Category: Reviews

One of my favorite novels of all time…

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So you’ve adjusted to the new music economy. You know the big acts have little to gain from making the album of their lives, because only a few of their fans will actually buy it, and most of them will listen to it on terrible-sounding earphones anyway. The money and the passion previously reserved for albums are being redirected into touring. U2 is travelling with a stage set that takes two days to dismantle and pack up. God bless the big guys for bringing the big toys—sports arenas and concrete tubs are not often a friend to the sonic arts. So when Metallica comes to town, go. They’ve been perfecting the art of loud for years. Like Nine Inch Nails and other scientists interested in splitting the ear, Metallica knows the secret is in the low midrange and not in overdriving gear that can’t be overdriven. I haven’t cared for a Metallica album in years, but the band can still make a stadium rumble. At Madison Square Garden on Nov. 14-15, their music won’t sound like it’s ricocheting around in a toilet. It will sound like metal, not concrete.

Adam Lambert - For Your Entertainment

It wasn’t really the man-on-man kiss or the simulated oral sex that marked Adam Lambert’s performance on the American Music Awards on Sunday as shocking. Mostly it was ABC’s reaction. By rescinding Mr. Lambert’s invitation to sing on “Good Morning America,” ABC self-protectively drew a line that networks usually prefer to keep blurred.

Or as Mr. Lambert said Wednesday morning on “The Early Show” on CBS, “There’s a lot of very adult material on the A.M.A.’s this year, and I know I wasn’t the only one.” Mr. Lambert, runner-up on this year’s “American Idol,” was referring to other risqué performances Sunday night, including Lady Gaga smashing whiskey bottles, Janet Jackson grabbing a male dancer’s crotch and Eminem talking about his character Slim Shady’s rap sheet of rape, assault and murder.

There is a lot of very adult material on television all the time, and mostly it flows unchecked and unpunished, except when it comes as a surprise and hits a nerve. Community standards are mutable and vague; lots of people don’t know obscenity until someone else sees it. Ms. Jackson transgressed during the 2004 Super Bowl halftime show because she exposed a nipple, which is one thing that network television normally doesn’t show. Mr. Lambert, who just released his first album, startled viewers because he did things akin to what outré rappers and female pop stars have performed onstage to get attention, only he did it as a gay man.

CBS, which eagerly invited Mr. Lambert to its morning show after ABC canceled, savored its rival’s discomfort. CBS is still fighting a $550,000 Federal Communications Commission fine in the Jackson “wardrobe malfunction,” but at the time it wasn’t any braver than ABC about defending a suddenly controversial star. After the incident CBS disinvited Ms. Jackson from the Grammy Awards that followed, even though it allowed her Super Bowl bodice ripper, Justin Timberlake, to attend.

The Jackson case showed that indecency lies in the context. People complained that children were watching during the Super Bowl halftime show; viewers normally don’t expect to see soft-core pornography until the commercials.

Mr. Lambert’s context was different, mostly because he is gay and his song “For Your Entertainment” is graphically sexual, with intimations of sadomasochism and oral sex. Straight sadomasochism is suggested all the time in music videos, and early this season Courteney Cox’s character on the ABC sitcom “Cougar Town” was coyly depicted performing oral sex on a younger man.

Television has embraced openly gay male entertainers like Neil Patrick Harris, and gay characters are on soap operas, sitcoms and dramas, notably two men who’ve adopted a baby on ABC’s new hit “Modern Family.” But while gay sexuality is discussed and joked about plenty, rarely are the gay characters shown having sex or kissing passionately. The joke in “Modern Family” is that the gay couple’s relationship is as bourgeois and unlibidinous as that of any long-married suburban couple. (“Oz,” a stark and explicit drama about men in prison, was shown on HBO, a pay cable network.) Women kissing women is far more common, probably because it doesn’t offend: for many viewers, two women romping together in bed registers less as lesbianism than as an extracurricular turn-on for men. Girl-on-girl action is a standing salacious joke on prime-time sitcoms like CBS’s “Two and a Half Men.” And respectful depictions of lesbian love are on shows like ABC’s “Grey’s Anatomy.”

