In the failed-males-sabotaging-their-own-lives genre of storytelling,  sub-genres abound. The latest variation takes its cues from our on-going economic conditions; guys lose their jobs and go into free fall as does Matthew in Jess Walter’s The Financial Lives of the Poets.

Sam Lipsyte’s take on this theme finds Milo Burke (this is a book with a number of strangely-named characters, for effect we assume) laid off from his job as a development officer at an obscure private college in New York, otherwise known as Mediocre University. The usual complication ensue: he can’t pay his bills, his wife may be fooling around and his kid begins to treat him with distrust. How his life unravels and how it loosely ties back up into a new knot, square to half-hitch, makes Lipsyte’s tale stand out from the kind of story we’ve heard too many times. Statistically, happy endings may be on the increase. But they’re still in the minority. Frustration, as it is in The Ask, seems the theme of the day.

Frustration is the source of much of the book’s humor as well as its dividing line. Readers who feel only frustration with Milo’s situation, his inability to (mostly) take things seriously, his appetite for porn, doughnuts and turkey wraps, and, especially, his desire to be more a naughty boy than he is, will find the book frustrating. Those who enjoy Lipsyte’s satiric take on fund raising, his celebration of self-loathing and the digs at the egoism of the rich, powerful  and unfaithful will find joy in those  same frustrations.

That this is a book about America’s descent into meaninglessness  is apparent from the first page. Horace, the forever-office temp who turns capre diem into a slacker anthem, defines our country as “a run-down and demented pimp” whose “whoremaster days are through.” What’s left? “Now our nation slumped in the corner of the pool hall, some gummy coot with a pint of Mad Dog and soggy yellow eyes, just another mark for the juvenile wolves. ” “‘We’re the bitches of the First World,’” Horace declares.

Of course, our hero must take issue. “That’s a pretty sexist way to frame a discussion of America’s decline, don’t you think? Not to mention racist,” Milo counters, apropos  to nothing. Lipsyte, in classic satiric form, has defined the current state of discussion in the U.S.: real questions hounded by cliched, knee-jerk reactions, be they claims of  discrimination, outcries of deficit spending or paens to free enterprise.  You want to discuss details? Climb over this first.

It’s no coincidence that the metaphoric complaints come from a guy named  Horace, that our doofus hero is named Milo or that the woman who holds power over them both is a big-bosomed, crack-whore’s daughter named Vargina (the “r” inserted after naming, Lipsyte tells us, by a sympathetic nurse). Side twists in this satiric corkscrew include  four-year-old son Bernie’s day care center, Happy Salamander, run by some  “young people with fancy education degrees and a tin of Tinker Toys” who operate under a “dense, pedagogical manifesto.” Then there’s a deck carpenter’s pitch for a Food Channel-styled program about death-row inmates’ last meal entitled “Dead Man Dining.” And don’t forget Milo’s weird parents, living and dead. There’s a lot here that’s funny in a sort of sad way.

The plot is simple enough. After losing his job for offending the art student daughter of a deep-pockets donor (”You made his daughter doubt herself, artistically. He had to buy her an apartment in Copenhagen so she could heal”), Milo is asked back to help secure a donation from a former college buddy named Purdy. Irony here is that Purdy asked Milo to join his fist-over-hand money-making ventures right out of school. Milo chose to pursue his art instead. Purdy has a troubled, disabled Iraq War-veteran son. Purdy has chosen Milo to be a sort of go-between, shuttling bribe money and generally keeping an eye on the son. The son, of course, stays anything but quiet.

The reward in all this? Possibly a huge endowment for the university which would mean Milo gets his job back. With money, the family stays together. Happy ending.

As Lydia Millet points out in her review of the book in The New York Times, true satire is rare in today’s literature, but pervasive in such vehicles as The Colbert Report and The Onion. Maybe that’s because literature demands more than just funny. And Lipsyte, plenty funny, provides it, not just making fun of certain character types and closely-held beliefs (meritocracy) bur raising real ethical, existential questions.

So what’s the larger target here? It’s certainly not men like Milo. Much of what happens to him is out of his control –  almost as much as is under his control — and we can’t help feel sympathetic for the sap. Yet Milo is more than some Gulliver, a vehicle to lampoon everything else. Maybe the real target of Lipsyte’s satiric skills is the men-sabotaging-their-own-lives genre itself. True or not, Lipsyte has given the form new life, all because he didn’t take it that seriously.–Cabbage Rabbit

UPDATED (at end): Since the death of J.D. Salinger, there’s been scads of comment declaring his books as life-changers (or not) and plenty of speculation on what waits in his safe to be published or what might be made into a movie and even some of that personal, David Copperfield kind of crap. But there’s been precious little about why Salinger’s great achievement, The Catcher In the Rye, had the impact it had. How is it that the story of a post-World War II, New York prep-school kid spoke across class and generational divides to six decades of teens as well as adults? What is it that continues to speak to readers, not only in the competitive world of New York private schools, but to kids in Nebraska, California and Montana as well (this may be changing) ? Why do those of us who read it more years back than we’d like to remember and, picking it up again, still find plenty of laughs, poignancy  and situations to identify with?

