But then, perhaps that’s as good a reason as any to do it. If you’re not going to have time to read all the books you want to read anyway, then why not go back and read the same book twice, if it means something to you and moves you in some way?

I pulled a book down from the shelf this week that I hadn’t thought of in a long time. It’s a battered green paperback that’s older than I am, a 1961 Grey Arrow edition of The Best of Saki (Selected and Introduced by Graham Greene) that I no doubt swiped from my mother before I left home. Or earlier, actually: a dated notation on the inside cover from my teenaged writing-in-books period suggests that I first read Saki a couple of weeks after my 14th birthday. The pages are getting brittle. I remember, turning them carefully, that this jewel of a book is one of the very, very few exceptions to my habit of never reading the same book twice. I must have read this thing a dozen times before I left home at 18. I’ve carried it with me from city to city.

Saki — actually, let’s drop the nom de plume and call him by his real name, which was H.H. Munro — was a precursor to P.G. Wodehouse and one of Wodehouse’s influences. He specialized in short, sharp little stories, filled with biting dialogue of the wittier-than-thou variety; in fact, some of his stories were composed almost entirely of this stuff, as in the first story of the collection, “Reginald at the Theatre”, which opens mid-argument:

“After all,” said the Duchess vaguely, “there are certain things you can’t get away from. Right and wrong, good conduct and moral rectitude, have certain well-defined limits.”

“So, for a matter of that,” replied Reginald, “has the Russian Empire. The trouble is that the limits are not always in the same place.”

Reginald and the Duchess regarded each other with mutual distrust, tempered by a scientific interest.

Munro’s signature characters, Clovis and Reginald, read like Bertie Wooster’s equally ruined but vastly more intelligent older brothers. But Munro, on the whole, is far darker than Wodehouse. He wrote a great many light and often very funny send-ups of the stifling conventions and manners of the Edwardian age, involving misunderstandings, witty one-liners, and practical jokes. But on the other hand, three of the first eight stories in the book involve corpses, with two of these being small children eaten by wild animals — respectively, a hyena and a werewolf. A child is blown up by a bomb hidden in an easter egg; a woman sits dead in a dimly-lit drawing room while her unknowing husband tries to draw her into conversation; a man nearly dies of humiliation in a railway carriage. Clovis is funny, but frankly a bit of a sociopath. His isn’t exactly the reaction one might hope for in a house guest when a child goes missing, for example, as in “The Quest”:

“We’ve lost Baby,” she screamed.

“Do you mean that it’s dead, or stampeded, or that you staked it at cards and lost it that way?” asked Clovis lazily.

The practical jokes are often vicious. The stories often hold an edge of cruelty, and Graham Greene blames Munro’s miserable childhood for this; Munro was born to British parents in Burma, but raised largely by his grandmother and aunts in a strict puritanical household in England after his mother’s death. His mother was charged by a cow on a visit home to England, the shock caused her to miscarry, and she died a short time later. One could speculate on the source of the streak of dark absurdism that runs through his work.

Greene does draw the obvious lines between the personal history and the darkness of Munro’s depictions of childhood, particularly in the magnificent “Sredni Vashtar.” The hero of the story is Conradin, a sickly 10-year-old who lives under the guardianship of his cousin, a woman who takes a certain pleasure in beating him “for his own good.” But he has a secret joy and solace: in the back of a disused garden shed, he’s been keeping a ferret. It’s not his only friend — he also keeps a hen — but it’s his only god. It was originally just a ferret, but it became a god and idol at the moment he dreamed up its spectacular name. He makes offering of crimson berries and fruits before Sredni Vashtar, nutmeg on special occasions. He prays to Sredni Vashtar daily. When the cousin discovers his secret and goes to the shed to open the cage and investigate, he kneels by the dining room window to offer up a hymn that after countless readings still gives me a chill:

Sredni Vashtar went forth
His thoughts were red thoughts and his teeth were white
His enemies called for peace, but he brought them death
Sredni Vashtar the Beautiful.

I’ll return to this book, I realize, thumbing through the yellowed pages, again and again for the rest of my life.

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And you know, the publicist was right. Dallas Hudgens’ Wake Up, We’re Here is easily one of the best books I’ve read this year.

Some of Hudgens’ work is reminiscent of the fiction of Joshua Mohr, whose three excellent novels to date — Some Things That Meant the World To Me, Termite Parade, and Damascus — chart the lives of the damaged and the down-and-out in America. Hudgens’ stories often involve the clinically nervous, the unable-to-make-it-in-the-world, the damaged and the addicted. In the opening story, “Target,” a middle-aged bar musician enlists his anxiety-plagued daughter to drive the getaway car in a stolen electronics scam. In “Zamboni,” perhaps the most dazzling piece in the collection, a man with a history of drug problems, alcoholism, and petty criminality struggles to find a way to live in the world in the months following his mother’s death; he cared for her for some time before she succumbed to brain cancer. It must have been hard, a friend suggests, being her primary caregiver. “No,” Serge replies, “it was okay. I liked it, you know. It was an honor.” The work is filled with such unexpected moments.

