Book Reviews
The Necessity of Certain Behaviors, by Shannon Cain: The Rumpus, 1/5/2012
In the title story of Shannon Cain’s The Necessity of Certain Behaviors, a single woman from the city gets lost on an “ecotourism trek” only to discover a hidden tribe whose villagers enjoy a blissful system of bisexual polyamory. In “The Steam Room,” the mayor’s wife gets caught masturbating at the YMCA. And in “I Love Bob,” a girl with an androgynous love interest stakes out “The Price Is Right” because she thinks Bob Barker is her father.
The hip, quirky scenarios of Cain’s debut collection, which won the 2011 Drue Heinz Literature Prize, partly explain why her work stands out among debut short fiction, but they don’t explain why these stories are so good. The satisfaction they offer has less to do with Cain’s (wonderfully bewildered) characters or (satisfyingly non-gimmicky) plot developments, I think, than it has to do with her dead-accurate sardonic tone. And given how delicious that tone is, I’m surprised Necessity didn’t attract more attention last year. In these stories, the characters and the narrator both speak in “the flat tones of their urban language,” as one story names it, with an effect of subtle but satisfying irony.
In Zanesville: A Novel, by Jo Ann Beard: The Rumpus, 4/25/2011
Beard once again takes the strangely subversive tack in her new novel, In Zanesville. The stock descriptor “long awaited” feels inadequate; “long labored over” might be right, but mildly put. You can see the results of that anguished laboring in the details of the new novel, and the details of this novel are everything, because once again Beard stakes her aesthetic on making the texture of an almost defiantly ordinary experience painstakingly precise and true. Like The Boys of My Youth, In Zanesville is about, well, boys—or really, the difficult achievement of maturity that comes from dealing with boys. The main character narrates in a present-tense voice that stays convincingly adolescent yet is subtly infused with super-adolescent insight. She never gives her name, but she bears remarkable resemblance to the Jo Ann of The Boys of My Youth, though the setting now is Illinois. She has a sidekick, Felicia, who goes by Flea. (Other girlfriends go by last names like Luekenfelter and Maroni, while the cheerleaders are Patti, Cindy.) The narrator and Flea are “late bloomers,” as the narrator’s mother puts it—and then, enter the boys.
Of course, there are also men at the margins—most notably, the narrator’s father, who is a drunk. Here is where Beard’s daring comes in.”
Apollo’s Angels: A History of Ballet, by Jennifer Homans: San Francisco Chronicle, 11/12/2010
“Jennifer Homans begins and ends her weighty new cultural history of ballet with a provocative old claim: Ballet is dead. Let’s set aside the obvious question of why anyone would invest 10 years of research and 643 pages in a moribund art; let’s set aside, too, Homans’ withering tone and spurious framing (we’ll get to that). Forget the possibility that this death-knell sounding might be merely a shrewd publicity maneuver (Homans seems too earnest). Ignore, for now, the panicky reactions – pro and con – that the slim epilogue to “Apollo’s Angels” is sure to provoke. Predictable controversies should not be allowed to obscure the tremendous achievement of this book.
Because “Apollo’s Angels” is an important addition to the literature on ballet: intellectually rigorous, beautifully written, brilliantly structured. Homans, a former professional ballet dancer with a doctorate in modern European history, rarely strays from the cultural historian’s detached and deeply contextualizing perspective.”
Nureyev: The Life, by Julie Kavanagh: San Francisco Chronicle, 10/14/2007
Ballet biographies are getting raunchy: Meredith Daneman’s insightful 2004 portrait of that bastion of British dignity, Margot Fonteyn, taught me more than I ever expected to learn about the great dancer’s Kegel muscles, and Julie Kavanagh’s 1997 study of choreographer Frederick Ashton hardly shied from exploring his more profane inspirations. Now Kavanagh is back with a revealing 782-page tome on that most mega of ballet stars, Rudolph Nureyev. But one can hardly blush at its sexual descriptiveness. It was, after all, not only technical feats but ballet as a channel for that wild, amorphous sensuality that fueled Rudimania for decades after his headline-making 1961 defection, that had women and men alike sleeping on sidewalks for tickets to his performances, that enthralled everyone from Jackie Kennedy to Mick Jagger. And Nureyev himself never hesitated to boast about his exploits, claiming (probably falsely) to have impregnated several ballerinas. You can imagine Nureyev looking on from the afterlife with that mischievous smirk of his as you read Kavanagh’s dishy, detailed treatment, for he emerges as a prodigious and insatiable lover.
But there is much more than bedroom gossip to smile about, because Kavanagh, trained from childhood in ballet, knows the art.
Click here to read more.
Cellophane, by Marie Arana: San Francisco Chronicle, 7/2/2006
Possible Side Effects, by Augusten Burroughs: San Francisco Chronicle, 5/21/2006
First Love, by Adrienne Sharp: San Francisco Chronicle, 6/19/05
She’s Got Next, by Melissa King: San Francisco Chronicle, 6/12/05
The Kreutzer Sonata, by Margriet de Moor: San Francisco Chronicle, 1/30/05
All in the Dances, by Terry Teachout, and George Balanchine: The Ballet Maker, by Robert Gottlieb: San Francisco Chronicle, 12/19/04
How to Make Dances in an Epidemic, by David Gere: San Francisco Chronicle, 12/16/04
Divining Women, by Kaye Gibbons: San Francisco Chronicle, 4/18/04
O.K., Joe, by Louis Guilloux: San Francisco Chronicle, 9/21/03
Vicious Spring, by Hollis Hampton-Jones: San Francisco Chronicle, 5/25/03
more coming soon
