PERFUME & PAIN, raucous raunchy ribald reading...go get one NOW!

PERFUME & PAIN
ANNA DORN
Simon & Schuster
$18.99 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A controversial Los Angeles author attempts to revive her career and finally find true love in this hilarious nod to 1950s lesbian pulp fiction.

Having recently moved both herself and her formidable perfume bottle collection into a tiny bungalow in Los Angeles, mid-list author Astrid Dahl finds herself back in the Zoom writer’s group she cofounded, Sapphic Scribes, after an incident that leaves her and her career lightly canceled. But she temporarily forgets all that by throwing herself into a few sexy distractions—like Ivy, a grad student who smells like metallic orchids and is researching 1950s lesbian pulp, or her new neighbor, Penelope, who smells like patchouli.

Penelope, a painter living off Urban Outfitters settlement money, immediately ingratiates herself in Astrid’s life, bonding with her best friends and family, just as Astrid and Ivy begin to date in person. Astrid feels judged and threatened by Penelope, a responsible older vegan, but also finds her irresistibly sexy.

When Astrid receives an unexpected call from her agent with the news that actress and influencer Kat Gold wants to adapt her previous novel for TV, Astrid finally has a chance to resurrect her waning career. But the pressure causes Astrid’s worst vice to rear its head—the Patricia Highsmith, a blend of Adderall, alcohol, and cigarettes—and results in blackouts and a disturbing series of events.

Unapologetically feminine yet ribald, steamy yet hilarious, Anna Dorn has crafted an exquisite homage to the lesbian pulp of yore, reclaiming it for our internet- and celebrity-obsessed world.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Have you read Highsmith's Carol (aka The Price of Salt)? This has that particular kind of Questa o Quella? Rigoletto-but-sapphic-romance aura. And, follow-up concept, are you aware that Highsmith was a cruel, nasty piece of work? This has that same mean-creative story aura.

Having now hooked a few, driven a few off, and confused most, let's talk about lesbians. I'm the gay brother of a spiky, difficult lesbian. (She said so before I did! But, to be scrupulously fair, our entire family is/was spiky and difficult.) Astrid's 'tude is nowhere near as unkind as the reviews led me to believe it would be, by my own family's standards. What she is, that seems to surprise and unnerve the people around her in the story, is what I think interesting people usually are: Opinionated. I note without pleasure that opinionated women get miles of stick from persons of all genders and orientations. Just ask Hillary Clinton if you doubt me. It shows also in the readers' reviews I've seen around and about. Lots of people, even the ones who liked the story fine, commented on how abrasive Astrid was. Well, yeah. She's smarter than a solid 95% of the people around her. She's in a highly stressed passage in her life. She's abrasive because she's rubbed raw by her life.

Her happy place is perfume. Think about what that means. She collects something that is designed to hide and to enhance a person's most intimate quality, their smell. She doesn't even collect the stuff itself! She collects the containers...the carefully designed vessels that seduce the eyes but in and of themselves provide nothing but a space to be filled! The capitalist/consumer seductions carefully designed to increase your (largely female, as these are perfume bottles) cultural anxiety about your fundamental attractor or repeller of intimacy, smell!

This Anna Dorn, she knows her onions. Show me, please, another author whose depth of character development includes these intense sociopolitical shades whose prose isn't clunking, juddering, jelly-like didacticism. Author Dorn's got little enough competition in the witty-banter segment. She's sui generis in the segment of the Venn diagram where that overlaps anti-capitalist/feminist discourse.

Happily so. I'm glad Simon & Schuster offered me this DRC because, old gay man that I am, I hadn't heard of Author Dorn before. Now it's me for Vagablonde.

I see a few raised eyebrows contemplating an expected fifth star, after that gush. I wanted to put a fifth star on, I promise! I couldn't because Astrid being wishy-washy about Ivy-vs-Penelope was overplayed. I think will-they-won't-they is an easy trope to allow to outstay its actual usefulness. My perception is that this is what happened here. I'm also a wee bit wary of things like cancel culture/getting canceled being enshrined in stories that say bigger, more trenchant things about inclusion and cultural norms. It feels more like an add-on to use Astrid's canceling for her unguarded comments than an actual feature of the entire conversation the rest of the story is having about the greater issues abovementioned.

