By The Beachwood Obituary Desk

1. “After David Foster Wallace became a twentysomething literary phenom – after the publication of his first novel (The Broom of the System, 1987) and short-story collection (Girl With Curious Hair, 1989) got the Thomas Pynchon comparisons flowing – he checked himself into a hospital and asked to be put on suicide watch,” Mark Caro writes in the Tribune.
“‘In a weird way it seemed like there was something very American about what was going on, that things were getting better and better for me in terms of all the stuff I thought I wanted, and I was getting unhappier and unhappier,’ he told me in 1996 upon the publication of Infinite Jest, the 1,000-plus-page novel that would cement his status as one the few modern-day literary giants.”

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Posted on September 15, 2008

By Steve Rhodes

Books on my table that I’ve recently read and/or re-read and/or have been meaning to write about for a long time.
1. Drunkard. Neil Steinberg’s memoir of his battle with alcoholism.
2. Five Ring Circus. An account (and cautionary tale) of Vancouver’s successful 2010 Olympic bid by a University of British Columbia professor who led the opposition.
3. Moneyball. The Michael Lewis classic about how the sabermetricians have revolutionized the way thinking people look at baseball, using the Oakland A’s and their general manager, Billy Beane, as his case study.
4. Clinton in Exile. The unauthorized (and sleazy) biography of Bill Clinton’s post-presidential life.
5. See You In Court. Subtitle: How the Right Made America a Lawsuit Nation. A counterintuitive yet persuasive account by Thomas Geoghegan.

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Posted on September 10, 2008

By Connie Nardini

Jon Clinch/Finn: A Novel
Why do we love a story? Why do we need fiction at all? Above all, why do we need a sequel (prequel?) to an American classic like Adventures of Huckleberry Finn? Because we need to escape the restrictions of our own rules of engagement with our civilized world much as Huck did; and then we must reconstruct this world, remake the rules, even break them completely, and, finally, dance among the ruins.
Jon Clinch does this in Finn through his recreation of Huck’s father “Pap” – we never know his real name. On the cover of the paperback version of his book there is a picture of a large hook with the word “Finn” floating just beneath it. Pap Finn is hooked by many things in this novel, but so are we as we become entrapped by the dark and powerful Mississippi that is at the center of his life. This river has many things within it, such as the fish he catches on his many trotlines that provide him his livelihood, such as it is. There are also strange things:

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Posted on August 28, 2008

By Steve Rhodes

While Tom Frank’s What’s the Matter With Kansas was not without its problems, it still stands as one of the most incisive works not only about recent American politics but American culture in at least the last decade.
The fact that Frank is a University of Chicago graduate who founded The Baffler here doesn’t seem to get him any special dispensation from the local media, though, much of whom I’m certain have never heard of him. The larger political universe has heard of him, though, and not just because he lives in Washington, D.C. now (and is a columnist for The Wall Street Journal, but because he is one of the leading political and cultural intellects of our time.
Still, his latest book, The Wrecking Crew sounds like a bit of a disappointment – not just because it is getting lukewarm reviews, but because those reviews seem to ring true in their main complaint that Frank has fallen into a leftist ideological prism that he can’t get out of long enough to see, for example, that Democrats are evil too. My God, didn’t Chicago teach you anything?

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Posted on August 20, 2008

By Steve Rhodes

“The New Yorker writer Jane Mayer’s new book, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals, reviewed on this week’s cover, may be the most uniformly praised nonfiction title of the summer,” Dwight Garner writes in his “Inside the List” column in the New York Times Book Review. “It enters the hardcover nonfiction list this week at No. 4.”
Behind books by David Sedaris, Madonna’s brother, and Chelsea Handler.
Be that as it may, Dennis Kucinich ought to stop fooling around with his impeachment articles and just enter this work into the congressional record. If there were more time left in the terms of Bush and Cheney, if the Democrats had an ounce of courage, and if there was any justice in the world, our fearless leaders would be in the dock for war crimes before you could finish saying extraordinary rendition.
Of course, anyone who has been reading the work of Mayer and others in the New Yorker – or who has half a brain – won’t be surprised at her thoroughly reported findings. But the gathering of detailed evidence in one narrative still has the power to shock.

