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October 10-16, 2002

cover story

Fiction

The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time

By Douglas Adams Harmony Books, 288 pp., $24

Much like Kurt Vonnegut, the 20th century's other great science fiction inclined satirist, Douglas Adams had a skill for creating a universe governed by dark comedy and irony. Unlike his American war veteran counterpart, however, the hulking, gentle Brit had a certain warmth and charm that let the reader know there was a master plan at work for the characters he sent hurtling through space. Less realistic and biting, yes, but satisfying and important nonetheless. Adams' relatively sunny perspective -- one might guess after reading this posthumous collection of essays, magazine articles, interviews and the first 11 chapters of a never completed novel -- came from his unabashed enthusiasm for this planet. It's an odd thing to consider about the author who destroyed the Earth in the third chapter of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but a truth quite apparent in Salmon's non-fiction works. An environmentalist and adventurer, Adams traveled the world documenting its natural wonders and criticizing our encroachments therein.

Of course, it’s Adams’ fiction which is nearest to the hearts and imaginations of his nerdy, longtime fans. The incomplete novel, a Dirk Gently story pieced together from miscellaneous hard drives, shows an author at the top of his captivating and ironic best. Like Douglas Adams’ life story, The Salmon of Doubt ends frustratingly early, but it’s an interesting and entertaining adventure while it lasts.

Patrick Rapa

Untitled: A Bad Teen Novel

By Tara Ariano Writers Club Press, 156 pp., $11.95

Many writers take the pain of adolescence and use it as fodder for their work. Few, though, so literally use their pre-teen experiences. Tara Ariano, co-creator of TV recapping/skewering site televisionwithoutpity.com, wrote a "novel" in 1987, when she was in eighth grade in Regina, Saskatchewan. This tale of four girlfriends touches on pretty much every typical middle school concern (first loves, smoking, shoplifting) and then veers into some darker territory (rape, kidnapping, death). The book is very clearly written by someone who has little to no knowledge on any of these subjects, and that's what makes it so much fun. Ariano presents her text annotated with present-day comments that skewer her younger self before the reader gets a chance to. Her editorial asides on her adolescence are vicious and hilarious, and help move along what otherwise might have been an amusing but somewhat dull read. This book will either make you want to dig out your old writing attempts or, more likely, immediately destroy all evidence of your awkward phase.

Debra Auspitz

Skirt and the Fiddle

By Tristan Egolf Grove Press, 224 pp., $23

Now, now. We're all just plum tired of reading books about well-off New York publishing types and the cocktails they drink. Really -- who cares anymore? We've heard the stories, read about the restaurants, squirmed through the talk show appearances. Enough already.

How about, instead of all that strappy-shoe angst, we crack the spine on Tristan Egolf's second novel, Skirt and the Fiddle? Which opens with the violinist Charlie Evans throwing his instrument into the gutter after a fairly bad day at the office, here a coliseum full of metal-hungry nu-Vikings? Where what at first looks like the bottom of the barrel is actually the start of a journey -- one that goes through a flophouse and some rat-infested sewers and a few scuffles here and there, into the world of heart-flipping romance?

Egolf's prose is dizzying and exhilarating, like a roller coaster that's all loops. His language is so adept, so carefully placed, he can make the tale of cleaning up a restaurant that's been torn to pieces and shit on by anarchists sparkle. His dialogue is snappier than His Girl Friday, and he can make a plot twist faster than a trapped rat.

And -- well, OK, there is a woman who works in publishing in a fairly major role in this story, and yes, she is fairly well-off, which Charlie discovers when he wakes up, head aching from a bender, in a luxury hotel suite miles from his flophouse home. But the fire Egolf breathes into Charlie's knock-down, drag-out love for this woman -- a passion so fierce, he forsakes his forsaking of the violin so he can pour out his heart to her via Bartók -- turns this particular sin into a lesson for media kiddies looking to write their own great American novels; getting the gimlet-eyed gaze away from the gimlets, and poring over what makes the heart's deepest embers glow just might result in beauty being glimpsed from the oddest of angles.

Tristan Egolf reads Wed., Oct. 30, 7 p.m., Borders, 1727 Walnut St., 215-568-7400.

