Lola, California by Edie Meidav

The bonds of friendship that connect two girls are explored in Lola, California, the new novel by Edie Meidav. In this book, Meidav looks at the forces that unite Lana and Rose, or Lola 1 and Lola 2 as they called themselves as children, and the effect the power of their own girlhood potential has not only on their own lives, but on the lives of their family, lovers, children, and on the environment itself, on the idea of their California home. The magic that defines them, as effervescent as the negative ions that wash ashore from the Pacific Ocean, also traps them in roles they spend most of this story trying to outrun.

Rose, an orphan and adopted by a caring family, worships Lana and fights for her friendship, while Lana, the daughter of an egotistical Berkeley professor who, for most of the book, sits in a prison cell awaiting execution for the murder of his wife, fights against her father’s horrible legacy. The girls’ sense of entitlement, their aura of invincibility, is hedonistic, egotistical, and ultimately harmless, but their friendship, stretched over time until it reaches a breaking point as adults, leaves lasting scars.

Bridesmaids

I was almost hoping the movie would somehow get less funny so that the six or so women in the row behind me would stop laughing hysterically and snorting in my ear, unapologetic full-nostril nose snorts of the type that can only come when one is having too good a time and doesn’t care who the fuck knows. Sorry for that, I was channeling the sorting women, or more likely Annie, the main character of the movie, Bridesmaids, played with winning comedic dash by Kristen Wiig, which the row of women and I saw the other night in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn.

Exit Music by Ian Rankin

Detective Inspector John Rebus does not go quietly in Exit Music, the last in a series of police procedurals by Ian Rankin set in and around Edinburgh and featuring the Scottish detectective.

It’s not too much of a spoiler to say that Rebus’s leaving seems similar in spirit and impact to Holmes and Moriarty’s plunge off Reichenbach Falls, and even Ahab and the white whale’s final deadly dance. That it’s surprising given the elegiac lead-up through most of the novel’s 600 pages is a testament to Rankin’s skill as a novelist, his love of his character, and DI Rebus’s innate unpredictability. Some would say orneriness. Rebus cannot seem to stay safely inside his box, even after 18 novels, beginning with Knots and Crosses in 1987 and ending with Exit Music, published last year and recently released in paperback.

Shattered Spoilers

Rosebud is an electric train.

Frankenstein’s Monster is made up of pieces of Frankenstein’s long-lost half-brother, Toby.

Oedipus kills his father and plays golf with his mother.

Babe the Talking Pig is not a real pig.

Hamlet’s step-father killed his father and married a nice girl from New Jersey.

Anna Karenina caught a later train.

Dewey defeated Truman.

Upon closer inspection, Moby Dick is revealed to be a kind of taupe.

The Broken Estate by James Wood

There’s a small hardware store in the East Village that feels magical because it seems to contain on its narrow shelves anything you could possibly want, just as you soon as you ask for it. Ice trays and tumblers, seeds and fertilizer, screws and socket wrenches? It’s all right here, next to the light bulbs, nails, batteries, washers, hinges, candles, sandpaper, shoelaces, and paint brushes.

I think that’s what James Wood’s library must be like. Though he says, in How Fiction Works, that he didn’t look further than the books he had at hand to help him write his examination of literary techniques in the novel, implying that it’s not beyond the layman to assemble a comparable collection of classics, Wood’s modest bookshelf must be touched with magic because its seem to encompass the entire history of literature, from the King James Bible and Shakespeare to all of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, Conrad and Crane, Kafka, Dickens, David Foster Wallace, Pynchon, and Updike up to his 2006 effort, “The Terrorist.” I know this not because I kept a running tally. Wood, who wears his erudition lightly, did it for me in a helpful bibliography at the end of the book.

Free for All, by Kenneth Turan & Joseph Papp

Its publication long delayed, Free for All, the oral history of Joe Papp and the rise of the Public Theater in New York, comes across almost as much as a curio, an historical artifact, as the inspirational tale it tells of a scrappy New York kid who loved Shakespeare and almost singlehandedly created one of this nation’s most influential and enduring cultural institutions.

Told by over a hundred voices, including actors, directors, theatre administrators, critics, writers, New York politicians, and Papp himself, the book presents an often vibrant, sometimes cacophonous mosaic of New York theater history from the 1950s through the 70s, as Papp grew up and molded the New York Shakespeare Festival into an irresistible cultural force, and his own legend into something more elusive.

The Ask by Sam Lipsyte

Milo Burke, a thwarted undergrad artist now hustling donations for a minor liberal arts college, is in the business of posing “the Ask,” to which, ideally, wealthy donors respond by offering “the Give.” It’s not the job he expected, nor the world he expected, and he’s not the person he expected to become, either. This general thread of discontentment, which is often stretched to absurdist extremes, hangs over Milo’s world as he struggles to survive the persistent pull of wanting and getting in The Ask, Sam Lipsyte’s deeply funny new novel.