FICTION: A ROCK STAR WHO WASN’T
Stone Arabia by Dana Spiotta
At the center of Dana Spiotta’s new book, “Stone Arabia,” sits a 50-year-old bartender named Nik Worth who sponges off his devoted sister, Denise. In the late ’70s, Nik and his band almost made it big. “Nik had the sensibility down,” Denise remembers. “And Nik had the look down. He was born to look pasty and skinny and angular.” Like so many other musicians, though, he never attained escape velocity, and his career faded away, another no-hit wonder in the City of Angels.
Faced with the prospect of oblivion, Nik began throwing all his energy into creating an alternative history of a spectacular career, a sprawling collection of fake documents he calls “The Chronicles.” Even as his real life stagnated into loneliness and poverty, he wrote Rolling Stone profiles of himself, Los Angeles Times reviews of his music (good and bad), fan magazines and newsletters. He created his own concert posters and album covers. He wrote lyrics and recorded his own CDs. Eventually, “The Chronicles” grew to more than 30 volumes of faux history that describe the life- work of a musical colossus on a par with Elvis.
We get only well-parceled glimpses of Nik and his postmodern autobiography. “Stone Arabia” is as much about Denise, the younger sibling who adores him, who thinks of herself only as a footnote to her brother’s private success. She may spend the whole novel looking at Nik, but she becomes the more fascinating, tragically resonant character for us. A hypochondriac who’s desperately unhappy but terrified of dying, she’s rubbed raw with “a nearly debilitating sympathy” for every tragedy she sees in the news. While Nik meticulously constructs his own glorious past, Denise remains panicked about losing hers. She challenges herself every day with little games to forestall the symptoms of Alzheimer’s that have already ravaged her mother’s brain.
What’s most remarkable about “Stone Arabia” is the way Spiotta explores such broad, endemic social ills in the small, peculiar lives of these sad siblings. Her reflections on the precarious nature of modern life are witty until they’re really unsettling. She’s captured that hankering for something alluring in the past that never was — a moment of desire and pretense that the best pop music articulates for each generation and makes everything else that comes later sound flat and disappointing.
NONFICTION: A MASTER CRITIC
When Movies Mattered by Dave Kehr
For a number of years, it has seemed obvious to me that the best movie critic in America is Dave Kehr, who writes the DVD column for The New York Times. Kehr tends to focus on older titles in his column, but a new collection of his work from the period when he was the movie critic at the Chicago Reader titled “When Movies Mattered” allows us to bask in his passionate enthusiasms and equally passionate dislikes.
Among the former: Malick, Welles, Hitchcock, Blake Edwards. Among the latter: Huston and Wilder, although, oddly, Kehr liked “Fedora.”
This is a long-overdue collection by a brilliantly incisive mind with a style to match. (Kehr is not one of those writers who takes 1,000 words to get into second gear.) Oddly enough, although Kehr obviously feels that the movies have gotten worse, it seems to me that his style has gotten stronger in recent years — communicating more in less space.
My only complaint about the book stems from its title, which implies a receding golden age, when objective history tells us that it’s always a golden age when you’re 20, and it’s never a golden age when you’re 70.
NONFICTION: COMBAT-TESTED WISDOM
How to Avoid Being killed in a War Zone: The Essential Survival Guide for Dangerous Places by Rosie Garthwaite
When in a war zone, wear a bra to bed, in case you need to run for it. Bring condoms, which can function as sterile gloves, water carriers or party balloons. Do daily exercise, pack granola bars, and carry a portable saw, for amputations.
In “How to Avoid Being Killed in a War Zone,” Rosie Garthwaite, a journalist working for Al Jazeera, keeps things light as she offers advice to those bound for restive areas. In first-person voice, she weaves her own experience with anecdotes from fellow journalists, aid workers, former hostages and other war-zone veterans.
The contributors do not always agree — some advise dressing like the locals to blend in; others warn that this could offend — but in wartime it’s probably a good idea not to stick too rigidly to any one approach. The information on medical care, wilderness survival and food would be useful anywhere, while the cultural advice skews heavily toward Islamic countries, where most of the contributors have worked.
Noncombatants who enter war zones voluntarily, and repeatedly, compose a rarified society where “real” life can fade into a distant haze. With danger always present, perspectives can become skewed, causing people to jump recklessly into the middle of firefights — or into each other’s beds. For the latter, there are the aforementioned condoms. For the former, as one contributor writes, when a 50-50 chance of being killed starts to look like playable odds, “That’s when it’s time to leave.”
