Book Review Roundup, May 2012

I haven’t collected my book reviews in a few months. One of the reasons I’ve been reading so many 60-year-old Patrick Dennis novels of late—besides the fact that they’re awesome—is that I’ve been digitizing my private collection, and save for the two Mame books, Dennis simply isn’t in print any longer. Which is a shame, because there are few satirists as ruthless.

Death Comes to Pemberley
by P.D. James
1 Star
As a casual fan of James' Dalgleish detective novels, and as someone who loved her entry into science fiction, The Children of Men, I was quite happy to follow the author down a new avenue of genre writing: the Austen pastiche.
However, Death Comes to Pemberley is simply not good. James obviously intends the novel to be a rather light-hearted tribute with a detective twist. Instead, it comes off as a slow-moving, lumbering Frankenstein's monster of a work, stitched together from an uninspired modern-author Austen sequel, and a couple of never-made episodes of CSI: Regency England and Law and Order: Derbyshire.
None of it's convincing. Worse, none of it is really interesting. I kept hoping the killer was Lady Catherine de Bourgh, hiding out in the woods with a knife like a madwoman. I was disappointed even on that front.


Whatever Happened to Pudding Pops?: The Lost Toys, Tastes, and Trends of the 70s and 80s
by Gael Fashingbauer Cooper, Brian Bellmont
3 Stars
For a book devoted to the wacky ephemera of the decades of my childhood, Whatever Happened to Pudding Pops? is curiously short on illustrations, anecdotes, and or any hint of just good clean fun. It's as dry as a fossilized old box of Quisp.
Still, this encyclopedia-like look at lost consumer culture manages to hit some notes of nostalgia (Peanut Butter Koogle, anyone?) and mines some memories that, on the whole, might be better left forgotten.

The Companions
by Sheri S. Tepper
4 Stars
Those who dismiss Sheri S. Tepper's books as too strident in their feminist and ecological concerns need only take a look at the 2012 U.S. Republican presidential campaign for retort. It provides almost too many examples of the ways in male public discourse at the very highest levels that women—and their reproductive systems—are reduced to mere vessels, sluts, and handmaidens, almost as extremely as they are in Tepper's dystopian Gibbon's Decline and Fall. That Tepper always has axes to grind in her novels should not lead anyone instantly to dismiss her. They're valid axes.
That said, The Companions is one of the few Tepper novels I never bothered to re-read after its initial release. When I picked it up again recently with no clear recollection of the plot, I was only a few pages in when I remembered dismissing it as "Tepper's dogs-in-space novel", in 2003. And yeah. It does have dogs in space.
What I didn't notice the first time around, however, was how beautifully-written huge chunks of the novel actually are, and how rich the world-building, and how complex the linguistic systems that Tepper explores. The primary story of Jewel Delis and the dogs she's attempting to save is both affecting and sweet, and had me sniffling back tears by the book's end.
True, a lot of the book's climax seems accomplished by having the main characters explicate a heck of a lot of material, and sometimes the book's premise seems almost too richly elaborate. But there's force and sheer will powering the novel's plot, colored as always by both Tepper's intertwined fatalism and humanism.

Every Step You Take: A Memoir
by Jock Soto
3 Stars
Reading dancer Jock Soto's memoir is a bit like skipping dinner for a supper of circulating tiny hors d'oeuvres at a swank cocktail party—there are plenty of tasty morsels, though nothing really fills you up.
The book is initially narrated as if it's a memoir about a mixed-heritage gay man's relationship with his mother . . . but it's not, really, though it's obvious her passing affected him deeply. It should perhaps have been a comprehensive look at Soto's career as principal dancer within the New York City Ballet, but his early training is quickly related and anyone attempting to glean hard information about his work with George Balanchine or Jerome Robbins or any of the other hundreds of talented choreographers and artists with whom he worked will come away disappointed. As a chronicle of its time, it suffers; Soto sums up the nineteen-eighties simply by tossing a mixed salad of names into a paragraph (Andy Warhol! Debbie Harry! Basquiat! Keith Haring!) and calling it a day.
The book's odd pacing and structure is made even more digressive by the inclusion—or interruption—of several of the author's favorite recipes. I like recipes. Just not necessarily in my dance biographies. And I don't want to spoil anyone's experience of the book and its cuisine, but one of the recipes is more or less "Hey, why not spread some caviar on a toasted bagel?"
The book is a swift, light read, and was interesting enough to make me not really notice how much of it was empty calories. A full meal, however, it is not.

