A Review of "Sister, Sinner: The Miraculous Life and Mysterious Disappearance of Aimee Semple McPherson" by Claire Hoffman

 

Why and how masses of people fall under the thrall of a magnetic person are the kinds of questions that sadly keep poking their, in the most recent case, oddly orange-tinged heads up far too often in history. That makes Clarie Hoffman’s steady, insightful biography Sister, Sinner, an examination of the fantastic and tragic life of evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, all the more timely. An early 20th century powerhouse, McPherson arguably created the first megachurch (what became the Foursquare Church, which still has over 6500 congregations globally today) and was wise enough to be the first woman to preach on the radio, too. Her style of Pentecostal ceremonies featured staged spectacle, from camels to faux police motorcycles, big choirs, some speaking in tongues.

But the most important voice was always Aimee’s. Her goal was to make one’s relationship with the lord more personal—her original magazine from her church was the Song of Solomon inspired The Bridal Call. As Hoffman puts it, “Aimee’s words were a sort of heavenly come-hither, a promise of intimacy with the divine, a lifting up away from all the darkness that was gathering in the world.” But, often drawing her sermons from her life—and what a life it was—“She emphasized her fallibility, always,” Hoffman further explains, “She was prideful and prone to make foolish mistakes, but all of this made her more adorable and magnetic.”

Care to read the rest then do so at the California Review of Books.

Review also posted at the Santa Barbara Independent on September 5, 2025.

A Review of Marcy Dermanksy's "Hot Air"

 

In Marcy Dermansky’s engrossing novel of (mis)manners Hot Air, third person limited isn’t just a narrative technique, it’s a view of the world where solipsism holds all the cards. Her characters are self-involved, feckless, cruel, and what’s worse, two of them, couple Jonathan and Julia, are ridiculously rich. As their assistant Vivian considers it, “It was amazing how easy it was to solve problems when you did not have to worry about how much it cost.”

Of course, things can cost us more than money. A handful of pages into the tale, Jonathan and Julia, contentiously celebrating their anniversary on a hot air balloon ride, crash into Johnny’s pool, just as he and Joannie have had their first kiss on their first date. (Yes, four names that begin with J, which leads to some confusion, but also underlines how sadly similar everyone is deep down.) Joannie, the poorest of this foursome, is a divorced mom, eager to move up in the world for her and her daughter, Lucy. Although Joannie has written a semi-successful novel she has never been able to follow up on, and therefore perhaps is the closest to a stand-in for the author—who names each chapter after the character’s viewpoint we are privy to in those pages—Dermansky lets loose this zinger, “As a rule, Joanie didn’t like rich people, but she thought that could change if she were to become one.”

Care to read the rest then do so at the California Review of Books.

Review also posted at the Santa Barbara Independent on June 10, 2025.

A Review of "What Art Does" by Brian Eno and Bette A.

 

At a mere 4.5 by 6.5 inches, only 122 pages long, with a cover that’s bright white and soothing flamingo pink, Brian Eno and Bette A.’s What Art Does beckons with an easy-going, “See? Manageable.” That’s even with its subtitle “An Unfinished Theory” dragging along like tin cans attached to a car, startling everyone. That said, a quick peek inside is even more welcoming. Bette A.’s deceptively naive, you could almost draw them yourself, just beyond line drawings are full of childlike whimsy. The typography is also playful, changing size, color, font, and even fading away. Given the ultra-creative natures of its authors—Eno is a British polymath musician, producer, artist, activist, A. a Dutch artist, novelist, and art school teacher—of course this book about art is art itself.

But then what is art? That’s where the aphoristic writing steps in, each sentence a barbed argument posed as indubitable statement. You find yourself bobbing your head in agreement page after page. Take this run of claims, “We all make art all the time, but we don’t really call it that;” art is “the name for a kind of engagement we have with something;” and, “the art engagement begins where functional engagement ends.”

Care to read the rest then do so at the California Review of Books.

Review also posted at the Santa Barbara Independent on May 2, 2025.

