December 20, 1998
By Mark Lindquist
THE GATES OF EDEN
By Ethan Coen
Ethan Coen and his brother, Joel, have made some of the more
interesting movies of the last two decades: ''Blood Simple,'' ''Raising Arizona,''
''Barton Fink'' and ''Fargo.'' Ethan Coen writes and Joel Coen directs. And while Ethan
Coen isn't quite as stylish with language as his brother is with a camera, he does have a
distinctive voice and an offbeat worldview, both of which come through with varying
degrees of success in his first collection of stories. ''Have You Ever Been to Electric
Ladyland'' is a brilliant monologue by a record executive trying to figure out who had a
motive to castrate his dog. But ''Johnnie Ga-Botz,'' composed of nothing but dialogue and
stage directions, is the sort of exercise that talented, undisciplined creative writing
students pound out at 3 A.M. The title story is a good example of what the Coen brothers
are known for: a leap into an off-kilter yet fully imagined world in which a bureaucrat
with the California Department of Weights and Measures thinks and acts like a hard-boiled detective. All of these stories take place in Coen Brothers
Land, a parallel universe similar to our own -- except it's weirder, funnier and better
edited.