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Posted on August 5, 2008

By Steve Rhodes

Setting aside the Obama story (for now), the now-famed issue of the New Yorker is noteworthy on a couple of other counts.
This piece of artwork in the art listings caught my eye. It’s by Pepe Villegas, and it’s called “Sears Tower, 1997.”

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Posted on July 22, 2008

By Steve Rhodes

Let’s catch up.
Women’s Work
“The New York Times Book Review has never exactly embraced passionate advocacy – unless it was promoting Pynchon’s and DeLillo’s place in the postmodernist canon. Even worse, it has become the place where serious feminist books come to die – or more accurately, to be dismissed with the flick of a well-manicured postfeminist wrist,” writes Sarah Seltzer in Bitch. (h/t: Literago).
“Recently, Times editors – in both the daily paper and the Sunday section – have trotted out a particularly insidious formula for bashing feminist authors. First, hire a female reviewer to unleash misogynist tropes in her piece and then, lest she appear prejudiced against her own gender, throw in an illogical, contradictory statement about the importance of a less threatening version of feminism that isn’t so ‘polarizing,’ ‘provocative,’ or ‘strident’.”

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Posted on July 8, 2008

By Steve Rhodes

Amazon recommendations based on items I own and more.
1. West/Lucinda Williams
2. When the Mob Ran Vegas: Stories of Murder, Mayhem and Money/Steve Fischer
3. The Battle for Las Vegas: The Law Vs. the Mob/Dennis Griffin
4. The Tangled Web: The Life and Death of Richard Cain – Chicago Cop and Mafia Hitman/Michael J. Cain
5. Hopes and Dreams: The Story of Barack Obama/Steve Dougherty

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Posted on June 23, 2008

By Max Eddy

Gentle reader, let me bare all to you. Let me tell you about how Warren Ellis hurt me. In 2005, I discovered Desolation Jones, an offbeat little number written by Warren Ellis. I read the first two issues while sitting on my cousin’s chair and stroking his cat. It blew me away, and I went right back home and bought the first issue for my very own, and started my first pull-list. At the time, I hadn’t bought a single-issue comic since the mid-1990’s and displayed Desolation Jones #1, and many of the subsequent issues on my shelf.
But this summer romance was not to be. After the June 2006 issue, there was a long, long silence. Readers know that when a monthly regular is late, the future of the title is in question. When Jones miraculously returned around December, I was overjoyed! As the birth of Jesus brought hope in the dead of winter, so did the arrival of Desolation Jones #7 bring hope to me. But it was a false hope. A new story arc, a new artist, and what felt like a new mindset for Ellis made #7 a weak offering. The arrival of #8 was met not with enthusiasm, but trepidation. And since then, no one has seen not hide nor tail of good ol’ Jones.
When newuniversal first showed up in my local shop in 2007, I was still reeling from the whole Jones debacle, and wasn’t sure if I was willing to trust Ellis again. But the covers looked neat and the word on the street was that newuniversal was a good read, so I picked it up. It was weird, it was wonderful, and completely surprising – I loved it. And then again, after a good six-issue run, it vanished. There was no anger, not this time. I should have known better.

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Posted on June 17, 2008

By Steve Rhodes

Catching up.
Baggage Fee
“Dear American Airlines, Jonathan Miles’s fine first novel, takes the form of a letter to the titular air carrier, which has stranded Benjamin R. Ford, the book’s middle-aged protagonist, in O’Hare Airport on the way to his estranged daughter’s wedding,” Richard Russo writes in the New York Times. “One doesn’t take this premise literally, of course. As Bennie waits to be put on another flight, he has a lot of time on his hands, enough to miss first the rehearsal dinner and then the ‘wedding’ itself (quotation marks courtesy of Benjamin, who’s just found out that his daughter is marrying a woman), but not enough to write a novel. The premise works though, because, as anyone who’s ever been stalled in an airport knows, time crawls.”
“Indeed, airport time goes so slowly in the ‘purgatory’ of O’Hare that there’s plenty left over for Benjamin, a former poet who now works as a translator, to read and translate large sections of a Polish novel, as well as to digress into an impressive array of cultural issues, large and small. Bennie’s digressions don’t all advance the story, but they’re great fun and serve an important purpose by lightening the narrative load.”

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Posted on June 13, 2008