A Review of Sameer Pandya's "Our Beautiful Boys"

It’s no coincidence that the two main subjects of Sameer Pandya’s second novel Our Beautiful Boys are family and violence. Set in a vaguely Santa Barbara-ish fictional Chilesworth, CA (Pandya is an associate professor of Asian American Studies at UCSB), the book focuses on three high school football players and a vicious attack of a fourth student at a post-game party in a spot called the Cave House. This sly and captivating book fronts as a whodunit—crucial plot elements keep dropping until the very final pages—but even more so it’s a whoarewe, if I may create a sub-genre, as all its well-limned characters must confront the chaos of their inner selves. And then try to find where their true selves allow them to be in the shifting and complex milieus of family, work, teams, friendships.

Pandya masterfully builds three distinct family units—the Shastris, Gita and Gautum, and their golf-playing son Vikram, suddenly turning his attention to football; the Cruzes, high-powered academic Veronica, her running back son Diego, and her brother, Alex; the generationally privileged Berringers, Shirley, Michael, and their star quarterback son Michael Jr., who goes by MJ. Issues of race and class are clearly obvious from the first pigheaded teenboy taunt, but they go lots deeper than mere name-calling. Indeed, issues of race will grow quite twisted as Veronica’s backstory unspools, and we get to discover why she might be so hesitant to visit her parents. In this way Pandya gets to examine what the limits of self-invention are.

Care to read the rest then do so at the California Review of Books.

Review also posted at the Santa Barbara Independent on March 27, 2025.

A Review of "Nobody's Empire" by Stuart Murdoch

 

It would be easy to spend a ton of time teasing out where writer/musician Stuart Murdoch ends from where the main character of his debut novel Nobody’s Empire, Stephen Rutherford, begins.

Fans of B&S (that is, those who know enough to abbreviate Belle and Sebastian) will recognize that Murdoch’s novel borrows its title from a tune on 2015’s Girls in Peacetime Want to Dance that artfully captures Murdoch’s struggles with ME, or Myalgic encephalomyelitis (the medically mysterious chronic fatigue syndrome). Yep, his novel’s protagonist and two best friends, Richard and Carrie, also suffer from ME. Both Stuart and Stephen actively engage with questions of faith, albeit with an amorphous notion of god. Stuart went, and Stephen goes, on transformative trips to California. And both were saved by rock and roll. Heck, ignoring the shift from Scotland to Ireland, perhaps there’s even a nod to Joyce and his alter ego Stephen; think of Murdoch’s book as Portrait of the Artist as a Young ME.

But spending a ton of time teasing out such connections would also be a waste.

Care to read the rest then do so at the California Review of Books.

Review also posted at the Santa Barbara Independent on April 9, 2025.

A Review of "99% Perspiration: A New Working History of the American Way of Life" by Adam Chandler

A few weeks into the oligarchical hell of “Trump II: This Time We Leave the Country Stripped on Blocks,” Adam Chandler’s 99% Perspiration: A New Working History of the American Way of Life can seem downright roseate in its desire to consider what work means and how we might re-invent it. One way to think of Chandler’s engaging, thought-provoking book is to compare it to a Last Week with John Oliver: your narrator/host will make some funny jokes at his own expense, will bring the receipts for all the facts and figures carefully chosen to enlighten and not overwhelm, and will follow a pattern of how did we get here/where can we go from this unappealing here. “Writing this makes me feel a bit like the most stoned kid on an ultimate Frisbee team, but America isn’t what we’re told it is,” he confesses in his intro. “I’m not saying anything that you don’t already know.”

Chandler’s false modesty aside—he tells us plenty we don’t know, or perhaps haven’t quite considered via his long-view perspective—no doubt many of us feel snookered by what he bills the “American abracadabra,” that hard work always brings big rewards. As he says, we are meant to believe “anyone who fails to make it here in the Land of Opportunity must not be trying hard enough.” But as he also points out, citing a 2022 study, “35 percent of families in the United States with full-time workers don’t earn enough to cover basic needs such as food, housing, and childcare.” (And that’s all before the current crony capitalists further strip-out Medicaid, Medicare, SNAP, and then painfully tax everyone’s necessary goods with tariffs.)

