Fangs and Other Fluff, Completely Guilt Free
By Janet Maslin
Memorial Day marks the start of a special season: the time to stop lying about what you read for fun. Call anything a beach book, and suddenly you’ve got an excuse for being seen with it. No need to claim you’re reading Christopher Farnsworth’s “Blood Oath,” about the president’s personal vampire, only because there’s a wait at your library for a copy of “The Road.”
Don’t think of Mr. Farnsworth’s debut thriller as the umpteenth vampire knockoff on the market. Think of it as the inventive one in which a brave young White House staff member asks, “You really expect me to believe we’ve got a vampire on a leash, and we can just send him after terrorists and spies whenever we want?” Multibook series and $200 million movie franchises have been built on a lot less.
When they’re treated as beach reading, even the most well-devised books can be taken more lightly. Sometimes that’s a relief. Consider “The Nearest Exit,” a terrific second installment in Olen Steinhauer’s “Tourist” spy series about Milo Weaver, a brooding C.I.A. operative with all the right lone-wolf tendencies. Milo, who was alluring from the start, would bring to mind George Clooney, even if Mr. Clooney didn’t intend to play him some day.
Milo arrived fully formed in the first “Tourist” book with a mountain of personal and professional baggage. His story is even more complex this time around. But the agile twists of “The Nearest Exit” are best enjoyed if you don’t have to explain, say, how the theft of art in Frankfurt, the abduction of a Moldovan teenager in Berlin and the killings of mullahs in Sudan are related. Milo gets it. Milo figures it all out and stays several steps ahead of the game. Why not just take Mr. Steinhauer’s word for that? Milo’s company is at least as valuable to the series’s appeal as is his flair for international trickery.
Besides, it’s easier to explain being drawn to a highly complex story than having a hankering for anything aimed at the young-adult set. But here’s a badly kept secret: An awful lot of best-selling adult books have the large fonts, short chapters and simple ideas of young-adult books anyhow. And “Theodore Boone: Kid Lawyer” happens to be a legal thriller by the otherwise fully adult writer John Grisham. Mr. Grisham can tell a good story no matter what audience he’s telling it to.
His new book kicks off a series about Theodore Boone, a 13-year-old who is the son of two small-town lawyers and is madly infatuated with all things related to the courtroom. Not since Nancy Drew has a nosy, crime-obsessed kid been so hard to resist. What’s more, Mr. Grisham manages to make Theo’s amateur law practice perfectly plausible. If you pick up “Theodore Boone” and get hooked, just say you’re looking at it for your sister/nephew/ neighbor/other. Presto! Not guilty. It’s no crime to let your inner seventh grader loose.
And it’s fine to dig into the latest Dave Barry collection, even though there are many, many Dave Barry collections. And that this one includes essays about his vasectomy and colonoscopy.
First of all, “I’ll Mature When I’m Dead” isn’t a quickie: there are 18 humor pieces here, and all but the one about the colonoscopy are new. Second, this isn’t a book to take on vacation; it is a vacation. Simply consider that the entire “Twilight” series seems to have been written for the express purpose of giving Mr. Barry the chance to make fun of lousy writing.
“With a feeling of ominous foreboding based on the cliffhanger ending of the last book,” Mr. Barry begins “Fangs of Endearment,” a wall-to-wall riotous parody. Adopting the voice of the series’s dimwitted, verbally maladroit heroine, Mr. Barry comes up with little marvels like “I wondered who it could be and decided to find out by opening the door,” and, “With a feeling of even greater foreboding than usual, I kept walking forward, putting one leg in front of the other in an alternating sequence.” One character has “vampire eyes glowing with redness like two hot eyeball-sized coals.”
In his “Solving the Celebrity Problem” chapter Mr. Barry writes about fans who besiege him to tell him how much their kids loved his book “Hoot.” In other words, they confuse him with Carl Hiaasen, but that’s a happy accident all around.
Next month brings Mr. Hiaasen’s “Star Island,” which revolves around a 22-year-old pop star who has a drug problem. The main character is a look-alike hired to distract paparazzi from photographing the pop star when she is throwing up a birdseed, vodka, painkiller and stool softener mix into an ice bucket, as she discreetly does at the start of “Star Island.” This book is billed as fiction, but you be the judge.
One real pop star whose story has been overlooked is Tommy James, who grew up as Tom Jackson and made up the band name “Shondells” in high school study hall. Then he lifted a song called “Hanky Panky” from a bar band without knowing where it came from, and Tommy James and the Shondells turned it into a monster hit. (It came from the stellar Brill Building songwriting team of Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich.)
