Boldtype | August 2007


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August 2007:: issue 46

Books This Month
1.	The Wild Trees: A Story of Passion and Daring by Richard Preston
2.	Jamestown by Matthew Sharpe
3.	Flight: A Novel by Sherman Alexie
4.	Plenty: One Man, One Woman, and a Raucous Year of Eating Locally by Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon
5.	Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson
6.	There Goes My Everything: White Southerners in the Age of Civil Rights, 1945-1975 by Jason Sokol
7.	Mamma Andersson by Ann-sofi Noring
	Interview: Shannon Ravenel Book News Credits/About Us

Rural
This month we go a little bit country with a bevy of books that will transport you far from the concrete jungle. There's a surprisingly gripping account of the world's biggest trees and the people who love them, as well as a new history tome that exhumes a neglected chapter of the Civil Rights movement, and a memoir by a pair of Canadian writers who decided to mini-size their diet by only eating locally. In the fiction department, Sherman Alexie charts cycles of violence in his new novel, while Norwegian writer Per Petterson plumbs the dark echoes of a pastoral past, and novelist Matthew Sharpe won't let history be, imagining a post-apocalyptic Jamestown. Equally marvelous is a monograph of stunning landscapes and interiors by Swedish painter Mamma Andersson. We conclude with an interview with Shannon Ravenel of Algonquin Books, who edited and published the last, unfinished novel by the late Southern fiction titan Larry Brown.

- Toby Warner, Managing Editor

NONFICTION

The Wild Trees: A Story of Passion and Daring by Richard Preston


Published:	April 2007
Pages:	294
Publisher:	Random House
Links: Richard Preston author site Richard Preston interview on NPR's Fresh Air

“With Hollywood panache, Preston recounts dialogue as if he had been there himself the first time Sillett and Antoine made love 300 feet above the forest floor. Many times, however, Preston was there, joining Sillett and Antoine as a member of their research team.”

Review
In October 1987, two wayward college juniors, Steve Sillett and Michael Taylor, unwittingly began separate forays into the unexplored temperate rainforests of northern California, home to the world's tallest tree, the coastal redwood. The two men wouldn't meet for another seven years, but during this time, Sillett, a botanist studying lichen, learned to climb redwoods and discovered a thriving, pristine ecosystem 300 feet above the ground. Taylor, a grocery clerk with severe acrophobia, launched a quixotic, but ultimately successful, search for the world's tallest tree by bushwhacking through the impenetrable underbrush of California's old-growth forests and pointing his homemade surveying devices at treetops.

In The Wild Trees, Richard Preston traces the converging destinies of Sillett, Taylor, and Sillett's future wife and climbing partner, fellow lichen scholar Marie Antoine. Harrowing adventures and groundbreaking scientific discoveries aside, the personal relationships of these maniacally devoted individuals are at the core of Preston's story: Sillett and Antoine's complicated courtship; Taylor's fraught relationship with his father; the early deaths of Antoine's parents.

Keep reading »

- H.G. Masters

FICTION

Jamestown by Matthew Sharpe


Published:	2007
Pages:	320
Publisher:	Soft Skull Press
Links: Small Spiral Notebook interview Brooklyn Rail interview Bookforum review Sharpe reading Jamestown on NPR

“Throughout Jamestown, Sharpe skillfully mixes the politics of 1607 with post-9/11 cynicism, present-day technology, uniquely American questions, and pop culture's post-apocalyptic visions.”

Review
The story of John Rolfe's courtship of Pocahontas during the founding of Jamestown in 1607 has been told by seemingly everyone, from Walt Disney to William T. Vollmann, so you might think a wise novelist would stay away from such well-trod territory. Thankfully, though, Matthew Sharpe hasn't, as his novel Jamestown is fiercely entertaining even as it deconstructs popular myths and applies the oft-told story to the present day.

It's post-apocalypse, 2008, and Manhattan and Brooklyn are at war, supplies are scarce, and it's contingent on Manhattanite Johnny Rolfe and his companions to head south in an armored bus and find oil. Instead they find Indians. After some initial getting-to-know-you, the colonists are promptly fed, bathed, stroked, and then beset upon by a rain of arrows. As Rolfe and company attempt to fulfill their corporate-mandated duties without further punctures, Sharpe follows the contours of the original Jamestown colony blow-by-blow, even incorporating language from historical correspondence. But this is not a historical novel: Pocahontas and Rolfe meet via blog-type messages beamed from handheld devices, the Indians are actually Southerners who survived the apocalypse, and the colonists' leader is an authoritarian corporate climber trying to impress his boss.