Le Freak: An Upside Down Story of Family, Disco, and Destiny
by Nile Rodgers
4 Stars
In the late nineteen-seventies and early nineteen-eighties, when the U.S. public opinion of disco music soured, Nile Rodgers was among those who took the backlash the hardest. There's an affecting anecdote in his chatty and informal autobiography, Le Freak: An Upside-Down Story of Family, Disco, and Destiny in which he and his partner in the Chic empire, Bernard Edwards, stood alone and ostracized in a nightclub during those disco-sucks days because record studio executives were simply too frightened to be seen passing beneath a doorway with the word 'disco' emblazoned in small neon.
Though it's over thirty years since that incident, it still seems to haunt Rodgers. The man built his musical empire on the backbone of the elegant and eminently funky Chic, a band that propelled not only disco and dance music to new artistic heights, but influenced generations of musicians in all genres that followed. And yet, curiously, the Chic years are glossed over in this autobiography, despite the band's chart domination and succession of hits. There's more space devoted in Le Freak to the production of David Bowie's Let's Dance album than there is to the formation and many successes of Chic.
To an extent, that's fine—Rodgers has endured and flourished as a producer in the time since Chic, and that's clearly where he believes his legacy lies. There's quite a lot of interesting information here about his transition to mainstream radio-friendly production during the nineteen-eighties with David Bowie, Duran Duran, and especially with his hand in making Madonna into the cultural icon she is. And if he doesn't go into detail over even some of his most popular material (no mention of The B-52s and Cosmic Thing, for example) or my personal favorites (not a word about Debbie Harry's Koo-Koo), it's simply because he produced so many acts during those years.
The bulk of the book devoted to Rodger's early upbringing by heroin-addict parents, and his constant relocation from New York City to Los Angeles and back again, is pretty fascinating stuff. It comes as no surprise that Rodgers battled addiction issues of his own, during his career. What is astonishing, however, is how he thrived in spite of it.
Still, for those of us of a certain age who regarded Chic as a pinnacle of dance music achievement, and Rodgers as a personal hero of sorts, the thoroughness with which he distances himself from Chic's urban sheen in favor of the safer (and whiter) music of Bowie and Madonna is a bit disconcerting. Perhaps Rodgers—who was raised by bi-racial parents and who rightly rails against the segregational and racist tendencies of studio and radio executives—still has a few more demons to tackle.

Genius
by Patrick Dennis
5 Stars
To keep it short and sweet, Genius lives up to its title.
This most engaging and carefully-plotted of Patrick Dennis' social satires is at once both a vicious lampooning of—and a comic valentine to—the entertainment industry that made Dennis a mid-century literary sensation. The cast of characters here is more outrageous than perhaps any of his other books, yet at the same time eminently sympathetic in all their frailties (even the con man gets a Get Out Of Jail Free card at the novel's end). And in the character of Leander Starr, the narcissist whose delusions of solvency drive forward the plot, Dennis managed to prove his stuff by concocting a egomaniac who is undeniably dreadful in every respect . . . and yet commands a reader's concern.
Dennis's best satires, vicious though they can be, have a juicy humanist core; none of them is juicier than Genius.

