Breakfast Club
That New Book Smell
by Levi Asher on Monday, March 9, 2009 06:20 pm
1. The e-book scene (also known as the d-book scene, if you read Booksquare) is buzzing again with news of Amazon's new iPhone Kindle application, which allows readers to enjoy the considerable benefits of the Kindle store without buying a bulky and expensive dedicated device.
Does this mean I'm going to brag yet again that I was among the first to attempt to point Amazon in this exact direction, even though everybody thought I was crazy at the time? Yes, it certainly does. It also means that I can stop beefing with Amazon.com, a company I used to like until Jeff Bezos started trying to be Steve Jobs. Some will still beef with Amazon/Kindle over DRM, but there's no doubt Amazon is moving in the right direction by allowing Kindle books to run on non-Amazon devices.
Meanwhile, the dumb, dumb articles about how e-books are ruining everything just keep coming (this one via Frank, who shares my derision). What is wrong with these people? At least one minor miracle takes place within Sven Birkerts piece: he doesn't tell us he loves the way books smell.
2. Like Mark Sarvas, I used to mill around the Librarie de France bookstore in Rockefeller Center (though unlike Mark Sarvas, I don't read French). This small store was a nice worldly touch for midtown Manhattan and I'm very sorry to hear that it will be closing this
3. Was Ludwig Wittgenstein really the greatest philosopher of the 20th Century? I think he was, assuming that William James belongs to the 19th Century, and many others think so too.
4. Via Largehearted Boy, a long list of fictional computers.
5. How Jeff Kinney and his Wimpy Kid made it big.
6. Roxana Robinson, inspired by a mockingbird's call.
7. Literature as an alternative to traditional incarceration.
8. NPR on Carlo Collodi's original Pinocchio. And let's also pay good attention to Kanye's personal spin on Collodi's tale.
9. I do not have high hopes for a movie based on Beverly Cleary's Ramona The Pest, one of the books I loved most as a kid. What do you want to bet they'll screw up the big Halloween parade scene and leave out the Q's with the cat tails?
10. Jamelah gets framed.
11. Another Bret Easton Ellis movie is heading our way.
12. Poetry.
First Person Plural, Second Person Singular
by Levi Asher on Monday, May 26, 2008 09:17 pmChecking out debut novelist Ed Park's office-culture novel Personal Days, I was surprised to find it written in First Person Plural -- the same odd "we" voice that debut novelist Joshua Ferris chose for last year's hit office-culture novel Then We Came To The End. Does the "collective voice" have some special relevance for our age? Somehow it does seem to fit the cubicle mentality in Park's hands:
Whenever we sniff a layoff coming, which is always, each one of us thinks, It can't be me because ___.
When Lars started with us -- six months ago, nine months, a year ago? -- he was full of pep, but we managed to squeeze it out of him.
Or in Ferris's:
We were fractious and overpaid. Our mornings lacked promise.
And yet, reading both novels, I find myself skidding against the device. I like it when writers experiment with narrative stance, and I want to like both of these books. But I work in an office myself, and I don't find that a plural voice reflects my own generally more anguished experience of cubicle culture. The collective "we" is both limiting and liberating. Park and Ferris tend to rely on the comedy of recognition, of shared experience, and that's where this stance works. But Fyodor Dostoevsky could have never written in First Person Plural.
Yet the approach does add to the appeal of both novels, and I think it's best appreciated not as a cultural signifier but as an innovative device. The great television comedy The Office also seems to emanate from a strange, carefully constructed collective narrative stance. The characters in "The Office" seem to be filming some type of cosmic eternal reality show, which is why they make faces at the camera and give furtive interviews between scenes. Yet it's completely unclear who is watching this reality show and whether or not this reality show exists at all. Like Park's book and Ferris's book, "The Office" simply employs an off-center narrative stance as a great hiding place from which to stalk its prey.
The modern craze for First Person Plural reminds me of the craze for Second Person Singular during the "Breakfast Club" literary scene of the 1980's. Jay McInerney's Bright Lights Big City was ground zero of the "you" craze with this opening line:
You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning.