Madonna’s infamous smooch with Britney Spears at the 2003 Video Music Awards was a hot topic, so to speak, but no network blackballed them as a result. Mr. Lambert had a point when he complained on “The Early Show” about a double standard.

“Good Morning America” justified its censure of Mr. Lambert by stating that his performance on Sunday went beyond anything he did in rehearsal (true), and ABC didn’t want to risk exposing its viewers to a spectacle of similar debauchery first thing in the morning (not very likely). Instead “Good Morning America” hosts lavished attention on squeaky clean Donny Osmond, the winner of “Dancing With the Stars.” Mr. Lambert acknowledged that he got carried away in the live performance but said that if he could do it over, he would do only one thing differently. “I would sing it a little bit better.”

It wasn’t the best musical performance by any means, but it wasn’t the worst display of sexual debauchery either. Mostly it was a reminder of television’s policy regarding gay men: Do tell, just don’t show.

Just finished reading/listening to this book. It brought back so many memories of my childhood, as it was a story that took place in the 50s and 60s. The audio book is the best I’ve ever listened to! Do yourself a favor and BUY AND READ THIS BOOK.

Janet Maslin of the NY Times Book Review has it about right.

Racial Insults and Quiet Bravery in 1960s Mississippi
By JANET MASLIN
Published: February 18, 2009

In “The Help,” Kathryn Stockett’s button-pushing, soon to be wildly popular novel about black domestic servants working in white Southern households in the early 1960s, one woman works especially tirelessly. She labors long into the night. She is exhausted. Her eyes are stinging, her fingers bloody and sore.

Is she ironing pleats? Scrubbing toilets? Polishing silver for an all-important meeting of the local bridge club? No way. She is Miss Skeeter Phelan, a white woman. And the white women of “The Help” don’t do those demeaning jobs. They don’t do much of anything else either.

But brave, tenacious Skeeter is different. So she is slaving away on a book that will blow the lid off the suffering endured by black maids in Jackson, Miss. Skeeter’s going to call the place “Niceville,” but she won’t make it sound nice. All of Jackson’s post-sorority girls from Ole Miss will be up in arms if Skeeter’s tell-all book sees the light of day.

The trouble on the pages of Skeeter’s book is nothing compared with the trouble Ms. Stockett’s real book risks getting into. Here is a debut novel by a Southern-born white author who renders black maids’ voices in thick, dated dialect. (“Law have mercy,” one says, when asked to cooperate with the book project. “I reckon I’m on do it.”) It’s a story that purports to value the maids’ lives while subordinating them to Skeeter and her writing ambitions. And it celebrates noblesse oblige so readily that Skeeter’s act of daring earns her a gift from a local black church congregation. “This one, this is for the white lady,” the Reverend of that church says. “You tell her we love her, like she’s our own family.”

A brief word now about Ms. Stockett: When she moved to New York City from Jackson, she came to understand how deeply ambivalent she felt about her roots. If a New Yorker told her that Jackson must be beautiful, she would say it was fraught with crime. But if a New Yorker spoke contemptuously about Jackson, Ms. Stockett would rise to its defense. “Mississippi is like my mother,” she writes in an afterword to “The Help.” And you will see, after your wrestling match with this problematic but ultimately winning novel, that when it comes to the love-hate familial bond between Ms. Stockett and her subject matter, she’s telling the truth.

Expectations notwithstanding, it’s not the black maids who are done a disservice by this white writer; it’s the white folk. The two principal maid characters, the lovingly maternal Aibileen and the angry, scrappy Minny, leap off the page in all their warm, three-dimensional glory. Book groups armed with hankies will talk and talk about their quiet bravery and the outrageous insults dished out by their vain, racist employers.

The worst of these bosses, a woman known as Miss Hilly, treats Minny like a thief. And she campaigns to have Jackson households install extra toilets so that colored help will not have to use white families’ restricted bathrooms. With the kind of lead-footed linkage that runs throughout this novel — even though it may accurately reflect what Ms. Stockett witnessed in her Southern girlhood — Miss Hilly’s Junior League does its fund-raising for the sake of “the Poor Starving Children of Africa” while treating the poor African-Americans of Jackson as if they were subhuman.