That debut smash, in 1966, was the start of a wild story involving Roulette Records’ boss, Morris Levy, and an awful lot of guys who called Tommy “kid” for reasons he would be slow to understand. The title of his boisterous memoir, “Me, the Mob, and the Music,” is self-explanatory.
Among the plaques in Mr. Levy’s office was one that said, “O Lord, Give Me a Bastard with Talent.” A directional microphone hidden in the “O” in that sign would ultimately lead to Mr. Levy’s conviction on racketeering and extortion charges. Until then Mr. James (whose book was written with Martin Fitzpatrick) would have some wild times as one of Roulette’s golden boys. It’s high time that he had a book to himself, since his stories can almost rival the wider-ranging show business lore recalled by Jerry Weintraub in “When I Stop Talking, You’ll Know I’m Dead.”
Between Mr. Weintraub’s skills as a raconteur, Rich Cohen’s punchy style as his co-writer and a fabulous cast of those with whom Mr. Weintraub has done business over the years, this book is paved wall to wall with funny, hard-nosed stories. If Mr. Weintraub ever backed down from a negotiation while promoting concerts, producing movies or just finding ways to sell snow to Eskimos, he’s not telling. Never mind, because he’s great at the name-dropping game: “Yeah, Elves. It’s me. What’s up?” Even in that kind of company his best stories are the ones about himself.
The actor Bryan Batt’s best stories are about his mother. No wonder: “She Ain’t Heavy, She’s My Mother” is a title to be reckoned with, and so is Gayle Batt, the steel magnolia whose son plays Sal Romano on “Mad Men.” Mr. Batt — “Pumpkin,” to Gayle — engagingly tells his family’s story through good times and hard ones. His acting career has had its ups and downs too. (He was a cat in “Cats.”) The pièce de résistance: his mother arrived to watch the shooting of the “Mad Men” Season 3 premiere, in which Sal figures prominently. Mrs. Batt had to be warned by her son that she’d be watching a scene in which Sal is explicitly groped by a bellhop. “Pumpkin,” she answered, “I can’t wait.”
If Mr. Batt is confidently embarrassment-proof, Chelsea Handler is coated in armor. Her “Chelsea Chelsea Bang Bang” opens with a riff on her discovery of masturbation as an 8-year-old, a startling writing gambit even for her. But the chapter is ridiculously funny, especially since Ms. Handler remembers her 8-year-old self as full of adult backtalk. “I’m 8,” she claims she said irritably to her father as she complained about the 15-year-old boy next door. “Are you familiar with the term ‘molester?’ ”
With that kind of chutzpah, Ms. Handler can go toe to toe — or whatever to whatever — with Chuck Palahniuk, whose “Tell-All” is full of boldface words that become stranger and stranger as he presents an escalatingly loony pipe dream that savages Lillian Hellman and many others. Having gone off the deep end with his most recent envelope pushers (“Haunted,” “Rant,” “Snuff” and “Pygmy,” none of them readable), Mr. Palahniuk is in good form once again. Finally.
Jill Kargman’s “Arm Candy” also uses boldface. Unfortunately, she isn’t kidding. “Move over, Ashton and Demi! New York has its own pair of May-December stunners in eligible finance heir Chase Lydon and famed model/muse Eden Clyde,” she has a gossip columnist exclaim about the supposedly red-hot couple her book describes. Read it only if you think a model’s horror of turning 40 is an interesting plot idea.
In terms of value “Arm Candy” looks like the Oxford English Dictionary compared with Claire Cook’s “Seven Year Switch.” Its cover actually depicts a woman sitting in a beach chair, with a book on the table beside her as turquoise waves surge at her feet.
Even against such stiff competition Debbie Macomber’s “Hannah’s List” does this year’s most egregious job of pandering. Ms. Macomber presents the lonely Dr. Michael Everett after his wife, Hannah, has died of cancer. Hannah turns out to have left behind a three-name list of women Michael can marry. The story of Hannah’s deathbed offer comes wrapped in a treacly sweet cover, visible at a distance of about 100 yards.
Ms. Macomber has also produced a knitting book with the same cover art. You can knit the shawl made for Hannah while she was undergoing the chemotherapy that couldn’t keep her alive.
Better yet, you can throw in the beach towel and decide that this year’s hot-weather reading exemption has its limits. Maybe they’ve got “The Road” at the library after all.
The New York Times - May 27, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/28/books/28beachreads.html?nl=books&emc=booksupdateemb5
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