Salinger’s Holden Caulfield does what all adolescents do:  struggle to define identity (see Erik Erikson, Identity: Youth and Crisis).  Holden’s struggle overwhelms him. What teenager can’t empathize with his alienation? The book is full of things that teenagers still hear:  “frequent warnings to start applying myself”  (”applying?”…what does that mean?), and “life being a game” ( “Game, my ass. Some game. If you get on the side where all the hot-shots are, then it’s a game all right–I’ll admit that. But if you get on the other side….”). Sexual identity adds confusion, lots of confusion: “Sex is something I just don’t understand. I swear to God I don’t” and, “In my mind, I’m probably the biggest sex maniac you ever saw.” Holden’s sensitivity leads him to find the importance attached to the innocuous discouraging. “If somebody, some girl in an awful looking hat, for instance, comes all the way to New York — from Seattle, Washington for God’s sake–and ends up getting up early to see the goddamn first show at Radio City Music Hall, it makes me so depressed I can’t stand it.” Then there’s hypocrisy. Remember Ossenburger, the Pencey graduate who made “a pot of dough in the undertaking business”? How in his address to the students,  “He said he talked to Jesus all the time. Even when he was driving his car. That killed me I can just see the big phony bastard shifting into first gear and asking Jesus to send him a few more stiffs”?

Phonies. They’re the bane of Holden’s existence. And who’s the biggest phony? “I’m the most terrific liar you ever saw in your life,” Holden says.  Remember him on the train home feeding manure to Ernie Morrow’s mother about how great her son was? (”Her son was doubtless the biggest bastard that ever went to Pencey, in the whole crumby history of the school.”) Somehow, we know we aren’t really who we think we are (Holden: “I’m quite illiterate, but I read alot.”), a realization that puts us in Caulfield-like crisis.   This is the “fidelity” stage of Erikson’s   personality theory. Society’s push to make us conform puts Holden in a quandary. Where do the ducks in Central Park go when the pond is frozen? Why does Holden wear his red hunting cap with his pajamas?

That the story is told with humor and a certain spoken rhythm adds to its authenticity. Salinger pioneered the irreverent, scatological humor so prevalent in movie comedies of the last several decades (”The only good part of the speech was right in the middle of it….all of a sudden this guy sitting in the row in front of me, Edgar Marsalla, laid this terrific fart. It was a very crude thing to do, in chapel and all…”). The swearing–still the bane of high school librarians everywhere–not only adds realism but a sense of the phoniness directed towards teens.  “I toleja about that. I don’t like that type of language,” says the woman that Holden dances with in his hotel’s lounge.  Holden’s relationship to adults–his parents, cab drivers, waiters,  elevator operator and prostitute–contrasted with that to his 10-year-old sister Phoebe seems too idealistic, as if children could never be mean or  phony. But it stands as a symbol of innocence and genuineness, a  nostalgic cry for our lost childhood.

The book’s central image, the catcher in the rye keeping children from going over the edge, speaks to this nostalgia. In my case, it led to a life dedicated to working with children, a result that was a slight misinterpretation of what Salinger probably intended. But right reading of the image or wrong, my life was changed. Salinger’s other books didn’t affect me as deeply, though I loved them well. The Nine Stories, Raise High the Roof Beam ,Carpenters and Seymour: an Introduction were lessons on the sometimes radical actions that come of identity confusion and the use of those actions as symbol for larger meaning. Franny and Zooey introduced us to a type of specific yet undefinable spirituality that has since been embraced by writers ranging from Isabelle Allende to Jim Harrison. As good as these books are, they seem footnotes in Salinger’s career. But Holden Caulfield? He’s our  guru.–Cabbage Rabbit

UPDATE: Adam Gopnik’s sparkling Salinger “Postscript” in the February 8th issue of The New Yorker sums up Salinger’s writing better than anything else we’ve read. He writes of Salinger’s ear for American dialogue, his “essential gift for joy” and, how “that amid the malice and falseness of social life, redemption rises from clear speech, and childlike enchantment, from all the forms of unselfconscious innocence that still surround us,” statements that explain Salinger’s fascination with children and his reluctance to paint them or their experience as perfect. “writing, real writing,” he says, ” is done not from some seat of fussy moral judgment but with the eye and ear and heart; no American writer will ever have a more alert ear, a more attentive eye, or a more ardent heart than his.”  Note to writers (including self): Forget that MFA, “high-hearted” moral posturing and all the other (to borrow Holden’s word ) crap and start paying closer attention to what you hear from those around you as well as your own heart.

