My Kind of Place: Travel Stories from a Woman Who's Been Everywhere
By Susan Orlean (Random House, $24.95)
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New Yorker writers are a droll bunch, none droller than Susan Orlean, who wrote all but four of the 30 articles collected in My Kind of Place for the magazine between 1987 and 2002. She is like Mr. Samgrass in Brideshead Revisited: "He was the Victorian tourist, solid and patronizing, for whose amusement these foreign things were paraded."
As much as I loathe that faintly ironic, superior New Yorker sensibility, there's no denying Orlean's ability to whip her wry observations on anything at all—a grocery store in Queens, a trailer park in Portland, a trek up Mount Fuji—into frothy, super- readable confections. Her stuff is, in fact, so fun and easy to read that you might not notice that Orlean rarely has much of anything to say about her subjects. Her formula is to string together vivid, offbeat details she has collected on her subjects ("the guy was wearing a Budweiser hat and rubber boots that had articulated toes") in a rambling—but, again, highly readable—first-person account that, rather than coming to any conclusion, trails off in a way meant to be suggestive and literary. A typical final sentence: "Juan wanted to keep hitting, but his father said it was time to go home."
As pure descriptive writing, her work is brilliant, but there is something strangely hollow and incomplete about it. OK, I admit I did enjoy the book, so I guess that means I fall within the Middle-Class-Boob demographic that goes for this kind of thing. And Orlean—whose 2000 book, The Orchid Thief, provided the inspiration for the movie Adaptation—is damn good at her job. But that doesn't change the fact that her job is to supply middlebrow chortles for the bourgeoisie. DAVID STOESZ
Susan Orlean will appear at Third Place Books at 6:30 p.m. Fri., Oct. 8.
Gutted: Down to the Studs in My House, My Marriage, My Entire Life
By Lawrence LaRose (Bloomsbury, $24.95)
There's no situation more dangerous than a man, a hammer, and a house—and yet no position more tempting for a guy who feels the rest of his life is out of control. Things will be different with the house, author Lawrence LaRose and his wife, Susan, both believe. Finding a dilapidated and atypically humble 1950 Hamptons abode for the "bargain" price of $350,000, the newlyweds think that completely renovating—i.e., almost completely demolishing—the shack will lend stability to their lives. Laid off from his dot-com job just as the market crashes, LaRose needs something do with himself. Blueprints, contractors, power tools, and Home Depot—it all seems so simple.
But as LaRose entertainingly discovers while coping with nosy neighbors, intransigent zoning officials, and recalcitrant subcontractors, "It makes me wonder if we are renovating the house or if the house is renovating us." His wife remains in Manhattan during the week, working to support them, while the author drops out of the yuppie economy to pound nails and lift Sheetrock with the proles on inept local construction crews laboring on profligate parvenu mansions. The experience is nothing like Trading Places and all those quick-and-easy home reno shows on TV, and LaRose freely admits to being no Ty Pennington. He mocks his own frequent mistakes—including the inevitable encounter with the business end of a nail gun—and vainly tries to save face with the more experienced contractors working alongside him.
Like the couple that has a kid to save their shaky marriage, the entire enterprise places predictable strains on Lawrence and Susan. They bicker over money, paint colors, and bathroom tiling. A twofold narrative tension emerges as the reader wonders (1) if the house will ever be completed, and (2) whether they'll be divorced by the time it is. Yet somehow they manage to salvage their marriage and rebuild their house, bonding while shingling and at the hardware store where, LaRose rhetorically asks, how can you not love a woman who "now knows the difference between eighths and sixteenths on the tape measure?" Anyone looking to remodel their Phinney Ridge bungalow would do well to read this book first; the dos and don'ts amusingly apply to both relationships and remodels. BRIAN MILLER
I, Fatty
By Jerry Stahl (Bloomsbury, $23.95)
By 1921, Fatty Arbuckle was the biggest man in Hollywood—literally. Not only was he about 300 pounds, but he was the first star to make a million bucks a year, and if critics preferred his rival Chaplin, the masses would rather see a baby-faced giant take pratfalls and crash into things. A botched carbuncle operation got him hooked on heroin, which didn't help his brandy habit.
Now all anybody remembers about Arbuckle is the disgraceful accusation that he raped the allegedly angelic actress Virginia Rappe at a debauched Hollywood party in San Francisco's tony St. Francis Hotel, killing her with a Coke bottle and/or his enormous privates. The real disgrace was Fatty's three trials, which entirely acquitted him but fueled the first national tabloid feeding frenzy by Hearst and worse.
