Book Recommendation

Tom Perrotta, "Nine Inches."

I just finished Malcolm Gladwell's "David and Goliath." I wish I could recommend it. But it's flawed. The concept is not coherent enough and you start wondering re the cherry-picking of examples, I mean David Boies made it because of his dyslexia? And the problem with successful people, like Gary Cohn, whose ascension from aluminum salesman to President of Goldman Sachs is chronicled in the book, is that...people never tell the truth about themselves, especially after they've made it, it's all about the myth, which is unfortunate, because the great unwashed believe the myth and try to emulate and achieve that which cannot be gotten, unaware the game was rigged from the get-go.

But that's "nonfiction."

Fiction's a whole 'nother animal. Ironically, when fiction is done right, it makes your hair stand on end with its accurate depiction of life, especially inner life.

That's what we're all interested in, that's what life is truly about, what's going on inside someone's head. People rarely reveal it, and when they do it comes out in fits and starts and is so often filtered, but life is about the brain not the body, and nowhere is this evidenced more than in Perrotta's book.

discovered him by accident. Removing his short story collection, 1994's "Bad Haircut," from the shelf of the Santa Monica Library where I used to spend so much time before the Internet hit big and I rarely left the house.

And "Bad Haircut" was a good attempt. But it wasn't fully-realized. Just another writer trying to find his niche and climb above the dead end of teaching creative writing in college.

Next came "The Wishbones." Which I didn't read until six years later but which you should read immediately. It's the story of a garage band, musicians who never became famous. Not a sanitized film take, but the real story of getting older and playing for your living and what your life is like, it's exceptional.

Then came "Election." Yes, the story of Reese Witherspoon's best movie was first a book, which I read after seeing the incredible flick that seems to have been forgotten but was truly great. In this instance, the film is a bit better, this happens so rarely, like in the case of Michael Chabon's "Wonder Boys," yet the book is still satisfying after seeing the movie.

And after the even better "Joe College," Perrotta broke through, with "Little Children" and "The Abstinence Teacher." But the problem was that Perrotta was now taking himself too seriously, the books had a heaviness his earlier work did not. He stopped being ours and started becoming theirs, and nothing alienates a core audience more.

And speaking of aliens, Perrotta jumped the shark with a genre book thereafter, "The Leftovers," about a post-apocalyptic world. It failed. With everybody dashing for cash, writing about zombies and vampires, true readers became unsatisfied...is it about money or art?

And now comes the unexpected "Nine Inches." Perrotta returning to his original framework, the short story. He went back to basics, like John Lennon recording fifties songs, if he wrote new ones that sounded like the originals instead of doing covers.

But Perrotta is so much better now, he's got so much more under his belt, it's the aforementioned Gladwell's 10,000 hours in action. "Nine Inches" is a master at work.

But it's getting little traction. Because it's the genre fiction that's triumphing and everybody pooh-poohs short stories.

And short work can be unsatisfying...because it ENDS!

You don't want to read "Nine Inches" from start to finish in a day or two, which you could easily do. You want to savor each story. You truly have no other choice, because that's how much they stick with you.

Can you convince yourself your present significant other is number one, burying in your mind the one who got away?

The person who appears to have it all together...is that just a facade?

Do we all have hopes and dreams, and are too many of those shattered and unfulfilled?

I've already told you too much.

But I will say if you're not truly haunted reading the title story and "Grade My Teacher," you've got no heart, no soul, and you're no friend of mine.

http://amzn.to/GC6I9S


--
Visit the archive: http://lefsetz.com/wordpress/
--
http://www.twitter.com/lefsetz
--
If you would like to subscribe to the LefsetzLetter,
http://www.lefsetz.com/lists/?p=subscribe&id=1

If you do not want to receive any more LefsetzLetters, http://lefsetz.com/lists?p=unsubscribe&uid=0eecea7b60b461717065cbde887c8e25

To change your email address http://lefsetz.com/lists?p=preferences&uid=0eecea7b60b461717065cbde887c8e25




--
Powered by PHPlist, www.phplist.com --