Throughout the novel, Sharpe skillfully mixes the politics of 1607 with post-9/11 cynicism, present-day technology, uniquely American questions, and pop culture's doomsday visions. The result is an extremely violent, cartoonish world (check the carnivorous bunnies) in which dirty jokes sit beside references to Hegel. Sharpe's adroit plotting holds it together, and by any standard — intelligence, style, enjoyment — Jamestown stands out in the (lately quite crowded) post-apocalyptic genre.
- Scott Esposito

FICTION

Flight: A Novel by Sherman Alexie


Published:	March 2007
Pages:	208
Publisher:	Grove Press, Black Cat
Links: Sherman Alexie Powell's review

“Although the narrator's story of abuse and alienation can be dark, he doesn't shy from asking the Big Questions. Is violence ever justified? Are any of our collective heroes real? Is revenge a circle inside a circle inside a circle?”

Review
Sherman Alexie's Flight, his first novel in ten years, is a work of speculative fiction narrated by a troubled foster kid nicknamed Zits. Abandoned by his Spokane Indian father and orphaned when his mother dies of cancer, Zits spends most of his childhood being abused by a rotating cast of foster parents. But as an awkwardly insightful narrator, he recognizes the irrationality of his anger while in the midst of attacking a foster mother. He is brilliant and explosive, an "orphan meteor."

In juvenile detention, Zits teams up with a teenage revolutionary named Justice who encourages him to re-create the Ghost Dance by shooting up a bank. It is this act of cathartic violence that sends Zits on his journey through time and space, alternately inhabiting the body of a 19th-century Indian tracker, a Lakota child at Custer's last stand, and, finally, his present-day self, in a redemptive arc.

Zits spends much of the novel trying to maintain his sanity and survive nightmarish historical scenarios by tossing out factoid-laced quips distilled from his History Channel addiction: "Custer is a crazy egomaniac who thinks he is going to be president of the United States. Custer is one of the top two or three dumb asses in American History." Although the narrator's story of abuse and alienation can be dark, he doesn't shy from asking the "big questions": Is violence ever justified? Are any of our collective heroes real? Is revenge a circle inside a circle inside a circle?

Alexie uses a daring conceit to implicate our naiveté toward the cyclical nature of violence and revenge. Shielded from the realities of war, clinging to the worn tropes of the Good Guys and the Bad Guys, he posits that we have lost touch with the inherent nihilism of conflict. In Flight, Alexie forces the reader to view the players close-up and to witness the acts of personal betrayal and heroism against the landscape of larger political forces, blowing us about and hopefully returning us to something that resembles home.
- Alexios Moore

NONFICTION

Plenty: One Man, One Woman, and a Raucous Year of Eating Locally by Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon


Published:	April 2007
Pages:	264
Publisher:	Random House
Links: Excerpt Co-Authors' blog Grist interview

“These provocative reflections illustrate how quixotic it is to eat against the grain these days.”

Review
Sometimes couples do strange things — start dressing alike, say, or take up bowling. Alisa Smith and her partner James MacKinnon, both professional writers, decided to mini-size their diet. After realizing some of their food traveled 3,000 miles to their table, they decided they wanted to reduce their carbon footprint — so they committed to only eating food grown within 100 miles of their Vancouver apartment, for a year. To celebrate their decision, they had a glorious meal full of local, organic delicacies. When that set them back about $128, they quickly remembered that they were two young freelancers who were already pinching pennies. It's this realism that keeps Plenty, their co-authored memoir, from being a self-congratulatory romp.

Surprisingly, this project founded in ascetic determination turns into a year of discovery and flexibility. With many of the bare necessities off-limits (salt, cooking oil, even beer) or simply hard to get (wheat), the couple find themselves exploring their little corner of the world, getting to know fisherman and farmers. Along the way, they're schooled by an unlikely set of teachers, including intractable farmers, a Native American fisherman, and an old cookbook from the '40s. Their provocative reflections illustrate how quixotic it is to eat against the grain these days.

Trading off his-and-hers chapters, the two offer complementary but distinct stories. Occasionally, both MacKinnon and Smith digress to the point of losing the reader, but they usually salvage the story by bringing it back to the dinner plate. James is the cook — excitable, stubborn, and given to rapturous bursts of natural history. Alisa is equally passionate, but also practical, more of a social historian than her partner. She's candid about the impact their diet is having on their lives, as they suck it up through weevil scares, tedious bouts of canning, and the inevitable intrusions of real-world troubles. The cumulative strain comes very close to breaking them up for good, but the saving grace of Plenty is that it doesn't try to hide the wear and tear. That makes all the pluck, humor, and plain-old good eating all the more savory.
- Toby Warner

FICTION

Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson


Published:	2007
Pages:	288
Publisher:	Graywolf Press
Links: Graywolf Press

“The lingering sensation of a strange familiarity pulls the reader back and forth in time as Trond recounts a summer of his youth in rural Norway, when his life was forever altered by tragedies involving guns, fear, and boys growing into the men that they may not be ready to become.”