Many followed, including Lorrie Moore, Don Delillo, Ann Beattie, Nicholson Baker, Julian Barnes and Frederick Barthelme. Hell, I tried it myself, with utterly unsatisfying results. Twenty years later, whatever happened to Second Person Singular? Writers from Chuck Palahniuk to Junot Diaz still use it, but now nobody calls it seminal. I guess the fashion went out with Spy Magazine.
The funny thing about both First Person Plural and Second Person Singular is that, while they are relatively rare occurences in fiction, they are both used widely in song lyrics. First Person Plural:
"We Shall Overcome"
"Let's Dance"
"This is D-Block"
Second Person Singular:
"Don't You Forget About Me"
"I Got You Babe"
"Do The Hustle"
What narrative stance will be the next big thing in postmodern fiction? I guess we'll have to wait and find out, won't we?
Whenever we sniff a layoff coming, which is always, each one of us thinks, It can't be me because ___.
When Lars started with us -- six months ago, nine months, a year ago? -- he was full of pep, but we managed to squeeze it out of him.
Or in Ferris's:
We were fractious and overpaid. Our mornings lacked promise.
And yet, reading both novels, I find myself skidding against the device. I like it when writers experiment with narrative stance, and I want to like both of these books. But I work in an office myself, and I don't find that a plural voice reflects my own generally more anguished experience of cubicle culture. The collective "we" is both limiting and liberating. Park and Ferris tend to rely on the comedy of recognition, of shared experience, and that's where this stance works. But Fyodor Dostoevsky could have never written in First Person Plural.
Yet the approach does add to the appeal of both novels, and I think it's best appreciated not as a cultural signifier but as an innovative device. The great television comedy The Office also seems to emanate from a strange, carefully constructed collective narrative stance. The characters in "The Office" seem to be filming some type of cosmic eternal reality show, which is why they make faces at the camera and give furtive interviews between scenes. Yet it's completely unclear who is watching this reality show and whether or not this reality show exists at all. Like Park's book and Ferris's book, "The Office" simply employs an off-center narrative stance as a great hiding place from which to stalk its prey.
The modern craze for First Person Plural reminds me of the craze for Second Person Singular during the "Breakfast Club" literary scene of the 1980's. Jay McInerney's Bright Lights Big City was ground zero of the "you" craze with this opening line:
You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning.
Many followed, including Lorrie Moore, Don Delillo, Ann Beattie, Nicholson Baker, Julian Barnes and Frederick Barthelme. Hell, I tried it myself, with utterly unsatisfying results. Twenty years later, whatever happened to Second Person Singular? Writers from Chuck Palahniuk to Junot Diaz still use it, but now nobody calls it seminal. I guess the fashion went out with Spy Magazine.
The funny thing about both First Person Plural and Second Person Singular is that, while they are relatively rare occurences in fiction, they are both used widely in song lyrics. First Person Plural:
"We Shall Overcome"
"Let's Dance"
"This is D-Block"
Second Person Singular:
"Don't You Forget About Me"
"I Got You Babe"
"Do The Hustle"
What narrative stance will be the next big thing in postmodern fiction? I guess we'll have to wait and find out, won't we?
Jay McInerney's Good Life: The Odeon In Dust
by Levi Asher on Tuesday, March 28, 2006 10:35 pm
I'm not sure why I like reading Jay McInerney. He's a moderately popular novelist with a shallow intellectual range and a level-headed narrative tone, and yet I felt inexplicably excited to read his new The Good Life, which is about two married Manhattan couples before and after September 11, 2001. As I waded through the first chapters I wasn't sure why I was reading it at all.
Most novels are about people with big problems, but a typical Jay McInerney character has far less problems than, say, me. The Good Life is about four New Yorkers with fabulous careers, trendy hobbies and great real estate. One couple has a treasured Tribeca loft and expects Salman Rushdie for dinner (he's a no-show), and that's the less wealthy pair. The display of vapid values, famous names and expensive logos in the first few chapters is almost over the top, and I nearly tossed the book aside in a pique of Marxist disgust at that point. But I decided to stick around, to see where Jay was going with all this.
