3 book reviews

[May 28th, 2003] badlands
by Doug Rennie
(Creative Arts Books, 151 pages, $15.95)

For lovers of the "flawed narrator" à la Denis Johnson, Doug Rennie's new book of short stories, Badlands, will come as a welcome addition to the genre.

Rennie, who once toiled at WW, is a master at delivering visceral descriptions that bring the reader face to face with the reality of the narrator. This is aptly demonstrated in the story "Tobruk," in which the narrator describes her initial meeting with her now-husband: "Within a few months, they became lovers, if that term, she often thought, is appropriate for someone who left immediately afterward, without saying a word, without leaving behind a hair on the pillow, or cigarette stub in the ashtray, not one...smudge of himself."

Another of Rennie's strengths is his ability to refrain from over-explaining his intentions, leaving the reader as breathless and uncertain as many of his characters. A perfect example of this comes at the end of Hooper's Wife, a story of a man who is troubled by his certainty of his beloved wife's infidelity, only to discover her time away from home is being spent shoplifting from expensive boutiques: "Hooper began to breathe hard through his mouth as he stood before his expectant wife. He wanted to leave, to turn at this moment and run from the store, but he could not. She said nothing more...waiting, until he began at last to take tiny steps. Not toward his wife, but circling her in a tight arc to his left, like a moon in orbit around a star."

The author's reality is a dark one, but he is concerned with events that pull heavily from the headlines, rather than from an imagined world: The atrocities of war, terminal illness, loneliness and jealousy are all themes explored here. Although fond of the metaphor, Rennie writes of a world most of us, whether or not we want to, can understand. Lisa Warner

make your own damn movie! secrets of a renegade director

by Lloyd Kaufman, with Adam Jahnke and Trent Haaga
(St. Martin's, 330 pages, $14.95)

There are shelves upon shelves of books out there designed to teach you "How to Make Movies," and you could spend years reading them all. At the end of the day, however, most of them say the exact same thing, and you never really learn much. In Make Your Own Damn Movie!, his follow-up to All I Need to Know about Filmmaking I Learned from the Toxic Avenger, schlock auteur Lloyd Kaufman offers up his insights on the creation of cinema--sort of.

Truth be told, Kaufman is more concerned with rambling stories and offbeat non sequiturs than with the nuts and bolts of filmmaking. But that doesn't stop him from dispensing priceless pearls of wisdom for DIY movie moguls. "It is possible you may feel a twinge of guilt over exploiting someone's talents and reducing him or her to indentured servitude," writes the creator of Stuff Stephanie in the Incinerator. "You shouldn't."

Sure, there are other books out there that may be more useful for technical aspects of filmmaking, but none of them explain how to crush a human head or create vomit. And from a practical standpoint, most guides to filmmaking tend to gloss over things like how to audition actress for roles requiring nudity while at the same time avoiding sexual-harassment lawsuits.

Kaufman writes with a hilarious, quick-witted style that flows as naturally as conversation, making the book less like an instructional tome and more like crazed recollections of killing rats and bouts with suicidal depression--infused with some filmmaking advice--from your eccentric Uncle Lloyd. David Walker

portrait of my mother, who posed nude in wartime
by Marjorie Sandor
(Sarabande, 213 pages, $13.95)

Sandor reads at 7:30 pm Thursday, May 29, at Powell's Books on Hawthorne, 3723 SE Hawthorne Blvd., 238-1668.

Sandor, a teacher at Oregon State University, presents a series of independent short stories strung together to create something akin to a novel. The chapters seem to be extractions from a longer diary, affording us penetrating views into three generations.

The first-person narrator focuses on the mother, Clara, the grandmother, Eva, and associated men: grandfather, father and brother. Along with the author's skill in constructing complicated, often contradictory, characters, Sandor exhibits a beautifully lyrical style with metaphors that float and dance, rather than hitting the reader with jolts of migraine. Motherhood, a recurring concern, is described as "that condition as big and unbeatable as the sky at night, the black dome of it jammed full of beauty, stars and trouble." Sandor invents compelling first lines for her individual stories: "It was a year of maiden lady suicides." "By the time she was eleven, the house was deep in old age quiet." "When I was thirteen, a girl visited my brother in secret."

In the last story, "Malingerer," the first-person viewpoint disappears. The father, from a hospital, writes to his family, "Take my advice: save your biggest secret till you're well beyond the grave." We realize this vignette occurs post-mortem: Father's ashes already have been flung in the preceding chapter. The realization charges the final piece with heightened poignancy. Art Chenoweth