Hudgens excels at character development; days after reading the stories I find myself still thinking about Serge, the violence-prone man trying to find his place in “Zamboni”, and Tek, the heartbreakingly awkward musician caring for his senile father in the story “Sounding Brass.” The language is beautiful throughout (“Her neck was long and fragile, a soft note from an instrument that touched his skin.”) Hudgens doesn’t shy away from the brutality of life on earth — the illness, the decreptitude, the humiliations and the teen suicides — but the grittiness is never gratuitous, and his stories are infused with compassion and hope. Happy endings are by no means assured or even particularly likely, but redemption is possible, and the endings of nearly every story in the collection surprised me.

Who published this thing? Hudgens’ bio listed a couple of books published by Scribner, but the imprint on this one was listed as Relegation Books. A small press, I assumed, but I couldn’t find it online. Had Hudgens published the book himself? I’d noticed that the book seemed not to have been copy-edited (“’Give me ten mintues,’ he told her”), but on the other hand, the book looked approximately a thousand times more professional than any of the other self-published book I’d ever seen, and I’ve seen that kind of typographical error in books published by the largest publishers on earth. I emailed the publicist. Yes, she said, he’d published it on his own.

It’s extremely rare for The Millions to cover a self-published book, but that’s not a matter of editorial policy, and my personal feeling on the matter is that all that actually really matters is whether a given book’s any good. In the case of Hudgens’ short story collection, I think the writing’s remarkable. I was curious about why a guy who’d published two novels with Scribner would strike off on his own, so I wrote to the author.

2.
Hudgens published two novels with Scribner, and then they declined their option on Wake Up, We’re Here. He was disappointed, but he understood: publishing is a business, and Scribner was making a business decision.

Short story collections can be a tough sell in the United States. Conventional wisdom is that they tend to sell fewer copies than novels, which of course might be a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy: it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that short story collections have, generally speaking, fewer resources directed toward them by skeptical marketing departments who’ve been told that short story collections don’t sell very well. An editor at a recent party I attended told me rather wistfully that he tries to publish a couple of short story collections every year; the implication was that he’d publish more of them if he could.

Hudgens told me that he’d always been drawn more strongly to short stories than to novels. The collection meant a lot to him, but he realized there might not be an audience for his book. Perhaps, he reasoned, this was the end of a particular moment in his life. Perhaps the period of his life wherein he published fiction was drawing to a natural close. “I was grateful to Scribner,” he said, “and especially my editor, Brant Rumble, for the opportunity to publish two novels.

I thought I’d accepted the fact that I hadn’t found an audience for the story collection. I also thought it made sense to step away from writing and to focus that energy somewhere else. But it was hard to stop writing. After a couple of months, I went back to work on the stories. And, of course, the more I wrote and the more I worked on the collection, I found myself hoping again that there might be an audience for the book.

He thought perhaps a smaller publisher would be a better fit for the collection. He started querying, but had singularly bad luck: the one small publisher who expressed an interest went out of business soon after. He tried submitting the stories to journals and magazines, in the hopes of attracting the attention of other publishers, but — this part’s baffling to me — none of the stories were accepted for publication.

This was when Hudgens began to consider publishing the collection himself. He’d long been interested in the idea of publishing his own work, and ereaders and advances in print-on-demand technology had somewhat lowered the distribution barrier. “I’d spent quite a few years asking editors and publishers to take a chance on my writing,” he said. “It felt like the right time to take that chance myself.”

He hired an editor and a cover designer, and set about learning the details of print-on-demand and purchasing ISBN numbers. He came up with a name, Relegation Books.

Since I have the trade name and business license, I sometimes think that it would be nice to keep Relegation Books going in the future. I don’t know if it would be possible to operate as a small press and publish other writers, but I like to think of Wake Up, We’re Here as the test subject. It’s still early in the process, and I’m learning as I go along. If nothing else, I’ll be able to share my experience with other writers who might be considering this approach. The experience, so far, has been very satisfying.

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Perhaps that’s why Mark Haskell Smith’s Heart of Dankness so resonated with me. Smith ventures to Amsterdam to cover the Cannabis Cup, the world’s premiere marijuana expo, trade show, and competition. When sampling a particularly potent strain called John Sinclair (named for the manager of the proto-punk band MC5), Smith experiences a moment of epiphany, the words floating above his head in cartoon font — “This shit is dank.” And so begins a quest to get to the root of what, exactly, “dank” is.

