| |
| |
|
|
|
Synopsis
Nedra and Viri come to terms with themselves and their marriage as their lives revolve around friends, children, and a desperate yearning for something more.
Review
Every so often, we put down a book and cannot remember what life was like before having read it. Light Years is such a book. With an intimacy and a sympathy reminiscent of Milan Kundera, Salter gives us a novel that is both lyrical and profound.
With a house on the Hudson River, a beautiful wife, and two adoring daughters, young architect
Viri Berland leads an idyllic life full of picturesque scenes: lunch served on a blanket on the
beach, birthday parties for the children, Christmas on Broadway, dinner parties, and a new puppy.
His friends tell him how lucky he is. But as Viri and his wife's lives unfold, they admit their
dissatisfaction — never to each other, but to their lovers or friends.
Salter is careful to make us both envious of the couple and distraught by their refusal to
accept such charmed lives. There is sadness in those languid afternoons, those evenings otherwise
filled with ease and comfort. Years pass, marked by moments that only matter to family: birthdays,
apple picking, and school gymnastics events. As they are forced to address their unhappiness,
we're suffocated by the destructive power of constantly wondering what could have been.
Like a grandfather remembering something important, Salter renders characters at once hazy and
absolute, defining them in their attitudes toward money or their relationship to their family.
Much of the story is told in descriptive passages that read like still lifes — empty
glasses and an ice bucket full of water can tell the story of an infidelity, or the ocean
is described as a painting, "rough as bark." And with these masterful
brushstrokes, he gives us the portrait of a marriage and a family "like a garment, this life.
Its beauty was outside, its warmth within." (JM)
|
| back to top |
 |
| |
|
|
|
Synopsis
Through research and memory, Geoffrey Wolff takes on the daunting task of deconstructing his enigmatic father, not only as a labor of love, but also as a way to understand him.
Review
Subtitled Memories of My Father, Wolff's biography of his father is less a memoir of his days with his father than it is a detailed and ultimately forgiving account of a fraud and charlatan who just happened to sire the author.
Because of his regal manner, Arthur Wolff went by "Duke" for most of his life, sometimes adding "II" or "III" to his name. He told of his days at Yale, where he belonged to the exclusive Skull and Bones fraternity. He often regaled audiences, with his trademark stammer, of his days in the OSS. On the surface, he was the quintessential "clubman" — well-dressed and well-versed in social graces, with an affability that he oftentimes used to charm others into believing him to be larger-than-life. But, in truth, there was no Yale or OSS, just a penchant for borrowing that was eclipsed only by his unwillingness to reimburse.
The Duke of Deception includes all the elements that make the heavyweights of American fiction so powerful and relevant — set against the Roaring Twenties, then the Great Depression and World War II, Wolff shows us a protagonist who will stop at nothing to fabricate a better life, desperate for class transcendence despite his hidden ethnicity and less-than-average academic performance. A loving father and all-around nice guy, it would be wrong to characterize Duke Wolff as a "con-man," per se; the illusion he created was for the sake of itself, and strangely, for the well-being of his son. He had a flair for fashion, but as his son, the author, says, "It would have been like a Duke Wolff watch chain to have no time piece secured to its end." (JM)
|
| back to top |
|
| |
|
|
|
Synopsis
Focused on his father, Mitch Epstein's film and photographic project tracks the demise of the family furniture store and the economic decline of his hometown.
Review
When an arson fire in a family-owned property burned a whole city block in Holyoke, Mass., Mitch Epstein returned home to help one of the victims — his father. Besieged by lawsuits, uncontrollable crime, and a failing business, the patriarch was grappling to maintain a hold on his way of life. Mitch, the eldest son, had chosen a different path than the family business when he left home in 1970, becoming a successful photographer, production designer, and cinematographer. For this fantastic documentary, he applied those skills to expose the struggling reality of his family as they are inextricably tied to the poor surrounding community.
Over a three-year period, Epstein documented the saga with photography and digital video. He followed his family members from home to work to retreats, nobly portraying longtime workers in the furniture and realty businesses, as well as impoverished customers and tenants. In strangely frank photos, he sympathetically captures the police, elected officials, and business leaders in their humble environs, while depicting the decaying town and community with poetic grace. The mass of materials was edited into a succinct group of photographs, storyboards, video stills, and dialogues divided into four chapters — store, property, town, and home — to tell the compelling story of an aging patriarch and his crumbling world.
Looking at his father's life symbolically, Epstein presents a realistic image of the American Dream unraveled — all the while turning his father's tragedy into a newfound success. "When I handed him the book last Thanksgiving... he sat down, read it from cover to cover for over two hours without looking up," Epstein said in a recent interview. "He came out of that experience moved... very surprised by the degree of commitment that I had made to this work, how complex it was — how complex in fact his life has been." What could have easily finished as tragedy, instead finds life as a visually fascinating portrayal of relationships. (PL)
|
| back to top |
|
| |
FEATURE
Group Hug
|
|
A source of great comfort for its confessors, the blog-style website Group Hug is a discomfiting, but no less addicting, experience for its readers. A modern-day confessional, Group Hug provides a forum for disclosure, a place where people can seek absolution by getting misdeeds off their chests, anonymously. Confessors circumscribe their fetishes, talk about stealing (office supplies, cakes, cats), and expose the contents of their (very frequently) cheating hearts. The gamut of postings as well as specific kin-oriented blurbs reveal the sort of family values that the FCC certainly wouldn't approve of broadcasting:
"one time I told my brother he was adopted and he believed me"; "i hate my mom alot. and sometimes i wish she would get hurt like in a car wreck or something"; "I found out yesterday that my brother raped my friend. So i told my mom that he did it." This fall, a compilation of GH highlights, entitled Stoned, Naked, and Looking in My Neighbor's Window: The Best Confessions from GroupHug.us will be released by Justin, Charles & Co., which means you won't need a wireless connection to bring this choice low-brow reading to the beach — where it belongs. (JKG)
|
| back to top |
 |
| |
BOOK NEWS
A few notable bits of recent print reporting.
|
Relatives protest auction of Joyce lust letter (The Observer
UK)
|
The celebrated author's relatives are not happy about the exposure of
this
very intimate letter to Nora, his "strange-eyed whore."
|
Foer, Krauss, and Eggers look into the future (New York)
|
The McSweeney's crew considers the evolution of our national lexicon,
defining such imminent additions as "Cheney Effect," "ralphnadir," and
"yint."
|
Did reviewers actually read Clinton's book? (Slate)
|
With only one or two days to slog through more than 950 pages, it's
doubtful
that any of the first reviews were actually based on reading.
|
Hipsters discover reading (Times Online)
|
Writers like Zadie Smith and JT LeRoy and magazines like Zembla
underscore the literary fashion moment.
|
The rest of population forgoes reading (New York Times)
|
A just-released NEA survey shows literature reading on the decline in the US across age groups.
|
New York Times serializes classic novels over the summer (New
York Times)
|
Read the old-school way starting July 12, as the New York Times
publishes a
handful of novels, beginning with The Great Gatsby.
|
First-time Australian writer wins world's richest nonfiction award (arts.telegraph.co.uk)
|
An unknown writer published by an independent press defeats such heavyweights as Bill Bryson for this prestigious nonfiction prize.
|
Village Voice's list of beach reads (Village Voice)
|
From crime to collections to Corduroy and Denim, a list of reads
for the sunny days.
|
|
| back to top |
| |
|
|