What is it that’s “invisible” in Paul Auster’s latest novel? It’s not the truth. The truth is there… somewhere … though choosing it from all the various claims and denials batted around by three different narrators and one or two other characters might be an impossible task. Or maybe it’s not. Let’s settle on this: the truth is not apparently visible.

What’s invisible is Auster himself. In the past, Auster has inserted himself to various degrees in his writing (remember the detective Paul Auster in City of Glass?). And his work has often focused on identity; how it’s established and how it’s held. In Invisible, Auster explores how our identity is developed and perceived, by ourselves and others, through the stories we tell.  Here the stories are of  trust, love, murder and incest, made-up and otherwise. Just when we think we know one of the characters, and through his/her telling, the others, the point-of view changes and the new narrator destroys what we believed about them all. As we take more and more interest in the entwining tales, the author of them all goes transparent.

It’s 1967 and Adam Walker,  a student at Columbia and aspiring poet (as was Auster) is befriended by an excitable, mysterious older Frenchman, Rudolf Born, and his younger woman friend Margot. The two become entangled in Walker’s’ already tangled life. Born proposes generously funding a literary journal that Adam will edit. In Born’s absence, Margot and Adam begin sleeping together, apparently with Born’s blessing. All seems hope and promise until Adam and Born are accosted walking on Riverside Drive and Born reacts with surprising brutality. Or does he?

This first of four sections seems to fall into a literary model of the type represented by John Fowles’ The Magus. A young man, full of aspiration and desire, falls in with an unpredictable, Svengali-like mentor who, through sinister manipulation, seems intent on teaching his young protege  the cruel and trustless realities of life. But in part II we’re propelled forward some 30 years and given a new narrator, Adam’s Columbia-era friend Jim, who hasn’t heard from him all this time.  Adam is dying from leukemia and entrusts the story–so it was only a story?–of his relationship with Born and Margot to his old friend. Their correpsondence reveals much more of Adam’s story, including his deep, incestuous relationship with his sister. After the Riverside Drive incident, Adam breaks with Born and questions his own involvement. He travels to Paris where he again takes up with Margot. Then he runs into Born, who has become a cipher that marks the point Adam’s life lost all innocence (or was it that incestuous experience with his year-older sister when he was fourteen?).  The affair with Margot becomes less serious even as it’s announced that Born will marry an old acquaintance with a strangely desirable daughter. Adam, anxious to expose Born’s murderous behavior, hatches his own magus plot, one that can only end in emotional–and dangerous– disaster. The daughter, years later, tells her own story.  As Auster writes, “Compelling as those twists and turns might be, they amount to just one story among an infinity of stories, one film among a multitude of films…”

Auster has discussed the power of the stories we tell ourselves previously, notably in 2008’s Man In the Dark. Here, the theme isn’t as much about creating reality as defining it. Identity creates truth, circumstance defines identity and truth, real or perceived, influences circumstance.  Adam and his sister are drawn together by the death of their younger brother. That leads them to intimacy. Born, something of a double agent, defines himself as he sees fit, leaving others to their suspicions. In his pursuit of revenge, Adam seeks a new identity but becomes something entirely unexpected, by him and the reader.

Invisible cements Auster’s reputation as a mystery writer, one who pursues the various clues of meaning towards an ever-elusive answer. In this sense, his writing is as captivating as any detective fiction while vastly superior in psychic and existential puzzles. This writer-as-detective is a stand-in for all of us who have ever wondered who or what to believe. Believing ourselves could be a mistake. Fashioning our lives as stories may or may not help make sense of it all.–Cabbage Rabbit

Like much of Nick Hornby’s work, Juliet, Naked is not a book about love in the traditional sense. It’s a book for those of us who are obsessively in love with music, so much in love that it defines us when so little else does. We identify with someone’s art, and them as well, without any defining, creative acts of our own. Our identification with them tells us who we are.  Part of the reason we love some music so much is that it talks about love. There’s no real love in Hornby’s characters, just attachments of convenience, stops against loneliness, occasionally sexual attraction. Okay,  hardly any sexual attraction. Sad, really.

Sad like a lot of Juliet, Naked. Hornby revisits familiar territory here-who can forget High Fidelity?–and again music stands in for the emotions that seemingly can’t be generated any other way.  The people here aren’t falling in love, even with music, as much as they are falling out of love. Maybe there’s no such thing as love after all. Even for music.