Care to read the rest then do so at the California Review of Books.

Review also posted at the Santa Barbara Independent on February 21, 2025.

A Review of Neko Case's "The Harder I Fight the More I Love You"

 

Given she’s enchanted by fairy tales, it’s only fitting that Neko Case’s memoir The Harder I Fight the More I Love You leaves its readers following breadcrumbs tossed in a dark forest. Sure, many of the typical milestones of the rock ’n’ roll book get visited—childhood record purchases (Best of Blondie, “We’ve Got the Beat” 45), the agony and ecstasy of the road (on bad sound systems: “Your voice sounds like it’s being piped through a thrift store whale’s carcass into a pirate’s wet diaper. Ahoy, bitch!”), the tease and sleaze of a failed major label signing. But don’t come to the book expecting an album blow-by-blow or much dirt or gossip. This is really a book about art—how and why we make it and need it. That involves digging, a care to ever reconsider the past, a drive to outrun whatever hunts and haunts us, from the Green River Killer to familial trauma. And a hope to be fiercely feminist—at one point she rightfully laments, “How do women have any space left inside us with all the shit we swallow?”

Care to read the rest then do so at the California Review of Books.

Review also posted at the Santa Barbara Independent on February 5, 2025.

A Review of "A Few Words in Defense of Our Country: The Biography of Randy Newman" by Robert Hilburn

 

A tunesmith with a con, not a song, in his heart, Randy Newman is a quintessential American composer. And like America, what a bill of goods Newman sells us: racist rednecks and drop-the-bomb political science, feel my pain anthems and a testy Old Testament God.

He gets away with singing from the viewpoint of these twisted characters for a slew of reasons. Despite a fiercely appreciative fan base, he’s never been able to sell himself; flying outside the radar of Top 40 has freed him from attacks from the irony-impaired, except for his one hit, an infamy that was, uh, short-lived. (His best known song, “You’ve Got a Friend in Me,” beloved heart of the Toy Story films, never got released as a single, fyi.)

But those who are in the know get to know people they might never have otherwise. His lyrics, despite the humor that mostly means we laugh ’cause we don’t know what else to do while squirming, give voice to those we’d rather not hear from, like the sweet promises of the slave trader in “Sail Away,” the N-word dropping titular Southerner in “Rednecks.” But the true dignity these characters get are from the tunes. From a family of film composers, and multiply nominated for Oscars himself, Newman invests a cinematic quality to his melodies, providing each song with a kind of back-story.

A Few Words in Defense of Our Country, Robert Hilburn’s new bio of Newman, means to make the case for Newman as one of the great artists of our time. Throughout the book he interpolates encomiums from esteemed figures, and he kicks that off with none other than Dylan himself (he’s a Nobel Prize winner, you know). Hilburn is not here to bury Newman but to praise him, setting up with his prologues a two-pronged attack—Newman as prescient, penetrating American Jeremiah, sagely realizing the root of our national original sin is racism, and Newman as brilliantly funny.

Care to read the rest then do so at the California Review of Books.

A Review of "Rental House" by Weike Wang

 

You’re a mere five pages into Weike Wang’s masterful novel Rental House when she does this to you, as her married couple main characters, one a first-gen Chinese immigrant, the other a striving son of Appalachia, contest a name for their sheepdog puppy, possible considering Mantou (steamed bun):

Nate brought up the propensity of yuppie couples to name their expensive dogs after basic starch items…. There was no fruit or vegetable Keru enjoyed enough to dedicate to their dog. She would also not be giving their dog a human name like Stacy. The other possibility was Huajuan, or a fancy-shaped, swirled steam bun. Nate said the word a few times, believing that he was saying the word right, but Keru said that he was saying the word wrong, and though Nate couldn’t hear where he’d gone wrong, and she couldn’t explain it either, he agreed that Mantou was fine.