Miss Hilly is enough of a witch for readers to wait eagerly for a house to fall on her. She makes herself the nemesis of each of the book’s black characters and many of its white ones. Sounding decades older than Skeeter even though the two were college roommates, Hilly shrieks villainously about the virtues of segregation and the rectitude of Mississippi’s politicians.

News of the real world seeps into the book only occasionally, with a brief televised glimpse of James Meredith integrating Ole Miss or other muffled rendered news. “There is a skirmish in Vietnam,” Skeeter notices. “The reporter seems to think it’ll be solved without much fuss.”

The tide of soapsuds rises as Skeeter comes across a copy of Jim Crow laws and is galvanized into action; as Skeeter the liberal-minded spinster begins dating the son of an intolerant local politician; as Skeeter begins wondering what happened to Constantine, the maid who lovingly raised her; and as both Aibileen and Minny become increasingly privy to the secrets of their employers’ households.

Though “The Help” might well have veered off into violent repression of these maids’ outspokenness (one character is blinded for having accidentally used a whites-only bathroom), Ms. Stockett doesn’t take it there. She’s interested in the affection and intimacy buried beneath even the most seemingly impersonal household connections.

Aibileen is this book’s loveliest character, especially in scenes that have her raising Mae Mobley, the toddler now in her charge. Having endured the pain of raising white child after white child only to see them grow up and away from her, Aibileen is still ready to embrace another one. On the evidence of Ms. Stockett’s autobiographical afterword, this is the part of the story she knows best; she herself had an absentee white mother and was raised by a black woman named Demetrie. She loved Demetrie dearly without ever giving much thought to what Demetrie’s life was like, and she says that “The Help” was written to fill in that gap.

Mae Mobley’s little games include pretending to stage a sit-in at a Woolworth’s counter and pretending to ride the bus with Rosa Parks. Or so it goes in this ultimately soft-pedaled version of Southern women’s lives, one in which real danger is usually at a distance.

At one point Skeeter hears a strange new guy, Bob Dylan, singing a strange new song, “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” and finds herself full of optimism. Had she heard the same Bob Dylan singing “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” his accusatory song about the fatal caning of a 51-year-old black barmaid by a young white patrician, “The Help” might have ventured outside its harsh yet still comfortable, reader-friendly world.

“The ’60s are gone, dope will never be as cheap, sex never as free, and the rock and roll never as great.” – Abbie Hoffman

I saw The Beatles in concert a long time ago (can you believe the ticket prices ranged from $2.50 to $5.50)

and just the other night went to see The Fab Faux, a Beatles tribute band perform.

They were really, really good and brought back tons of memories for me. I enjoyed it thoroughly! And as this review says,

Lee [one of the Fab Faux] said that playing in the Fab Faux definitely makes him wish the Beatles had stayed together to witness the amazing advances in audio technology that would have allowed them to take their latter-day compositions on the road. “I often think how sad it is that they were so ahead of the technology,” he said.

Rolling Stone wrote this article about the band back in 2005 and it’s right on. Go see them if they come to a city near you. You won’t regret it!

New York combo is the greatest Beatles cover band — without the wigs, by David Fricke, Aug 03, 2005

One day in early 1998, Jimmy Vivino, guitarist and arranger for the Max Weinberg 7, the house band on Late Night With Conan O’Brien, ran into his neighbor Will Lee, bassist for Paul Shaffer’s CBS Orchestra on Late Show With David Letterman, in the elevator of their Manhattan apartment building. “We were going to our shows,” Vivino says, “and Will goes, ‘Hey, I’m starting a Beatles cover band.’ The first thing I said was ‘Why? There are plenty of Beatles tribute bands out there.’”

“Then I realized he was serious,” Vivino recalls. “He said, ‘I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about the way classical musicians start a chamber orchestra to play Mozart. I’m talking about playing the Beatles’ songs and records live, as perfectly as we can.’ I said, ‘Without the wigs?’” Lee’s reply was quick: “Sure.”