Some Assembly Required: A Journal of My Son's First Son
by Anne Lamott, Sam Lamott
3 Stars
Midway through Lamott's latest memoir, the author visits India, where she's assaulted by a flurry of new sensations, strange customs, and quirky oddities of a type that bring out her natural sense of good humor. Sigh. I wish the entire book had been about India.
Because save for that colorful (and too-brief) interlude, the rest of Some Assembly Required is a chronicle of the birth and first year of Lamott's grandchild. It's territory she's covered before, and better, in Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year. While there's a lesson to be learned in Lamott's experience as a grandmother—namely that the baby's not hers, and she has to learn not to expect it to be—there's really not much to say about babies here that she hadn't already explored.
And because much of the book takes place against a background of rancor between Lamott's own son, Sam, and his girlfriend Amy, it's often an uncomfortable read. Writing about the intimate details of a young couple's disintegrating relationship at a volatile flashpoint seems intrusive, and even slightly exploitative; it made me wish several times that grandma would take another vacation and leave the squabbling young parents alone.

Paradise
by Patrick Dennis
4 Stars
When I first started reading the novels of Patrick Dennis in my teens, Paradise—the story of twenty strangers in a vacation guest house, on a peninsula in Acapulco that becomes an island after a freak earthquake—was one I returned to again and again. I'd not read it in some thirty-odd years, though, and when I was scanning through the book's early chapters, I kept thinking, Why in the world did I like this novel? The characters are so VICIOUS!
And they are. Dennis's island is a microcosm of the world at large, and it's populated by drunks, and has-beens, and perverts (by 1971 standards, anyway), and fakes, and snobs, and the pretentious, and that darling of Dennis's satirical pen, the self-deluded. With Patrick Dennis, one expects a little acidity; the set-up for Paradise is a whole barrel of the sourest lemons.
Yet part of Dennis's point is to see which of his nasty creations can be purified in the crucible of tragedy. In the face of extreme adversity and an uncertain future, the best of the characters rise to the occasion, shed their bad habits, and emerge triumphant. Those who do not face a humbling end. In that respect, Paradise is almost New Testament-like in conception and execution, with its assortment of drunks, hookers, crooks, and weirdos scampering into the kingdom of heaven, while the author's Pharisees are very politely denied entry.
That he was able to predict so accurately a particular type of reality television subgenre some forty years before it appeared on the networks shows how in-tune Dennis could be with the entertainment industry, and how prescient was his own cynicism. Paradise is very much a worthwhile read, but the peculiarly mean satire in this next-to-last of Dennis's novels is guaranteed to leave a sour taste on the tongue.

Guestward Ho!
by Patrick Dennis, Barbara Hooton
4 Stars
Although billed on the original cover as 'By Barbara Hooton as indiscreetly confided to Patrick Dennis, author of Auntie Mame', it's pretty clear to any aficionado of Dennis that while the stories about opening and running a New Mexico dude ranch are all Babs', the writing is completely Dennis' own. It's a fact subtly reinforced in the credits of his later novels, when Guestward Ho! is always listed as 'By Patrick Dennis, with Barbara Hooton.'
Bill Hooton was a friend of the author's when they were both in the American Field Service during the war; when Bill married Barbara, and Pat married Louise, the two couples shared an apartment for a considerable time. It probably seemed a natural fit for Hooton and Dennis to collaborate upon a book, and capitalize upon a popular mid-century subgenre of humorous literature in which urban couples abandon the busy city for a more fulfilling, though comedy-prone, experience in the country. Frank Gilbreth Jr.'s Innside Nantucket, about a young couple running a vacation resort is a solid example of the type, but the movement probably had reached its apex with Betty McDonald's The Egg and I, the story of a young couple trying to raise chickens among a backdrop of mountains, drunk and disorderly neighbors, and comical Indians. (It's a genre reached its nadir when it was satirized on TV's Green Acres.)
Guestward Ho! appears almost to combine the best of Gilbreth and McDonald, with its story of a young couple running a vacation resort with a backdrop of mountains and surrounded by drunk and disorderly employees—although to its credit, it manages to leave the native Americans with their dignity intact. The book's not outrageously funny, though Dennis' sole foray into non-fiction does contain his trademark zingers and a huge cast of zanies. And if Hooton's not-so-ghostly ghostwriter manages to make her sound like every other strong and capable broad in Dennis' later repertoire of female characters—wry, clever, honest to a fault, slightly bitchy, and not suffering fools or bigots gladly—at least she's in good, strong company.