I like my nonfiction to be both entertaining and edifying, and Dankness delivers both. Smith dives deep into the world of high-end cannabis, from the cobblestone streets of Amsterdam to the near-ubiquitous and semi-legal medical marijuana dispensaries of Los Angeles and Oakland to the clandestine grow sites of the Mexican Cartel. His experience as a novelist serves him well, as he brings to life the many growers, vaporists, budtenders, breeders, and activists who make up the cannabis industry. We learn about the different effects of sativa and indica, the two strands of pot that each produce very different highs. Indica, with its sledge-hammer heaviness, dominates the California market at the moment, while the light, cerebral high of sativa permeates the Dutch coffeeshop scene. We learn, too, about the landrace strains of marijuana that seed companies keep in vaults. These genetically pure strains are “the primary colors” of the seed business, combined to make endless new variations of weed, each with a slightly different flavor and feel. Smith is so adept at describing the strains that they almost become characters themselves, albeit characters with really great names like Super Lemon Haze, Kosher Kush, and Trainwreck.

If you want to know how the contemporary cannabis industry operates, Heart of Dankness is the book for you. But beyond that, Dankness is a great book for anyone with an inclination towards connoisseurship, because dankness, it seems, is at least in part about circumstances. The right thing at the right time in the right place with the right people. A perfectly cooked egg might be considered dank if you ate at precisely the right time and place. Or an ice cold glass of your favorite beer at the end of  the longest, hottest day of the year. Quality is a part of it, to be sure, but you can’t underestimate the situational component. This, ultimately, is why the book holds great appeal beyond the world of marijuana aficionados. Take it from a guy who hates reggae: I highly recommend picking up Heart of Dankness, whether you have a doctor’s recommendation or not.

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I was then granted two pieces of good fortune. The first, a weekend with nothing to do. Oh, March 24 and 25, how delightfully brunch- and errand-free you were. The second, Arcadia by Lauren Groff. I had seen the beautiful cover, and my former bookselling co-workers were all tweeting about it, so I decided I would devote the weekend to it, hoping to recapture that ol’ reading magic.

I have never unwittingly made such a good reading decision. Arcadia was perfect for this venture, both because I was immediately in love with it, and because the book itself is about experiences that wrap around you until the outside world fades away.

The book is titled after a hippie commune where our hero, Bit, grows up in the 1970s. Arcadia’s charismatic founder and leader, Handy, is a folk singer, drug enthusiast, and inspiring speaker, whom the members of Arcadia traveled with until settling on a donated farm in rural New York. The commune supports itself with profits from Handy’s concert tours, a store that sells handmade goods, and occasionally the sale of drugs.

Arcadia is uniformly vegan, occasionally nudist, usually stoned, ostensibly dedicated to equality, and can be difficult to endure, with its cold winters, hand-me-down clothes, isolation, gossip, and scant rations. But these more sensational aspects of commune life, except for the gossip, are on the periphery of Bit’s experience of Arcadia. To him it is a beloved home, a nurturing village of people where he grows up with dozens of surrogate parents and sibling, falls in love for the first time, learns about sex and drugs, and delivers babies.

The novel is divided into four parts, dropping in on Bit when he is 5, 15, 35, and 45 (roughly), and tracing the lifespan of Arcadia from optimistic experiment to perhaps inevitable demise, then as the legacy that Bit carries with him in his adult life. As a child, Bit is brought up on the dream of Arcadia, believing it as second nature. Even when he is 15, and the cracks in Arcadia’s foundation have become chasms, Bit is still a true believer at heart. In the middle of a photography workshop one day, part of Arcadia’s wide-ranging tutorial program, “he feels, with a gathering of wonder, how this is exactly what makes Arcadia great: this attention to potential, this patience for the individual, the necessary space for the expansion of the soul.”

In the poem “Angel” by Lermontov, an angel is flying down from heaven to deliver an infant soul to the world. As he flies, he sings a beautiful song, more beautiful than any earthly music.

And within the young soul the sound of his songs
Remained, wordless, but alive.

For the rest of his life, that soul vainly yearns for the songs of heaven. Minus a bit of the Russian melodrama, Bit reminds me of this poem. The ideals of Arcadia in their purest form had been instilled in Bit at his purest age, and he never gets over it.

Bit’s Arcadia is such a thrumming, vivid, beautiful place, it’s hard to believe Groff herself did not grow up there. Reading it in one fell swoop as I did, I felt that I too was walking the rolling hills of New York with a bunch of hopeful nudists. And it’s easy to see why even decades later, Arcadia feels more real to Bit than his life in New York City, why he’s always more attuned to the past.

“It isn’t important if the story was ever true” he says, “he knows stories don’t need to be factual to be vital. He understands, with a feeling inside him like a wind whipping through a room, that when we lose the stories we have believed about ourselves, we are losing more than stories, we are losing ourselves.”

The real story of Arcadia — the story of an exciting but flawed leader whose oversized dreams eventually can’t sustain themselves — is an interesting but perhaps a common one. Bit’s version of the story, of a place and group of people that wanted to be perfect, is the one he needs. Groff lets both stories exist, showing us how Bit forms one from the other, and how his version shapes his life.