So okay, I didn't find myself sitting slackjawed, wondering how this author faceted this sparkling thousand-carat diamond. (That experience is what I call six-stars-of-five storytelling.) But make no mistake, this wordsmith will be on my readar as I wait for her to do just that.

It seems very likely to happen.

THE SUNSET GANG, old age ain't for sissies but it can be played for laughs

THE SUNSET GANG: Inspirational Short Stories That Reshape the Meaning of Aging
WARREN ADLER
Stonehouse Publishing (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$4.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: In America, where "old" is a dirty word, people over sixty-five are often shut out as if growing old were some kind of contagious disease. But you cannot shut the Sunset Gang out of your heart.

With time running short, these intrepid residents of Sunset Village in Florida continue to thirst for life and love.

"The Sunset Gang" is as lively, fun, and courageous a group as you'll find anywhere this side of the Last Reward. The fact that you'll find them at Sunset Village, a condominium retirement community in Florida - where an ambulance siren is the theme song and cycling at a stately pace is strenuous exercise - does not mean that they are ready to pack it all in. Not by a long shot.

Sex and romantic love keep Sunset Village bubbling with activity.

If you were to walk down one of its well-tended paths, you might spot Jenny and Bill sitting on a bench, acting like young lovers, and never suspect that they are married - to other people! And at the pool, Max Bernstein, with an expertise that comes from five decades of skirt chasing, is singling out attractive widows.

But the true beating heart of Sunset Village is the love of family and friends. Widowed Molly Berkowitz learns that although her son and daughter may be failures in the eyes of the world, they are well worth bragging about, and Isaac Kramer begins to feel truly at home when the gray-haired boys down at the Laundromat start calling him by his old neighborhood nickname, "Itch."

This short story series about aging in America that inspired the PBS American Playhouse TV trilogy produced by Linda Lavin and starring Uta Hagen, Harold Gould, Dori Brenner and Jerry Stiller, garnering Doris Roberts an Emmy nomination for 'Best Supporting Actress' in a mini-series.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Waitaminnit waitaminnit whereinahell's the Bryce Method, you ask...I hear you, don't front! I'll tell you the truth: much as I say "blahblah isn't a novel, it's a récit or braided stories or a syncretism of Egyptian death-spells with upanishads or whatever," I am equally likely to say this is a novel when told it's stories.

Just that the chapters are a funny length.

For funny old Jewish people, that shouldn't be a problem. And honestly it isn't. This is a comfort read. I got lots and lots of laughs, and as I live in a building full of old Jewish folk, I was frequently trying not to read chunks of it aloud to...no one in particular (it says here). The late Warren Adler knew exactly what he was doing writing this entertaining chronicle of aging and its indignities hidden behind a very slippery figleaf. Laughing at people is frowned on, rightly so, in today's world. But laughing at yourself, and with your friends, is the way to stay sane in a world that won't listen to you, doesn't much want you, but still has your heart walking around in it.

That's everyone in here. While the author first published it in 1977, when a lot of the world's prejudices were different, the list of concerns of the Greatest-Generation cast of Jewish folks sounds exactly the way my neighbors sound. It's a little odd, when I think about it, that the immigrants raised in the 1930s on the Lower East Side and Brownsville who mostly populate the book are darn near clones of the Long Island facility I occupy. But I think it shows cultural continuity is very much a feature of Jewish identity. I know several of my friends here are children of Auschwitz and other camp survivors...only recently, early in COVID, did our last survivor resident die. (Vale Arthur, quit nagging Yhwh about what she needs to do better.)

Oh, okay. I can't resist the power of Tradition in this context. Bryce, your method lives!

Yiddish revs up the ol' libido when two assimilated folk reconnect with their mother tongue.