Maura Johnston

Suicide Casanova

By Arthur Nersesian Akashic Books, 370 pp., $25

There aren't any surprises in Suicide Casanova. Take the title literally and listen to Arthur Nersesian's supreme anti-hero Leslie Cauldwell as he admits to everything he is: a creepy, twisted, naive stalker who works as a lawyer. Leslie's only flaw is loving too much, and confusing love with obsession. That, and he ends up loving the objects of his desire to death. Leslie, a man with a bisexual name, has posed as an amateur photographer to get as up-close as possible to the people he loves, mainly porn stars and dominatrixes. Inside the industry, the managers and bosses see him as a swattable kid fan, but those who receive his affection see him as just another mark. And Leslie is a sucker. Everyone else is an expert, and he's the novice, taking advice from porn stars on how to photograph them, and blindly obeying a dominatrix's orders without ever remembering to use the "safe" word.

Nersesian (whose first novel, The Fuck-Up, was the cult hit that put Akashic Books on the map) has drilled out a tight noir novel, but upsets the genre by making the thrust of the story not about crime, but love. Sure, it's a really fucked up kind of love, but the real thing can be just as sickening. Since Leslie is unapologetically himself, like any noir anti-hero, the only thing he has going for him besides his limitless love is perspective -- a perspective severely muddled by booze and pills. How much good would true clarity be, when everyone around you is in trouble or dying? Exactly.

While most noir heroes run away from relationships and domestic settings, Leslie embraces them fully. He's well-rounded like that. Sensitive. He just wants to be loved, is that so wrong? Nersesian has written a tight, gripping, erotic thriller sure to make every pervert who reads it feel more well-rounded, and every vanilla-flavored "norm" who reads it may look at stalkers and go, "aww."

Alex Richmond

The Good Remains

By Nani Power Grove Press, 322 pp., $24

Halloween's not a big holiday for book publishers, and there are very few Thanksgiving titles outside of the American history list. At least, that would seem to be the most plausible explanation for the early-fall release of Nani Power's The Good Remains, which bills itself as a tribute to A Christmas Carol and seems to aim squarely for a maudlin, heartwarming spot under the tree.

This is a pity, because Power's novel shows much more ability than adjectives like "uplifting" and "Dickensian" would suggest. At the same time, it's those adjectives, and the ill-conceived contrivances Power sets up in her attempt to mush her plot and characters into holiday tearjerker shape, that hamper The Good Remains.

After all, the reason that A Christmas Carol has become an enduring classic has nothing to do with the quality of Dickens' writing; his characters for the most part are made of cardboard, and the plot bears no resemblance to reality. Scrooge's Christmas Eve affects us as a fable because its contrivances and its happy ending take place in a world far more black-and-white than ours.

The Good Remains looks to put flesh on those old bones. Power's characters are full, rounded and meaty, from the disgraced obstetrician the book focuses on, to the teenaged misfits of the subplot, to the minor eccentrics that soften the edges of the story. The book's central moral quandary -- painted in varied grays, quite the opposite of Dickens' black and white -- examines a case of euthanasia closely and unsparingly. And Power's writing is often sparkling, often witty, especially when she fills in her minor characters.

So many of the component parts of The Good Remains work so well, in fact, that their failure to mesh makes for a surprise. Ultimately, all of her strengths get distorted by the effort to shoehorn her novel into the frame of a fable. And the shades of gray, the issues of real life, just can't be resolved in a single dreamlike evening, over the course of four visitations of memory and premonition.

Nani Power reads Thu., Oct. 24, 7 p.m., Borders, 1727 Walnut St., 215-568-7400.