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Edgar Lawrence Doctorow, now 81, occupies an avuncular place in our literary culture. He has been an eminence grise in the NYU creative writing program for many years, and before his rise as a writer in his own right, he was editor-in-chief at The Dial Press where he edited the likes of Norman Mailer, James Baldwin, and William Kennedy. With his bald pate and genial, bearded countenance, the guy just looks nice. But as we know from books, looks can be deceiving.

A grandchild of Russian Jewish immigrants raised in the depths of the Great Depression, Doctorow often centers his historical novels around violent insurgents bent on overturning a smug, wealthy elite. Ragtime, perhaps his best-known book, sets a white upper-middle class family that owes its fortune to the production of American flags and fireworks against a family of poor Jewish immigrants who find solace in the politics of anarchist Emma Goldman, and a fictional black jazz musician named Coalhouse Walker, who turns violent after white policemen kill his wife. The March follows General William Tecumseh Sherman on his scorched-earth March to the Sea from Atlanta to Savannah in the waning months of the Civil War.

As good as these books are – and they are good – they keep these historical fire-breathers safely in the past, dead and buried and of no threat to us. This is what makes The Book of Daniel an outlier on the Doctorow bookshelf. Published in 1971, Daniel tells the story of accused Communist spies Ethel and Julius Rosenberg – called the Isaacsons in the novel – from the perspective of their son, Daniel, who is not merely still alive, but over the course of the novel becomes deeply enmeshed in one of the principal historical movements of his day, the fight against the Vietnam War.

As a literary conceit, this is in itself daring. The Rosenbergs, when they were executed in 1953, did have two children, Michael and Robert Meeropol, both still living today, and both former academics long aligned with left-wing causes. In the novel, the two brothers morph into Susan, a mentally unstable twenty-year-old college student involved in the protests against the Vietnam War, and her older brother Daniel, a twenty-four-year-old Columbia University graduate student trying to finish his dissertation. The novel is that dissertation, or rather, the crazy mishmash of autobiography, historical analysis, self-justification, and blind rage that Daniel pours out onto the page after he learns that his sister has attempted suicide after being betrayed by the anti-war New Left.

Structured in this way, and set during the long hot summer of 1967, the novel poses the question: What would it be like to know that your own government, in a fit of mass political hysteria, murdered your parents? How would you relate to such a government? And, more importantly, how would you function if you saw your country entering a new phase of political hysteria against a phantom Communist menace, this time located half a world away in North Vietnam, that appears likely to consume the last remaining member of your family, your own baby sister?

Daniel at first responds to this crisis by going mad, and it is this, Doctorow’s depiction of a very bright, very angry young man losing his grip on his senses, in real time, right there on the page before you, that gives the book its taut drama. But what makes the book work as fiction is that Doctorow never loses his grip, not for a second. Daniel is a horror show: cruel, vituperative, physically abusive toward his young wife, and at times just this side of clinically psychotic. The text he produces is fractured and wild, careening from first-person to third-person perspective, from engrossing family narrative to dry historical analysis, from quirkily annotated lists to long, barely coherent rantings from Daniel’s crazy Russian grandmother – and yet the whole thing, if you take the time to read it carefully, makes perfect sense.

The Book of Daniel is metafiction done right, by an author who cares as much about telling stories as he does about talking about telling stories. And just as that other great modern metafictional triumph, Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, is the smartest book about the experiences of soldiers in the Vietnam War, The Book of Daniel is the smartest book I know about the home front during that war.

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Here’s Leonard, brainy, wise, and self-effacing, painting his own self-portrait of the critic as a young man:

Like lonely kids everywhere, I entered into books as if into a conspiracy — for the company, of course, and for narrative and romance and advice on how to be decent and brave and sexy. But also for transcendence, a zap to the synaptic cleft; for a slice of the strange, the shock of an Other, a witness not yet heard from, archaeologies forgotten, ignored, or despised; that radioactive glow of genius in the dark: grace notes, ghosts, and gods. It’s an old story, and I won’t kid you: I became an intellectual because I couldn’t get a date.

And here he is on the way books shaped his sensibility:

I picked up my plain American style from Mark Twain and Ernest Hemingway, my dreaminess from Greek myths and The King James Bible, my social-justice politics from John Dos Passos and Ralph Ellison, my nose for phonies from J.D. Salinger, and my delusions of grandeur from James Joyce. At first I wanted to be Huck Finn and Holden Caulfield, not to mention Prometheus…After a fast start, I haven’t published a novel in twenty years. The public has a way of letting you know that it will pay more for you to discover and celebrate excellence in other people, and rather less for your own refined feelings.

