July 23, 2010 Ask The Paris Review Stuck in Bed, Appropriate Irony By Lorin Stein I read a Richard Yates novel. And I’m fucking depressed. Like wow, what a downer. Give me something to cheer me up. —Jeff Swift Like, you can’t get out of bed? Get someone to bring you the Jeeves novels of P.G. Wodehouse. They are extra-strength heartening. Emergency use only. For a mild case of the blues, may I suggest either of Sam Lipsyte’s last two novels, Home Land or The Ask? Some reviewers call them depressing, but they’re not. They master depression. And they take place on Yatesian territory—the suburbs of failure. Yet they are full of Olympian laughter. Some people swear by Laurie Colwin. Try Happy All the Time. Or Consenting Adults, by Peter de Vries. If nothing else works . . . I’m not sure how to recommend this, but are you familiar with I Am a Bunny? I have come this close to stealing that book from two separate babies, during two different dark nights of the soul. If you ask me, the consolations offered by I Am a Bunny are wasted on the extremely young. Read More
July 16, 2010 Ask The Paris Review Manhattan Unfurled, Partying at The Paris Review By Lorin Stein I’m looking for good books about New York to give as host/hostess gifts. What would you recommend? —Elizabeth P., New York City There is always E. B. White’s little classic Here Is New York. The old edition is the one to buy for its beautiful jacket. Ten years ago I gave a copy to my friend Matteo Pericoli, a native Italian in love with the plain style in American prose. Matteo then turned around and created an even more beautiful book: Manhattan Unfurled. This unique object, which unfolds like an accordion, consists of two thirty-seven-foot pen-and-ink drawings. One portrays the western shore of Manhattan, the other the east. Matteo also made a children’s version, See the City, with pencilled annotations, e.g. “This is a power plant”; “United Nations (I drew more than 3000 little lines!)”; “This is a not-so-famous building, but I like it.” I don’t know which version I prefer, loving them both as I do. If your hosts lives downtown, you may also want to give them Luc Sante’s Low Life, with its haunting history of the tenement city New York used to be. Then, if your hosts are unemployed, you can always give them Gotham. Once, as a house-sitter in Greenwich Village, I spent the better part of a week in a gigantic Adirondack chair reading Gotham from cover to cover. I mention the chair because you need a big sturdy comfortable one, or a book stand. There is no question of reading the book in bed. Read More
July 9, 2010 Ask The Paris Review Girl Crazy, Lame Book Blurbing By Lorin Stein Girls. I’m girl crazy. It’s ’cause it’s summer. I’d like to calm myself down. What should I do? —Ronnie Oh, Ronnie. One feels you. I take it you’ve tried self-love and cold showers? If all else fails and you hear the first garbage trucks and all you want is a moment of oblivion—of surcease—what you need is boring books. I keep a stash for just such occasions: A History of the United States During the Administration of Thomas Jefferson, by Henry Adams. My intellectual friends tell me it’s a masterpiece. I have never got past page six. The Education of a Gardener, by Russell Page: “Were I working out a rectangular theme, for instance, I would not hesitate to introduce diagonals or curves if these were justified by expediency, or if their introduction contributed to reinforce that same theme by contrast. On the contrary, a composition all curves and irregular forms might well demand certain rigidities, certain angularities in detail are you listening to me ronnie no you are not because you are fast asleep.” The Complete Guide to Furniture Styles, by Louise Ade Boger. This one is new to my collection. I got it off the two-dollar cart at the Strand last week and already I have found it an indispensible settler of the mind. I know what you’re thinking: for a diseased one-track Bonobo like yourself, it’s only the tiniest baby-step from furniture to sex. Trust me. Ms. Boger is an artist. She was bored writing the thing, bored shitless from sentence one, and she manages to communicate that feeling to the reader in real time. To say The Complete Guide to Furniture Styles is 427 pages long is to say nothing. The pages are giant; the text bicolumniar; the black-and-white plates, for all intents and purposes, useless. Reading The Complete Guide is like popping six Ambien and hitting yourself on the head with a brick. Read More