In fact, McInerney knows how to engineer a story, and it was clear that these early displays of jaded prosperity were a setup for the obvious pivot. It's September 10 2001, and a character steps out of a cab:
"... pausing to look up at the huge monoliths looming above her ..."
Tribeca is only blocks away from the World Trade Center, and this neighborhood has been McInerney's literary backyard since the young magazine yuppies of Bright Lights Big City snorted coke in the bathroom at Odeon. Now his characters are older and attending more sophisticated parties, and we leave one of them off at the dregs of an awful society ball on the evening of September 10. Then it's September 12, and the same man wakes up outside, injured and caked in dust, desperately trying to dig a dead friend out of a mountain of burning rubble.
This is Luke, once an investment banker. He begins volunteering at a ground zero food relief station, along with Corinne, a modern downtown mother living inside a poundingly dull marital tableau. Luke and Corinne need each other, they fall together, and in the last few pages they blast back apart.
The ending is powerful, and justifies many flaws in the lazier pages that precede it. Overall, I enjoyed reading the book, but I am far from sure if it has what a book needs to be read by future generations or not. The writing is sometimes witty but never brilliant, and as always Jay McInerney's literary influences seem to range all the way from Hemingway to Fitzgerald. A Good Life feels much of the time like a good article in a toney magazine. That's what I didn't like.
What I did like is the quiet conviction and honesty of the story, and the humanity McInerney invests in his characters. It's hard to believe McInerney every wrote a book about yuppie coke fiends, because these characters are all paragons of responsibility and maturity (or three of the four main characters are, anyway, and the fourth, Luke's rich bimbo wife, shows up mostly as a comic foil for the other three).
I also liked the truths revealed at the sad but uncertain ending. I was expecting a happier resolution, but I'd forgotten that McInerney's favorite book is The Great Gatsby. Two boats against the current; two buildings down. A Good Life doesn't fully justify itself until the ending of the love affair, which reveals itself as both surprising and inevitable.
Some other opinions on this book can be found here, here and here.
We Love The 80’s
by Levi Asher on Wednesday, February 1, 2006 10:40 amI try to cover drama here on LitKicks, but the death of acclaimed playwright Wendy Wasserstein made me realize that I've never seen, read or heard a line of dialogue from any of her plays. In fact, having once served my time on Wall Street, I know more about her brother, the influential financier Bruce Wasserstein than I do about her.
Strangely, though, I have a vague sense that I heartily approve of Wendy Wasserstein's work, probably just because her titles are so appealing: The Heidi Chronicles, The Sisters Rosenweig, Isn't It Romantic?, An American Daughter, Uncommon Women and Others. I wish I could say something smart about her work, but I'll have to yield to a bunch of Bookslut links instead.
One voice from the literary 1980's is dead, and New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani's review of Jay McInerney's new novel suggests that another one isn't doing much better. I don't usually place a lot of faith in Michiko Kakutani's conventional and pedantic viewpoints, but I've read an occasional late-period McInerney book myself, and I think Kakutani aptly nails his fatal flaw: "He has demonstrated a desire both to satirize his self-indulgent characters and to romanticize their dilemmas, to italicize their moral failings while luxuriating in the surface flash of their lives. At the same time he has often seemed torn between a willingness to skate along lazily on his sardonic humor and grasp for social detail, and his aspiration to tell deeper, more emotionally involving stories."
I think she's got him. Maybe Bright Lights Big City, which once seemed truly innovative, was just a lucky stroke. Who would have ever thought that McInerney's contemporary Bret Easton Ellis would eventually be seen as the more substantial writer of the two?
But there it is. Or maybe it isn't: Slushpile presents a dissenting view. I think I'll check out The Good Life myself and settle this matter once and for all.
Strangely, though, I have a vague sense that I heartily approve of Wendy Wasserstein's work, probably just because her titles are so appealing: The Heidi Chronicles, The Sisters Rosenweig, Isn't It Romantic?, An American Daughter, Uncommon Women and Others. I wish I could say something smart about her work, but I'll have to yield to a bunch of Bookslut links instead.
