Good & Bad, Real & Fake, Cain & Abel, Jacob & Esau
By Tom Teicholz at 4 March, 2008, 2:31 pm
Lot to discuss:
First the Good: Richard Price‘s new novel, “Lush Life” got a rave review From Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times. How’d you like to wake uo to this line:
“No one writes better dialogue than Richard Price — not Elmore Leonard, not David Mamet, not even David Chase.
Or how about this?
In his latest novel, “Lush Life,†Mr. Price puts his myriad gifts
together to create his most powerful and galvanic work yet, a novel
that showcases his sympathy and his street cred and all his skills as a
novelist and screenwriter: his gritty-lyrical prose, his cinematic
sense of pacing, his uncanny knowledge of the nooks and crannies of his
characters’ hearts.
I’m a fan and I’ve stuck by Price from the start. Can’t wait to actually read the book.
On to the bad news:
Michiko (it’s not that we’re on a first name basis, just that I’m too lazy to type her last name), also gave a rave to Margaret Jones memoir about growing up in South Central. Turns out it is certainly not her life story. She went to Grant in the Valley and Campbell Hall.
Question No. 1: Why not call it fiction in the first place?
Early on she might have said, these are stories I know, and still written about them. Clearly she can write convincingly. But I suppose once she started in a lie, she followed it down a certain path. Did she (and others imply to her) that it would not have been as commerical as fiction? That as memoir, it was somehow more believable that she was a foster child, than that as a middle class white woman she could write about South Central as fiction? Even an accomplished a novelist as Susan Straight is always having to give her bona fides for writing about Riverside.
Compelling detail No. 1: Her sister turned her in. After a glowing “House & Home” feature in the New York Times on Thursday, her older sister called the editor at Riverhead. Interesting, no? Don’t you get the feeling that there’s more of a story there. Some deeper family dynamics/ resentment/ history at play? Why call the editor? Why not call her own sister? Why not stay out of it, and leave it to others?
It brings to mind all those Cain & Abel, Jacob & Esau, sibling dramas. By contrast, it also calls to mind the example of the “good Brother” as in when Ted Kazcinski (the Unabomber)’s brother turned him in — in that case, he was saving his brother from harming others, and saving his brother from himself and from a possible death sentence.
Lot of good stuff to chew over here.
Compelling detail no.2: that it was the “house and Home” feature that sent the sister over the edge, which brings to mind that old Japanese saying that it’s the nail that sticks up that is pounded down. Jones must have known that the publicity would sink, she must have looked upon the good reviews and media attention as the best thing/worst thing imaginable — she must have known that she was going down.
Compelling detail.no. 3: The editor was Sarah McGrath. I know nothing about this person, other than what the Times mentioned, that she is the daughter of Charles “Chip” McGrath, who is a longtime New Yorker and New York Times editor and contributor. But knowing nothing about her, or him, — let me put forward this thought (which may have no basis in truth, but the psychological issue interests me): Imagine that Ms. McGrath has a father who is well known in the literary world and she becomes an editor at a publishing house — and somewhere in the back of her mind, she wonders if she’s a fake, or if people think she got her job because of her father. Then she discovers a manuscript and says to herself, “This will prove that I’m the real thing!” — and the memoir tuns out to be a fake. WoW ! that would be something.
MORE FAKES
All this comes on the heels of the admission that Misha, a Holocaust memori is a fake. Blake Eskin wrote a very good piece about this at Slate.
The comments and discussion are worth reading too, as they reference Jerzy Kosinski, and his own opportunistic relationship with truth and fiction –notwithstanding all the differences from the present case.
Finally, this week sees the premiere of “The Real Housewives of New York City,” a reality show, so-called. The New York Post is infuriated and insulted by these women representing NYC, while Alessandra Stanley in the Times, muses:
“We’re in the wrong business.All of us.”
That, too, is something worth considering.
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