Five New Novels & One Work of Nonfiction Considered Alongside Six Excellent Warren Zevon Songs
The great Warren Zevon—there will only ever be one of him—once twisted a quote of Arthur Schopenhauer’s into a pithy line that has haunted me for decades: “We buy books because we believe we’re buying the time to read them.”
I’ve been taking that to heart for a while now, averaging a book or so a week. And it’s been a great year for contemporary novels. And it’s always a great time for Zevon. So I thought, why not combine the two? Here are five novels from the past year or so, and one excellent work of nonfiction, each paired with a ridiculously fine Warren Zevon song. I hope you find the time to read—and listen to—all of them.
Crossroads by Jonathan Franzen
I admit that part of Crossroads’s appeal to me is that it’s set around a church community in the ’70s in Chicago, and it all felt familiar to me. But part of it is Franzen’s mastery of the family saga. It’s hard not to feel something for each and every one of the very different characters. It’s funny and sad and there are several spectacular scenes and it makes you realize how much you like Jonathan Franzen’s novels, even though he sometimes seems like kind of a jerk. (But “he’s a shit-talker who has the moves to back up his big mouth.”) It’s a perfect match with Warren’s great, melancholic “Desperados Under the Eaves.”
2 a.m. in Little America by Ken Kalfus
Subject for another day: the extraordinary number of excellent new novels that would have to be classified as science fiction, but keep landing on mainstream shelves. This is one of them: the story of an American refugee in a time after the United States has erupted and been demolished in some horrible civil war. It’s not just the war that’s opaque in Kalfus’s neat little near-future story: We know our protagonist’s name, but no specifics about where’s he’s from or which side he’s on or even the country or city where the refugee community is located. Americans will always find a way to advance their culture, though. Sometimes, it takes “Lawyers, Guns and Money.” (Also: Why did David Sanborn have a show?)
A Calling for Charlie Barnes by Joshua Ferris
Ferris’s Then We Came to the End is one of my favorite novels. It doesn’t hurt that I spent most of my working life in and around ad agencies. But even if you haven’t, it’s a hilarious and ultimately moving, and even profound, meditation on workplace culture and the fictional characters we create of each other. Charlie Barnes stalks some of the same territory, concerning itself with the life and times of a dreamer of a working stiff and the question of who gets to tell the story. There’s no question that Charlie was a guy who was working it till the bitter end. Or was he? Whose story is it, anyway?
Wayward by Dana Spiotta
If you asked me to make a list of writers whose every work I was nearly certain to love, I would put Dana Spiotta very near—maybe at—the top of the list. Like the Sixties radicals in Eat the Document, Sam Raymond, the protagonist of Wayward, is on the lam. From her loving husband and smart teenage daughter and aging mother? From some outdated idea of herself? Will she find what she’s looking for in the rundown Arts and Crafts bungalow she decides she has own? Is this a midlife crisis triggered by the election of Donald Trump? Some might choose “Poor Poor Pitiful Me” or “The Heartache” to represent Sam’s situation. I choose to see Sam as a fighter.
The Candy House by Jennifer Egan
Jennifer Egan describes The Candy House as a “sibling novel” to her Pulitzer Prize-winning A Visit from the Good Squad. It’s a pretty apt descriptor; both novels bebop back and forth in time, so to call it a sequel isn’t really accurate. You could read The Candy House first. But more of The Candy House takes place in the future, which (according to my science fiction writer friend, Maurice Broaddus) makes it science fiction, which makes it the second “mainstream” science fiction book on this short list. Which brings me to Transverse City, allegedly inspired by the works of William Gibson. Pretty minor Warren, but I kinda loved it. (P.S.: Maurice and two other smart readers joined me to talk about The Candy House on the Radio Free Book Club radio show. Stream it here. And, yeah, you should probably read both Candy House and Goon Squad.)
Bonus Nonfiction Selection: Camera Man by Dana Stevens
Dana Stevens has been Slate’s film critic for darn near 20 years, and is a delightful and insightful member of the Slate Culture Gabfest team. To call Camera Man a biography of Buster Keaton is to seriously shortchange it; in fact, to call it Camera Man seriously shortchanges it, since the full title is Camera Man: Buster Keaton, the Dawn of Cinema, and the Invention of the Twentieth Century. Stevens uses Keaton’s life and career as the centerpiece of a larger story of the last century, and if you’re a fiction reader like me, it’s a great change of pace. And if you’re a Warren Zevon fan, here’s nice change of pace: a cover of “Raspberry Beret” from Hindu Love Gods, which was Warren plus three quarters of R.E.M.
Photo of Warren Zevon opening for Jackson Browne in Heidelberg, Germany in 1976, by Klaus Hiltscher via Wikimedia Commons.
