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David Rakoff Perfectly navigating that delicate balance of a
biting wit and endearing charm, Rakoff is probably
the best of the modern personal essay magazine writers. He visits Doris Lessing Thanks to a friend’s encouragement, I
finally got around to reading this. Anna Wulf,
British writer, feminist, and communist in the 1950s, keeps four separate
notebooks: a record of her days as a young adult in Stephanie Kallos Weird fun. The premise is that an older
woman, surrounded by the relics of her past in her A Sparrow Reader, edited by Marcus Boon This review appeared in the February 2006 issue of Chronogram. America: A Prophecy begins with Sparrow telling us how
ill-suited he is to his name, telling us how ill-suited he is to his name,
which was bestowed upon him 25 years ago by a woman who wore a purple snood
and called herself the Princess of Love. He thinks it's too wimpy, and he has
a point, but if we think of him as a small voice in the wilderness, something
ever-present but not overbearing, fluttering at the edges of our
consciousness, it's not a bad fit. After years of gradually becoming aware of Sparrow's byline on letters to the editor and short pieces in various small magazines and free newspapers—wise commentaries, often funny, sometimes bittersweet—I grew curious about who this person was. Man? Woman? Young? Old? Surely some sort of hippie, with that name, yet too humble and open-minded to be an ideologue. But after finishing this collection, I'm still not certain who he is. The
book ends with approximately 100,000 biographical notes on Sparrow, and that
number is only a slight exaggeration, as are some of the entries. I'm pretty
sure he's never been a submarine captain, but some things are clear: He's a
troublemaker who likes to take long baths, a substitute teacher living on a
shoestring budget in the Catskills, a poet in the Greenwich Village scene, a
Marxist who has run for President four times, a Conservative Jew and a
Buddhist, a 50-something husband and father, and a fan of musicals. Mostly,
he's someone who pays attention. For a guy who hasn't watched television in
28 years, he sure knows a heck of a lot about pop culture. This
collection spans the breadth of Sparrow's writing: from surreal flights of
fancy like an account of sex with an ant or an interview with Kurt Cobain
after his death, to quiet observations about the sky in the Catskills and his
baby daughter, to quotidian dramas like his wife's having a cockroach stuck
in her ear. Sparrow is a master at clever subversion (you gotta
love a guy who hands out free books in front of The Wiz to discourage people
from buying televisions), a student of history, and passionate about language
and literature. My
favorite is his "Translations of the New Yorker into
English." They bring the reader up short—how can Sparrow
nail in just a couple of sentences what took John Updike or Robert Pinsky five stanzas to dance around? Sparrow has no
patience for pretension—it's one of his best qualities; he seeks
spirituality in a Manhattan Bloomingdale's and beauty in e-mail spam. Yet
he's merciless in his disdain for the proliferation of bad poetry. Currently
a columnist for the Phoenicia Times and a frequent contributor to this
magazine, Sparrow is finally achieving a bit of fame by writing bumper
stickers. Short, pithy insights are his strength, and this collection
includes dozens of his proverbs: Cerebral one-liners that sneak up on you,
give you a tickle, and leave you pleasantly dazed. If only he wrote fortune
cookies. America: A Prophecy leans toward the silly, and that's
plenty entertaining, but what I like best is his own voice of reason, that of
another befuddled human being trying to make sense of an absurd and
frequently disappointing world. And the book's organization, if there is one,
is inscrutable. Pieces are dated, but not always with years, and since they
jump around chronologically, keeping track of which President Bush and which
wasteful America: A Prophecy, like Sparrow, has no platform;
it's best dipped into at random and savored in small doses—all the
better to make it last. To quote one of Sparrow's proverbs: One noodle, long
enough, is a meal. Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the
American Dream Barbara Ehrenreich In her
follow up to Nickel and Dimed (which, despite being the book everyone
loves to say they are reading, seems to have done nothing to halt the massive
screwing over of poor people) Ehrenreich goes
undercover to try and secure a corporate job. She has such a hard time
getting hired that the book is more about unemployment than working life
– the only jobs she is offered are selling insurance on commission and
peddling Mary Kay products. As she points out, it’s more and more
common that the worker is not given benefits, a guaranteed salary, or even an
office to work out of, and even expected to invest her own money up
front. She meets employed people searching for jobs and discovers that
they’re just as unhappy as the unemployed, and as discouraging as being
out of work is, it’s made more difficult by having to seek a job that
you know won’t bring you satisfaction or security. Ehrenreich is a “brown shoes will be fine with navy
pants, right?” kind of girl, and she’s tooled her resume, but it
isn’t exactly corporate material. So it may not be surprising
that she can’t play the game, but why should such a smart, articulate
and hard-working woman have to play a game to get a job? What this book
really reveals is that the business world is built on air; you fake your way
in, and then fake your way through a job trying to convince people they want
things that they don’t need. To her credit, Ehrenreich
has turned this horribly depressing subject into compelling, and even funny,
reading. Nina Shengold When fate
throws together three irrepressibly sexy people in The Early Arrival of Dreams: A Year in Rosemary
Mahoney Written
before Tiananmen, this is Mahoney’s account of the year she spent
teaching in Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture Ariel
Levy ‘Girls
Gone Wild’, striptease aerobics, invitation-only orgies in The
Amateur Marriage Anne
Tyler Don’t
expect a love story – or maybe you just have to look carefully to find
it. Spook:
Science Tackles the Afterlife Mary
Roach Roach looks
at those who’ve studied whether and how the soul survives death, be it
a reincarnation expert in Myla Goldberg When I saw
that this novel kept up a running commentary in sidebars, my heart
sank. Sidebars are bad enough in non-fiction, evidence of our cluttered
culture of instant gratification, but they’re unforgivable in a novel.
It’s a novelist’s job to construct a narrative, not to
constantly distract the reader with details the writer couldn’t be
bothered to work into the story. Not that it’s much of a story
– set in Boston during the first world war, it begins with a love
affair, but Goldberg seems to quickly grow tired of that and falls back on a
sappy tale about a plucky young nurse who stands up to the big bad doctors.
With none of Bee Season’s magic or heart, it’s
just a few vague ideas and a handful of notes, not a fully realized work of
fiction. |
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