Review
It's not hard to see that Per Petterson bows at the literary altar of Raymond Carver. However, as opposed to the throngs of authors attempting to replicate the master's masculine disenchantment, Petterson chooses a different and far more successful way to honor his literary hero — by creating a novel that could be a sequel to a Carver short story, if one of Carver's frustrated protagonists had fled suburban wasteland for isolated, rural Norway.

In Out Stealing Horses, Trond, a man in the golden years of his life, ponders the tragedies of his past as he secludes himself in his new woodland home after leaving his former life in the bustling metropolis of Oslo, Norway. When he comes across his sole neighbor searching for a lost dog, Trond can't shake the feeling that he knows him from somewhere. The lingering sensation of strange familiarity pulls the reader back and forth in time as Trond recounts a summer spent in rural Norway, when his young life was forever altered by tragedies involving guns, fear, and boys growing into the men that they may not be ready to become. It's this open, natural expanse that allows Trond the time and space to reflect on life concepts such as choice versus fate and what it means to be a father.

Keep reading »

- Diana Metzger

NONFICTION

There Goes My Everything: White Southerners in the Age of Civil Rights, 1945-1975 by Jason Sokol


Published:	August 2006
Pages:	433
Publisher:	Knopf
Links: Excerpt Author site NPR interview

“Sokol isn't interested in putting whites on trial — and as he points out, that would be impossible in any case, so diverse and inconstant were the responses of individuals throughout the era and the region.”

Review
Histories of the American Civil Rights movement of the mid-20th century understandably tend to focus on the conflict's primary actors, whether it's the courageous African-American leadership embodied by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., or the vitriolic opposition represented by segregationists such as Bull Connor or George Wallace. Yet such a Manichean view of this revolution inevitably treats the South's vast white majority as mere spectators either hissing their racist displeasure from the sidelines (mostly) or occasionally nodding in silent assent (the "good ones").

The problem with the word "racist," as Jason Sokol points out early in There Goes My Everything, is that it doesn't adequately explain the complexities of many whites' perspectives on race — perspectives as invisibly fundamental to them as the air they breathed — or convey the depth of the hatred others really did feel and, in some cases, acted upon. Sokol isn't interested in putting whites on trial — as he points out, that would be impossible in any case, so diverse and inconstant were the responses of individuals throughout the era and the region. Rather, the author seeks no more and no less than to catalog these manifold reactions, understand their reasons and implications, and thereby enable a more nuanced view of history and its present repercussions — not the least of which was the ascendancy of the Republican party in the South, supported by whites who felt betrayed by the Democrats on whose watch they thought integration occurred.

Keep reading »

- Chris Parris-Lamb

NONFICTION

Mamma Andersson by Ann-sofi Noring


Published:	August 2007
Pages:	160
Publisher:	Steidl & Partners
Links: Moderna Museet Steidl site Andersson's gallery page Artkrush exhibition review

“Close-ups of her palette, strewn with paint tubes and piles of desiccated paint, reveal the similarity between the cluttered condition of Andersson's studio and the textured surface of her paintings.”

Review
Swedish painter Mamma Andersson's landscapes and interiors are a breath of fresh air in a contemporary art scene brimming with conceptually addled, technology-driven artwork. Backwoods (2006) — a winter landscape depicting a brooding sky and snow-streaked fields, dotted with darkened homes — encapsulates Andersson's probing romanticism and alacrity with paint, for which she has rightly been celebrated. Mamma Andersson, the eponymous catalog to her mid-career retrospective at Stockholm's Moderna Museet, prioritizes superb reproductions of the Swede's paintings over interpretative chatter, sufficing with a trio of poems by fellow Swedes and prosaic reflections from curator Ann-sofi Noring and other admirers.

The catalogue's most unique and brilliant feature consists of 38 foldout pages, which allow Andersson's horizontal paintings to be reproduced in wide spreads. Details of her richly textured paintings and grainy black-and-white photographs by Swedish photographer JH Engström are strategically interspersed on the overleafs. Engström's photographs portray Andersson at work, the views from her studio window, and closely cropped images of her blond hair in a fur hat — echoing passages from Andersson's recent paintings. Close-ups of her palette, strewn with paint tubes and piles of desiccated paint, reveal the similarity between the cluttered condition of Andersson's studio and the textured surface of her paintings. Like the reclusive French painter Pierre Bonnard, whom Andersson calls "one of my house gods," she addresses the daily practice of painting in both its banality and enchantment.