The book falls into three sections, roughly divided as its three main characters rotate their third-person narration duties. On its first page, Duncan from the washed-up-town of Goolness, England is in a Minneapolis bar taking a picture of a urinal with help from his live-in of 15 years, Annie. They have come to America on a pilgrimage, as obsessed fans will, to view the landmarks in the career of mostly-forgotten rocker Tucker Crowe. The urinal, as legend has it, is the place where Crowe in 1986 decided to chuck his career. Duncan later sneaks into the Berkley home of one of Crowe’s many women, the one who inspired Crowe’s “sixth and… last studio album” (according to a fictional Wikipedia entry) Juliet. Singer-songwriter-Crowe has been (mostly) invisible since that year but it doesn’t stop his consumed-with-him fans from speculating on the meaning of Tucker’s music and that important epiphany, if there was an epiphany, at a Minneapolis urinal.

This first part of the book, focused on Duncan’s captivation and how it defines his life, is the most interesting. Then, Duncan receives an advanced copy  of  Juliet, Naked, Crowe’s masterpiece “unadorned,” before it was mastered, shorn of strings and percussion. Annie, who is at home to receive the package, listens before Duncan has the chance, and Duncan’s reaction to that not-so-innocent act opens flood-gates in their relationship.

When it’s Annie’s turn to take center stage, we learn of her disappointment, or more specifically, puzzlement at not having children during her long relationship with Duncan, years that span Tucker’s public absence. Then, after Tucker sends Annie an e-mail about her blog-post reaction to Juliet, Naked (she doesn’t like it, further alienating Duncan), the two strike up an unlikely relationship. Crowe, it turns out, is incapable of love as well, though he’s gone through numerous relationships and fathered a few children. Suddenly, the story loses momentum.  Better, as novelist Julie Meyerson’s review in The Guardian suggests, that Tucker remain an unseen presence.

But he does turn up, crowding Duncan and Annie aside. Though his presence isn’t required to do it, he provides contrast to Duncan. Here is someone who has actually accomplished something before disappearing, who psychologically abused several women not just one. It’s as if we know much of what will happen in this middle section–short of a heart attack–before it does.

The end of the book turns back to Annie, the only character we have real sympathy for. In tying up the plot, Hornby goes for the maudlin: “The two biggest parts of a man’s life were his family and his work…” Do we need to be told at end that it’s too late for Tucker or Duncan to do anything about them?

Still, there’s joy and insight to be had in the getting there. There are nuggets like this: “Loving art…involved a lot more ill will than one might have suspected.”  As he does with that phony Wikipedia entry and the Annie-Tucker e-mail exchange, Hornby is a master of making meaning out of the contemporary, of relating technology, old school or new, to human experience:

“The first time Duncan had watched his computer fill in the track names of the CD he’d put into it, he simply didn’t believe it.  It was as if he were watching a magician who actually possessed magic powers…Shortly after that, people from the message board started sending him songs attached to e-mails, and that was every bit as mysterious, because it meant that recorded music wasn’t, as he’d previously always understood, a thing at all–a CD, a piece of plastic, a spool of tape. You could reduce it to its essence, and its essence was literally intangible. This made music better, more beautiful, more mysterious, as far as he was concerned. People who knew of his relationship with Tucker expected him to be a vinyl nostalgic, but the new technology had made his passions more romantic, not less.”

It’s for passages like this that we read Hornby, even when his storytelling isn’t at best. Juliet, Naked has too much dressing. Still, it’s worth a listen.–Cabbage Rabbit

Jeanette Winterson’s review in the New York Times of Joan Schenkar’s biography, The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith draws a connection between not only Highsmith’s plot sequencing and the six-panel comic but Highsmith’s–and her characters’–personalities as well. Highsmith, who died in 1995, wrote Strangers On a Train,  The Talented Mr. Ripley, The Cry of the Owl (yes, all became movies) and other tales in which apprehension becomes a palpable force (in his posthumous introduction to The Selected Stories of Patricia Highsmith published in 2001, Graham Greene calls her “the poet of apprehension…” ).  She famously consumed alcohol, cigarettes and love affairs with equal abandon.  After her graduation from Barnard College in 1942,  Highsmith wrote for a handful of comic publishers and Winterson suggests the staging of her novels, as well as the lives of  her subjects, is true to that visual form:

“…the comic strip formula of threat/pursuit/fantasy life/alter ego/secret identity was the formula she used in all her work. The four-color, six-panel comic strip shaped Patricia Highsmith the crime writer like nothing else–however much she cared cite Dostoyevsky and Henry James.”

