Tag Archives: los angeles times

Feel the Love

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I really enjoyed Loving Day, the new novel from Mat Johnson. It might be the most frank and open consideration of race I’ve encountered since Norman Mailer’s The Fight. I realize that’s a deeply weird comparison, especially since Loving Day is so relentlessly comic, but there’s something really admirable about the author’s determination to write about blackness and whiteness in contemporary America in a way that’s genuinely funny, particularly since it’s a conversation so many are strenuously avoiding. If this is your kind of conversation, check out my review in the Los Angeles Times.

The Killers Inside Us All

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I spent a month with this monster. You should, too. 

Despite the influence of Roberto Bolaño’s “2666,” Sutler calls the protagonist of another open-ended epic to mind: Tyrone Slothrop of Thomas Pynchon’s “Gravity’s Rainbow,” a character who disappears from the book but whose presence can be felt on every page. “The Kills” has similar goals as “Gravity’s Rainbow”: to expose the greed and corruption that thrives in the economy of war.

Read the rest of the review in the Los Angeles Times. 

Forest of Fortune in the L.A. Times

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It was such a thrill seeing this review of Forest of Fortune in today’s Los Angeles Times. Even though I’d read the review when it went online last week, this just felt different. It helps that it’s full of amazing quotes like this one:

Things are rotten in the state of Thunderclap. Or at least they are rotten for the people who wash up at the remote, desert Indian casino somewhere in the mountains inland of San Diego in Jim Ruland’s masterpiece of desperation, delusion and misdeeds, “Forest of Fortune.”

Charged with Wit and Wonder

Books,

I reviewed Edouard Leve’s Works in the Los Angeles Times:

When I was in the Navy, I heard a story about a prankster who’d chalked a profane message on the lawn of the commanding officer’s residence. Knowing the huge white letters would inspire the C.O. to immediately wash away the offensive language, the prankster had added a layer of grass seed to the message so that every spring the insult would return.

It’s the kind of joke that Edouard Levé would have appreciated. In “Works,” translated by Jan Steyn, Levé presents 533 ideas for works of art across a wide range of media. Some are plans for photographs, others include detailed notes for installations, while others lay the groundwork for films and books, including the first in Levé’s series: “A book describes works that the author has conceived but not brought into being.”

Read the rest of the review here.

A Not-So-Great Day at Sea

Books

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I reviewed Geoff Dyer’s Another Great Day at Sea for the Los Angeles Times: 

Dyer is an odd choice for the job. He’s written more than a dozen books, but there’s little in his wide-ranging works of novelistic music criticism, meta analyses of film and literature, and novels of eroticism and wanderlust to suggest the English author is up for immersing himself in the U.S. Navy’s rich tradition of nautical nomenclature and affinity for highly specific jargon, or as Dyer puts it, an “Acronym Intensive Environment.”