Stephen Rodrick is a contributing writer for the magazine. His last article was about the making of the film "The Canyons," starring Lindsay Lohan and directed by Paul Schrader. HarperCollins will publish his first book, "The Magical Stranger," in May.
Book I'm reading now:
"All That Is," by James Salter.
I've spent much of the past three years writing about my father, who was a navy pilot killed off The Kitty Hawk when I was 13. I never got to talk with him about his flying, and Salter's memoir, "Burning the Days," served as a literary substitute. Salter was an Air Force pilot in the years immediately after World War II and spent much of 1952 flying missions over Korea. His take on flying is completely unromantic; he describes in painful detail the time he crashed a training plane into a house in Great Barrington, Mass., and remembers a squadron mate who bluffed his way into a fighter plane despite no training time in the particular aircraft. Since then, I've worked my way through most of his back catalog, filled with concise short stories and vivid travel writing, all written in the same manner: no melodrama, just beautiful sentences not about how things should be but how things really are. His new novel is centered on a Navy man turned book editor living in New York City in the last half of the past century. Salter is 87 and his book has an elegiac feel to it. I thought of Ted Williams, a Korean War pilot like Salter, as I read it. In one of his last interviews Williams said, "You gotta let go somewhere." He was talking about hitting, but it applies to writing and living too. If this is where Salter lets go, we should all be that lucky.
Last book I loved:
"The Misfits," by Arthur Miller and Serge Toubiana.
When I was writing about "The Canyons," this photography book was never far away. It became so much a part of the story that I can't remember who told me about it first, either the director Paul Schrader or Joanna Milter, one of the magazine's ace photo editors. "The Misfits" was the last film of both Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe; the director John Huston allowed a slew of photographers to swarm the set. Monroe was erratic and elusive, and the shoot in the Nevada desert dragged on endlessly. The book starts with a wonderful interview with Arthur Miller, the screenwriter of "The Misfits" and Marilyn's husband. If you want a primer on the creative process in all of its beauty and chaos, get this book.
Unread book on my night stand that gnaws at my conscience:
"The 10 Rules of Rock and Roll: Collected Music Writings," by Robert Forster.
I'll cheat a little here. I don't so much dread reading this as I'm rationing the book out for maximum pleasure. Forster and Grant McLennan were the creative geniuses behind the Go-Betweens, a critically acclaimed, poorly selling Australian band trafficking in what I call unpopular pop. Forster and McLennan went to college together, recorded nine albums and even wrote an unproduced screenplay before McLennan died at 48 in 2006. Forster was left wondering what to do with the rest of his life and answered with a great solo album, "The Evangelist," and by becoming one of Australia's greatest music critics, quite by accident. The opening essay about an elderly Glen Campbell ends with Forster's description of Campbell's cover of Jackson Browne's "These Days" and is so moving that it makes me want the other essays to last a little longer.
Three books in my field I'd recommend:
Because my upcoming book is half-memoir about my family's struggles after my dad's crash and half-reportage following his old squadron as they deployed for missions over Afghanistan, I tried to keep perspective and humor among all the dross, and these three sort-of memoirs helped:
"Things the Grandchildren Should Know," by Mark Oliver Everett.
Everett is better known as E, the man behind Eels, a great L.A. band. This is a memoir less about music and more about his father, Hugh Everett III, a physicist partially credited with discovering string theory. Mark's dad lived his life in his head, and his relation with his son was distant, brought physically close only when a teenage Mark discovered his father's body, dead of a heart attack at 51. The book is about depression, realizing you're not as different from your parents as you think and giving yourself a break. Great stuff.
"Standing By: The Making of an American Military Family in a Time of War," by Alison Buckholtz.
America goes to war. Husband leaves. Wife is left with two small kids in a postcard town thousands of miles from family and friends. What happens next? A note-perfect account of what passes for normal in a military family.
"The Buddha of Suburbia," by Hanif Kureishi.
"My name is Karim Amir, and I am an Englishman born and bred, almost." Kureishi's first novel is a fictionalized memoir of a boy growing up in 1970s London, the son of an Englishwoman and an Indian immigrant who transforms himself from bureaucrat to a chanting new-age guru. Bell-bottoms and punk rock intervene. I came to writing fairly late and read this at 24, and it was one of the books that made me want to be a writer. Kureishi tricked me. He made it look easy.
A book I would recommend to anyone:
"Jerry Engels," by Thomas Rogers.
Described by Philip Roth as an American Evelyn Waugh, Rogers was a longtime Penn State professor who published "At the Shores" in 1980, which introduces us to Jerry Engels, a teenage boy in love with love. "Jerry Engels" starts up shortly after "At the Shores" ends, but it took Rogers nearly 25 years to write the sequel and find a publisher. Our boy hero is now a young man at State College in the 1950s, busy flunking out and seducing an English professor when he's not shimmying down drain pipes to elude irate third parties. Funniest book I've ever read.
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