Le Salon Annex

"Reading The Woman in Black "  ©  2019 Kristin Fouquet There is romanticism in devotion after death, especially in Hollywood. Joe DiMaggio sent roses to Marilyn Monroe’s gravesite weekly for twenty years. Rudolph Valentino had the “Lady in Black” who visited his grave annually for decades. In Erik Tarloff’s fourth novel, the deceased actor Chance Hardwick has The Woman in Black .  Tarloff’s book is a structural marvel. In The Woman in Black , Gordon Frost is a film producer, historian, and university professor. Frost claimed Chance Hardwick was the best actor of the postwar generation. His obsession with Hardwick drove him to search for those who knew the actor or at least thought they had. He interviewed forty-seven “witnesses” who were familiar with Chance Hardwick- spanning from his upbringing in the Midwest to his New York City theater days, then to his final years in Hollywood. Each interwoven account has been transcribed from a recording of the interview. On...

"Reading All Our Yesterdays " copyright 2014 Kristin Fouquet Only several pages into Erik Tarloff’s novel All Our Yesterdays , I knew I was going to adore it. Was it naïve optimism? Was the plotline already so riveting I didn’t think I’d ever be able to put it down? Maybe a little of both, but the simplest reason was because I immediately loved the protagonist. The story begins with a first person recollection of when he, Zeke, met his love, Molly, at a party in 1968. Through this flashback, the reader gets a glimpse into the decent, good guy he is and will prove to be over time. The setting is Berkeley in the late 60s and early 70s, a backdrop of rapid social change and heightened political awareness, juxtaposed with contemporary Berkeley. Because of Tarloff’s masterful construction, one is not reliant only on Zeke’s first person account, which occurs in the chapters from the past. These “then” segments shift back and forth with “now” chapters delivered in third p...