Winterson, who loves the biography but has doubts about its subject, implies an important point about comics when comparing them to Highsmith’s story-telling ability. The pace of the action from panel to panel, and what (and how much)  to illustrate inside each of them is a crucial part of the craft. Emphasis on the scene–what’s pictured and it’s relationship to everything else pictured (composition)–and the angle from which it’s viewed is part of the narrative path.  As Highsmith demonstrated, the same goes for fiction writing, with description and symbol standing in for illustration. Highsmith not only knew how to create tension and suspense with her pacing, she knew that alter-egos are common to all of us (think The Talented Mr. Ripley). She apparently didn’t like to concede her background in comics. She “only vaguely acknowledged,  when pressed by the more ferrety kind of interviewer, having conjured up a few story lines for Superman and Batman,” write Winterson. But she seemed to recognize a comic-truth that  the Rabbit has always believed: Peel away the conservative suit of a mild-mannered reporter, or anyone for that matter, and you’ll find an unlikely leotard–with cape!–if not a different being all together. In other words, someone with something to hide.–Cabbage Rabbit

It’s not too late to appreciate Chris Ware’s cover and story in The New Yorker’s November 2  “Cartoon Issue.” Young trick-or-treaters stand at doorways, their faces hidden behind white masks, while their parents wait back on the sidewalk, their faces masked in illumination from their personal communication devices. What a great image! The story inside is equally clever and layered: generational,  revealing of interpersonal relationships and delusion, graced with beautiful imagery and designed , like a Pynchon novel,  in circular fashion. Who is that eyeless blond at the center of it all? Ware’s recent stories have been (mostly) focused on women–see The Acme Novelty Library Number 18–and it’s fair to ask what this Midwestern male can tell us about females. The answer is apparent in this latest story of mothers and daughters. They serve as a means to discuss the reoccurring foibles of men and the human condition at large.  The irony of the story’s last line–”Poor Mom…She was still naive in so many ways”–speaks to our own, unavoidable naivete.  See the Rabbit’s Chris Ware interview here.   –Cabbage Rabbit

When we last saw Duane Moore in Larry McMurtry’s 2007 novel When the Light Goes, he was a sixty-something malcontent who had just found age-old happiness with a much younger woman. When we first saw him back in 1966, in McMurtry’s The Last Picture Show, he was a sexually confused teenager living in a dying Texas town. In McMurtry’s latest Duane Moore-and-town- of-Thalia saga Rhino Ranch, our hero is still confused about women though he knows he likes them young. The more things change…

The fifth book in the series that began in 1966 with The Last Picture Show– and promised last–is more like the previous two than the first two. The Last Picture Show is a great American novel, a tale of aimless, small-town youth in a graying American lifestyle. The languid, now-pointless town of Thalia, is full of boys who are afraid of girls and happy to pursue a rancher’s blind heifer to satisfy their otherwise repressed sexual desires. In When the Light Goes Out, successful oil-patch man Duane Moore is told by a big-city psychiatrist and a lesbian to boot that he doesn’t understand women and relationships. Somehow it didn’t take three books to prove it. Thinking back, one has to feel even sorrier for the sightless heifer.

Thalia, dying in the first book and dying again after another oil boom thirty years later in Texasville, has become a joke in the last three installments. The Last Picture Show used the town to symbolize the erosion of small town life, pitting those who stay against those who wanted to leave. It’s still on life support, pulsed by a series of ironic gags: two Sri Lankans symbolize the globalization of small town life by taking over the corner convenience store and turning it into the Asia Wonder Deli, technology is seen as just the thing to re-invigorated the oil business, and the ranches have all been bought up by the rich and cut into “hunting leases.” The mistakes of the ubiquitous meth cookers make prairie fire a constant threat and the cemetery seems the most lively place in town. In the new volume, a billionairess intent on saving the black African rhinoceros, takes over a huge swath of ranchland to pursue her goals. What little life this pumps into the nearby town mostly breeds scorn and resentment. The strange opportunities and characters the rhino ranch brings seems to make Duane even more confused.

Duane’s always had good reason to be confused. Back in the 1960s, the high school beauty queen prick-teased him unmercifully. Years later, his much-loved wife is killed in an auto accident. His children behave strangely. He falls in love withy his therapist only to discover she’s a lesbian. His new, much-younger wife runs off with an Iranian playboy.

As in Duane’s Depressed and When the Light Goes, Duane casts around blankly, walking the Texas flatlands, spending time with his remaining friends and fishing out of sheer boredom. When the diagnosis comes, it’s not too deep to understand. “You’ve lost your sense of purpose,” the billionaire rhino rancher observes. Duane agrees.

