First-rate execution by top-notch talent saves a shaky premise.
Grasping-at-straws anthology compiled by California novelist Sussman (On a Night Like This, 2004).
The problem with asking your contributors to turn “bad” behavior into a good story is that everybody has a different idea of what constitutes bad. Fortunately for Sussman, she managed to recruit 26 fine contemporary writers, from Ann Hood and Susan Straight to Daphne Merkin and Roxana Robinson. Most of them come through with substantive thoughts on the angel/whore dichotomy, though their first-person essays range wildly in tone, from poet Kim Addonizio’s sexual confessionals about a stoned one-night-stand at a writer’s conference (“Plan D”) to Elizabeth Benedict’s prissy contrast between her expressive self and her rigidly buttoned-up stepdaughter (“The Thrill of a Well-Placed ‘Fuck’ ”). Laura Lipmann takes the middle road in “Laura the Pest,” which chronicles a difficult time in her life when coworkers and friends kept their distance because “you could smell failure on me.” Several stories of the author’s fall from grace involve a grade-school crisis, as in Elizabeth Rosner’s account of her early determination never to stop asking questions (“Everything I Know about Being Bad I Learned in Hebrew School”) to Susan Cheever’s girlish 1959 misdemeanors at Masters School (“Alma Mater”) and Madeleine Blais’s discovery of “occasions of sin” at the Ursuline Academy (“The Beard”). In the hilarious “Author Questionnaire,” Kaui Hart Hemmings fantasizes about defending her imaginary book How to Party with an Infant to academic colleagues. M.J. Rose’s idea of being bad simply constitutes overhearing a salacious confession (“The Thrill of the Spill”). Two veteran authors do best of all here: Joyce Maynard rehashes her painful teenage affair with J.D. Salinger in “A Good Girl Goes Bad,” and Erica Jong argues that badness is still defined by men in “My Dirty Secret.”
First-rate execution by top-notch talent saves a shaky premise.Pub Date: July 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-393-06463-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2007
Analyzing his craft, a careful craftsman urges with Thoreauvian conviction that writers should simplify, simplify, simplify.
A New York Times columnist and editorial board member delivers a slim book for aspiring writers, offering saws and sense, wisdom and waggery, biases and biting sarcasm.
Klinkenborg (Timothy; or, Notes of an Abject Reptile, 2006), who’s taught for decades, endeavors to keep things simple in his prose, and he urges other writers to do the same. (Note: He despises abuses of the word as, as he continually reminds readers.) In the early sections, the author ignores traditional paragraphing so that the text resembles a long free-verse poem. He urges readers to use short, clear sentences and to make sure each one is healthy before moving on; notes that it’s acceptable to start sentences with and and but; sees benefits in diagramming sentences; stresses that all writing is revision; periodically blasts the formulaic writing that many (most?) students learn in school; argues that knowing where you’re headed before you begin might be good for a vacation, but not for a piece of writing; and believes that writers must trust readers more, and trust themselves. Most of Klinkenborg’s advice is neither radical nor especially profound (“Turn to the poets. / Learn from them”), and the text suffers from a corrosive fallacy: that if his strategies work for him they will work for all. The final fifth of the text includes some passages from writers he admires (McPhee, Oates, Cheever) and some of his students’ awkward sentences, which he treats analytically but sometimes with a surprising sarcasm that veers near meanness. He includes examples of students’ dangling modifiers, malapropisms, errors of pronoun agreement, wordiness and other mistakes.
Analyzing his craft, a careful craftsman urges with Thoreauvian conviction that writers should simplify, simplify, simplify.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-307-26634-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 13, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Making movies may be ``hard work,'' as the veteran director continually reminds us throughout this slight volume, but Lumet's simple-minded writing doesn't make much of a case for that or for anything else. Casual to a fault and full of movie-reviewer clichÇs, Lumet's breezy how-to will be of little interest to serious film students, who will find his observations obvious and silly (``Acting is active, it's doing. Acting is a verb''). Lumet purports to take readers through the process of making a movie, from concept to theatrical release—and then proceeds to share such trade secrets as his predilection for bagels and coffee before heading out to a set and his obsessive dislike for teamsters. Lumet's vigorously anti-auteurist aesthetic suits his spotty career, though his handful of good movies (Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, Prince of the City, and Q&A) seem to have quite a lot in common visually and thematically as gutsy urban melodramas. Lumet's roots in the theater are obvious in many of his script choices, from Long Day's Journey into Night to Child's Play, Equus, and Deathtrap. ``I love actors,'' he declares, but don't expect any gossip, just sloppy kisses to Paul Newman, Al Pacino, and ``Betty'' Bacall. Lumet venerates his colleague from the so-called Golden Age of TV, Paddy Chayevsky, who scripted Lumet's message-heavy Network. Style, Lumet avers, is ``the way you tell a particular story''; and the secret to critical and commercial success? ``No one really knows.'' The ending of this book, full of empty praise for his fellow artists, reads like a dry run for an Academy Lifetime Achievement Award, the standard way of honoring a multi-Oscar loser. There's a pugnacious Lumet lurking between the lines of this otherwise smarmy book, and that Lumet just might write a good one someday.
Pub Date: March 27, 1995
ISBN: 0-679-43709-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1995
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