Care to read the rest then do at the California Review of Books.

Review also posted at the Santa Barbara Independent on January 9, 2025.

A Review of "What Nails It" by Greil Marcus

 

Trying to write a book review about essays in which one of our preeminent social critics, Greil Marcus, explores why he writes criticism…well, I’ve already mirrored myself into infinity or oblivion. But perhaps that’s a worthy task. For Marcus’s short in pages (87) if long in contemplation What Nails It—part of the Why I Write series from Yale University Press, based on the annual Windham-Campbell Lectures—makes an immediate claim for the ineffable dropping into a writer’s noggin. He writes, “I live for those moments when something appears on the page as it of its own volition—as if I had nothing to do with what is now looking me in the face.”

Of course, what stares Marcus in the face during his writing process leads to classics like his debut (not counting—or discounting—his journalism in Rolling Stone, Creem, etc.), Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ’n’ Roll Music and second book Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century. Both drew musical murder boards that looped lines connecting unlikely persons and traditions, upending any sense of high and low culture; for just one example, 16th century insurrectionist and self-proclaimed King of New Jerusalem John of Leiden meet Sex Pistol punk Johhny (Lydon) Rotten.

Care to read the rest then do so at the California Review Books.

A Review of "Didion & Babitz" by Lili Anolik

Perched in a cultural place between Ryan Murphy’s Bette and Joan and Craig Seligman’s Sontag & Kael: Opposites Attract Me, Lili Anolik’s Didion & Babitz pairs up exemplars of their age to examine how their age let them (and pretty much most women) down. Just as Seligman made the case for an Apollonian Susan Sontag and a Dionysian Pauline Kael, Anolik does the same for the heady, distant Joan Didion and the easily past Dionysus all the way to Bacchus Eve Babitz. This book is not a high-blown literary assessment or simply a twined biography, but cultural criticism told in an engaging, gossipy tone in which Anolik often directly addresses the reader, sets us up for her methods, previews her structure, even offers two versions of one crucial event and then shrugs and says, “You decide.” Didion & Babitz reads as if you and Anolik were cozied up in a red leather booth at Musso & Frank Grill, dishing dirt over bone-dry martinis.

Care to read the rest then do so at the California Review of Books.

Review also posted at the Santa Barbara Independent on January 2, 2025.

A Review of "Dorothy Parker in Hollywood" by Gail Crowther

 

Late in her life Dorothy Parker claimed during an interview that if she wrote a memoir—which she was loathe to do (and never did)—she would title it Mongrel. That’s the kind of telling, troubling nugget that writer, researcher, academic Gail Crowther unearths in her fascinating Dorothy Parker in Hollywood. Crowther set herself a tricky task, as Parker is both someone people tend to feel they know—heck, her poems might get recited from memory more than anyone’s, especially by those fond of martinis or mordant wit—but also don’t know at all. It’s easy to think of her as a relic of the Roaring 20s and the brilliance of the Algonquin and not even realized she didn’t pass away until 1967. It’s hard to imagine her listening to the Velvet Underground and hanging with Warhol.

Parker also lacks a dedicated archive, and very little exists of her drafts or letters or journals. A paucity of such materials just made Crowther digger harder and deeper, both finding many helpful sources from her friends and contemporary writing about her, but also using Parker’s work itself as a means to measure the woman. And a complicated one she was, for as Crowther puts it, “It is difficult to know whether it is better or worse that however rude Parker was to other people she was equally hard on herself.”

Care to read the rest then do so at the California Review of Books.

Review also posted at the Santa Barbara Independent on November 27, 2024.

A Review of "Plastic" by Scott Guild

 

The best speculative fiction gives us the distance to see our own world more clearly. Take Scott Guild’s debut novel Plastic. Most of its characters are just that, figurines, although others are waffles, or robots, or hairy shipping boxes with whirring propellers as means of locomotion. But their post-nuclear-war world is a nightmare of rampant consumerism, life lived virtually, and the ever-present anxiety over random terror attacks from groups trying to wake up the drugged-to-complacency citizenry to its own environmental destruction, in the book called the Heat Leap. It doesn’t take much for our humanity to be stirred by these unusual characters’ plights.