Keep reading »

- H.G. Masters

FEATURE Interview with Shannon Ravenel		When Larry Brown left the Fire Department in Oxford, Mississippi, in 1990 to write full-time, his rough and precise voice had already earned him widespread praise. He went on to win two Southern Book Critics Circle awards and a chorus of appreciation for his novels and short stories. When Brown died of a heart attack in November 2004, he left an unfinished manuscript. His widow and literary executors asked Shannon Ravenel, his editor at Algonquin, to get the pages into publishable shape in accordance with Brown's vision. She did, and the result is the crystalline and heartbreaking "novel in progress" A Miracle of Catfish. Ravenel is a very accomplished editor in her own right: she's a founder of Algonquin, where she has her own imprint, and she has been the series editor for Best American Short Stories and New Stories from the South. Boldtype editor Toby Warner spoke with Ravenel about how she approached editing the manuscript, and what keeps her reading. Boldtype: You trimmed large sections of A Miracle of Catfish, marking the excisions with brackets, but you chose not to alter the language of Brown's prose. How did you arrive at that approach? Shannon Ravenel: Before I started the editing, I read the manuscript twice, very slowly, taking notes and, on the second reading, marking places I thought needed trimming. Once the negotiations between Larry's agent, his widow, Mary Annie, and the Free Press (who had contracted for this novel and a third when they bought The Rabbit Factory) were completed, I called several novelist friends of Larry's to ask them what they'd want done in such circumstances. All of them said they'd want an editor to work on the manuscript before it was published. I also consulted my colleague, Louis Rubin, a scholar of Southern literature. He told me that making changes beyond cutting could be construed as taking liberties. He also suggested that I indicate where I had cut. Armed with this advice, I returned to the original unfinished manuscript, which ran to more than 700 pages. It seemed to me beautifully conceived and written — perhaps the most stylistically successful of all Larry's books. But it needed tightening. There were a couple of characters who didn't seem to pull their weight either thematically or narratively and who appeared only once each. The decision to cut those was fairly easy. And there were, I thought, a lot of scenes that Larry had extended past their natural endings. Thinning those scenes was also easy and accounted for most of the cut pages in the end. Larry loved writing so much that he sometimes got into a groove and kept going just for the pure fun of it. He was used to my suggestions for thinning over-long scenes and didn't often balk. So I cut. And that was all I did. BT: What did you miss most during the process — discussions, disagreements, anticipating revisions? Keep reading »

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BOOK NEWS A few notable bits of recent book news.
Stalking simplified (BookTour Online)
A new website allows readers to track their favorite authors on tour.
Another Condé Nast tell-all optioned (Variety)
Jeff Bridges will star as Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter in a film adaptation of How to Lose Friends & Alienate People.
The upside of long commutes (BBC)
Statistics show that people in the UK are reading more now than in 1975, due to busier lifestyles and more schedule gaps.
Bond is back (The Guardian)
Sebastian Faulks has been tapped to pen a new James Bond novel.
*Foreskin's Lament* (BEA)
Maud Newton interviews Shalom Auslander.
Over and? (Radio Free Asia, via TEV)
Chinese authorities closed down the Lamp, a Tibetan literary website, for posting overly political content.
The Tintin affair (The Guardian)
Tintin in the Congo has been pulled from the children's section of Border's and re-shelved in adult graphic novels due to complaints about its racist content.


CREDITS Editors Toby Warner Mark Mangan Toby Shuster Zolton Zavos Chris Parris-Lamb Doug Levy Paul Laster Anna Balkrishna Chris Gage Editors-at-Large Larry Weissman Sean McDonald Contributors H.G. Masters Diana Metzger Alexios Moore Scott Esposito Production & Design Anjuli Ayer Jessica Bauer-Greene Morgan Croney Sascha Lewis Andrew Steinmetz Cover Art Mamma Andersson Heimat Land, 2004 Acrylic and oil on canvas 31 1/2 x 119 1/4 in./ 80 x 280 cm Courtesy Magnus Karlsson, Stockholm; Stephen Friedman Gallery, London; and David Zwirner, New York All Rights Reserved		ABOUT US Boldtype is a monthly, email-based review of books published by Flavorpill Productions. Our mission is to cover five to seven books each month that are worth reading. No money is accepted from any publishers, writers, reviewers, or marketing or PR companies. In addition to this monthly review of books, Flavorpill also publishes ten other email magazines, covering ART, FASHION, NEWS, MUSIC, and cultural events in six cities — NEW YORK, LOS ANGELES, SAN FRANCISCO, CHICAGO, MIAMI, and LONDON. MEDIA PARTNERSHIPS Every month, Boldtype presents one exclusive media partner. Click for more information about advertising opportunities on Boldtype and across all Flavorpill publications. FEEDBACK We welcome any and all feedback — comments, criticism, and even effusive praise. To reach the staff at Boldtype, please email us at editor. SUBMISSIONS If you have a book that you would like us to consider for review, please send an email to books or mail a copy here: Boldtype c/o Flavorpill Productions 594 Broadway, Suite 1212 New York, NY 10012

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