The Dream Life + An Army of Phantoms + Everything is Now — J. Hoberman: There’s no greater living film writer than J. Hoberman; just in terms of prose, he’s one of the best in the world. Every word is screwed in tight for maximum impact, without ever feeling flashy or coming off as anything but graceful and effortless. The Dream Life and An Army Phantoms are volumes one and two of his “Found Illusions” trilogy, tracking American politics, pop culture, and film. Always fastidious about dates, his books evoke the periods they cover just as they contextualize events and people that would otherwise appear disparate. Unlike Jonathan Rosenbaum or Pauline Kael, Hoberman’s voice is unfailingly even, without remaining “neutral.” Everything is Now is more personal, as the author regularly places himself among the underground of late-1960s and early-1970s New York, largely as a teenage spectator. A fine example of Hoberman’s elegant prose is the last sentence in Everything is Now: “I consider this book a memoir, although not my own.”
Erotic Vagrancy — Roger Lewis: Lewis’ 700-page rumination on Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton is as messy and autobiographical as Hoberman’s books are tight and distanced. I learned very little about Taylor and Burton from Erotic Vagrancy; in fact, I think I knew less by the time I finished it. But what a book: Lewis spent 12 years tussling with the most famous couple of the 20th century, two people who considered living in the jungle in order to be around “our own kind.” Dispensing with any kind of linear chronology, Lewis flits from speculating on Burton’s complicated relationship with his older brother Ivor; Lewis suspects that Burton accidentally paralyzed him, contra all other biographies that characterize the elder Burton’s fall as accidental. He’s not partial to Burton or Taylor, but is clearly more interested in Burton, and less in the woman whom Burton affectionately called “monkey nipples.” Taylor had a lot of body hair, and this is just one of the things that Lewis has excavated from countless other books, films, documentaries, and extant interviews. Rather than a traditional biography like Furious Love, Lewis’ book reads like a perpetual eureka moment, the internal monologue of a scholar deep in library catacombs, constantly discovering new tidbits and angles, without ever coming to any “conclusions.”
Remote — David Shields: “I breaka your face.” This single line from Remote has been stuck in my head since I read it in July. I didn’t like Shields’ Reality Hunger, but was curious enough to keep going through his considerable bibliography. After writing two novels in the 1980s, Shields struck on the form he’s been developing since 1996 with Remote. It is, and isn’t, autobiography, poetry, collage, reality as fiction. Thirty years on, it remains an unclassifiable book, made up largely of personal anecdotes and pop culture assemblages; “I breaka your face” comes from a chapter made up exclusively of bumper stickers. I’ve read most of Shields’ books now, and I’ve liked them all, but none approach the clean pop sheen and formal innovation of Remote.
The Mezzanine — Nicholson Baker: I have to thank Jordan Castro for talking about this book at length on The Bret Easton Ellis Podcast last month. I enjoyed his novel Muscle Man, but I read The Mezzanine right after, and that overshadowed all of my reading for about a month. Baker’s 1988 debut takes place during one man’s lunch break at a corporate office job, a predecessor to the protagonists of Fight Club and Office Space. His tone is as flat as a technical manual, but through extensive footnotes, Baker gradually reveals his narrator’s inner behavior through asides in the middle of long digressions on shoelaces, milk men, earplugs, CVS, and much more. The Mezzanine is the funniest book I read this year, a novel whose punchline comes in the form of a stats list near the end. This isn’t some dry, opaque intellectual exercise despite the lack of a traditional narrative; the book’s flat tone is exactly what makes it funny, because Baker knows exactly when to bend it.
Last Call — Daniel Okrent: Okrent’s 2010 history on the rise and fall of Prohibition in America is full of once famous and influential people largely forgotten today: Richmond Hobson, Mabel Walker Willebrandt, Jane Addams, William Jennings Bryan. Prohibition’s failure and the immediate aftermath of its repeal is relatively well known: organized crime developed to serve a public not ready to quit drinking, and their power structures remained in place after repeal. What’s less known is what spurred Prohibition in the first place: Americans drank shocking amounts of liquor in the 1800s, often simply poison that blinded them (“blind drunk” was a literal, descriptive term); even if men got merely drunk, they beat the shit out of their families, and it was a largely female-led temperance movement that convinced the country to go dry. But by the time Prohibition was made law in 1920, the situation was already compromised and bound to fail, or backfire. Okrent’s prose is clean, fluid, and far from dusty, making obscure figures like Hobson and Walker vividly real. An exemplary and underrated book of American history.
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter: @NickyOtisSmith