One voice from the literary 1980's is dead, and New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani's review of Jay McInerney's new novel suggests that another one isn't doing much better. I don't usually place a lot of faith in Michiko Kakutani's conventional and pedantic viewpoints, but I've read an occasional late-period McInerney book myself, and I think Kakutani aptly nails his fatal flaw: "He has demonstrated a desire both to satirize his self-indulgent characters and to romanticize their dilemmas, to italicize their moral failings while luxuriating in the surface flash of their lives. At the same time he has often seemed torn between a willingness to skate along lazily on his sardonic humor and grasp for social detail, and his aspiration to tell deeper, more emotionally involving stories."
I think she's got him. Maybe Bright Lights Big City, which once seemed truly innovative, was just a lucky stroke. Who would have ever thought that McInerney's contemporary Bret Easton Ellis would eventually be seen as the more substantial writer of the two?
But there it is. Or maybe it isn't: Slushpile presents a dissenting view. I think I'll check out The Good Life myself and settle this matter once and for all.
What About T. C. Boyle?
by Levi Asher on Wednesday, September 14, 2005 11:06 pmT. C. Boyle has a new book out, Tooth and Claw. I read the title story in an anthology edited by Lorrie Moore, but I just couldn't share Lorrie Moore's excitement (in fact, I'd rather read Lorrie Moore). The story is about a lonely guy who adopts a large cat, not exactly tamed, with all the metaphors that implies. It was an amusing piece -- but one of the best of the year? I don't know.
Because he's a generally well-respected writer, I've given T. Coraghassen Boyle a few chances over the years. I read Road To Wellville, about some wacky cereal-makers in turn-of-the-century Battle Creek. I liked the setting of the book, but the plot was wooden and artifical, and the story finally clip-clopped to a stop without an epiphany.
I also caught Boyle at a Central Park Summerstage reading a long while ago, in the late 80's or early 90's. He read his Springsteen-inspired story "Greasy Lake", which was pretty much the story that made him famous. I thought it was okay, but Springsteen told it better.
Are there any T. C. Boyle advocates out there, and is anybody reading his new book? I'm curious what others think of this author.
Because he's a generally well-respected writer, I've given T. Coraghassen Boyle a few chances over the years. I read Road To Wellville, about some wacky cereal-makers in turn-of-the-century Battle Creek. I liked the setting of the book, but the plot was wooden and artifical, and the story finally clip-clopped to a stop without an epiphany.
I also caught Boyle at a Central Park Summerstage reading a long while ago, in the late 80's or early 90's. He read his Springsteen-inspired story "Greasy Lake", which was pretty much the story that made him famous. I thought it was okay, but Springsteen told it better.
Are there any T. C. Boyle advocates out there, and is anybody reading his new book? I'm curious what others think of this author.
Book Marketing, the Lunar Approach
by Levi Asher on Wednesday, August 24, 2005 01:01 pmI'm planning to drop by Bret Easton Ellis's reading from Lunar Park at the Half King in NY City this evening. I'm not sure what I might say if the author takes questions from the crowd; I think I'll ask if, as I suspect, the character of Robert Miller was actually based on Venkman from "Ghostbusters".
As the pseudo-site above demonstrates, Ellis's publishers are mounting what must be the most postmodern web marketing campaign in book publishing history, scattering tiny straight-faced websites representing various characters and incidents from the book all over the internet. The latest volley from the land of meta-Ellis is TwoBrets.com, where you can enter a writing contest (just click "Game" on the menu) inspired by a missing story cited in Lunar Park.
Has anybody else checked Ellis's new book out, and if so, has all the web-based promotion influenced your decision to do so (or not to do so)? The strange approach Alfred A. Knopf is taking happens to be a great fit for the crazed and quasi-realistic Lunar Park, but if this type of marketing turns out to actually sell books, there's no telling what we're going to be seeing in 2006 ...
As the pseudo-site above demonstrates, Ellis's publishers are mounting what must be the most postmodern web marketing campaign in book publishing history, scattering tiny straight-faced websites representing various characters and incidents from the book all over the internet. The latest volley from the land of meta-Ellis is TwoBrets.com, where you can enter a writing contest (just click "Game" on the menu) inspired by a missing story cited in Lunar Park.