Purpose, of course, means sex and Duane is enthused at its promise, first with an under-aged prostitute, secondly with a Thai secretary at his former oil company and lastly a much younger reporter who like to drink bourbon and do housecleaning. At his age, you’d think Duane is ready to retire. But McMurtry seems to have other ideas.

He’s enlivened this book with a few nice touches of the sort represented by the Asia Wonder Deli and the big-city shrink who takes an interest in our backwater hero. Here it comes in the form of ranch hands imported from South Africa, an old bushman hired to patrol the fence lines with nothing but a spear and an old and formidable rhino who appears to have supernatural abilities and, of course, takes a liking to Duane.

Much of the other fun in Rhino Ranch comes from the supporting cast. Bobby Lee Baxter, who admits  that he’s a “dick-driven” man, consumes  whiskey with Boyd Cotton, a man more interested in horses than women, as they stand watch with big-game worthy rifles over the eclectic herd. Duane’s single testicle son Dickie keeps thing lively at the Moore Oil Company by hiring that under-aged prostitute. The billionairess’ boyfriend, Hondo Honda, is a former Texas Ranger, who never goes anywhere, including the shower, without his rifle. Hondo is even more aimless than Duane. As Dickie notes, both Hondo and Duane have “become mere shadows of their former selves.”

The fatigue Duane’s story endures is reflected in the short-and-shorter chapters of Rhino Ranch. Few are over two pages long. Many are a page or less. These brief scenes make for quick and easy reading. But they also seem to represent the exhaustion McMurty’s storyline has suffered over three very similar books. Don’t get us wrong. We love Duane Moore and think he’s one of the great character inventions of the last 40 years. But his story ran its course two books back and we can’t help think that McMurty, as did John Updike with Rabbit Angstrom, should put him to rest.–Cabbage Rabbit

Reading Rhino Ranch, the latest installment in Larry McMurtry’s on-going Duane Moore saga that began in 1966 with The Last Picture Show, was a bit of deja-vu all over again. The last three books of the series are of a sort. The town of Thalia is still dying. Sexual frustration continues into old and older age.  Duane again suffers from malaise (indeed, the third installment of this five-part saga is entitled Duane’s Depressed). The Rabbit, who felt as if he were writing the same review twice, wonders if McMurtry could have melded the last three books and their ever-shrinking chapters into one grand book.  In the interest of letting readers determine this themselves, we offer our previous review of When the Light Goes, first published in the Inland Empire Weekly. Look for the Rhino Ranch review here. Our down-the-hole conclusion? Duane Moore is no Rabbit Angstrom. While both men are great American fictional characters, Updike’s Rabbit makes every appearance count. With Duane, it’s the same old themes revisited.–Cabbage Rabbit

Gray Sex

Senior citizen goes stiff in Larry McMurtry’s new novel

Even fictional men get old. But do they learn anything? We first met Duane Moore over 40 years ago in The Last Picture Show, the landmark novel of small-town decay by the prolific Larry McMurtry (Lonesome Dove, Terms Of Endearment and the screenplay of Annie Proulx’s short story Brokeback Mountain). Duane was a sexually frustrated high school senior who lived on his own in the local hotel and worked nights as an oil roughneck (the 1971 movie adaptation featured Jeff Bridges as Duane and Cybill Shepherd in her first film as the object of Duane’s frustration). In McMurtry’s latest book, When The Light Goes, Duane is a 64-year-old eccentric who owns a small oil company and travels rural Texas by bicycle. The sexual frustration remains.

Small town sexual repression was first among many themes in The Last Picture Show. Its characters included the macho football coach with closeted homosexual desires, his frustrated wife who awkwardly seduces Duane’s best friend Sonny, curious high school girls and their desperately horny male classmates (who can forget the great scene in which a pack of boys heads out to the ranch to gang rape a blind heifer?). In When the Light Goes, most everyone’s over their ignorance if not their frustration. Duane still suffers it, as does his son Bobbie Lee who has only one ball.

The Last Picture Show turned a flashlight on the hidden shadows of desire. When The Light Goes hits it with a flood lamp and sends up flares. The words “stiffening nipples” peeks from the book’s first sentence and becomes a reoccurring motif. If you think sex let alone wet dreams are over by 60, this book will be a revelation. What can we say but “Ewwwwww!”

Duane has just returned from Egypt and isn’t at all anxious to plunge into his former life. In the series’ previous book, Duane’s Depressed, our hero has taken to living in a cabin after the death of his wife in an auto accident. He ditches his truck to walk and bicycle, even to the neighboring city. On his return from Egypt, a sense of duty obliges him to stop in the oil company office where he spots those stiffening nipples. The story proceeds from there.