Seven years later, the Fab Faux — Lee, Vivino, guitarist Frank Agnello, drummer Rich Pagano and multi-instrumentalist Jack Petruzzelli, all of whom sing lead and harmony vocals — are the most accomplished band in the Beatles-cover business. Since debuting at New York’s China Club in May 1998, the Fab Faux have mastered and played more than 160 of the 211 songs in the official canon — according to Agnello, the Faux’s resident Beatles statistician — and most are complex hits and post-’65 LP tracks the Beatles never performed in concert. The Fab Faux are surely the only Beatles tribute band that has never covered “She Loves You,” “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and “I Saw Her Standing There” but has re-created the complete White Album collage “Revolution 9″ live. The Faux don’t do the obvious, says Lee: “We do the impossible.”

They do it to the letter. At a June club date in New York, augmented by small horn and string sections, the Faux went the distance, from the chiming guitars and high brassy vocals of “Please Mr. Postman,” on 1963′s With the Beatles, to Petruzzelli’s perfect take on Paul McCartney’s soulman howl in Abbey Road’s “Oh! Darling.” Pagano vocally evoked John Lennon tripping through watery reverb in “I Am the Walrus,” while drumming in strict Ringo Starr time. And in “Penny Lane,” guest trumpeter Lew Soloff blew the brief, closing cadenza found only on the rare promo version of the single.

“When we play the early stuff, it’s fun,” Pagano says one day before a Faux rehearsal. “But when we play the later stuff, it becomes an enigma, this dream state — how it would have been.” The Faux are religiously attentive to vintage studio detail. Lee recently bought a cowbell that matches the exact pitch of the one the Beatles used during the recording of “I Call Your Name.” But Agnello insists, “We’re not that exact. We learn all the parts from the records, but we sing the songs in our own voices.” And when all five voices spread out in full harmony in “Nowhere Man” or when Vivino spins out on lead guitar at the end of “Paperback Writer,” the Faux invigorate the artistry of even the Beatles’ most intricate studio masterpieces with top chops and Beatlemaniac glee. “It’s not just a cover band,” Pagano claims. “This is the greatest music ever written, and we’re such freaks for it.”

Ranging in age from forty (Petruzzelli) to fifty-two (Lee), the Fab Faux are all veteran session players, songwriters and touring sidemen who were already pressed for spare time when they met at Lee’s home for their initial practice. The first thing they tried: the ornate waterfall vocals of “Because,” on Abbey Road. “And we nailed it pretty well,” Lee remembers. “But this is not a band of weekenders. Other Beatles bands have the same love for the music, but they don’t have the edge. They don’t do what we do for a living.”

Pagano, who oversees the Faux’s booking and financial affairs, hopes the band can start doing more than its current two dozen or so gigs a year and meet a growing demand for appearances outside New York. (The Faux’s next big local shows are September 11th and 12th at Webster Hall, where they will perform Ex-Factor, a thematic salute to the Beatles’ solo years.) “We get so many requests to play in other big cities,” says Pagano. “But Will and Jimmy never know when their vacations are coming up, and touring is a big part of Jack’s and my life.” In June, Petruzzelli missed only his second Faux gig in six years because he was in Europe with Rufus Wainwright. (The Faux have understudies for such rare occasions.)

The Fab Faux long ago learned to live with the stigma of being a cover band. “The first thing I tell people is ‘We don’t dress up,’” says Petruzzelli. “Some people are just not open to it, period.” But for the past few years, the Faux have been a top attraction at the annual Beatle Week in the real Fabs’ hometown of Liverpool. “These are people who had seen the Beatles,” Lee says. “They tell us, ‘We saw the Beatles many times, and they were never this good.’” He laughs. “That’s kind of hard to take.”

I stumbled upon a 50% off DVD sale at Borders the other day and found this video for only 4 bucks!

As one reviewer on Amazon said about the film:

A hilarious tour-de-force by Dylan of one of his legendary press conferences from the 60s…the only one caught in its entirety on film. The mind boggles at some of the simplistic queries posed, not to mention the contempt in which reporters frequently held Dylan. Of course, he matches them in the contempt level and verbally outspars all comers, while attempting to frequently turn the conversation to a serious discussion of his music — before another stupid question sets off another riff on the absurd. This is for Bob Dylan fans only, but for them it is a huge treat!

