“Perhaps you would like to read a restaurant review this morning,” Jonathan Gold often wrote, broadcasting his Los Angeles Times reviews on Twitter. I want to read an uncountable number of additional reviews by Gold, who died July 21 at the age of 57, just a few weeks after receiving a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer. To read one Gold review after another, which you can do in the collection Counter Intelligence (2000), is to enter a world in which flavors are vivid and the virtues and flaws of each eatery are picked out in fine detail. He covered food trucks, white tablecloth restaurants, and 2:00-a.m.-hangover-recovery-noodle counters in Koreatown, and he described them all with a voice that was playful, literary, and just. July 28 would have been his 58th birthday, and several buildings in Los Angeles were illuminated with gold light in commemoration. He was, and remains, beloved, irreplaceable. Now Gold’s trademark silhouette — a tongue-in-cheek imitation of Alfred Hitchcock — is drawn on the wall of a taqueria in the Arts District. One of his familiar mottos, “The taco honors the truck,” is written next to it.
Gold offered weekly reviews of restaurants in the Los Angeles area, but he also represented Los Angeles both to the city’s residents and to the world. His reviews and notes on food may bear the time-stamp of workaday journalism, but they also transcend their time and geography. They constitute a full-fledged chapter of Los Angeles’s literary history, and of the history of food writing. Encomia aside, I owe Gold a personal debt as a reader. His reviews taught me to love Los Angeles, shaking off cinematic and literary visions of the city that had taught me to mistrust the place.
It’s a typeface that draws the eye with its inherent contradictions. It seems to have been drawn improvisationally with a brush, and yet it’s so hefty it looks like it could slip off a wall. It’s both delicate and emphatic, a casual paradox, like a Nerf weapon.
Choc is far from the most popular typeface on the storefronts of New York, but it can still be found everywhere and in every borough. It’s strewn on fabric awnings and etched in frosted glass. It gleams in bright magenta or platinum lighting. It’s used for beauty salons, Mexican restaurants, laundromats, bagel shops, numerous sushi bars. It may be distorted, stacked vertically, or shoehorned into a cluster of other typefaces. But even here Choc remains clear and articulate, its voice deep and friendly, its accent foreign, perhaps, yet endearing.
Among poets, the lauded and the unrecognized share the suspicion that their peers are against them. For years now or maybe forever, it’s seemed that the only responsible attitude toward poetry is one of skepticism, pointed fatigue, even hatred. Hating poetry, especially hating it in scare quotes, became a fashionable route back to loving poetry with the publication of Ben Lerner’s The Hatred of Poetry in 2016, but postures of engaged dissent both preceded and survived the conversations occasioned by his book. I’ve texted Marianne Moore’s timeworn disclaimer, “I, too, dislike it” with a self-abasing *blah blah blah* to more than one friend who does not read poetry or resents its obscurity, as I believe them to have this in common with some poets.
This resentment of poetry is evident on both sides of a murky divide that’s perpetually redrawn in new terms. On one side, writers of coherent lyrics anchored by a stable “I”—some of whom have weathered decades of vanguardist rupture—defend intelligibility against what they fear poetry has become. In the title essay of American Originality (2017), Louise Glück, hardly a partisan of traditional forms, shows how a sincere investment in poetic voice can be a form of protest against the genre’s drift toward the impenetrable. Glück argues that the frantic and self-doubting pursuit of a more original style is defining of contemporary poetry, and of Americanness, and damns both for it.
The wonder of love, the cruelty of war, the black world he knows well, the music he loves (Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, George Shearing) — all the beauty and cruelty and craziness he filed away in his mind before he began writing these novels. With “Wrecked,” Ide confirms that he’s among the most original new voices in today’s crime fiction.
Some enigmas aren’t meant to be solved — but they can be usefully illuminated. That’s just what Dery does in this excellent book.