The people who worry about Duane’s mental state are as weird and troubled as he is though nonchalant about it all, their lives a playground of wide, comic swings. His daughter Julie, after confessing to her father that she’s slept with a “zillion” men, admits her husband Goober is gay and that she’s committed to becoming a nun. Son Bobby doesn’t want to shoot the parolee his wife has taken up with because he’s such a bad shot. (Bobby once tried to kill a bug with a pistol and instead blew off his little toe.) Duane has a crush on his analyst–shades of Tony Soprano!– a lesbian who quits her practice to deal raunchily with Duane’s hang-ups and her own grief. His 90-year-old employee Ruth Popper, once the frustrated coach’s wife who seduced Duane’s buddy Sonny, likes to brag about her sexual escapades with the Methodist minister. “There’s nothing like screwing a preacher,” she asserts. If you think life in sleepy little towns is predictably boring, this book might change your mind.

The suffocation of small towns was the other prominent theme of The Last Picture Show. Thalia, the Texas town in question, has been on the croak for four books and is now off life support and barely breathing. The only encouraging sign comes from the crossroads convenience store recently purchased by two Sri Lankan brothers who do away with microwave burritos and instead serve fresh shrimp dumplings and spring rolls to the oilboys.

Thalia’s ongoing death is only backdrop here. The book’s preoccupation is sex and how its serves as a key to Duane’s mental health. It’s decided that Duane, despite lovers, a forty year marriage and two daughters, is weak with women. Enter those stiff nipples, as sported by geological analyst Anne Cameron who’s been hired to bring new life to Moore’s drilling business (we’re not sure McMurtry meant the pun). Anne is younger than Duane’s daughters and her nipples become an obsession.

While Anne talks a good game she’s not much of a player. The story evolves as Duane and his paramour develop a physical relationship in spite of heart disease and a repulsion to tongue kissing. When the Light Goes is full of laughs and unruly characters. But it’s one-dimensional entertainment compared to the multi-dimensional The Last Picture Show. Maybe McMurtry just can’t get it up like he used to. Still, there’s no doubt  what’s on his mind.

WHEN THE LIGHT GOES By Larry McMurtry; Simon & Schuster, hardback, 195 pages, $24,; paperback, $14

Hugh Hefner may have had dozens of girlfriends over his 83 years, but his life-long love is jazz. Hefner declared his undying devotion to swing and big band music when the Rabbit interviewed him in 2008 for an inside story, “Jazz Playboy Style.” With all the recent attention, good and bad, given to Hefner –  Brigitte Berman’s documentary ” Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist and Rebel that premiered at this year’s Toronto Film Festival, a  forth coming Hollywood biopic to be directed by Brent Ratner, a feature in the New York Times, rumors of financial problems and bad mouthings from former girlfriends — the Rabbit feels its time to revisit Hefner’s jazz legacy. Everyone knows what he did for the middle-class male libido. Let’s not overlook what he’s done for music.

“My own taste in music, as is often the case, was defined by my early experiences,“ he said in an afternoon call from the mansion. “There were two major sources of music in those days, the big band broadcasts on radio and recordings. I had some occasion in high school to take a girlfriend to a ballroom or a theater and see a band. I saw the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra, the Harry James Orchestra, a couple of my favorites at the time. I really love the early origins of the music, the Dixieland, blues, and New Orleans music of the ‘20s and ‘30s. One of my favorites is Bix Beiderbecke. We still play a lot of him around here.”

Playboy’s affair with jazz dates to its very first issue in 1953 that included, along with the famous pictorial of “sweetheart of the month” Marilyn Monroe, a profile of the Dorsey Brothers. The magazine introduced its jazz poll in 1957 and its very first interview subject was Miles Davis back in 1962. The panel discussion on the state of jazz in Playboy’s “Jazz and Hi-Fi” issue of February 1964 included the likes of Dizzy Gillespie, Dave Brubeck, Gerry Mulligan, Cannonball Adderley, Charles Mingus and Stan Kenton among others. The discussion center on the future of jazz, how it might evolve, where it would be performed and how it would attract new fans. The schisms between old and new, tradition and innovation and even black and white are often visible. Still, the comments somehow seem apt all these years later.

Hefner often brought jazz standouts to his television series Playboy After Dark and Playboy’s Penthouse, appearances that demonstrated his love and knowledge of the music. In a classic scene from a 1959 installment of Playboy’s Penthouse, Hefner introduces the “divine” Sarah Vaugh with the respect and affection of a dedicated jazz fan. He notes that she’s appearing at The Empire Room in NewYork’s Waldorf Astoria Hotel, a club not normally associated with jazz. “That’s quite a transition,” Hefner says. The singer agrees, saying she’s trying to attract those listeners as well. Hefner talks of Sarah’s early involvement with Earl Hines pre-bop band that included Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker. He lets Vaughn introduce her accompanists. Then he steps back to let her enchant us with “Broken Hearted Melody.”