Justin Bauer

The Wasties

By Frederick Reuss Pantheon, 224 pp., $23

The most puzzling thing about The Wasties, I'm afraid, is not the condition to which the title refers. Our narrator -- mute Michael Taylor, former professor of English, who now prefers to be called "Caruso" -- sustained an "event" which left him with an unspecified degenerative psychological or neurological condition. He refers to it as "the wasties," and because of it he needs constant supervision, a cane to walk and a notepad to communicate. Nor is the most troubling aspect of the book the boundary between external reality and Caruso's fantasies. In Frederick Reuss' hands, the roots of Caruso's delusions seem abundantly clear: When Walt Whitman appears in the subway, with unkempt beard and unwashed hair and acoustic guitar, it's obvious that Caruso's Whitman is just a panhandler to his nurse. For his surface confusion of categories, Caruso (and Reuss) remains remarkably lucid. Nor is the most difficult problem in understanding the book one of figuring out whether Michael Taylor is malingering. The gaps between Caruso's thoughts and his actions are wide, and often Caruso makes an infantile physical response to a mature emotional need. Occasionally, these moments are wonderful. In one scene, Caruso attempts to discuss aesthetics with his nurse, using words like "Dictung" and "thingness"; she responds by discussing her background in pediatric speech therapy, whereupon he bites her. And as the novel progresses, and Caruso degenerates, the contrast between his need for his wife's care and love and the betrayals of his body and mind become increasingly poignant and his acting out increasingly sad. One suspects that the effect Reuss is able to achieve from these gaps, and the difficulty of writing a novel with so impaired a narrator, are what drew him to create this story. What puzzles me the most, though, is why this technical experiment extends any longer than the 10 pages of a short story.

Justin Bauer

Non-Fiction

Not the Triumph but the Struggle: The 1968 Olympics and the Making of the Black Athlete

By Amy Bass University of Minnesota Press, 424 pp., $27.95

Not long ago, Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb signed the richest contract in NFL history ($115 million over 12 years, with a $20 million signing bonus); Eagles owner Joe Banner summed up, "We're ecstatic, but broke." Word that Michael Jordan is playing another season with the Wizards thrilled the NBA and related industries. And Tiger Woods' declaration that he wouldn't play Olympic golf in order to pursue as many majors as possible basically put the kibosh on further IOC efforts to bring the sport to the Games.

Money, power and respect. It would seem that black athletes have it all. But, as Amy Bass' Not the Triumph but the Struggle contends, the story is far more complicated and far from over. Absorbing and cogent, the book traces the "historical production of the black athlete," using the Olympic Project for Human Rights (OPHR) and the Black Power protests at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics as a simultaneously definitive and disruptive moment. "While the Nation of Jordan might overshadow the structural realities of racism in the United States," Bass writes, "the memory and call of the black-gloved fist linger."

Beautifully written, as well as appropriately complex and wide-ranging, the book examines the tangled relations among racism, global and national politics, commercialism, civil rights, national identity (looking, for instance, at various interpretations of "The Star Spangled Banner," by Jose Feliciano, Whitney Houston, Aretha Franklin, Marvin Gaye and Jimi Hendrix), labor and play, gender, "science" (as this is recurrently used to "explain" athletic prowess and performance), definitions of "professional" and "amateur," television, and sports-related industries (fashion, endorsements). To consider the many effects of icons like Jesse Owens, Arthur Ashe, O.J. Simpson, Muhammad Ali, Wilma Rudolph, and of course, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, the two track and field medalists who raised their fists on the victory dais in 1968, Bass draws on the work of academic theorists (C.L.R. James, Robin Kelley, Cornel West), as well as historians and sportswriters.

As much as sports might appear to be a straight-ahead business, where the "best" might be rightly rewarded, Bass deftly reveals the difficulties of maintaining a sense of self, collective consciousness and political urgency -- multimillion dollar contracts go a long way toward "erasing" the ongoing effects of prejudice. "Victory can be defined in many ways," Bass concludes, "including by the struggle itself."

Cindy Fuchs

Guerrilla Radio: Rock N Roll Radio and Serbias Underground Resistance

By Matthew Collin Nation Books, 256 pp., $14.95

It's hard, in 2002, to think of radio as an outlet for any sort of real subversion. Consolidation and cronyism have resulted in American airwaves being demographically and ideologically polarized; Clear Channel and Viacom stand tall on the music side while the NPR juggernaut slugs it out with right-wing talkers on the other.

Look back at 1990s Serbia, though, and you see an era where radio was vital to the underground resistance against the increasingly nightmarish regime of Slobodan Milosevic. The once-proud city of Belgrade was ruled by the lawless, inflation ballooned to 300 million percent and vapid reports of Serbia being the best of all possible worlds buzzed from the state-controlled airwaves.