So that is what he spent his life doing: discovering and celebrating excellence in others. It would be impossible for any reader to agree with all of Leonard’s opinions, not because they tended to be left of center, but because he had so many of them on so many topics — literary, political, cultural, personal — and he didn’t just hold them, he tended to brandish them. (I say that as a compliment.) He regarded Milan Kundera as a genius. I say no way, unless you equate cleverness with genius. Leonard also loved the ancients, epics, myths, fairy tales, the wisdom of primitive man. He disliked the Beats after a while (“the spoiled spawn of college literary magazines” dressed in their black turtlenecks and dirty white sneakers), and he positively loathed Richard Nixon. Reviewing Six Crises, Leonard had this to say about the slush-fund scandal that led to the Checkers speech: “The Fund was a nasty little business, a third-rate scandal, really, and rather minor all the way around. But out of it emerged Nixon the cliche machine, the mechanical dispensary: drop in your coins, and out gurgles a wet and sticky sentimentality, a poisonous brew concocted out of mother, America, dogdom, cloth coats, really folks, and all the Technicolored garbage of the boy next door.” That was in 1962. I’m glad I haven’t read anything Leonard wrote about Nixon after 1975. My guess is it would be like watching someone empty an Uzi into a lifeless Clydesdale.

Considering how drunk he was on books — he claimed to have imbibed 13,000 in his lifetime, and I see no reason to doubt him — it’s amazing that Leonard had the time and inclination to sip on television, which he did for many years as TV critic for New York magazine and as a regular guest on CBS Sunday Morning. This book contains a shining piece of fruit from that productive sideline, an essay called “Ed Sullivan Died for Our Sins,” from Leonard’s 1997 book, Smoke and Mirrors: Violence, Television, and Other American Cultures.

In reading this long essay, two things become clear. First, Leonard was not only a brilliant critic, he was also a superb reporter. He tells us that Sullivan lived in a suite at New York’s Delmonico Hotel, with his devoted wife, a Renoir landscape and a small Gauguin. Sullivan rose at 11 a.m. and breakfasted on sweetened pears, iced tea, and a lamb chop. He had no limo. ”Ed is a regular guy,” Leonard concludes. ”Except…he’s made somehow of air.”

Second, Leonard was always writing about something larger than what he was writing about. In this case, he was using the story of a remarkable showman as a way to write about the atomization of our popular culture. The Ed Sullivan Show was democracy at its purest. ”By being better at what they did than anyone else who did it, however odd or exotic, anyone could achieve his show, but nobody inherited the right,” Leonard writes. ”Ed’s emblematic role was to confirm, validate, and legitimize singularity, for so long as the culture knew what it wanted and valued, and as long as its taste was coherent.” Along came the 1960s, and out went coherence, with a subsequent shove from cable, satellites, the Internet. What we got in place of Ed Sullivan, according to Leonard, is sulfurous remorse: “Sometimes late at night, in the rinse cycle of sitcom reruns, cross-torching evangelicals, holistic chiropodists, yak-show yogis, and gay-porn cable, surfing the infomercials with burning leaves in my food-hole, I think there must be millions like me out there, all of us remote as our controls, trying to bring back Ed, as if by switching channels fast enough in a pre-Oedipal blur, we hope to reenact some Neolithic origin myth and from the death of this primeval giant, our father and our Fisher King, water with blood a bountiful harvest of civility.”

Reviewing Smoke and Mirrors in The New York Times, Sven Birkerts expressed admiration, surprise, and disbelief. The admiration: “John Leonard is a writer of such consummate grace, wit and provocation that it almost doesn’t matter what he settles on as his subject.” The surprise: “I’m surprised at how little of Mr. Leonard’s invective is directed at the corporate octopus that lurks behind every wall plug.” And the disbelief: “Does he really believe that the medium shows us who we are rather than what a group of mammoth corporations thinks we’ll agree to pretend we are?” Good question, and I’m afraid the answer, too often, is yes.

Yet Leonard’s writing about television can also be almost painfully personal and acute. He tells us that while battling alcoholism he couldn’t bear to watch episodes of St. Elsewhere or Cheers because he didn’t ever want to see the insides of another hospital or saloon. The man knew pain and he cared about everything, even sitcoms.

But let’s get back to Leonard’s writings about books, which is where he shines brightest. His love of good writing is not only infectious, it’s also mind-expanding because his tastes were so elastic and catholic. He champions many of the usual American suspects, including Robert Stone, Don DeLillo, Philip Roth, Thomas Pynchon, Richard Powers, E.L. Doctorow (who wrote an introduction for this book), Michael Chabon, and Joan Didion. He also torches a few, including Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, Norman Mailer, and Jonathan Lethem. His boyhood delight in the shock of the Other led him to reach way beyond our razor-wired national borders to embrace Günter Grass (Germany), Jacobo Timerman (Argentina), Amos Oz (Israel), Gabriel García Márquez (Colombia), Edward Said (Palestine), Eduardo Galeano (Uruguay), and Václav Havel (Czech Republic). And before it was fashionable, Leonard was a champion of many women writers, including Maxine Hong Kingston, Cynthia Ozick, Nan Robertson, Maureen Howard, and Doris Lessing. Toni Morrison was so grateful for Leonard’s support that she invited him to accompany her to Stockholm when she accepted her Nobel Prize. As Mary Gordon writes in the appreciations that close this book, “This is what John did for so many of us: He made us believe that the reader of our dreams is out there, waiting for us, listening, supporting, understanding, seeing, hoping always for our best, never relishing our missteps but cheering us on in this ridiculous enterprise in which we are involved.”

