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  • I'm a writer, journalist, and the editor of The Gambit, the alt-weekly newspaper in New Orleans.

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    Publishing: Tight Shot, my first novel, was nominated for an Edgar Award by the Mystery Writers of America. Its sequel, Hot Shot, was roundly ignored by everyone, but was a far better book. I'm also a member of the National Book Critics Circle.

    Stage: I was a member of the Groundlings and Circle Repertory West in Los Angeles, and am a playwright (see "Stage" in the right-hand rail).

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« And you may ask yourself: How did I get here? | Main | All apologies »

October 26, 2006

The One-Minute Book Review

LayofthelandRichard Ford is perhaps the least Southern of Southern writers, which is probably why he's the most lionized of all of them (the Pulitzer, the PEN/Faulkner, and a lot of lesser awards). He's so non-Southern, in fact, that a lot of people probably don't realize he was born in Mississippi and lived in New Orleans for years.

Hell, a lot of New Orleanians probably didn't realize he lived in New Orleans; Ford wasn't the most visible or voluble of local writers, despite that Pulitzer he won for Independence Day.

I never got that far reading Ford. I got about 75 pages into The Sportswriter and just gave up. The interminable, interior monologues of Frank Bascombe, Suburban Everyman--do not want. John Updike did it first with the "Rabbit" books, and I always agreed with Florence King's assessment that reading Updike was like "cutting through whale blubber with embroidery scissors."

Now Ford has closed out his trilogy with The Lay of the Land. Reviews have been mixed. Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times didn't like it, but it was a quote in Bob Minzesheimer's review in this morning's USA Today that ensured I wouldn't be giving Ford another try:

"Another way of saying this (and there're too many ways to say everything) is that some force in my life was bringing me hard up against what felt like my self (after a lengthy absence), presenting me, if I chose to accept it, with an imperative that all my choices in recent memory — volitions, discretions, extra beats, time spent offshore — hadn't presented me, though I might've said that they had and argued you to the dirt about it."

How would you even begin to diagram that?

Not a Southern writer. Nope. Not in the least.

07:16 PM in Book reviews, Publishing |

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