Has anybody else checked Ellis's new book out, and if so, has all the web-based promotion influenced your decision to do so (or not to do so)? The strange approach Alfred A. Knopf is taking happens to be a great fit for the crazed and quasi-realistic Lunar Park, but if this type of marketing turns out to actually sell books, there's no telling what we're going to be seeing in 2006 ...
Lunar Park: Weird Happenings on Elsinore Lane
by Levi Asher on Friday, August 19, 2005 01:48 pm
Bret Easton Ellis's Lunar Park is more fun than any novel he's written before, and it's easy to see why it's become one of the hot books of the summer.
A satirical pseudo-autobiography as well as a creepy paranoid thriller, the book glides like a fast dream and keeps you in suspense, even though you won't care a bit about the well-being of any of its endangered characters. Everything still all adds up to less than zero in Ellis's world, and that's the way it's supposed to be.
The book kicks off with a hilarious summary of Ellis's writing career and his emergence as one of three super-hot lit-darlings of the 1980's (along with Tama Janowitz and Jay McInerney). He's bitter and funny as he looks back on all the parties he attended and all the celebrities he met, revealing that he remains just as callow, just as drug-dependent, and just as unenlightened now as he was then. But he recently got married, and trying to be a good stepdad to his movie star wife's 11 year old son and 6 year old daughter. This only seems to create a dark undercurrent of parent-anxiety, and images of Ellis's own dead father start to haunt him.
The book is packed with literary references that refuse to take themselves seriously. The Ellis family lives on Elsinore Lane and shops at the Ophelia Mall, hints so hokey that Ellis can only be inviting reviewers to sneer at them. The punchy sentences Ellis uses to advance the creepy underplot recall Chuck Pahlaniuk, while the use of the author as a character in an implausible criminal plot indicates that Ellis has been reading Paul Auster (the title of the book also echoes Auster's Moon Palace). Meanwhile, the family dynamic, complete with clueless neighbors and sweet corrupted children in an affluent college town, recalls Don DeLillo's White Noise.
Back in the 1980's, when the Ellis/McInerney/Janowitz trio ruled the party photo pages in Vanity Fair and Spy Magazine, nobody ever thought Ellis would emerge as the only serious writer of the three. In fact he seemed the slightest of the trio, and the least original. But McInerney and Janowitz, for all their good haircuts, have clearly stopped experimenting with either form or content. McInerney has tried to position himself as the F. Scott Fitzgerald of his age (supposedly we'll all appreciate Brightness Falls twenty years after he's dead?) while Janowitz has simply stuck to familiar grooves. Ellis, on the other hand, has made a career of twisting his rich party boy persona into one odd tortuous new shape after another, and in 2005 he seems to belong more to this decade than to that one. We don't exactly love his books, because that's not what the Ellis experience is about, but it sure is easy to enjoy this one.
Bret and Fran
by Levi Asher on Thursday, August 11, 2005 03:16 pmBret Easton Ellis's new novel/memoir Lunar Park is getting a lot of attention. I haven't read it yet, but I have been amused to peruse the famously fake websites created to introduce some of the supposedly but questionably real characters in this book.
Since when does a major publishing firm like Random House do wacky stuff like this? It must be a new kind of world we are living in.
But if this fast-changing world leaves you yearning for the comfort of a familiar sarcastic voice from the past, here's an interview with Fran Lebowitz. Fran hasn't written much since the days when Bret Easton Ellis was the new kid on the block, and it's good to hear from her again.
Since when does a major publishing firm like Random House do wacky stuff like this? It must be a new kind of world we are living in.
But if this fast-changing world leaves you yearning for the comfort of a familiar sarcastic voice from the past, here's an interview with Fran Lebowitz. Fran hasn't written much since the days when Bret Easton Ellis was the new kid on the block, and it's good to hear from her again.