AMEN! And for the whole length of the video, I couldn’t quit thinking of my son Luke, the struggling musician in the family, who refuses to be pigeonholed into one music genre, much like Dylan. (and the wonderfully wild hair-do didn’t hurt, either!)

I loved this movie! Funny, inspiring, and as Stephen Hunter of the Washington Post said, “it’s about the transcendental power of — well, yes, music.”

If you’re bummed by the long political season, the endless war and the seeming stagnation of the soul — it’s easy to feel mired in what Yeats called “the foul rag and bone shop” of the human spirit — then you owe yourself the two-hour vacation provided by “Young@Heart.”

There’s not much to it, really, which is another way of saying: There’s a whole lot to it. It’s just a festival of good behavior, a little talent, a lot of work, and a kind of commitment to the idea that shows must go on, individuals must sacrifice for the whole, and that doing good is better, though harder, than talking good.

It follows a choir of generally peppy septuagenarians from Northhampton, Mass., through six weeks of practice, trial, tribulation and performance. The gimmick that has propelled the group Young@Heart to a small measure of fame is that rather than sing standbys such as “Adelaide” and “As Time Goes By,” they’re rockers, rappers and punkers.

So the movie generates a lot of humor when Dora Morrow dodders to the microphone and lets out with a James Brown’s famous cry of life, “I feel good.” When Fred Knittle, breathing oxygen out of a portable tank through a tube that runs to his nose, blasts out a version of a famous Cold Play tune, or when Stan Goldman, who looks like a cross between Don Rickles and Alan Arkin and is a confessed opera buff, answers Morrow with a “Yeeee-oww,” guess what? You’re the one who feels good.

The documentarian is a Brit, Stephen Walker, whose brisk, ironic style of narration and frank inclusion of himself in the observations contributes mightily to the enterprise. It’s also helped by his honesty. Though the gimmick sounds, well, gimmicky, Walker is still a truth-teller and not one to look away from reality. Here are old people in all the magnificence of their elderliness: crusted with barnacles, rogue hairs, strange bruises, splotches, sags and discoloration, the movie doesn’t pretend like getting old is any fun.

But it’s about the transcendental power of — well, yes, music, and each of these folks, with a background in music, has a talent whose expression is a fuel to survive. But in a larger sense it’s about belief. They believe. Singing in the chorus gives meaning to life; living for the whole and not the self, the love of comrades of the same circumstance and situation, that’s what keeps them alive.

And of course the final honesty of the film is its attitude toward death. The movie chronicles the passing of two members at inopportune times, and the hole it opens in this little society, the pain, the grief. But almost like soldiers, the survivors see the deaths not as a tragedy but as an obstacle: It only makes them tougher.

Walker makes a couple of bad decisions. Three times, he stops the movie’s progress and does a little MTV-style video with the old guys set against ironic, comic backgrounds, in frank imitation of the commercial product. He’s not really a stylist, however, and none of these sequences rises to the level of honesty and inspiration the more straightforward documentarian sequences achieve. And it has to be said that the move has a little of the subversive to it. Now that everything is sacred, nothing can be laughed at, but the movie is so up-with-people-y it gives you a little disguise by which you can have a good crow at the expense of the infirmities and bewilderments of age without being considered a boor by those around you, because they’re laughing, too.

What I liked best about “Young@Heart” wasn’t its portrayal of the elderly with a song in their heart, but of a middle-aged guy doing his darndest. If there’s a hero in the film, it’s Bob Cilman, who directs the choir, a mid-50s professional musician without an ounce of sentimentality. He just works himself to death, he gives them so much, and you never feel him preening or posing. The camera doesn’t pick up a whisper of vanity and no sense that he ever entertains the thought it’s really about him. Few enough of those around anymore.

Here’s the trailer:

That’s what my wise “baby” son chatted to me the other day, and he’s right. I’m going to try really hard to use the library more and not buy so many books.

This is a book that I read in July of 2008. I enjoyed it, as much as anyone can enjoy a book about 9/11, but I also agree with this review from Laura Miller that appeared in Salon in May of 2007.