Edmund Wilson was often extolled as one of America’s greatest critics, but he insisted he was just a working journalist. I view Leonard the same way — not as some vaporous highbrow, but as a prolific, wide-eyed, and deeply erudite observer of the passing contemporary scene, equally at home writing about sitcoms and Nobel laureates, happy to show his face on television, and as willing to cash a paycheck from Playboy as from The New York Review of Books. For him, it was always the message, never the medium. He died of lung cancer in 2008 at the age of 69, and when I look at the blasted landscape of American book publishing and pop culture today, I can’t help but think that John Leonard died for our sins.

In a blurb on the back of Reading For My Life, Colum McCann calls Leonard a “national treasure.” I agree with him, and I almost agree with Sven Birkerts. John Leonard was a writer of such consummate grace, wit, and provocation that it doesn’t matter what he settled on as his subject. Note that I’ve elided Birkerts’s qualifying word almost.

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The book’s opening essay, “Upon This Rock,” is a good place to begin illustrating the point. The essay tells the story of what happens to Sullivan at the biggest Christian rock festival in all of Christendom, the Creation Festival, “a veritable Godstock” held every year in rural Pennsylvania. Many reporters, wise to the ways of the world, would have helicoptered in from the coast and delivered yet another predictable let’s-laugh-at-the-Clampetts bulletin from the hinterlands. Not Sullivan. He’s too smart and too honest to go this lazy route. He’s above being above his subjects. Instead, he opens his eyes and his heart to the people who have come to the festival, particularly a group of guys from West Virginia he falls in with – Darius, Jake, Ritter, Bub, Josh, and Pee Wee. Sullivan’s empathy is made easier, he notes, by the fact that he was born in Kentucky and as a teenager went through his own “Jesus phase,” which ended when he started reading books that “didn’t jibe with the Bible” and caused him to question his faith. Books will do that to you. Yet Sullivan admits that he still loves Jesus Christ. ”His breakthrough was the aestheticization of weakness,” Sullivan writes. “Not in what conquers, not in glory, but in what’s fragile and what suffers – there lies sanity. And salvation.”

Sullivan uses such bits of personal history to great advantage in his reporting and writing. Once we know about his “Jesus phase” – and his subsequent loss of faith, and his unwillingness to dismiss believers as fools – we see the thousands of people at the Creation Festival with fresh eyes. Such insights could come only from someone who has done the reporting and has an eye for something that lives way deeper than the much-ballyhooed “telling detail,” way down in the darker sediments of the American soul. Here’s Sullivan’s description of something he didn’t witness at the Creation Festival: “I’ve been to a lot of huge public events in this country during the past five years, writing about sports or whatever, and one thing they all had in common was this weird complicit enmity that American males, in particular, seem to carry around with them much of the time. Call it a laughable generalization, fine, but if you spend enough late afternoons in stadium concourses, you feel it, something darker than machismo. Something  a little wounded, and a little sneering, and just plain ready for bad things to happen.”

It addition to such gem-like observations, Sullivan gives us humor. Here’s his description of the 29-foot whale of a rented RV he drove to the festival: “The interior smelled of spoiled vacations and amateur porn shoots wrapped in motel shower curtains and left in the sun.” Here’s a cute country girl: “Her face was as sweet as a birthday cake beneath spray-hardened bangs.” Here’s delicious food: “She made rum cakes you could eat yourself to death on like a goldfish.” And here’s what he hears: “There was music that sounded like a rabbit’s heartbeat in the core of your brain.”

Sometimes the humor comes with wisdom, as in this verdict on the meaning of an entertainment phenomenon that started way back in the Paleolithic 1990s and long ago went kudzu: “My God, there have been more tears shed on reality TV than by all the war widows in the world. Are we so raw? It must be so. There are simply too many of them – too many shows and too many people on the shows – for them not to be revealing something endemic. This is us, a people of savage sentimentality, weeping and lifting weights.”

Yes, this is indeed us. Is it any wonder I go all mushy when I read this guy?

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Books, movies, television, newspapers, and radio were forbidden by his unhinged Calvinist father. At 20, Vikar summons the courage to defy his father and see his first movie, and with this he finds a new religion. Movies make sense to him in a way that nothing else ever has. On the day he’s kicked out of divinity school, he shaves his head. The tattoos come later, en route to Hollywood.

