LA Review of Books on KCRW
The Story
Three books, three genres, three ways to tell stories of redemption or its impossibility.
By Tom Lutz • • 3m ListenJess Walter:
The Kid Stays in the Picture, right down to an occasional 'You bet I did!')
Cleopatra, with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, was being filmed in Rome, the making of which is a story itself – the film came in twenty times over budget, and is the most expensive film ever made (over $350 million in today's dollars). And that is not a coincidence.
Deanne Stillman:
Twentynine Palms that is about a muder in the high desert north of Palm Springs. This book anatomizes the killing of a cop by a desert hermit in the Antelope Valley. Stillman is a great writer, and one of the few who fully capture the sparse culture our California deserts, the kinds of people who are drawn to live there, the reasons they, like the plant life, thrive only at a certain distance from any other living things.
Desert Reckoning follows the full story of everyone involved, from the killer's youth in the Inland Empire to the fiery conclusion of "the largest manhunt in human history." She has enormous sympathy for everyone involved, and yet never lapses into sentimentality or melodrama. The text rocks along like a good novel.
David Goodis:
Five Noir Novels of the 1940's and 1950's
David Goodis, who like many noir writers has a life straight out of a pulp plot (dead at 49), is as unlikely a candidate for canonization as anyone they have published yet. He was loved by French directors like Francois Truffaut (Shoot the Piano Player) and Hollywood (Dark Passage with Bogart and Bacall), but he wrote a lot of terrible novels, and his best are not at the Chandler-Hammett-Thompson-Highsmith level. But these five, selected by NYU's Robert Polito, one of the real experts in this tradition, are all fun examples of the ultra-hard-boiled mode, where characters do not, as in Jess Walter's case, shoot people for good reasons, or as in Deanne Stillman's, shoot them for complicated reasons – they do it, and worse, out of simple greed, lust, and nastiness.
