Lake Effect

Rating:
Summary: The Best Book About Friendship I've Read
Review: Cohen is brave and funny (he's the kind of explorer who makes jokes about termites when the mast breaks) and he's grabbed a topic that's tough and delicate at the same time: How do our friends make us who we are? Do we go after friends to become the kinds of people we'd like to be? The big question -- the "Lake Effect" Cohen's talking about -- is how did we become us? It's an act of personal anthropology, and that's the book's first level: we pull one thing from one friend because we know it's what makes them cool, we drop another thing off of our personal menu because we see it's knocking out the other guys, we pick movies, books, TV shows and records and experiences and situations because that's the pile of stuff we want to climb on top of to look at the world from. Cohen spends his time picking the exact right moments; it's a series of discoveries and firsts, the Lewis and Clark stuff of expeditioning into what will become our lives: first parties, first beers, first girls, first jobs, first cars, and he pushes himself to find the exact right items. I don't think I ever understood the exact personal growth potential of a first hangover untl I read "The Lake Effect."

But, as I say, that's only the first level. The real thing here is atmosphere. Elsewhere, Cohen has given us hints about his life -- he's used metaphors from a pretty standard suburban upbringing to nail down the feel of entirely un-standard situations. (Describing, in "Tough Jews," the electric chair in terms of its non-Barcalounger comfort, or his relatives, in family vacation snapshots, "looking determined to have fun." In "Tough Jews," he explains crime, which first generation immigrants climbed as their entry into the American economy but which they talked their own children away from, as "a ladder they pulled up after them." ) Here he goes inside out, and that suburban life is the whole book, and he makes you feel it. He seems to have compressed a whole book out of the things we've forgotten. It's almost a dare, as if Cohen was walking behind us throughout our childhoods picking up stuff, and it turned out our memories had holes in their pockets. Here's something you forgot. Here's something else you forgot. Here's one more thing you didn't remember. And now here it is in my book. The atmosphere is of bidding time until you can get to be an adult and go out there, and of the kids knowing it and appreciating it. The feel is of sensation and luck. The visuals of a bonfire by the beach --- the orange and floating sparks, and the lap of the water -- and the sound of girls laughting and the grainy aluminum-can sips of beer. He puts you back there, as sure as time travel, and makes you remember how pleasantly, thrillingly unimportant it felt. He makes you remember how most of adolescence pretty much felt like a summer weekend. And he reminds you of the friends who helped you see that's what it was.

Cohen's best friend Jamie, who helps him understand this, gets trapped in that Sunday world once the workweek of adulthood gets started up. Cohen gets that too -- the shame and guilt when you leave friends behind. The book reads like "On The Road" crossed with "Ferris Beuller" - you could call it "On The Lawn," and you'd be close to what the book is like. The word-group "beautiful writing" has ended up with a meaning that makes me itch to turn my TV back on. It seems to mean quiet, and deliberate metaphors, and careful hushes for presentation: "beautiful writing" seems to mean the kind of miniature stuff that could get passed around at a dollhouse convention. Cohen's writing is "beautiful" because it's muscular and apt, and it's the voice we wish, at our best, we always thought in: the metaphors come from cartoons, album covers, newspapers, the stoner world, fast food. Cohen has built his book out of things that fly in through the car window when we're driving out on a cool night for a first date, with the friends who are always in the back of our minds joking and kidding and scolding from the back seat. It's an astonishing thing to have brought off. It feels dumb to talk about it as a "memoir" - since even just that word has that fake, dollhouse sound. This book doesn't seem to have already happened to someone else; it happens as we read it, right there in the words, and it seems to be happening, all over again, to us.

Rating:
Summary: Seizes Your Heart and Makes You Nostalgic for Your Childhood
Review: Read this book if you had close friends growing up that were magical & mystic & charming. More impotantly, read this book if you didn't. Read this book if you grew up on the midwest. Even more importantly, read this book if you didn't.

I read about male friendship bonds. I read about Chicago. I read about charismatic boys and Southern Blues, about drinking lots of beer and how friends always think your dad is cooler than you think.

Rich Cohen is a good story weaver. He has a distinct, easy to read writing style. You'll be happy to read this book and satisfied when you're done.

Rating:
Summary: Moving and memorable, about the best years of our lives
Review: This is a wonderful little book about growing up, concentrating on high school and early adult experiences of the author, and mainly on his close friendship with another boy. The really fascinating part of it is that his friend, nicknamed and called by everyone "Drew-licious", is one of those kids who, despite not having family or social advantages, is charming, charismatic, and popular while young, but he ends up as something of a failure. Except that he obviously served as an inspiration for others, a point made subtly but eloquently in this memoir. I suspect that there are a lot of "Drew-licious" types out there. I know that I remember many from my youth, and often wonder about them.

Anyone who had intense friendships while young will enjoy this book; those who did not may feel cheated. As I read the book, I thought of all sorts of kids I knew while growing up, as well as all sorts of experiences similar to those recounted here. Twists of fate, moments of joy, of love, of being drunk literally and figuratively in the midst of adventures usually led by some guy like "Drew-licious".

The book is part paean to "Drew-licious" and how the author's family, particularly his father, related to him, but it is also a period piece of sorts, featuring Chicago and Chicago Cubs scenes of the mid-'80s. Parts are also set in New Orleans and New York City, where the author ended up, even as "Drew-licious" began drifting.

I would have rated it five stars except there were a few errors in narration that I noticed, very minor, but noticeable.

I am recommending it to all my friends from high school, but the "Drew-licious" ones may be hard to track down.

Rating:
Summary: You can't go home again
Review: This is an exquisitely written small book. I was attracted to it because Cohen writes of places I know. It was an unusual and pleasant sensation to read such a book, although the familiarity turned out to be only geographical. They may be the places I knew, but they're not the same spaces, having the same connotations. Of course the best thing is Cohen's skill as a writer. He touches lightly and wryly on the fun, intimacies, and disasters of his teen years in a white-collar suburb by a big city. He reticently yet precisely exposes his evolving relations with parents and teen friends. It is a form of double biography, him and a charismatic friend. Cohen has a wonderful way of giving his friends adventures, while much later revealing another truth of the matter. I didn't find it as nostalgic as some reviewers. The drugs and sex and "wasted" college years were very different from what I remember, or maybe Rich Cohen just ran with a faster crowd than I knew, or it's our different generations. He finishes off the story crisply rather than drag on, with a series of quiet bombshells about the friends we thought he had led us to know. This was fun to read, and for me had another's view of some of the very same places. It left me pensive or dislocated rather than nostalgic.

Rating:
Summary: The Great Gatsby meets Less Than Zero
Review: Very interesting, perceptive, and often funny writing style. Cohen can write "thumbnail sketches" of people and sitations as well as anyone I've read lately. (His short riff on a summer of bad jobs is a good example, wherein he sums up his bad bosses in a sentence or two, and you still "get" what kind of people they are.) In short, highly recommended.