Something is off about him, but it’s hard to say what. He’s on the autistic spectrum, or profoundly damaged by his upbringing, or both. He doesn’t understand comedies, and gets kicked out of horror movies for laughing. He is somewhat affectless, except when he’s violent. On his first day in Los Angeles, a hippie compliments his tattoo:

…[A] hippie nods at Vikar’s head and says, “Dig it, man. My favorite movie.”
Vikar nods. “I believe it’s a very good movie.”
“Love that scene at the end, man. There at the Planetarium.”
Vikar stands and in one motion brings the food tray flying up, roast beef and au jus spraying the restaurant–
–and brings the tray crashing down on the blasphemer across the table from him. He manages to catch the napkin floating down like a parachute, in time to wipe his mouth.
Oh, mother, he thinks. “A Place in the Sun, George Stevens,” he says to the fallen man, pointing at his own head. “NOT Rebel Without a Cause,” and strides out.

He lives for movies. He cares for little else, until he finds punk music and later books, and then he cares about those things too.

Zeroville chronicles Vikar’s rise from handyman in the Roosevelt Hotel to set builder on the Paramount lot to visionary film editor. The story has a David Lynchian quality about it, a slow unraveling, a gradual shift from something close to realism, to improbable meetings and coincidences and patterns and signs, to a kind of dream-logic flickering surrealism. The book’s very structure — 300 chapters ranging in length from one word to several pages — lends the book the stutter-stop fragmentation of a film reel or a dream.

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This is how I started reading smart crime novels.  First I went on a Tana French tear, and then I ate up Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter by Tom Franklin, which added Mississippi and snakes to its tale of dead bodies and a misunderstood outcast. These were well-written, completely manageable Mom Books.  I re-read The End of Vandalism by Tom Drury, which, with its snap-shot scenes and meandering plot, didn’t have profluence so much as a poetic realism that kept me in its clutches.

And then I decided to try some nonfiction.  I’d recently given up reality television (er, most of it) after Rachel Zoe said “literally” for the zillionth time, and I thought reading a true story would scratch the itch of confessionals, cat fights, and the shock that the drama is all too real.

I chose Christopher McDougall’s Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen because it was a Word Bookstore Favorite at this year’s Brooklyn Book Festival.  I didn’t attend the festival, but the store listed it in their e-newsletter as the book “that can change your life.” (I see now that the key word is “can”–not “will.”  Oh those cagey booksellers!)  Since I’d been considering getting back into running, I figured it might help motivate me.

Let me get this out of the way: I hate running.  I did it a few times a week for about six months before I got pregnant, and I was happy to stop.  I never enjoyed it: it hurt, it was boring, and I always worried about getting a sunburn.  I much prefer exercise that requires learning a routine; if there’s a mirror to admire and curse myself as I do so, all the better.  However, I liked the idea of reading about running.   A well-written depiction of physical exertion is supremely satisfying; it’s like watching The Biggest Loser, bowl of ice cream in hand.

Born to Run is about a tribe in Mexico called the Tarahumara who run incredibly long distances with grins on their faces and nary an injury.  Like all good nonfiction, though, it’s about far more.  The book seems to simultaneously dilate and contract–its scope becomes bigger as it focuses on smaller, personal stories.  As it progresses it folds in more and more information and background: we’re looking for a cadaverous-looking white man who runs with the Indians, known as  Caballo Blanco; we’re discovering the lifestyle, diet and outlook of the Tarahumara; we’re learning the biographies of some of the best ultra-marathoners in the world, such as the keyed up and loquacious Barefoot Ted, who, you guessed it, runs without shoes; we’re meeting scientists who might have figured out why we run in the first place; we’re celebrating the beauty and insanity of the human race.  By the last fifty pages I couldn’t wait to go to a dinner party to share some of these amazing stories and facts.  Everything I said to my husband began with: “Did you know…” My brain was aglow.

I also liked McDougall’s own role in the book.  At the story’s opening he’s a casual jogger with a bum foot, and at the end he’s competing in a Tarahumara race.  Much of his struggle reminded me of novel-writing.  His trainer tells him, “Just beat the course.  No one else, just the course,” and that advice helps him reach the finish line.  These are also wise words for anyone who’s mired in the first (or tenth) draft of a book: put away thoughts of the larger literary world, its capricious machinations, its fellow writers, and focus on the writing itself.  And, most importantly, don’t forget to smile.  McDougall argues that the runner who approaches the act with joy, and who faces the world at large with that same open heart, is better runner.  I’d say the same applies to the writer.  It’s no coincidence that Anton Chekhov considered compassion a requirement of fiction writing.

The fact that I haven’t yet returned to running is no fault of this book. I will. I promise.  When I do, I will keep my gait and posture in mind, and I will approach the challenge as a child would–that is, like it’s not a challenge at all.

Until then, I’d rather be reading.

