LA Review of Books

A LARB Radio double header on two mavericks of independent cinema. In the first half of the show, Kate Wolf and Eric Newman are joined by Joyce Chopra to discuss her new memoir, Lady Director: Adventures in Hollywood, Television, and Beyond. The book traces Chopra's earliest inspirations as a young girl growing up near Coney Island to the projects that launched her storied career across TV news, documentaries and feature films, including the feminist classics Joyce at 34 and Smooth Talk. The memoir also engages larger questions about how women combatted sexism in the entertainment industry before the #MeToo movement and in its wake. Chopra's story offers a path for women in film and beyond to find creative achievement, and that moving target we call happiness. Next, Kate Wolf speaks with Chris Smith about his most recent movie, Sr. It documents the career of the American underground filmmaker Robert Downey Sr., who’s best known for his 1969 farce Putney Swope, about an advertising agency in New York City. Downey made over a dozen other films, such as Greaser’s Palace, Chafed Elbows, and Hugo Pool, which stars his son, the actor Robert Downey Jr., who made his debut in another film of his father’s, Pound, when he was only five years old. In Sr. Smith follows Robert Downey Jr.'s experience of reckoning with his father’s wildly creative and unconventional life, his complicated parenting, and his painful decline as he struggles with Parkinsons, all while celebrating the work of a true iconoclast.

Kate Wolf speaks with the writer and psychoanalyst Jamieson Webster about her most recent book Disorganisation and Sex, which collects a decade’s worth of Webster’s essays on themes such as desire, pleasure, fantasy, and the unconscious, and the often uneasy relationships we have with them in our everyday lives. Sex, Webster writes, is sometimes felt as a curse, not a cure—and by extension its disorganizing force is both highly guarded and legislated against (as it was recently with the overturning of Roe vs Wade). In her writing and clinical work, Webster sees the role of the psychoanalyst as someone “who takes on the burden of disorganisation and tries, at all costs, to do something other than make it go away,” leaving room for its revelatory potential and power to change us. Also, Hilton Als, author of My Pinup, returns to recommend Henry Green's Party Going.

Hilton Als, joins Eric Newman to discuss his new book, My Pinup, a hybrid memoir-essay that explores questions of race, desire, and autonomy through an intense and intimate focus on Hilton's relationship with and to polymath musician and sexual dynamo Prince. By looking at Prince as a subject of queer desire and being and at his recording career as a study in the struggle between Black excellence and white corporate control, MY PINUP probes the simultaneous allure of Black queer aesthetics and its disavowal in the hostile terrains of the music industry and American culture. The memoir/essay offers us a chance to remember and get close to the Prince that was, and to mourn the Prince that could have been. Also, Dionne Irving, author of The Islands, returns to recommend A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance by Hanif Abdurraqib.

Dionne Irving joins Eric Newman to talk about her debut story collection, The Islands. Moving across the United States, Canada, Jamaica, England, and France, the collection explores the female characters’ experience of diasporic dislocation, that feeling of never quite fitting into the rhythms of either their adopted culture or their culture of origin. Dionne’s stories reveal origin — that foundational and orienting sense of where one is “from” — as an eternally unsettled question for her female protagonists, troubling the ways in which they find or make a home for themselves among people and places that never feel entirely theirs. Also, Peter Brooks, author of Seduced by Story: The Use and Abuse of Narrative, returns to recommend The Shadow King by Maaza Mengiste as well as The Anomaly by Herve Le Tellier.

Kate Wolf and Medaya Ocher are joined by literary critic and scholar Peter Brooks. Brooks is the Sterling Professor of Comparative Literature Emeritus at Yale. He is the author of many books but perhaps most notably of Reading for the Plot, originally published in 1984, which initiated the narrative turn in literary criticism. In it, Brooks focused on the story, how it was told and how it moved forward. His latest book Suduced by Story returns to narrative as its main subject, 30 years later. Brooks now finds narrative everywhere — from President Bush invoking the “stories” of all of his cabinet members to corporate websites touting the company “story”. What does this narrative takeover mean? Why have we started to privilege storytelling over any other form of expression? Brooks writes “This…suggests something in our culture has gone astray.” Peter Brooks joins us today to discuss, as he puts it, “the misuses, and mindless uses, of narrative.” Also, Darryl Pinckney, author of Come Back in September, returns to recommend three books: Elizabeth Hardwick's Seduction and Betrayal; Margo Jefferson's Constructing a Nervous System; and Marina Warner's Esmond and Ilia.