Itch reminds of the moment in Cranford when Judi Dench, as Miss Mattie, mourns her sister's death with the unbearably poignant musing, "Now there is no one left who will call me Matilda." A name is an identity, and as it disappears, one grows lonely for it and for what it stood for in one's life.

An Unexpected Visit reminds us all that there's a steady beat of time passing, and with its passing it's taking away forever the means of getting inside someone's head.

The Detective *chuckle* Pride goeth before a fall; Pride goeth before a fall. Different concepts, same outcome: No more pride and a lot of nasty vanity spread over top of everything.

God Made Me That Way, and pausing in one's day to thank her for it is a good idea since it means the right one will indeed come along.

The Braggart proves that empty gourds make the most noise.

The Demonstration limns the timelessness of battling hatred in her den.

The Angel of Mercy feels "The End" coming up over the horizon, and...it's okay.

Poor Herman proves that no matter how long true, spirit-deep friends are separated, they're really still the same friends.

The Home is a fate worse than death. It is...The End...but the curtain stays up. *shudder* Sooner I would die, thank you please.

To my irritation, I got a nastygram yesterday

It accused me of being middle-brow at best, and an uncultured cluck at worst. It was responding to an anti-Auster review I wrote.

Now...neither of those is, to me, an insult. Kinda funny in fact. Pretentious penile implants like this person is flit in off the Internet, set up a false identity, and then criticize *me* for being uncultured.

Heh.

In a completely different context, a social-media friend of mine posted this to me today:

Do you feel that The Library of America has sullied their reputation by including such Grub Street regulars as Chandler, Lovecraft, and Dick? Or do you feel their inclusion has merit?

And since I'd just been jabbed in the culture spot anyway, instead of saying "nope" and moving on as I normally would, I wrote this screed:

That gets to the heart of what constitutes a Library of America.

I am a snob.

I genuinely and sincerely believe I am entitled to look down my nose at pig-ignorant credulous right-wing GOP-voting Faux "News"-watching anti-science church-going dumbass motherfuckers.

I am not a snob about what people read. That's like who they fuck. It's not my place to say boo turkey about it. THAT they read is good enough for me, from Harlequins to sparkly vampire novels, to Rikki Ducornet and Marguerite Duras and Italo Svevo. Just sit down with a book and decode words on the page, it's all good.

I might like, or dislike, or even loathe what pleases others. That's my taste, that's my opinion, that's ME judging for me. My opinion is extremely well-informed on matters literary. I share my opinion as widely as I'm able to. People agree or disagree, but they come away informed.

So to call something the Library of America and curate it in such a way as to exclude the reading that millions of people do because it's not "good enough" or it's "just genre reading" is the same kind of pig-ignorant credulousness that I snort and hoot at in the lowest classes. A person's college degree or academic credential makes me no never-mind here because...guess what!...THIS ISN'T SCIENCE where there is a Right Answer! It's art, it's opinion. and it's personal!

Now, that taste thing? That's where we can debate. Is Chandler the pulp-noir writer I'd include in the Library of America? Yes, he's one. I'd put in Dashiell Hammett, a more uneven writer, and Jim Thompson, and Dorothy Whatsername; they all produced excellent work in the genre. Likewise PKD. In their genres, these folks were aces. IN Lit'rachure as a whole? Chandler, maybe...Lovecraft, nay nay nay! But in his genre, a monadnock.

Well. Now you know how I see it.

So my friend took about half a day to recover from the wind-burn I gave him with all that hot air, and then said:

An excellent, well-thought out, and civilized response all around. And I say this, of course, because I agree with you.

And that is why I keep on keepin' on, puttin' out the reviews and discussin' the books. Because there are some who agree, and some who are interested enough to have an opinion that isn't like mine, and who generally think this is a conversation worth having.

Real Life? Not so much. So, future sociologists, flag this post. You want to know why the "dystopian" future of people interacting in cyberspace got so much traction? Because in cyberspace we can get our needs met far more often than in "Real" Life.