Red Meat Cures Cancer
By Starbuck O'Dwyer (Vintage, $13)
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Lord knows our fat-assed, SUV–driving, supersized nation deserves all the satire it can get. Plus fries. Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation helped sound the alarm that we're living in a self-inflicted obesity epidemic (itself partly the result of our country's unprece-dented affluence and obstinate immobility); there's even a recent Sundance documentary, Super Size Me, about a guy who goes on an all-McDonald's diet for a month—with predictably disastrous results.
Given such a big, fat, high-cholesterol target, it's surprising that Starbuck O'Dwyer couldn't arrive at juicier results in his first novel. His rather antic, slapdash Red Meat centers on a midcareer corporate everyman suffering a midlife crisis at the worst possible moment. Widowed, unhappy 48-year-old Schuyler "Sky" Thorne labors for a fast-food chain, Tailburger, based in upstate New York. Its products are wildly unhealthy, and he knows it. Worse, the company founder wants to make them even more unhealthy (by undercooking the meat, adding more grease, etc.) and to market them ever more crassly—think Harmony Korine movies, gangsta rap, and cyberporn.
Sound ridiculous? Of course—that's an entire school of satire, to be as exag-gerated and outlandish as possible. Yet satire has to have some kind of point to its silliness. Sky's boss, a history buff, has changed his name to Frank Fanoflincoln, after our 16th president, which is funny but pointless. So too are O'Dwyer's scattershot tangents on greedy sports agents, corrupt politicians, and—I hear cobwebs blowing here—the dot-com bubble. Singly, any one of those targets would be deserving of our ridicule. Collectively, they amount to a sloppy picaresque as Sky clings to his pension, appeases his boss, and films a sex tape far tamer than Paris Hilton's. The author is an Ivy League attorney with roots in upstate New York (if not fast food) who also comments on legal affairs for NPR, and here the breadth of his résumé may work against him. He gives us every item on the gut-busting American menu instead of cooking the bugs out of his main course. BRIAN MILLER
Starbuck O'Dwyer will appear at Elliott Bay Book Co., 5:30 p.m. Fri., Feb. 27.
Perpetually Cool: The Many Lives of Anna May Wong
By Anthony B. Chan (Scarecrow Press, $45)
UW communications professor Anthony Chan's bio of Hollywood's first Chinese- American starlet communicates in the manner of my car radio set on scan: Every few seconds, just after it's hooked your attention, the narrative changes stations with a jolt. The book is really a collection of disjointed, overlapping essays circling the fascinating figure of Wong Liu Tsong, the Los Angeles–born immigrant laundry-man's daughter who became Anna May Wong (1905–1961), broke into silent movies at age 14, scandalizing her dad, and shot to the top like Chinese fireworks. At 5 feet 7 inches, she towered over Douglas Fairbanks in The Thief of Bagdad and her alleged lover Marlene Dietrich in Shanghai Express, strutted the English stage with Laurence Olivier, hit it big in the '20s heyday of German cinema, then finally sank into bit parts and TV roles back in America. (Produced in Britain, the 1929 Piccadilly played here earlier this month; a DVD restoration will arrive this fall from Milestone.)
Because censors forbade Asians to kiss white men on film, and because movies are about sex and death, Wong's characters were perpetually doomed on film—unless they were impenitent killers. As she put it in her cornball wiseacre way, "I died a thousand deaths." Off-camera, she died a thousand deaths as Asian roles went to whites like Myrna Loy in The Crimson City. Austrian Luise Rainer got the Oscar for The Good Earth, the movie Wong most wanted. Goddamn foreigners taking American jobs!
Based mostly on secondary sources, Chan's bio can't quite pluck out the heart of Wong's mystery, but it's tantalizingly intriguing (so much so that two other bios have just been published). She seems to have been amazingly tough, as a girl had to be in an era when shopkeepers put signs in their window reading "Dogs and Chinese Not Allowed." She was also incandescent on the flapper social scene, the epitome of "silk-sheath-skirt chic." Chan gallantly tries to protect her reputation, suggesting that when alcoholic cirrhosis and a heart attack killed her right after signing to star in Flower Drum Song, "It was almost as if her death . . . came more from exhaustion after having lived a full and eventful life [than] from her health issues." Nice try: The girl partied herself to death, like her white doppelgänger Louise Brooks.
Chan's done his homework, but often he tendentiously tries to impose theory on an anarchic life—although the book's centri-fugal structure is perhaps appropriate, given her unruly passions. He should've heeded the warning of Charlie Chan, which he quotes: "Theory, like mist on eyeglasses, obscures fact." TIM APPELO
Anthony B. Chan will appear at University Book Store, 7 p.m. Mon., March 1.
Graceland
By Chris Abani (Farrar Straus Giroux, $24)
The ghetto bars and drug houses of Lagos, Nigeria, are hardly a place for a young boy. Chris Abani's GraceLand paints an often horrific and sometimes profound portrait of life in one such ghetto and of its victim: a 16-year-old Elvis impersonator named Elvis Oke.
