We’re coming to the end of beach read season, and with everything going on in the world, who can blame you if you spent your summer immersing yourself in lighter fare?
As the calendar flips to autumn, The Show’s resident book expert, Mark Athitakis, is here with a preview of some of the most intriguing books coming out this fall, and they’ve all got a lot to say about some pretty serious subjects. But that doesn’t mean they’re not page-turners.
First up is a book that’s actually already available on bookstore shelves: Peter Orner’s novel “The Gossip Columnist’s Daughter.” As Athitakis says, it’s inspired by the tragic story of real-life columnist Irv Kupcinet.
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Mark Athitakis.
Full conversation
MARK ATHITAKIS: He was the Louella Parsons or Walter Winchell of Chicago back in the ’50s and ’60s. He was the gossip columnist. So if Frank Sinatra was dining at some swanky downtown hotel, he was the person who was going to report in the Chicago Sun-Times about it.
Now this story turns on a darker story that involves his daughter, Karen, who was a young actress on TV and film. And in 1966, she was found dead, likely murdered, in her apartment in Los Angeles. And this novel is the attempt to untangle the murder and deal with the narrator’s obsession with the Kupcinet family, his own family’s relationship with it. So it deals with a lot of complicated feelings that happen with fame, celebrity, darkness, murder.
SAM DINGMAN: I also am really intrigued by the idea of fictionalizing the experience of being obsessed with a drama in someone else’s family.
ATHITAKIS: Yes, because the narrator is dealing with his own family relationships in the same way. So in some ways, the trauma that the Kupcinet family was experiencing becomes a kind of mirror for the trauma that his own family was experiencing because this event has a blast radius.
DINGMAN: Well, let’s move to the next one. This is by Dan Chaon, and it’s another novel. It’s called “One of Us.”
ATHITAKIS: Yes. So Dan Chaon is very talented at splitting the middle between literary fiction and horror fiction. And this novel, the phrase may resonate in the back of some people’s minds because it comes from the 1932 horror movie “Freaks,” which featured actual sideshow performers, the bearded ladies and so forth. So obviously it’s a very un-PC term, but it is about the idea of creating community in unusual ways.
And so this story turns on a pair of twins who have certain psychic powers and have literally run away to join the circus. So it uses Todd Browning’s film “Freaks” as kind of a launchpad for talking about, how do you create community among misfits? It’s meant to discomfit the reader, but it also has a remarkable amount of heart for a story that has this kind of promise.
DINGMAN: And am I right that there’s a bit of an inversion there in intention as compared to Todd Browning’s film? Because I remember being shown by a film nerd friend — when I was far too young — Todd Browning’s film “Freaks.” In my memory, at least, a big part of that experience was that it felt like the film was kind of intentionally othering its subjects.
ATHITAKIS: Yeah, it never quite reconciles the idea of making its characters on the screen ripe for exploitation. But also underneath it is this theme of “One of us. One of us.” People who are Ramones fans may remember that they co-opted that phrase “Gabba gabba! One of us! One of us!” to say that, OK, yeah, we’re misfits, but we’re together.
That’s not necessarily something that the movie itself does a great job of amplifying, though. It’s there. And I think that’s something that Dan Chaon is trying to play with and trying to elevate a little bit more.
DINGMAN: All right. Well, let’s talk about one more novel. This one is by Brandon Taylor, and it’s called “Minor Black Figures.”
ATHITAKIS: Yes. So Brandon Taylor is a very accomplished African American novelist. And this novel is concerned with African American art. Its main character is a painter who is Black and who is gay in New York City. But he is chafing at those sorts of identity characteristics and trying to find a way to live outside of them — and also recognizing that that is a little hard for him to do.
And the thing about this novel that I love is that Brandon Taylor has a real knack for getting into the real grit of social relationships and life in the city. The way I have described it, the people that if you liked “A Little Life” but it felt a little bit too big and melodramatic and a little bit too much — and for a lot of people was a lot of too much — this novel has the same kind of sensibility and the same kind of cast of characters but feels a little bit more manageable. It feels a little bit more earthbound.
DINGMAN: And if I’m hearing you right, it sounds like letting the details of a life that some readers might be less familiar with be enough in and of themselves.
ATHITAKIS: Indeed. And the novel dwells on this movie called “Jeanne Dielman,” Chantal Akerman’s movie. Which, if you’ve seen it, it’s a 3.5-hour movie where practically nothing happens.
DINGMAN: Until the end!
ATHITAKIS: Until the very end. It’s just there’s about 3 hours and 15 minutes of a woman just going about her errands and managing her apartment and trying to make money however she can. And clearly, Brandon Taylor is enchanted with that kind of slowness, that sort of “What do you see when you are attuning yourself to paying attention to the close details?”
DINGMAN: Well, Brandon Taylor, if you’re listening, I think Sight and Sound named “Jeanne Dielman” the best movie of all time. So not a bad comparison from Mark Athitakis.
All right. For our last one, this is a new book by Susan Orlean, and this one is nonfiction. It’s a memoir called “Joyride.”
ATHITAKIS: Yes. So, Susan Orlean — and this is a personal thing. I wanted to be Susan Orlean when I grew up.
DINGMAN: Same.
ATHITAKIS: She was a longtime writer for the New Yorker, and she was extremely gifted at writing pure feature stories, by which I mean delightfully irrelevant subject matters. Her most famous feature story, which she talks about at length in the book, is called “The American Man at Age Ten,” where she just profiled an average, everyday, suburban 10-year-old boy.
DINGMAN: I love that one.
ATHITAKIS: The first couple of paragraphs, where she imagines what they would be like if they were married, is one of the funniest and truest and most poignant pieces of observational writing that I know of. And so she’s really just focused on stories that are, “this looks interesting.”
It’s rare for an alt-weekly writer to maintain this sort of positivity that just runs through the entire book. The title is literally about how much pleasure she has gotten and all the things that she’s had to explore during her career.
DINGMAN: Well, and I didn’t know until going into this conversation that she had a background in alt weeklies. I only knew of her time at The New Yorker. What was the part of the alt weekly world that she traveled in?
ATHITAKIS: Her first job was at Willamette Week, which was Portland, Oregon’s alt-weekly. And this is in the ’70s, which was kind of the heyday of the alt weekly, where you were given free rein to try new ideas.
And it may break the heart of aspiring journalists or younger journalists like me, because she would talk about, “I want to expand my career. How do I do that? Well, I just called the San Francisco office of Newsweek and said, ‘Can I write features?’ And they said yes.” And so she has really and truly lived a charmed life.
DINGMAN: Yeah, yeah. But obviously had the goods to match that stroke of good fortune.
ATHITAKIS: Absolutely, absolutely. And one thing she certainly gets into in the book is the depth of research that is involved but also the pleasure that she finds in research. And I think anybody who’s spent serious time working on weird, offbeat alt weekly stories recognizes that part of the joy of that is discovering things about this weird little world that nobody else knows and that you’re really excited to report out into the world.
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