Falling Man
Don DeLillo’s powerful new post-9/11 novel makes surprising connections between the masculine minds of a terrorist and a World Trade Center survivor.

In the days after Sept. 11, when editors were scrambling for a writer who could say something profound about what had just happened, Don DeLillo was a name you heard a lot. The attacks themselves seemed so DeLillo-esque, a freakish juxtaposition of big, glossy, spectacular images and the confusion, fear and death we knew lay behind them. How was it possible to bridge the gap, to find a way to reconcile the Hollywood unreality of what we saw with the dust and blood of what we thought we felt? I say “thought” because most of us only ever saw the towers fall on TV, yet somehow we seemed to be experiencing it bodily. Ours is a culture constantly building mirages and then trying to peek behind them. Reality TV, backstage industry dish, “just like us” photos of celebrities — we want simultaneously to be dazzled by fantasies and assured of authenticity, and here was a nightmare that collapsed the two and then smashed our faces in it.

I wish I could say that DeLillo’s new novel, “Falling Man” — his Sept. 11 novel at last — offers some unique insight into what happened that day. What I can say is that it’s one of his best books in years, a revelation after the debacle that was “Cosmopolis” and free of the bloat that afflicted even “Underworld.” DeLillo is a master of the prose riff, and there are a few riffs in here as good as anything he’s ever produced: a description of the immediate aftermath of the towers’ collapse from the viewpoint of a man fleeing the World Trade Center, three chapters told from the perspective of one of the hijackers, and a final section that depicts, with almost inhuman perfection, the attacks themselves. For these passages alone, the book is worth reading.

The weaknesses of “Falling Man” are DeLillo’s long-standing ones. Most of them spring from the fact that he is an essayist at heart, who presumably chose the novel because it is the most exalted and revered literary form of our time — and DeLillo is not the sort of writer willing to risk being insufficiently exalted and revered. The characters in “Falling Man” are typically sketchy and the dialogue improbable; everyone speaks in exactly the same stagy, portentous manner as the mouthpiece characters in an experimental play. (What woman, being deserted by a lover, would say, “Do I know how to make one thing out of another, without pretending? Can I stay who I am, or do I have to become all those other people who watch someone walk out the door? We’re not other people, are we?”)

But if DeLillo can never quite make these figures register as actual human beings, they are nevertheless the vehicles for some intriguing ideas, as well as the occasion for some gorgeous writing. The central characters, Lianne and Keith, are an estranged married couple who reunite for a few years after he is nearly killed in the south tower. Lianne’s mother is an imperious retired art history professor sliding into old age, and her father killed himself to escape the ravages of Alzheimer’s. Lianne runs a writing workshop for patients in the early stages of the disease, a last-ditch grasp at memory for its participants, who approach “what was impending, each of them, with a little space remaining, at this point, to stand and watch it happen.” Some especially fine passages describe these people poised on the brink of dissolution, including one woman who, realizing she has forgotten where she lives, notices “the world was receding, the simplest of recognitions. She began to lose her sense of clarity, of distinctness. She was not lost so much as falling, growing fainter.”

Age causes people, even Lianne’s formidable mother, to fade away, and this loss feels oddly more palpable in “Falling Man” than the jolting bereavement of catastrophe. It is Keith who has lost someone in the attacks — a good friend, co-worker and poker buddy — but exactly how isn’t revealed until the description of the plane crash in the last pages of the book. His ineluctable drift away from Lianne and their 8-year-old son, Justin, could be interpreted as a reaction to this trauma, but detachment was Keith’s problem long before “the planes” (as all of the characters in the novel refer to the attacks). He is a classic DeLillo protagonist, a corporate he-man, tall and good-looking with a penchant for fistfights and refrigerated sex, gliding through sterile, fluorescent-lit interiors in a state of chronic emotional disconnection — James Bond for highbrows. He is also, like most of DeLillo’s male heroes, rather boring.

