The Singer Not The Song?

On First Glance

Novelist Amy Hatvany (Outside the Lines, Best Kept Secret) introduced an interesting discussion on Facebook by asking, “Do you think most book reviews are about the book or the reviewer?”   Interestingly, most of the respondents – a majority of whom seemed to be writers – selected the latter option.   I would like to respectfully disagree with this perspective.

It’s sometimes asked about a great song, “Is it the singer (the artist) or the song (the product)?”   When it comes to a review of a new book, I think the reviews are mostly about the product, before touching upon the author and/or the reviewer.   Why do I say this?   Because I’ve had multiple instances in which I love a book (often a debut or second novel) by an author, only to be disappointed by a later work.   So I know that my judgment is not about the writer as a person – or as a writer in general – but about the latest book he or she has completed.

This does not mean, as I’ve said before, that mine – or another reviewer’s – is the correct view.   It’s simply the one arrived at by a particular reader-reviewer.   I have no problem with considering other views as likely to have merit because each of us comes from a different time in life with different experiences…   Let’s say we were considering two memoirs by women writers.   Would we expect the one written by the 55-year-old cancer survivor to be the same as the one written by the 25-year-old right out of college?   Of course not – yet each would be a valid view on life as she knows it.

It’s All Personal

Someone wrote that music mix tapes/CDs are as much about the person putting them together as the person they were intended for.   I certainly concur with this.   We each demonstrate something of ourselves in the things we love – whether it’s a book, painting or music selection.   Sometimes people can learn more about us, inadvertently or not, by studying our favorite things.   And this begins to explain why book reviews are, yes, also about the reviewer.   The fact that a reviewer likes or does not like a particular book tells us something about him/her, and we hope the connection is revealed in the review and not kept hidden.

One of the highest recommendations for a book is that a friend has read it and loved it.   I recently lost a good friend who sought to convince me, since last September, that I must read the novel Freedom by Jonathan Franzen.   Since the paperback’s over 600 pages, I declined the invitation.   But now I will likely do so.   Why?   Because I will not have the chance to communicate with my friend again; and I suspect that in reading Franzen’s novel I will find something of her in it that will help me to see why she loved it, and what it had to do with her time on earth.

Very Personal

Some innovative new research appears to indicate that our personal views about books and films are even more individual than we suspected.   There are automated programs based on mathematical algorithms that attempt to predict what we might buy.   At Amazon, for example, you might be informed that, “If you liked this book by author Joe Blow, you may also like the new novel by Sally Snow.”   But guess what?   These programs don’t seem to work in practice.

As noted in an article in the U. C. Berkeley alumni magazine, California (“Taste By Numbers”) – quoting Professor Ken Goldberg:  “When you’re rating or evaluating something like a book or a movie…  you’re doing something that’s a matter of taste.   I think it’s not easily pigeonholed into a series of boxes.   Matters of taste are almost physiological.   It’s literally taste – part of your digestive system.   Or we talk about a gut reaction…”

So the next time you read a review of a book that you don’t agree with, you may want to chalk it up to simple differences in life experiences – or the reviewer’s Irritable Bowel Syndrome!

Joseph Arellano

This article is dedicated to the memory of Barbara Weiss of Sacramento, California.

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Here Come Those Tears Again

Come to the Edge: A Love Story by Christina Haag (Spiegel & Grau, $15.00, 276 pages)

“…there are those you love no matter how much they hurt you, no matter how many years have passed since you felt them in the morning.   I did not know how long it would take to get over such a love…”

The hardbound release of Come to the Edge bore the subtitle, A Memoir.   The re-release has what is perhaps a more appropriate subtitle, A Love Story.   This is a grand telling of a love affair between a young man and a young woman that ran for five years; one that did not end in marriage and a happily ever after existence.

The woman was the actress Christina Haag and the man was the son of the 35th President of the United States, John F. Kennedy, Jr.   Young love is hard enough as it is, but consider the plight of a female whose boyfriend is one of the best-known people on the planet.   Eric Pooley of Time Magazine was to write that, “Kennedy had to work through (questions of identity and self-image) while trapped inside a brightly lit media fun house with distorted mirrors all around.”

Early on, the love story had the makings of a fairy tale, with a young ambitious woman (Haag) – an extrovert since childhood – meeting America’s prince (JFK, Jr.) in Manhattan.   And – oh, yes – Haag was in some sense a younger version of John’s mother, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.   John was to say to Christina, “You sound like my mother…”; while Mrs. Onassis was to tell her, “I was watching you earlier – you reminded me of me.”

Suffice it to say that we don’t often learn of the details of private loves and losses, other than in works of fiction or in the biographies of prominent Hollywood actors but Haag is very transparent here about what happened – the good and the bad.   At one point she tells us that, “I saw myself growing old with him.”   Later she explains that their falling apart was not the stuff of great drama, their relationship (which was first a long-term friendship before it became a romance) simply slowly faded-out and away.