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The magic of The Devil’s Candy is that it wasn’t conceived or written as a hit piece. The book is subtitled “The Anatomy of a Hollywood Fiasco,” but when Salamon, then a film critic for the Wall Street Journal, began following Brian De Palma around the Bonfire set, he was riding high on the success of Scarface and The Untouchables, and he saw Bonfire as a prestige project that could boost him into the first rank of Hollywood auteurs. It didn’t turn out that way, but no one — not the studio executives, the stars, the film crew, nor De Palma and Salamon herself — knew just how disastrous a flop the film would be until it opened in the winter of 1990.

As much as The Devil’s Candy benefits from the reader’s foreknowledge that the film everyone in the book is struggling to get made will turn out to be a notorious turkey, the true value of the book lies in Salamon’s reporting. She is blessed with that rare talent for not missing the forest for the trees while, at the same time, being able to see the trees. She places the production, a big-budget adaptation of Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities, a bestselling novel about the fiscal excesses of the 1980s, squarely in the age of Hollywood excess. The Studio System, with its tight budgets and cookie-cutter approach to filmmaking, was long gone, replaced by high-stakes, risk-hungry corporate culture designed to chase blockbuster hits like Jaws and Star Wars. Unlike the founding generation of immigrants who built Hollywood, she writes, the crop of executives then heading the major studios were “refugees not from Russia but from Wall Street.”

They were the young M.B.A.’s and lawyers who had come of age during the eighties, men and women who had never built or run a company, but who thought nothing of buying and selling them — before they were thirty… It didn’t matter whether [their companies] made food or furniture, or if the food or the furniture was any good. The companies were merely components. The thing that mattered was the deal.

Gifted financial reporter that she is, Salamon walks the reader through how this deal-centric mentality led studio executives not only to lavish multi-million dollar salaries on the movie’s director and stars, but also to squander many more millions satisfying De Palma’s every artistic whim. In one gripping sequence, De Palma’s second-unit director Eric Schwab spends hundreds of thousands of dollars choreographing a shot of the Concorde landing at JFK against a background of the sun setting over the New York skyline — a shot that, while breathtaking, lasts all of a few seconds in the final version of the film.

At the same time, Salamon allows all the book’s characters, from the most egomaniacal stars to the lowliest production assistant, to shine with real humanity. For me, the most poignant figure in the book is Melanie Griffith, who is cast as the blonde bimbo mistress of Sherman McCoy, a wealthy bond trader played by Tom Hanks. Hanks comes off as a talented, hard-working young actor skillfully climbing the ladder to stardom, but Griffith, who was 33 and coming off her second pregnancy, was already on the downslope of her career. The film’s creative team holds meetings to discuss what to do about the age lines on her face (“Use Preparation H,” one producer says. “That’ll shrink ’em.”) and everybody on the set feels free to discuss whether she is too fat to be believable as a rich bond trader’s mistress. Griffith throws diva-like hissy fits about the size of her trailer and the crowds of onlookers on the set during her scenes, but for once, in Salamon’s telling, one understands Griffith’s neurotic rage, and even sympathizes with her.

This keen insight into the artistic personality, more so than her reportorial skill, is on display in Wendy and the Lost Boys, Salamon’s new biography of playwright Wendy Wasserstein, published in August. As the title implies, Salamon appears to have intended to use Wasserstein’s life story as a springboard for a group portrait of New York’s off-Broadway theater scene in the 1970s and 80s. Wasserstein, best known for her plays Uncommon Women and Others and The Heidi Chronicles, knew everyone who was anyone in New York theater and seemed to have a singular talent for falling hopelessly in love with the dreamy, driven gay men who made the theater world of that era tick.

The book is very well done, and if you are a Wasserstein fan, Wendy and the Lost Boys is a must-read, but it pales in comparison to The Devil’s Candy. In part, this is because Wasserstein, who won a Pulitzer Prize for The Heidi Chronicles, is just not an important or interesting enough writer to merit the attention Salamon lavishes on her. At the same time, any effort on Salamon’s part to use Wasserstein’s career as a window to the broader theater scene is eclipsed by the sheer complexity of Wasserstein’s private life.

Wasserstein, the youngest daughter of a wealthy, hyper-successful Brooklyn Jewish family (her brother was billionaire investment banker Bruce Wasserstein), had a succession of tortured love affairs with gay men and finally a daughter, via artificial insemination, at age 48. In 2006, just seven years later, she died of lymphoma. The levels of secret-keeping and duplicity this life required is worthy of an Elizabethan drama, but ultimately Wasserstein comes off less poignant and plucky than self-deluded and bullheaded. In this telling, Wasserstein is a woman who simply refused to give up in the face of insurmountable odds, whether those odds were that the gay man she was in love with would return her affections or that the cancer she was hiding from the world would simply go away. This can be charming in characters of romantic comedies for whom all turns out well in the end, but for a real person, who leaves her daughter motherless and alone, it can get a trifle infuriating.

None of this is Salamon’s fault, of course, but books on the entertainment industry work best as guilty pleasures, and while the pleasures of Wendy and the Lost Boys are many, for sheer guiltiness, nothing can touch the pleasures of The Devil’s Candy.

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