Far more engaging, strangely enough, is the hijacker Hammad, who will guard the cockpit of the airplane that crashes into Keith’s building. DeLillo seems to have an instinctive understanding of the attractions of fanatical martyrdom: What is it, after all, but the disengagement that entices all of his heroes, taken to extremes? Hammad wavers between the religious monomania of his teacher, Mohamed Atta, and the snares of Western hedonism — a German girlfriend, the beach scene in Nokomis, Fla., where his cell is stationed before the attacks. He can run this circuit from normality to fanaticism and back again in a moment, while standing in line at the supermarket: “He looked at women sometimes, yes, the girl at the checkout named Meg or Peg. He knew things she could never in ten lifetimes begin to imagine. In the drenching light he saw a faint trace of fine soft silky down on her forearm and once he said something that made her laugh.”

DeLillo’s most believable character has always been the Lee Harvey Oswald of “Libra,” and Hammad belongs to the same brotherhood of ambivalent yet determined soldiers of self-destruction. He might pause on the streets of Nokomis to consider how easy it would be to climb into a car filled with partying college kids, then turn around and condemn “this entire life, this world of lawns to water and hardware stacked on endless shelves,” as “total, forever, illusion.” As a counterweight to Western pleasures, the stuff Americans believe to be so seductive, stands the stark singularity Hammad finds at an Afghan training camp: “It was all Islam, the rivers and streams. Pick up a stone and hold it in your fist, this is Islam. God’s name on every tongue throughout the countryside. There was no feeling like this ever in his life. He wore a bomb vest and knew he was a man now, finally, ready to close the distance to God.”

The novel will eventually move toward the daring suggestion that Keith and Hammad are enmeshed in a similar process of erasure, focus and distillation. Instead of Islam, Keith boils his existence down to the ascetic discipline of professional gambling, specifically poker. This was the game he played with his dead friend, but Keith’s propensity for scraping things down to the minimum pre-existed Sept. 11. Back then, all the participants in his weekly poker game liked to experiment with renunciation, instituting a ban on food, then on colorless drinks, then on any game but five-card stud and finally forbidding “sports talk, television talk, movie titles.” With each reduction of the options, the stakes grew higher. Restriction and ritual become ecstatic ends in themselves.

DeLillo seems to regard this impulse as essentially masculine and linked to the loyalty of brothers in arms. Possibly Keith turns to professional poker as an unspoken tribute to his lost buddy. If so, he’s unwittingly emulating Hammad’s vow to “shed everything but the men you are with.” Or perhaps it’s that, like Hammad, Keith is in flight from the world, wanting to burn off the “various and human,” in pursuit of “a narrowness of need or wish” that will finally render him pure and free. This impulse is, of course, a kind of pathology, but it’s a disease DeLillo can’t help admiring. Every sentence in “Falling Man” has the same autistic chill to it, the same shiny, frictionless surface. It goes down like a spoonful of mercury.

The surprise of “Falling Man” is how acutely DeLillo imagines the terrorist’s mind and how feebly he captures the experience of the ordinary citizen. The figure who gives the book its title is not the man you think, the one who was photographed as he fell from the towers and whose image is considered by some to be too bleak or exploitative for publication. The Falling Man of the novel is a mysterious performance artist (remember those?) who dangles from public buildings in the same pose as the real falling man, presumably as a reminder or commemoration or commentary.

These appearances are exactly the sort of cryptic, arty motif that seems quintessentially DeLillo and quintessentially ’80s, an artifact of the pre-Internet days. Back when the mass media disseminated all images and information, maybe someone like the Falling Man would have been able to strike and then vanish like Zorro, leaving nothing behind but a big question mark. In the 2000s, everything you could ever want to know about the guy would be on the Web, with photos, within a couple of weeks. He’d have a Wikipedia entry. His intentions and their validity would be hashed and rehashed in blogs and cable news programs and Op-Ed columns, ad nauseam.

This sheer glut of information, and of chatter and bloviation, is the signal aspect of post-Sept. 11 culture that DeLillo seems to have missed. His characters, with their walls hung with Louise Nevelson “pieces” and their musings on Kierkegaard, seem weirdly dated, cut off from the mediated existence that their author was once so celebrated for nailing. The quiet of their world is uncanny. Out here, with the rest of us, the “various and the human” have multiplied to the point that they verge on the inhuman. And since the days of “White Noise,” DeLillo has become far more attuned to those men, like Hammad and Keith, who have turned it all off.