Books at the Movies
by Jamelah Earle on Friday, April 29, 2005 08:13 pmAs you may or may not know, a film version of the Douglas Adams classic, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, is opening in theaters this weekend. I know this book remains a popular favorite among many, so I thought I'd ask what you think about it being adapted into film. Do you plan to see it? Why or why not? If you catch it this weekend, be sure to give us a short review.
But now, because I'm fond of changing the subject, I'm going to, uh, change the subject. Even though it's often like the proverbial comparison of apples and oranges, the subject of books on film is capable of spurring debate among devotees of each form. (No, really. It is.) But beyond that, I think we can all agree that there are some film adaptations that shouldn't have happened, like, ever. (The Scarlet Letter, anyone?) We can all agree on this, yes?
But now, because I'm fond of changing the subject, I'm going to, uh, change the subject. Even though it's often like the proverbial comparison of apples and oranges, the subject of books on film is capable of spurring debate among devotees of each form. (No, really. It is.) But beyond that, I think we can all agree that there are some film adaptations that shouldn't have happened, like, ever. (The Scarlet Letter, anyone?) We can all agree on this, yes?
Living in the ’80s and Beyond: Tama Janowitz
by Andeh on Thursday, October 9, 2003 10:14 pm"Abby, don't do it. In the old days, marriages were arranged by the parents, and maybe you ended up with a jerk but at least you had the security of marriage, no one would dump you out on the street. In today's world, it's the slave system. If you live with this guy in New York, you'll be the slave" -Eleanor, of Slaves of New York
Tama Janowitz was born in 1957 in San Francisco, California. She was the daughter of a pysychiatrist father and a poet and literature professor mother. Tama's parents divorced when she was 10 and she was then raised by her mother. She had an interesting childhood and traveled to Israel. She later graduated from Barnard College in New York, where she majored in Creative Writing.
Janowitz published her first novel in 1981, titled American Dad. This achieved a bit of critical success. Following the release of this novel, she wrote four more novels which were rejected. The author then decided to approach writing from a different angle. She decided to write a collection of short stories. She called this collection Slaves of New York. This book, published in 1986, won her almost instant fame and qualified her as an '80s "it" girl author of sorts. Slaves of New York was a book of short stories focusing on artists, prostitutes and other city dwellers. This book was thought to be somewhat biographical, based on the author's experiences of living in the artistic world and Soho area of New York City in the 1980s.
The success of Slaves of New York put Janowitz in a certain class of authors who had written popular fiction set in 1980s-era city life. This group also included Bret Easton Ellis and Jay McInerney.
Janowitz became a bit of a staple on the New York City nightlife scene in the 1980s, befriending and partying around the likes of Andy Warhol. Slaves of New York was even turned into a 1989 movie; although the plot of the movie was a bit different and paled in comparison to the greatness of the book.
Janowitz' career as an author continued with several novels, including A Cannibal in Manhattan(1987), The Male Cross-Dresser Support Group(1991), and By the Shores of the Gitchee Gumee(1996). However, these novels were recieved in a critical backlash, compared to the greater success of Slaves of New York. Nonetheless, these novels had retained Janowitz' unique flair for describing New York City life or, indeed, life in general, from an innocent bystander's viewpoint. I personally think that all of Janowitz' novels up to the Male Cross Dresser Support Group captured the verve of New York City life best and unlike any other author that I have read who wrote about such a subject. I knew that Janowitz would bounce back, critically speaking, with an awesome book and many of her fans indeed remained.
After the critical backlash of Janowitz' second through fourth books died down, the author took some time off to focus upon creative renewal, family, and perhaps to take a break before getting inspiration for further writing. I imagine that many fans of her writing, and indeed many literary critics, were wondering 'what had happened to Tama Janowitz?' Would she ever write another book that was as "good" as Slaves of New York?
Tama came back onto the literary scene in 1999, with a novel called A Certain Age. Even before it was published, various parts of the literary publishing community had been excitedly comparing it to the earlier novel, Slaves of New York. However, A Certain Age is a more mature offer from Janowitz and contains a different plot and subject line than Slaves did. A Certain Age is about the character of a 32-year old woman, who is on a search for a rich husband, in both New York City and the Hamptons, during one summer. As a fan, I would say that while Slaves of New York had a decidedly 20-something feel to it, A Certain Age had a decidedly 30-something feel to it. In any instance, Janowitz' books can be read at almost any age; starting with the "young adult" age. I started reading her novels as a young teenager.