Tony
by Patrick Dennis
4 Stars
All the usual targets of Patrick Dennis' vicious satire are lined up like clay ducks in his 1966 novel, Tony. Written in episodic form, like Auntie Mame, and featuring an immoral antihero like Leander Starr of Genius, Tony aims for and shoots down social climbers, Southern gentility, camp gay men, noxious boarding schools, pretentious graspers of all strata, and saves a special lead shot-packed salvo for the entire state of Connecticut.
However, it may be that modern readers might not warm to Dennis' rambling tale of Tony Vandenberg and his hunger for social elevation at any expense, nor of his decades-long friendship—if it can be called that—with the book's nameless narrator. Although readers cheer for another of Dennis' amoral creations, Leander Starr in the similarly-themed Genius, it's because Starr, despite his human frailties and abundant flaws, despite his willingness to tromp over friends and family alike in his quest to film the perfect movie, manages to create something bigger and better than himself. Tony Vandenberg never does, and what's more, never cares to; instead he leaves a wake of destruction throughout his life. The chilly and judgmental narrator is scarcely better—he's too flawed to keep his distance from Tony, but not enough of a friend either to help him in his schemes, or to betray him for his own good.
Still, Tony is on point when it comes to the skewering of its targets. Trenchant in tone and compulsively readable, its depiction of an at-times charming sociopath is perhaps more extreme than any other single novel Dennis wrote, but it also contains one of his most pitiable and outrageous fictional depictions. The novel leaves a bitter taste in one's mouth, but it's also a well-written read that's more affecting in spots than the majority of Dennis' work.

The Loving Couple
by Virginia Rowans, a.k.a. Patrick Dennis
4 Stars
The Loving Couple is the third of four novels by Patrick Dennis (Edward Everett Tanner III) written under the pseudonym of Virginia Rowans. Upon its publication, it became a bestseller at the same time as Dennis’ Auntie Mame and Guestward Ho!, making Patrick Dennis the first author ever to have three books simultaneously on the bestseller list.
The Loving Couple—which contrary to the title, is about the disintegration of the marriage between young suburban marrieds—is written as two separate novellas, both covering the same twenty-four hours in the disintegration of a suburban marriage. The two tales were published back-to-back started from each end of the book, so that when a reader had completed one side of the story, he could flip the book around and upside-down and consume the other half.
"His Story" details nearly twenty-four hours in the life of the young husband after he storms out of his nearly six-year marriage, as he spends a day coping with shabby college friends and a men's club he's long outgrown, his vulgar and tasteless employers, and a starlet as ravenous as she is without morals. "Her Story" begins the moment the husband has slammed the door behind him, and the wife finds herself fending off the sympathies of her superior older sister, the unfortunate interest of a man-hungry neighbor, and the attentions of a Southern gigolo on the make. The two stories meet, tangle, and climax in the nightclubs and streets of a mid-century Manhattan that's decidedly seedier and more piss-elegant than what's succeeded it.
Although he's writing under a pseudonym (a pseudonym that's different from his Patrick Dennis pseudonym, anyway), Dennis is aiming some of his most highly-corrosive satire at his usual targets in The Loving Couple. The suburbia of Westchester County comes under fire, but so do the residents of Manhattan, and more especially those of Queens and New Jersey. He sends poison jabs in the directions of television, and advertising, and kitsch-obsessed America; his fascination with and derision for sexually-ambiguous young men motivates a huge chunk of both novellas' plots. So acid is Dennis in this particular volume that I suspect most readers will only find appealing the Loving Couple of its title because the rest of the book's characters are so awful that the separated suburbanites smell sweet only in comparison.
But the book is funny, and razor-sharp in its insights. It's a shame The Loving Couple is barely known even to aficionados of Dennis, because it's a clever and ambitious conceit—and to his credit, he pulls it off.