Did I mention when the characters converse, they do so in a quick cut new language? At one point history is described by a person explaining why not to study it: “War war war. Kill kill kill.” And here’s how a match from phone app Hot Date attempts to comfort our heroine Erin early in the book: “It okay feel bad, he says. No need embarrass. I get—I get total. Life just…creaky, no? So tough sometime.”

Care to read the rest then do at the California Review of Books.

A Review of "Life at the Dumpling" by Trisha Cole

 

Despite the obvious misery of the pandemic, if you had the luck, privilege, and health to make it through, it also provided opportunity. It forced us to slow, to focus on how our houses must be homes. It opened up the hours to do what we never allowed ourselves the time to do, whether bake bread (put the pan in pandemic?) or engage our arts-and-craftsy sides we tend to under-prioritize in a world of pressing deadlines.

In Trisha Cole’s case, it gave her time to crank out a family and friends newsletter, typed and handwritten and illustrated in a charming way that will create warm feelings of nostalgia for those of us who still pore over falling apart copies of the Moosewood Cookbook. Which is only fitting, as the newsletters offered recipes, poems, encouraging quotes, word search games, fashion tips from Cole’s teen girls, and more. And now the book Life at the Dumpling compiles the first 20 newsletters, originally penned and shipped from March 2020 to March 2023.

Care to read the rest then do at the California Review of Books.

Review also posted at the Santa Barbara Independent on October 24, 2024.

A Review of "Dogland: Passion, Glory, and Lots of Slobber at the Westminster Dog Show" by Tommy Tomlinson

 

As I was reading Tommy Tomlinson’s Dogland: Passion, Glory, and Lots of Slobber at the Westminster Dog Show, something delightful and ridiculous—at least in name—stuck its long schnoz into my lap, demanding pets. It was our silken windhound, a real breed (at least UKC recognized), bred mostly from borzois and whippets to create a smaller borzoi. And sure, Archie’s hair is sweetly soft, and he can run like the wind with that double suspension gallop that sighthounds share, but c’mon. Silken windhound? 

 That is all to say I’m not going to be objective in the least writing about Tomlinson’s book, for I’m a dog person through and through. 

 Of course I’m not alone in that canine love. Tomlinson informs us there’s one dog for every four people in the U.S., just one of the many well-researched tidbits he sprinkles like pills of information hidden inside all the other treats of the book that explore, well, happiness of all things. When he runs through the possible ways wolves evolutionarily decided to play nice with humans—there’s a debate—he ends “we domesticated dogs, and they domesticated us.”

Care to read the rest then do at California Review of Books.

Review also posted at the Santa Barbara Independent on August 2, 2024.

A Review of "And Then? And Then? What Else?" by Daniel Handler AKA Lemony Snicket

 

Given he has previously penned a series of four books called All the Wrong Questions, it’s not surprising author Daniel Handler (aka Lemony Snicket) would suggest he relishes the frisson of being wrong. He writes: 

That light dawning, that small but potent vertigo as a beautiful idea, taken for granted, falls apart in one’s mind, feels so very essential to the enterprise of literature, not only writing it but reading it and living in a world in which it is written and read. It’s a ticket, being wrong, not only a citation but a way of gaining entrance to something more marvelous and exciting for my not knowing at all what it really is. 

Readers who opt in by picking up his latest, And Then? And Then? What Else? will get to spend 200 pages and change frolicking in Handler’s mind as he struggles to figure out what it really is. It’s a bit of a genre-buster, this book, a sort of memoir in which he’ll do infuriatingly vague things like talk about his time in college without naming where he went (Wesleyan, if you’re interested), describe in detail how he writes while shying away from the writerly phrase process, and lean in to a tradition of many before him, from Didion to Orwell, from David Foster Wallace to Zadie Smith, examining the peculiar compulsion that leads anyone to put words together, thereby, perhaps, helping you do the same.