July 2, 2010 Ask The Paris Review Teenage Literature, Wet Brains By Lorin Stein I need to buy a present for a thirteen-year-old boy. His parents suggested “a good book.” This thirteen year-old is not that interested in literature, so I want this book to be a gateway to good, weird literature for him. Suggestions? —James in Providence This is such an excellent—and delicate—question, we decided to call in some experts. Lev Grossman is a senior writer and book critic for Time magazine. He is also the author of the novels Warp, Codex, and The Magicians, the last of which is centrally concerned with teenagers and gateway reading. Lev recommends: Cat’s Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut. I read and reread this book constantly from ages thirteen through sixteen. Vonnegut seamlessly merges (sorry for the cliché) the basic existential challenges of life with that early-adolescent sense of generalized grievance against the world of which thirteen year-olds are the chosen curators. Plus, it’s impossible to read Cat’s Cradle as a grownup, so it’s now or never. If that doesn’t work, T.H. White’s The Once and Future King. After that I give up. Laura Miller is a staff writer at Salon, which she helped found. She is a frequent contributor to The New York Times Book Review, the editor of The Salon Guide to Contemporary Fiction, and the author of The Magician’s Book: A Skeptic’s Adventures in Narnia. Laura writes: The Maze Runner by James Dashner is not exactly a literary triumph, but it’s accessible and action-packed (important to many young male nonreaders) yet also features just enough of that good, Vonnegutesque mind-blowing to show him that books can take you to places no other medium can. Read More
June 25, 2010 Ask The Paris Review Dirty Books, Greek Travels, Oily Birds By Lorin Stein Boy Reading, by Thomas Pollack Anshutz.I am eternally that girl who guys want to be friends with, and I am fed up with it. Where can I turn to help me with my predicament? And don’t say Jane Austen. —Jessica, New York City I wasn’t going to say Jane Austen! I find her deeply, deeply depressing. Maybe you feel the same. If you want to read a genteel English novel where the perpetual “friend” gets the upper hand, try The Tortoise and the Hare, by Elizabeth Jenkins. (Jenkins also wrote a biography of Austen, but you can skip that.) You might get a vicarious kick out of Dawn Powell’s 1942 satire of New York media people, A Time to Be Born. Another tale of a friend triumphant. It sounds, though, as if you may be in the market for a seduction manual. I’ve never read one that rang true, sorry to say. Instead it seems to me one should probably read dirty books—starting with something outrageous and perverse, like Bataille’s Story of the Eye—if only because these books, the really dirty ones, give a person courage when she (or he) feels unsexed. They may help you acknowledge your awkward or forbidden feelings toward those guys, even at the risk of rejection. If you’re fed up, as you say, it’s time to act! Read More
June 18, 2010 Ask The Paris Review Assholes Revisited, Milton’s Sonnets By Lorin Stein Boy Reading, by Thomas Pollack Anshutz.You answered how to be an asshole. But how about what to do when you’ve been dealt one? In other words: I got dumped. Quick: where’s the revenge section of the bookshop? —Greta, New York City In Patrick Hamilton’s 1947 novel The Slaves of Solitude, a middle-aged Englishwoman embarks on her first love affair and—after many heartbreaking and cringe-inducing misadventures—discovers that the best revenge is a night alone in a fancy hotel. As Rita Konig would say, J’AGREE. If nights alone are not your idea of poetic justice (or if you want to work on your French), I suggest the libertine novella No Tomorrow, by Vivant Denon. Here a jilted young nobleman takes revenge on his mistress the other way—by going to bed with her friend. (Who, needless to say, has her own agenda.) The New York Review Classics has bulked out this slim bagatelle (newly translated by Lydia Davis) with the original text. So you can compare as you set your vendetta out to chill. Read More