Category / Reviews

by Edward Champion

New Review

In all the NYFF madness, I failed to note that my review of Morris Dickstein’s Dancing in the Darkappeared in Friday’s edition of the Chicago Sun-Times. It begins:

While the intrepid academic Morris Dickstein has been noodling around on Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression (W.W. Norton, $29.95) for 29 years, the regrettable surprise is that the chapters read like airless lectures delivered to a fidgety audience that’s only sitting through the whole darn talk for a college credit or a free barbeque.

You can read the rest here.

by Edward Champion

The Underestimated Nicholas Meyer

In today’s Barnes & Noble Review, I take on Nicholas Meyer’s The View from the Bridge. Meyer is best known as the man behind Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, the film that arguably saved the Star Trek franchise (for better or worse). But people often overlook the fact that Meyer also wrote a series of amusing Sherlock Holmes pastiches (beginning with The Seven Per-Cent Solution), as well as the 1983 TV movie, The Day After.

Meyer is a far more interesting figure than most people give him credit for. While there are several unanswered questions in the book, the memoir does provide an interesting glimpse into an accidental career. But go to the B&N Review to get the full skinny.

by Edward Champion

New Review

My review of Chuck Barris’s Who Killed Art Deco? appears in today’s Chicago Sun-Times. And truthfully, the review is far crankier than I remember it being when I filed it. Indeed, the piece is more than a bit ridiculous with some of its pedantic quibbles. I don’t know how many reviewers would actually confess such qualities, but I am committed to candor. This is a Chuck Barris novel, for crying out loud. Not a Donald Westlake novel. But it was an annoying book with homophobic conceits.

by Edward Champion

New Review: I Am Not Sidney Poitier

In today’s Chicago Sun-Times, you can find my review of Percival Everett’s I Am Not Sidney Poitier. And it’s rather fitting that much of my review ended up as a list of rhetorical (and possibly unanswerable) questions.

everett2As it so happens, just after filing the review and being wowed by the book, I learned that Everett happened to be in New York. And I was able to set up a rare interview with him (which will be airing as the next episode of The Bat Segundo Show, to be released very soon). Everett, who has avoided nearly every form of marketing for his books*, and who declared to me that he had no interest in the business of publishing or catering to an audience, identified his book as a “novel of ideas.” But I Am Not Sidney Poitier is also steeped in an old-fashioned sense of humor. Here’s a brief excerpt from the forthcoming Segundo installment, in which Everett explains the relationship between these two concepts:

Everett: There are no rules. I don’t believe in any rules when it comes to fiction. If I can make you believe it, then it’s fair game. Probably when I’m working, if I can make myself believe it, then it’s fair game. Because I don’t know what you’re going to believe. And it depends on the work. A novel like Not Sidney, where much of it is more a novel of ideas and the narrator is of a certain sort, can make bizarre perceptions or representations of the world and have the one-dimensional county of Peckerwood County. Whereas in other works, that simply wouldn’t work. So the work talks to me. The most important part of the story is the story. And I can’t impose my feelings or my desire to write a certain kind of thing that day on it.

Correspondent: But in identifying Not Sidney as a novel of ideas, I would argue — and this is where we get into needless taxonomy arguments. But I should point out that you are essentially saying, “Well, this is a novel of ideas.” And maybe the story itself will matter on some basic entertainment level.

Everett: Oh no. The story still matters.

Correspondent: Okay. But I’m curious how committed you are to this idea of the “novel of ideas.” If it’s entirely a construct, should we believe in it entirely or should we believe in the ideas?

Everett: Well, if I’ve done it right, you should believe in it entirely. And superimposed upon this is the narrator’s concept of this being a story of ideas. But you can’t have — and this is not a rule, but, for me, I cannot have a novel where the story is secondary to anything. The world has to exist. And so I have to make it. And I have to make it believable. How I do that can vary and come across in any different number of trajectories or strategies or whatever.

* — This may answer, in part, Gregory Leon Miller’s query this weekend on why Everett’s work hasn’t received the attention it deserves.

by Edward Champion

New Review: Chuck Palahniuk

Chuck Palahniuk is regularly dismissed by the snobs. Despite his sales, you will not see a New York Review of Books or a Bookforum essay on the man anytime soon. The atmosphere is too retrousse. Here is an author who seems to be uncritically admired by his fans and just as unilaterally (and unfairly) condemned by the literary elite. But people do read the man and the man is not without talent. It is a foolish person indeed who does not submerge himself with some frequency into the common lake of the average Joe. You really don’t need a nez relevé to appreciate the bas-reliefs of any structure.

Much as Jeff Vandermeer did earlier this week in the Washington Post, I approached Palahniuk’s latest novel, Pygymy, with this demarcated dichotomy in mind over at the Chicago Sun-Times. And yet the book’s voice proved so unusual for a popular book that I felt compelled to turn in an initial review mimicking its style. The editor wisely suggested that I rewrite it, permitting me to keep a paragraph. The review is much stronger as a result. One can indeed write a whole review or a whole book in a particular style, but the human heart must remain in conflict with itself. That makes this business worth the agony and the sweat.