A friend recently told me that he thought DeLillo’s prophetic moment had passed, and perhaps he’s right. DeLillo was the great bard of the age of network TV; the monolithic image, its omissions and deceptions, was his subject, not the cacophony and eccentricity of today’s infosphere. No wonder he’s the first one we all thought of during those strange days when suddenly the same show was on every channel. Days like that, however, are few and far between.

I just finished reading The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini for my book club. It’s well worth the read, especially since Afghanistan and the escalation in US troops will (should) once again focus our attention to this war-town country. I pretty-much agree with this book review from the NY Times.

Review by Edward Hower*

This powerful first novel, by an Afghan physician now living in California, tells a story of fierce cruelty and fierce yet redeeming love. Both transform the life of Amir, Khaled Hosseini’s privileged young narrator, who comes of age during the last peaceful days of the monarchy, just before his country’s revolution and its invasion by Russian forces.

But political events, even as dramatic as the ones that are presented in ”The Kite Runner,” are only a part of this story. A more personal plot, arising from Amir’s close friendship with Hassan, the son of his father’s servant, turns out to be the thread that ties the book together. The fragility of this relationship, symbolized by the kites the boys fly together, is tested as they watch their old way of life disappear.

Amir is served breakfast every morning by Hassan; then he is driven to school in the gleaming family Mustang while his friend stays home to clean the house. Yet Hassan bears Amir no resentment and is, in fact, a loyal companion to the lonely boy, whose mother is dead and whose father, a rich businessman, is often preoccupied. Hassan protects the sensitive Amir from sadistic neighborhood bullies; in turn, Amir fascinates Hassan by reading him heroic Afghan folk tales. Then, during a kite-flying tournament that should be the triumph of Amir’s young life, Hassan is brutalized by some upper-class teenagers. Amir’s failure to defend his friend will haunt him for the rest of his life.

Hosseini’s depiction of pre-revolutionary Afghanistan is rich in warmth and humor but also tense with the friction between the nation’s different ethnic groups. Amir’s father, or Baba, personifies all that is reckless, courageous and arrogant in his dominant Pashtun tribe. He loves nothing better than watching the Afghan national pastime, buzkashi, in which galloping horsemen bloody one another as they compete to spear the carcass of a goat. Yet he is generous and tolerant enough to respect his son’s artistic yearnings and to treat the lowly Hassan with great kindness, even arranging for an operation to mend the child’s harelip.

As civil war begins to ravage the country, the teenage Amir and his father must flee for their lives. In California, Baba works at a gas station to put his son through school; on weekends he sells secondhand goods at swap meets. Here too Hosseini provides lively descriptions, showing former professors and doctors socializing as they haggle with their customers over black velvet portraits of Elvis.

Despite their poverty, these exiled Afghans manage to keep alive their ancient standards of honor and pride. And even as Amir grows to manhood, settling comfortably into America and a happy marriage, his past shame continues to haunt him. He worries about Hassan and wonders what has happened to him back in Afghanistan.

The novel’s canvas turns dark when Hosseini describes the suffering of his country under the tyranny of the Taliban, whom Amir encounters when he finally returns home, hoping to help Hassan and his family. The final third of the book is full of haunting images: a man, desperate to feed his children, trying to sell his artificial leg in the market; an adulterous couple stoned to death in a stadium during the halftime of a football match; a rouged young boy forced into prostitution, dancing the sort of steps once performed by an organ grinder’s monkey.

When Amir meets his old nemesis, now a powerful Taliban official, the book descends into some plot twists better suited to a folk tale than a modern novel. But in the end we’re won over by Amir’s compassion and his determination to atone for his youthful cowardice.

In ”The Kite Runner,” Khaled Hosseini gives us a vivid and engaging story that reminds us how long his people have been struggling to triumph over the forces of violence — forces that continue to threaten them even today.

*Edward Hower’s latest novel is ”A Garden of Demons.” A former Fulbright lecturer in India, he teaches in the writing department of Ithaca College.