Care to read the rest then do so at the California Review of Books.

Review also posted at the Santa Barbara Independent on June 26, 2024.

A Review of "The Secret History of Bigfoot: Field Notes on a North American Monster" by John O'Connor

 

How much of writing is staring down the dark. (Just ask Dante and his selva oscura.) Of course that also means, how much of life is staring down the dark, knowing that even if we fail or fear to consider it, the dark will swallow us up in the end. So maybe that’s why we want something to be out there, and why not Bigfoot? 

 Here’s one of the nut graphs John O’Connor offers in his lively, thoughtful, funny, The Secret History of Bigfoot: Field Notes on a North American Monster: 

Whatever mythic yearning monsters fulfill, we’re jonesing hard. Sixty-six million of us, according to a recent survey, profess to believe in just one: Bigfoot. Sixty-six million! As these numbers suggest, it’s not only crackpots who believe. There may be no more sacred expression of American exceptionalism than faith in a monster we’ve adapted to fit our peculiar view of history, unfalsifiable by facts proffered by science or qualified experts, and suggesting a medieval belief in the raw and violent power of nature. Perhaps we all need Bigfoot in our lives, whether we realize it or not.

Care to read the rest then do so at the California Review of Books.

A Review of "Come and Get It" by Kiley Reid

 

Kiley Reid’s second novel Come and Get It might appear to be a campus-set comedy of manners, but the joke will be on you if you think it’s only a satire of a self-involved academic/writer and a gaggle of coeds who lean on the phrase ohmygod a lot. It’s not that Reid fails to deliver witty insights about life at the University of Arkansas in 2017. For instance, at one point she describes her most sympathetic character Millie as follows: “She stood bright-eyed in her red RA polo with the posture of a zookeeper who feeds sea lions for a crowd.” But Reid has much more on her mind than pointing out character quirks, consumerist obsession, and social peccadillos. 

The academic, Agatha Paul, is a visiting professor teaching nonfiction and cultural and media studies, who gets most obsessed researching the young women of Belgrade (really its name, and it is not a choice housing location) dorm, first examining their thoughts on marriage, only to pivot to exploring their ideas about money. That’s a hint—the novel limns what one can and should do for money, but without any preachiness.

Care to read the rest then do so at the California Review of Books.

The review was also posted at the Santa Barbara Independent on May 17, 2024.

A Review of "Last Acts" by Alexander Sammartino

 

If fathers and sons didn’t exist, novelists would have had to invent them. Alexander Sammartino, in his debut novel Last Acts, dishes up quite a twosome, nailing the fear, faith, and fury of filial love. David Rizzo, veteran, gunshop owner in a godforsaken Phoenix-adjacent stripmall, “had been wandering around with his head bowed, begging to be kicked in the balls if it meant he would have enough money to be recognized a decent citizen.” His addict son Nick, as the novel begins, has just been saved from an overdose. And so we will get a moment of passive-aggressive love like this, as Rizzo rails at Nick: “How about a simple thank-you for a father that goes out of his way to make sure you have snacks? How many recovering drug addicts have snacks?”

Care to read the rest then do so at the California Review of Books.

The review is also posted at the Santa Barbara Independent on June 11, 2024.

A Bye to Barth

 

The easy joke would be to say that since I wrote a novel last November it killed off John Barth, but that’s too glib a line to honor a preternatural postmodernist who helped give contemporary fiction a big slap upside its lazy head in the late 20th century (along with others, sure, and I will get to one of them in a bit). But that photo above is the actual copy of Lost in the Funhouse I still own, the ninth printing of the paperback (as of 1980). One of the back cover quotes enthuses: “The reader has to dig. But the digging produces ore from one of the richest veins in American literature.” Turns out that was a review in Playboy. Yeah, times have changed.

Care to read the rest, then do so at California Review of Books.