book are their students or their patients. And all of these lives intersect and become entangled.

To some of her patients and even her friends, Dr. Berman can seem cold and calculating. She thinks of herself as wise and practical. All of the therapists in this story are trying improve the lives of their patients, who range from troubled to disturbed, many of them needing medication but not hospitalization.

There’s Justine, the gorgeous young movie star, who is anorexic and a kleptomaniac. There’s homely and lonely Anne, who fears she’s unlovable and gets coaxed out of the closet, only to be jilted. And the doctors refer their own children to each other for treatment. Dr. Z’s daughter Ronit is stressed because she can’t get pregnant, then Dr. Z is stressed about the possible complications when he finds out she’s carrying twins.

These are psychiatric case histories flavored with personal drama. We get insight into the mental processes and disorders of the patients, as well as those of their doctors. Because from Roiphe’s vantage point, all human minds are troubled. It’s just that some of us live with our demons better than others.

This is Anne Roiphe’s tenth novel, and she’s been described as a first-generation feminist. She’s also done nonfiction books and articles on family issues and mental health. She has an insider’s grasp of the psychiatric profession, and at times it’s not at all flattering.

Ballad of the Black and Blue Mind is a peek into the tangled psyches of a few intelligent people, most of them well-to-do and white, in today’s New York City. To paraphrase the narrator of the old TV series, “There are eight million stories in the Naked City. This is just a few of them.” And whether outwardly healthy or visibly disturbed, each of us suffers daily from self-doubt, jealousy, rage, guilt, arrogance, fears, phobias, and nightmares.

In Clifford’s Spiral a stroke survivor tries to piece together the fragments of his memories. Was he the victim or the perpetrator? 2020 IPA Distinguished Favorite in Literary Fiction.

Thinking About Thinking #5 – The Map and the Territory – Does genius boggle the mind?

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It’s perhaps a stereotype that great artists are tortured souls. Here’s a murky book by a quirky novelist. And it’s fascinating, even if I don’t quite understand it all.

Here’s my review of The Map and the Territory by contemporary French novelist Michel Houellebecq.

This author is unabashedly and unashamedly literary and intellectual. Those of us on this side of the pond who fret about novels and commercialism and fads and attention spans and the general lack of receptiveness for ideas can only envy the opportunity to wax philosophical and not only get away with it, but also actually sell books.

This is the story of a fine artist, Jed Martin, and the rationale behind various distinct phases of his work. It is also a police procedural about a ghastly murder. One connection is that the murder was performed in such a way as to create a work of art. This second story has very little to do with the main plot line of Jed’s work life. Jed’s difficult relationship with his aging master-architect father is a subplot upon which many heady sub-themes are hung, including the history and philosophy of architecture, the relationship between habitation and quality of life, and no less than the fate of civilization.

In perhaps the most stunning stroke of hubris in a work chockfull of it, occurring some way into the narrative so it’s a surprise when it comes, Houellebecq makes himself a principal character. By name. The relationship between life and art is open to question – that is, between the physical description of the French novelist, his eccentricities, and his volatile temperament. The Houellebecq in the narrative is not what you’d call a nice person – and certainly not someone you’d probably consider taking on as a friend. The author seems proud he’s alienating you, else why talk so unashamedly of his body odor and atrocious manners?

Main character Martin’s life is well-to-do Parisian, but mundane. He has an extended affair, off and on, with a Russian media executive named Olga. She is one hot babe, apparently, but even she can’t hold his interest. She did abandon him for a time, and perhaps an infantile ego can never forgive the ultimate insult of abandonment.

I’m somewhat mystified. I may reread it someday to study what I missed on first reading, which is probably a lot. I do know that, based on his descriptions of Martin’s paintings, I’d love to see them. I expect they would be photorealistic and iconic – like the old Chinese Communist propaganda posters. One of the delights of the book is imagining what these fictional works would look like.

My mystery-thriller about art history, which centers on a scandal rather than a forgery, is Bonfire of the Vanderbilts.

A hundred-year-old secret locked is in a painting. The painting’s owner, Los Angeles Museum of Art, refuses to admit I got it right. But, hey, it’s fiction, the art historians say. Why should anyone take it seriously? What, according to my decades-long research into this painting that obsessed me so, did Cornelius Vanderbilt II not want you to know? Hint: Vanderbilt and his reputed mentor, banker J. P. Morgan, were rivals in the Episcopal Church hierarchy, each claiming to be more righteous than the other.

Thinking About Thinking #4 – The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey – What if you found new romance at the end of your life?

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I’m reposting this review because the limited TV series starring Samuel L. Jackson just came out on Apple TV! Watch it!

Walter Mosley is best known for his prolific detective fiction. But this book is a fond, thoughtful story about a man who finds reasons to live just when he doesn’t have much time left.

Here’s my book review.

The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey isn’t a whodunit. It’s artful, introspective literary fiction about a 91-year-old man near the end of his life.

Ptolemy Grey lives by himself in a shabby one-bedroom apartment in a poor neighborhood in Los Angeles. His place is stacked with the trash of a lifetime. You see, he hasn’t paid any attention to it since he woke up one morning to find his beloved last wife Sensia lying dead beside him.

When Sensia passed, he threw a tarp over everything in the bedroom and closed the door. He now sleeps on a mattress under a table in the kitchen. He rarely goes out, except when his grand-nephew Reggie walks him to the store for a few meager supplies. And he’s terrified to open the door for anyone.

The narrative is full of Ptolemy’s fretful thoughts. He has outlived almost all of his closest friends and loved ones. And early in this story, he finds that Reggie has been killed in a drive-by shooting.

Another nephew, Hilly, drops by to take him to Reggie’s wake. There Ptolemy meets Robyn, a gorgeous, slender girl who is about to turn eighteen. She decides to take care of him, becoming his last love, albeit platonic, but intense as any of the romances in his long life.

As Ptolemy says to her:  I love you and I couldn’t be here right now if it wasn’t for you taking care of me. And if you were twenty years older and I fifty years less I’d ask you to be my wife and not a soul on this earth would have ever had better.

This may well be Walter Mosley’s best book.

In 2013 actor Samuel L. Jackson said in an interview with Red Carpet News TV that he had acquired the movie rights to Ptolemy Grey. Just released! Watch it!

In Clifford’s Spiral a stroke survivor tries to piece together the fragments of his memories. Was he the victim or the perpetrator? 2020 IPA Distinguished Favorite in Literary Fiction.