Kennedy comes off in this telling as a very likeable young man, one who was constantly attempting to find himself while getting ever closer to the line between safety and recklessness.   What’s lacking is a sense of who he really was – perhaps he had not matured enough in Haag’s presence for her to define this.   As an aside, it was in reading the novel One Day and encountering the character of Dexter Mayhew that I wondered if this was a glimpse of JFK, Jr.   Consider:  “There was something feline about  him.”   “…he had the knack of being perpetually posed for a photograph.”   “Clearly he knew he was being looked at…”   And we know that Dexter was to say about himself, “Everyone likes me.   It’s my curse.”

So perhaps John Kennedy, Jr. had to struggle with a different type of curse during his lifetime – the curse of being one of the world’s favorite sons, greeted with adoration and adulation (and lust), even when he wasn’t quite sure he’d done enough to earn it.   Thanks to Haag, the reader does come to know his mother, Mrs. Onassis, quite well.   The former First Lady comes across as a woman of grace, charm, dignity and loyalty.   Not all of the Kennedys are portrayed in such a positive light, but then this adds a sense of honesty and directness to the account.

“I had the sense that brokenness meant approach and that beauty was something mixed of shadow and decay.   That it was made, in part, from the pieces of the past and the things that are left behind.”

Haag’s prose is distinct and memorable as she tells us about a five-year love affair with a man who married another, and who then – like his father – died all too young.   This memoir is just the right length.   And there’s another true story waiting in the wings to be told by this actress (another memoir).   That will be the story of her battle to survive breast cancer.   Based on the  compassionate nature of this account, it will be one to buy.

Highly recommended.

Joseph Arellano

A review copy was provided by the publisher.

It Don’t Come Easy

Fire and Rain: The Beatles, Simon & Garfunkel, James Taylor, CSNY and the Lost Story of 1970 by David Browne (Da Capo, $26.00, 368 pages)

“Half the people are stoned/And the other half are waiting for the next election.”   Paul Simon

The year 1970, as some of us remember, was the year that Simon and Garfunkel’s Bridge Over Troubled Water was both the best-selling album and single of the year.   But what might not be remembered is that S&G would soon be targeted – during the very same year – as rock’s ultra-conservative sell-outs.   The New Yorker music critic, Ellen Willis, wrote of Mr. Simon:  “I consider his soft sound a copout.   And I hate most of his lyrics; his alienation,  like the word itself, is an old-fashioned, sentimental, West-Side-liberal bore.”

Not to be outdone, critic Miles Kingston (who claimed to be a fan) wrote:  “Some people hate Simon and Garfunkel because their music has no guts, because it is a middle-class look at life, because it slips too easily from idiom to idiom.”   Kingston described their fans as “the left-out kids – the loners, the book-worms… (and worse).”   And then there was the Time Magazine reporter, assigned to do a cover story on James Taylor, who wrote that, “…the people interested in James Taylor are those who never quite got over a fascination with Simon and Garfunkel.   Upon whom it is now fashionable to dump.”

Yes, David Browne has a knack for finding interesting bits and bytes of information that challenge our collective memory.   This is a non-fiction account of the 1970s – and, specifically, the decade’s beginning – in post Kent State America.   Browne writes about the softening of rock ‘n roll in a year that saw the demise of three of the world’s most successful groups – The Beatles, Simon and Garfunkel, and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young (CSNY).   Yet, in a year that one publication initially termed The Year That Melody in Popular Music Had Died, it was to be a year of rebirth in music, of melody.

If the hard rock of the late 60s had just about killed melody (John Lennon had called Beatle Paul’s Helter Skelter, “just noise…”), it was soon brought back to life in the form of new performers like James Taylor and Elton John.   Browne’s account is actually a melding of two – one, a background look at the music of the time; second, a description of the social and political environments of the late 60s/early 70s.   In this it bears many similarities to Girls Like Us, an earlier-written account of the musical careers and times of Joni Mitchell, Carole King and Carly Simon.

I noted that Browne has a knack for finding interesting factoids.   Here’s another one…  According to his research, backed by Paul Simon and Paul McCartney, two of the major songs of the decade were written not for the composer’s own group/band but for the voice of Aretha Franklin.   Yes, both Bridge Over Troubled Water and Let It Be were specifically written for the Queen of Soul, who – luckily for fate – rejected them.   It’s one reason that both songs, written within weeks of each other, share a gospel soul and structure.

If you’d like to read more fascinating things that you never knew about all of the band members and performers listed in the book’s subtitle, and about others like Joni Mitchell, Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan, Phil Spector, Allen Klein, Mary Balin, and Billy Preston, you’ll want to run and pick this one up.   As James Taylor was to sing, “Hey, Mister, That’s Me Up on the Jukebox!”

Well recommended.

Joseph Arellano

A review copy was provided by the publisher.

Notes – Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon and the Journey of a Generation by Sheila Weller was reviewed on this site on February 2, 2011 (“Women of Heart and Mind”).

Elizabeth Taylor was to say that, “People don’t like sustained success.”   Which is perhaps why, in 1970, George Harrison sold more records than either Paul McCartney or John Lennon.