One station was the searing feedback whine that punctured the happy noise perpetuated by the government; it refused to kowtow to the Socialist party line, while deftly maneuvering around almost all the roadblocks set up to make it fail. That station was B92, later B2-92.

Guerrilla Radio is the story of this station. B92, which still broadcasts today at www.b92.net, was a Belgrade radio station that, at first, just wanted to play punk records. But its application of the underground's principles to the reporting of news resulted in the station being right in the middle of a years-long fight that would see it being shut down, relocated, threatened, playlisted and even taken over by the government.

In the spring of 1991, after a Belgrade rally where citizens protested Serbia's stifled news media, the station was placed under "information blackout." The DJs at the station worked around the reporting ban by playing songs, like The Clash's "White Riot," that told the stories of the riots outside the station's door through lyrics, not news reports.

B92 turned into an independent media powerhouse in Serbia. The station organized an alternative media movement inside Serbia while serving as a window, online, for those outside. Of course, the path from illicit spins of "Bring the Noise" to reporting Milosevic's eventual ouster wasn't always smooth; between politically sympathetic listeners who couldn't stomach the strains of Sonic Youth and the takeover of the station by the government in 1998, B92 was often teetering towards pure white noise.

Brit journalist Matthew Collin is a gifted storyteller, and his ability to sift an orderly narrative out of the repressive, depressive chaos of 1990s Belgrade makes for compelling reading. But ultimately, the strength of Guerrilla Radio rests on the stories told within. The simultaneously awe-inspiring and jaw-droppingly depressing story of B92, and those who fought in solidarity with it, is a testament to the power of this courageous station's message and medium.

M.J. Fine

Roadkill on the Three-Chord Highway: Art and Trash in American Popular Music

By Colin Escott Routledge, 224 pp., $19.95

Perusing Roadkill on the Three-Chord Highway is comparable to viewing Robert Altman's sprawling opus Nashville: like the film, author Colin Escott presents an unorthodox, eclectic roster of pop/country artists that oscillate from renowned, revered icons and semi-legends to hopeful anomalies that fell by fame's wayside. Escott stir-fries comprehensive profiles of Roy Orbison, Patti Page and Jim Reeves with equally adept overviews of obscure performers like Onie Wheeler and Skeets McDonald, creating an alluring collage of biographical snapshots that revolve in a bipolar spectrum of prestige.

Escott possesses a graceful facility for crafting thorough career retrospectives of his subjects while sustaining the reader's interest with magnetic incidental details. "Wanda Jackson: Did She or Didn't She?" examines the rockabilly queen's journey from her honky-tonk salad days, where she crossed paths with a burgeoning Elvis, up through her born-again epiphany in the 1970s. "Perry Como: R.I.P." describes the singer's friendly television-ratings rivalry with Jackie Gleason (Como to Gleason: "Hey big ass, last night we knocked your ass off"), who forever endeared himself to Como by paying a surprise visit to his mother-in-law, a devoted fan who called him "Jackie Glissi." Most illuminating is his piece on the Collins Kids, a prepubescent sibling curiosity of the 1950s who were responsible for such saccharine ephemerality as "Hush Money," "Beetle Bug Bop" and "Date Bait": not only was brother Larry one of the first to brandish a double-necked electric guitar, but also older sister Lorrie became involved with nascent teen sensation Ricky Nelson, who was subsequently stood up and brokenhearted when she left him for Johnny Cash's road manager -- 19 years her senior.

Fortified with a stunning gallery of vintage photos and convenient postscripts that list available recordings, Roadkill on the Three-Chord Highway is an offbeat, engrossing collection of once-shining stars, the almost famous and a smattering of great pretenders.

Frank Halperin

American Skin: Pop Culture, Big Business & the End of White America

By Leon E. Wynter Crown, 296 pp., $25

In American Skin, Leon Wynter sets out to convince us that a new America -- one where race doesn't matter anymore and people of all races are just people -- has become a media reality in the past 20 years, and a perceived reality for the under-20 generation.