House Party
by Virginia Rowans, Patrick Dennis
5 Stars
House Party, Patrick Dennis' second published book, and the second book released (in 1955) under his feminine pen name of Virginia Rowans, is very much the work of a young author testing his literary wings. There are multiple technically awkward passages—particularly in the early sections of the novel—in which solitary characters speak their thoughts aloud, soliloquizing their back stories in a way that no real people ever do. There's also a raw and optimistic idealism at work in the early House Party that all but vanishes in Dennis' later, infinitely more cynical works.
True, it's a brand of mid-century idealism unique to its time, in which Progress and the Bright New Future is typified (without irony!) as the bulldozing of historic homes, dividing up the land, and turning it into a subdivision of tract houses. It's a naive form of idealism in which young moderns frankly discuss Sex . . . though none of them are actually having any, nor intend to until blessed by holy matrimony. And the book can be almost bafflingly politically incorrect by modern standards; the help (whether African-American, or Irish, or German) are all treated as cardboard comic conceits, the environmental commercialization of rural real estate is appalling, and there's a terrible scene in which one man takes a hairbrush to a female's backside for a thorough spanking, just because he thinks she deserves it. In these regards, House Party is very much a product of its time.
The novel uses one of Dennis' frequently-employed conceits, as in Paradise or Genius or How Firm A Foundation, in which he strands a huge cast of characters in a closed-off location, and lets their comic personalities drive the action. In this case, a dozen and more zanies descend upon the Pruitt clan's Long Island estate for a holiday weekend, and the results are genuinely and consistently comic. The Whitman's Sampler of personalities is familiar to anyone who's read other Dennis books—a young gigolo, a cold-hearted gold-digger, a hyper-masculine military fraud, a senior citizen floozy, a flaming elderly queen, and a number of clean-cut midwestern boys who are examples of American Democracy, and staunch young women with good heads on their shoulders. It's not difficult, in the early stages of the work, to puzzle out which bright young thing will end up paired with whom by the tale's end. Watching the machinations play out against the barrage of comic situations, however, provides most of the book's pleasure.
There's a depth of feeling at work that distinguishes House Party from later, drier novels; Dennis could never be accused of sentimental writing, but House Party veers closest to it. There are such a number of good eggs among the Pruitt clan, and they're so deftly realized, that it's almost easy to overlook what modern readers might find as the novel's political flaws. It has an essential sweetness that is unique among Dennis' novels. That alone makes it a stand-out entry in the author's library.

When You Were Me
by Robert Rodi
1 Star
When You Were Me is a body-swap comedy. But here's the thing about body-swap comedies—and one of my published novels is one of them, so I can speak with a little authority here—nobody really reads them in order to find out how the bodies get swapped. It can't happen in real life, you see, and the more an author tries to make the premise into something logical, something that can neatly be explained, the less it works. So Thorne Smith's Turnabout used a magical little statue that flips its married couple within a couple of chapters. Freaky Friday employed a masterful device in which the mother initiated the swap before the book's opening pages, but she doesn't intend to divulge how. Way to go, Mom!
When You Were Me's body swap doesn't take place until the halfway point of the book. Halfway through. That's a couple of hundred pages of the characters contemplating the body swap, researching the body swap, picking out someone to do the body swap, going to the physician's office to make sure the bodies are okay before the body swap, settling legal matters and cleaning up apartments before the body swap, and then finally going through the body swap in great detail. It may be a body swap comedy for an OCD audience of estate planners and contract lawyers, but no one else is having any fun.
Another thing about this particular subgenre of comic writing is that much of the tension between the newly-swapped individuals arises from their unwillingness to be in their new bodies. Jack and Corey, the two protagonists of Rodi's novel, however, are only too willing to switch—and it's because they're so full of self-loathing for what they perceive as wasted lives. Self-hatred isn't fun to read about in any form, and it's so distilled and bitter here that it's difficult to root for either of the idiots who get themselves into this mess.
By the time the body swap antics actually begin, they're rushed and haphazard; the book's climax is confusing and the denouement even more so. I've been a Robert Rodi fan since Fag Hag, and I've always been happy that he's continued to write novels and resist the siren call of television scripting. However, if When You Were Me is the author's anguished response to being dragged clawing and screaming over the threshold of his fiftieth year, it's made me thoroughly uncomfortable.
Body-swapping, it has a lot of. Comedy, not so much.