She has recently also written another novel in 2003 called Peyton Amberg. This is another novel which is different from Slaves, and touches on Janowitz' ever creative but also further maturing type of writing style.
No matter what comes, Tama Janowitz will remain in the hearts of many as an important author of city life -- namely New York City life. I cannot think of any author who has taken her place in this respect since. And, honestly, I do not want anybody to.
Today, Tama Janowitz lives in Brooklyn with her husband and her daughter.
Tama Janowitz was born in 1957 in San Francisco, California. She was the daughter of a pysychiatrist father and a poet and literature professor mother. Tama's parents divorced when she was 10 and she was then raised by her mother. She had an interesting childhood and traveled to Israel. She later graduated from Barnard College in New York, where she majored in Creative Writing.
Janowitz published her first novel in 1981, titled American Dad. This achieved a bit of critical success. Following the release of this novel, she wrote four more novels which were rejected. The author then decided to approach writing from a different angle. She decided to write a collection of short stories. She called this collection Slaves of New York. This book, published in 1986, won her almost instant fame and qualified her as an '80s "it" girl author of sorts. Slaves of New York was a book of short stories focusing on artists, prostitutes and other city dwellers. This book was thought to be somewhat biographical, based on the author's experiences of living in the artistic world and Soho area of New York City in the 1980s.
The success of Slaves of New York put Janowitz in a certain class of authors who had written popular fiction set in 1980s-era city life. This group also included Bret Easton Ellis and Jay McInerney.
Janowitz became a bit of a staple on the New York City nightlife scene in the 1980s, befriending and partying around the likes of Andy Warhol. Slaves of New York was even turned into a 1989 movie; although the plot of the movie was a bit different and paled in comparison to the greatness of the book.
Janowitz' career as an author continued with several novels, including A Cannibal in Manhattan(1987), The Male Cross-Dresser Support Group(1991), and By the Shores of the Gitchee Gumee(1996). However, these novels were recieved in a critical backlash, compared to the greater success of Slaves of New York. Nonetheless, these novels had retained Janowitz' unique flair for describing New York City life or, indeed, life in general, from an innocent bystander's viewpoint. I personally think that all of Janowitz' novels up to the Male Cross Dresser Support Group captured the verve of New York City life best and unlike any other author that I have read who wrote about such a subject. I knew that Janowitz would bounce back, critically speaking, with an awesome book and many of her fans indeed remained.
After the critical backlash of Janowitz' second through fourth books died down, the author took some time off to focus upon creative renewal, family, and perhaps to take a break before getting inspiration for further writing. I imagine that many fans of her writing, and indeed many literary critics, were wondering 'what had happened to Tama Janowitz?' Would she ever write another book that was as "good" as Slaves of New York?
Tama came back onto the literary scene in 1999, with a novel called A Certain Age. Even before it was published, various parts of the literary publishing community had been excitedly comparing it to the earlier novel, Slaves of New York. However, A Certain Age is a more mature offer from Janowitz and contains a different plot and subject line than Slaves did. A Certain Age is about the character of a 32-year old woman, who is on a search for a rich husband, in both New York City and the Hamptons, during one summer. As a fan, I would say that while Slaves of New York had a decidedly 20-something feel to it, A Certain Age had a decidedly 30-something feel to it. In any instance, Janowitz' books can be read at almost any age; starting with the "young adult" age. I started reading her novels as a young teenager.
She has recently also written another novel in 2003 called Peyton Amberg. This is another novel which is different from Slaves, and touches on Janowitz' ever creative but also further maturing type of writing style.
No matter what comes, Tama Janowitz will remain in the hearts of many as an important author of city life -- namely New York City life. I cannot think of any author who has taken her place in this respect since. And, honestly, I do not want anybody to.
Today, Tama Janowitz lives in Brooklyn with her husband and her daughter.