If Wynter were a clueless white liberal, we might dismiss this story by trotting out a few facts about institutional racism and have done with it. But Wynter's no white liberal, and he's no fool. He acknowledges early on that images in commercials don't add up to political equality, but he keeps readers in suspense to see what significance he will ascribe to this new transracial American skin.

The book's ponderous first 70 pages relate a synopsis history of African-American involvement in U.S. popular culture, freshman-term-paper-style, through block quotes and analysis regurgitated from other scholars. After mucking through this disorganized morass of secondary sources, Wynter devotes the remainder of American Skin to an engaging series of episodes from the recent history of marketing. As a journalist who pioneered the "Business and Race" column in The Wall Street Journal, Wynter clearly has home-court advantage as he spins tales of black men in beverage ads and the marketing decisions that made them. Through interviews with decision-makers in advertising and marketing, an oddly circular story emerges: Marketing firms use hip-hop and black basketball players to sell products to consumers of all stripes because audiences are already prepared to be swayed by them. Simultaneously, these ads, by taking multiracialness for granted, reinforce their audiences' (especially young, white audiences') sense of an Americanness that transcends race.

If so, so what? That question hovers unanswered throughout. Finally, in his conclusion, Wynter argues that the sting of racism can be salved somewhat by seeing Halle Berry in the movies and knowing that white people are watching her too. More provocatively, he asserts that since black people can now sell products to white people, and since hip-hop is the dominant youth consumer culture, this indicates that American racism and white privilege -- which were created, after all, primarily in order to maximize and protect profits in the young United States -- have become detrimental to American capitalism, and that their days are therefore numbered. Hard to believe? Maybe. Is Wynter right? Let's hope so.

Sara Marcus

Brilliant Orange: The Neurotic Genius of Dutch Soccer

By David Winner Overlook Press, 276 pp., $26.95

"Total Football" might sound like a terrace chant still echoing from this year's Zeitgeist-catching World Cup. Soccer fans dating back to the era B.H. -- Before Hamm -- however, will recognize the phrase: a style of play wherein a defender should be able to move up to attack, knowing that his teammates will, where necessary, shift positions to cover him. If this sounds like a system for creating "renaissance sportsmen," -- attackers who can defend, midfielders adept at striking, everyone on the pitch an all-arounder --David Winner posits that Holland, founders of total football, are used to devising devilishly clever solutions to modern problems: how to beat a team on the pitch through almost Pythagorian strategies that elasticate the available space, how to reclaim that pitch, and 50 percent of the country's land mass, from the ever-incursing sea.

In Brilliant Orange: The Neurotic Genius of Dutch Soccer, Winner gathers, through interviews with artists, critics and those at the forefront of Amsterdam's cultural rise, as well as sportsmen, testament to the way life below sea level has taught Holland's inhabitants to manage space judiciously. As he points out, Netherlanders are statistically the tallest people on Earth, yet the country's architecture, against the unremittingly flat horizon, has developed into towering, narrow townhouses. More than mere prudent economy with area, Winner argues the Dutch afford space -- in its most conceptual sense -- a kind of respect. When, in the late '60s, Johan Cruyff and Rinus Michels -- star player and manager, respectively, of Dutch team Ajax -- began discussing "space" on the pitch, Dutch football became truly respectable.

Rather than an august football history, Brilliant Orange's format works "connected obsessional investigations" into chapters, dizzyingly numbered according to the Dutch squad positions. Riddled with idiosyncrasy, Winner's Holland finds room for both superstition and logic; in recent history, the Dutch have clung to the sport as a national totem, from the national coach who collaborated with Hitler by keeping Jews out of the sport, to the Provos, a '60s group of left-wing radicals who performed happenings in "Magic Centre Amsterdam."

Winner's objective, in structuring the material around upheaval, is to probe why Holland as a national side still rarely reigns supreme. The grace of Total Football couldn't prevent the West German side thrashing them in the 1974 World Cup final; a recriminatory epilogue explains exactly how Holland didn't even qualify for this year's tournament. Since Winner can't honestly call them champions, he'll settle for hailing them as artists. In the dignified words of '90s striker Dennis Bergkamp, "If we were a killer team, we might forget to play the football we're good at."

Juliet Fletcher