In the first half of the show, Kate Wolf and Eric Newman are joined by LARB contributing editor Jon Wiener to remember the historian Mike Davis, who died last week at 76 years old. Jon and Mike were longtime friends and together they wrote Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties, Davis's final book. Then Kate speaks with the writer Constance Debré about her novel, Love Me Tender, the first of her books to be translated in English. It follows a woman, who like Debré was once a lawyer, but has quit her job, and vacated the comforts of her former life to devote herself to her writing. She has a son from her marriage named Paul. After telling her husband, who she's separated from, that she has decided to be with women, the narrator’s ex starts to turn Paul against her and prevents her from seeing him. The novel takes place over the span of a glacial court case that will decide the narrator's fate with her son—all the while asking critical questions about the fearsome nature of unconditional love and attachment, the roles of gender and motherhood, and the unassailability of the truth.

Eric Newman and Kate Wolf speak with the novelist and critic Darryl Pinckney about his new memoir, Come Back in September: A Literary Education on West Sixty-Seventh Street, Manhattan. The book recounts Pinckney’s relationship with a legend of American letters: the singular stylist Elizabeth Hardwick. Hardwick was Pinckney’s professor in a creative writing class at Barnard in the early 1970s, and they quickly became close friends. She invited him into her home, into her writing process, and into a world of New York literary culture and gossip, which Pinckney doles out here in generous cupfuls. It was through Hardwick that Pinckney met Barbara Epstein, an editor and co-founder of the New York Review of Books, where he began his writing career. His memoir documents a critical time in both his own life and in Hardwick’s, including the dissolution of her marriage to the poet Robert Lowell, and the composition of her masterful novel, Sleepless Nights. Also, Namwali Serpell, author of The Furrows, returns to recommend "Old Boys Old Girls" a short story by Edward P. Jones from his collection All Aunt Hagar's Children.

On this special LARB Book Club episode of the Radio Hour, Boris Dralyuk and Medaya Ocher are joined by Namwali Serpell, to speak about her new novel, The Furrows. One of the most daring and protean literary voices working today, Serpell is a Zambian-born novelist and essayist, and a professor of English at Harvard University. Her debut novel, The Old Drift, a genre-bending saga tracing the legacies of three families, appeared in 2019 and won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Arthur C. Clarke Award for science fiction, and the Los Angeles Times’s Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. Her equally unclassifiable — a compliment, that — work of nonfiction, Stranger Faces, appeared the following year, as part of Transit Books’ series of Undelivered Lectures, and was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award. Serpell is also the recipient of a 2020 Windham-Campbell Literature Prize, the 2015 Caine Prize for African Writing, and a 2011 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award. Like The Old Drift, The Furrows defies narrative conventions and readerly expectations, but it does so with a narrower aim in view, homing in on the after-affects — which are, truth be told, manifold — of a particular, though uncertain, trauma, an event that fractures the protagonist’s life and sense of self at the age of 12. Blamed for the death of her younger brother, Cassandra is haunted by the presence of his absence — or is it simply his presence? — for the rest of her days. What Serpell’s novel tells us is what Cassandra promises to tell us: not what happened, but how it felt. Also, Kathern Scanlan, author of Kick the Latch returns to recommend Charles Reznikoff's Testimony: The United States 1885-1915: Recitative.

Kathryn Scanlan joins Kate Wolf and Medaya Ocher to discuss her new novel, Kick the Latch. A series of taut, electrifying vignettes based on real-life interviews, the book narrates the life of Sonia, a horse trainer in rural Iowa, who enters the world of competitive racing while still in high school. Sonia’s experiences at the racetrack are by turns exultant and brutal: they take place in an atmosphere in which both human and animal are often pushed to the edge of their lives in the name of winning it all. But Sonia’s grit, devotion, and perseverance serve to counter to the exceptional details of her life and work. In her, Scanlan crafts a uniquely humane and gripping voice that reveals itself in small details, idiosyncratic phrases, and deep tenderness. Also, Hua Hsu, author of Stay True, returns to recommend Maxine Hong Kingston's Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book.

Hua Hsu joins Eric Newman to discuss his latest book, STAY TRUE. The memoir recounts Hua's feeling of being caught between the Taiwanese culture of his immigrant parents and the burgeoning Silicon Valley suburbs in which he was raised. A lifeline of sorts is thrown to him in the form of Ken Ishida, a confident young man from a multigenerational Japanese American family. At first, it seems that Ken has every Hua lacks—the looks, the easy social confidence, a finger on the pulse of American culture. But during their friendship those first years of college, the young men support and lean on each other as they grow into adults with bright—if intangible—futures ahead of them. But one night, a shocking and random act of violence takes Ken away and Hua and his friends must try to makes sense of a senseless tragedy and pull back together the broken lives left in its wake. Also, Andrew Sean Greer, author of Less is Lost, returns to recommend Julian Delgado Lopera's Fiebre Tropical.