Or take another example from a 1960 broadcast . Count Basie is at the piano at what appears to be a swank penthouse party (it was actually a studio at Chicago television station WPKB ). Occasionally playing with one hand while cradling a cigarette in the other, Basie accompanies singers Dave Lambert, Jon Hendricks and Annie Ross, joined by Basie’s ”favorite son,” singer Joe Williams. They scat along to “The King,” a tune from the Lambert, Hendricks and Ross LP Sing A Song Of Basie. The composition pays homage to jazz royalty:  “Earl “Fatha” Hines, Duke Ellington and, of course, the Count. As the singers improvise a spiraling series of scat lines, a tuxedo-clad Hefner and a host of impeccably dressed men and women bounce along to the irresistible beat. Television has seldom seen a hipper moment.

The magazine, like the culture at large,  has largely ignored jazz over the last several years. And Playboy’s signature jazz festival, held annually at the Hollywood Bowl, has become something other than a celebration of jazz (though it always pays homage). But to find Hefner’s true devotion to the music of his youth, travel back to the inaugural Playboy Jazz Festival, staged at the old Chicago Stadium in 1959, an event that included a long list of the top jazz names then on the planet.

“What made Chicago [Playboy Fest] unique for me was the time frame and the giants that were there. [Jazz critic] Leonard Feather called it the single greatest weekend in the history of jazz. I wasn’t that far from my college and high school years and there I was standing on stage with all the greats that influenced me and were celebrities to me. It’s a moment impossible to recapture.”–Cabbage Rabbit

What would Carl Jung say about the current state of political discourse in America? The Rabbit’s been rereading the founder of analytical psychology’s The Undiscovered Self in preparation for Liber Novus, a “new” book which records Jung’s middle age conflict or, in pop-psychology parlance, mid-life crisis. Undiscovered is one of Jung’s most political texts (the Rabbbit here admits to being only a casual reader of Jung’s work) and we were only a bit astonished to find him speaking across a half-century to post-millennial America and the psyche of tea-party extremism.

The parallels  seem prophetic (indeed, the book’s first line is, “What will the future bring?”). Jung cites “physical, political, economic and spiritual distress”  as he describes the modern condition. He seems to be speaking directly to our time and its irrational politics when he states, “Rational arguments can be conducted with some prospect of success only so long as the emotionality of a given situation does not exceed a certain critical degree. If the affective temperature rises above this level, the possibility of reason having any effect ceases and its place is taken by slogans and chimerical wish-fantasies.” Is there any question, with the screaming of August giving way to the racism of autumn, that we’ve exceeded that “affective temperature?” Jung even seems to explain the numbers of shrill and mindless protesters which spring from the 20 per cent that still support discredited conservative policy (as opposed to valid, rational  conservatism; the discredited are known as “Republicans”). “Such individuals are by no means rare curiosities to be met with only in prisons and lunatic asylums,” he says. “For every manifest case of insanity there are, in my estimation, at least ten latent cases who seldom get to the point of breaking out openly but whose views and behavior, for all their appearances of normality, are influenced by unconsciously morbid and perverse factors.” Is that what we’re seeing today? A breaking out of latent insanity?

The extreme right as well will find much to quote in The Undiscovered Self, especially in regard to Jung’s declaration that the state is increasingly depriving the individual of  “the moral decision as to how he should live his own life…”  There’s even a line which seems to describe Islamic (as well as Christian and right-wing) terrorists: “Everywhere in the West there are subversive minorities who, sheltered by our humanitarianism and our sense of justice, hold the incendiary torches ready…”  But it must be remembered that Jung is writing in the throes of the Cold War and it becomes apparent as one reads on that he is talking of  life in the Soviet bloc and in terms of East/West rivalries. Indeed, he cites the dangers of religious fanaticism present in the West (read “the Christian right”) and says that the West “unfortunately (has) not yet awakened to the fact that our appeal to idealism and reason and other desirable virtues, delivered with so much enthusiasm, is mere sound and fury.”

This short, easily-read text, updated in 1958 to reflect the consequences of the Hungarian uprising, has much to offer modern times, especially regarding our need for spirituality and the political surrogates rising up to replace it. The Undiscovered Self speaks to us with communal as well as personal relevancy. Can we expect the same of  Jung’s upcoming, personal  account of his descent into creative madness? We may never know. Set to be released in early October, The Red Book as it has come to be known, carries a list price of $195. Sometimes the price of knowledge, especially self-knowledge, is too dear.–Cabbage Rabbit