Hannah Arendt defined the banality of evil; Michael Tolkin dissects the evil of banality. Like Hollywood honcho Griffin Mill in novelist/screenwriter Tolkin’s “The Player,” Los Angeles businessman Frank Gale in Tolkin’s new novel is a man without qualities. “Nothing you do is important, Frank,” says his wife, Anna. This includes Frank’s soulless adultery with his mistress Mary, an affair he has confessed in a letter he intends Anna to read on their upcoming Mexican vacation. But after a long final lunch with Mary, Frank misses the plane, which crashes, killing scores including Anna and their 3-year-old daughter. What happens in the wake of this catastrophe turns into a thundercloud-black comedy as surreal and inescapable as a nightmare.
In a time of sanctimonious viciousness, Tolkin is a writer we deserve-a sadistic moralist. With joyous precision he dismantles Frank Gale, revealing him as a representative figure, the embodiment of the unlived life. Ineffective as businessman, artist, husband, lover, Frank is a master at constructing intricate chains of fantasies, scenarios, simulations. Trying to mourn his family, he can’t help thinking: “I can go to islands now, with women who are betterlooking than my wife.” In a revelatory flash he thinks: “So, I am a monster.” This appalling and compelling book will scare many people who can’t bring themselves to admit that Frank Gale is, in the words of Baudelaire, our double, our brother.
title: “Books” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-27” author: “Jo Hess”
Part zealot, part rogue, Dr. John Harvey Kellogg is a satirical novelist’s dream. The inventor of cornflakes, Kellogg was a pious health nut whose true genius was in making people miserable in the name of nutrition. For the first three decades of this century, he ran the country’s most famous health spa at Battle Creek, Mich., “the town of vegetable legend,” where everyone from Henry Ford to Johnny Weissmuller took the cure. Mixing quackery and legitimate medicine Kellogg preached the virtues of vibrotherapy, frequent enemas and a diet of bran and fruit augmented by such Kellogg specialties as Nuttolene giblets and Protose fillets.
A funny, thoughtful, immaculately written novel, “The Road to Wellville” eviscerates the gullible pilgrims and conniving hucksters who rubbed shoulders in turn-of-the-century Battle Creek. Looming over all is the complicated figure of Kellogg himself. As author T. Coraghessan Boyle portrays him, Kellogg was deaf to criticism and unfazed by the casual cruelty of his cures, a monster drunk on his own omnipotence. “I live right and think right every minute of the day,” he blithely asserts. But is this Kellogg as he was or as Boyle wants him to be? Boyle is infamous for mixing fact with his own fancies. But in this, his fifth and most accessible novel, it hardly matters. He is riffing on biographical fact to nail down one of the most influential, albeit unattractive, archetypes of our history: the puritanical, proselytizing crank. Kellogg’s harebrained remedies are no more than the antecedents of today’s high colonics and cholesterol counts. If we are what we eat, then it was the likes of Kellogg who helped make us what we are today.
title: “Books” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-04” author: “Wanda Rogian”
The Nasdaq Stock Market, which is under investigation for alleged price fixing, is getting more heat from a new book by a veteran Wall Street observer. In Secrets of the Street (238 pages. McGraw Hill. 820). BusinessWeek writer Gene G. Martial chronicles the misdeeds of brokers, bankers and money managers. Although the book suffers from its slew of unnamed sources, it’s a frightening look at how insider trading remains widespread years after Ivan Boesky’s parole. In a section on Nasdaq, Marcial tells how dealers manipulate prices to help favored clients and how brokers intentionally delay executing orders to line their own pocket s. (Nasdaq calls the stories “flat-out wrong” and “incredibly naive.”) Marcial’s advice: if you trade on Nasdaq, be sure to use limit orders, which restrict your broker to buying a stock at a price you specify.
title: “Books” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-26” author: “Cheryl Wilson”
Busta Rhymes, ‘Anarchy’ (Elektra) Another concept album by rap’s resident freak offers warped sermons and lopsided anthems, begging the question: can I get a woo ha? L.A. 2 stars
k. d. lang, ‘Invincible Summer’ (Warner Brothers) Muzak for Muzak haters. Lang’s lubricious voice, swoony sentiments and kitsch orches- tration make “easy listening” seem like a good thing. L.A. 3 stars
‘Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music, Volume Four’ (Revenant) He planned it but never put it out. Not as wondrously strange as the canonical three, but all keepers. And Al Hopkins and His Buckle Busters are sure weird enough. D.G. 4 stars
Rae & Christian, ‘Blazing the Crop’ (Mixer) British hip-hop? Could be horrifying, but these producers’ vintage R&B sensibilities, love of beat and stealth U.K. rappers create an undeniably soulful flow. L.A. 3 stars
BOOKS
Maureen Gibbon, ‘Swimming Sweet Arrow’ (Little, Brown) A young, working-class woman comes of age in this moving first novel–she could be the blunt-spoken daughter of a Carver character. The graphic sex is neither porn nor arty erotica: it’s anthropology with a heart. D.G. 4 stars
Gigi Levangie Grazer, ‘Rescue Me’ (Simon & Schuster) A debut novel–part romance, part suspense, part satire–about a woman working on a cheesy talk show and her drug-dealing brother. Only a screenwriter could dream this up, but only a promising novelist could pull it off. J.G. 3 stars
Stewart O’Nan, ‘The Big Fire’ (Doubleday) This account of the famous 1944 fire that left 167 dead under the Ringling Brothers Big Top in Hartford, Conn., is flatly told, but the story sears you anyway. M.J. 2 stars
MOVIES
Shaft A charismatic Samuel L. Jackson and the scene-stealing Jeffrey Wright as a villainous crime boss make this routine, sloppily plotted action flick oddly engaging. Can you dig it? Maybe… D.A. 2 stars
Jesus’ Son At its best, Alison Maclean’s episodic black comedy about a hapless junkie (Billy Crudup) wobbling self-destructively through the early ’70s is weirdly and wildly funny. When he cleans up, the movie nods out. D.A. 3 stars
Sunshine Ralph Fiennes plays three roles in this epic about a Hungarian-Jewish family. Fiennes grows tiresome, but this bitter tale of failed assimilation and history’s double-crosses leaves a haunting aftertaste. D.A. 3 stars
THEATER
Macbeth (Music Box Theater, New York) Wimp or hothead? Orator or babbler? Showoff or stiff? Kelsey Grammer’s mannered Broadway Macbeth has so many unconvincing personalities, he needs a shrink–and an acting coach. M.P. 2 stars
