Authors Share Views With Fans on Final Day of Book Festival

The self-described Las Vegas card-counter who calls himself Barfarkel was sitting in the shade at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books on Sunday, munching on a sandwich as he waited for novelist Elmore Leonard to take the stage for a conversation about his craft.

Barfarkel -- who for obvious reasons refused to give his real name -- said he admired Leonard’s work. But he had also come to soak up some of the details of the publishing game, seeing as how his memoir of life at the tables, “You’ve Got Heat,” is due out soon from a little publisher in Alabama.

This last detail was too much for a stranger, who quipped that Barfarkel seemed more like an Elmore Leonard character than an Elmore Leonard fan.

The man took a thoughtful chew of sandwich. “Thank you,” he said.

Sunday was the second day of the annual Festival of Books, where -- amid balloons and barbecue and rock singers -- the real draw was the promise that the barriers between reader and author would temporarily dissolve.

The authors argued, compared notes, signed autographs and talked about their politics and passions. Approximately 60,000 readers came to the UCLA campus to join them, bringing the two-day attendance for the ninth-annual event to an estimated 130,000.

The fair offered household names, up-and-coming niche writers, the gravest of foreign policy matters and the lightest of children’s confections. Attendees learned about rotisserie chickens and African American politics. They studied the ways to construct biographies and crime fiction. And they sang along with Barney, the purple dinosaur.

One of the most popular events was the debate on the Iraq war with pundits Mark Danner, Christopher Hitchens, Michael Ignatieff and Robert Scheer. The event filled the 1,800-seat Royce Hall.

Danner, a writer for the New Yorker magazine, argued that the invasion and occupation of Iraq was a flawed endeavor that was “based on a series of dreams” -- including a misunderstanding of the complications that would be involved in handing over sovereignty to a new government.

Scheer, who writes a weekly column for The Times, insinuated that the Bush administration lied in justifying the war. Raising the specter of Vietnam, he warned that “once they realize they’re being lied to,” the American people would cease to support the military effort.

Ignatieff, a professor at Harvard University, said he was in favor of ridding Iraq of Saddam Hussein. But he said he was dismayed that the war’s supporters “fiddled with the truth” in making their case to the American people.

All of these positions garnered a healthy share of applause. But the audience’s reaction was different for Hitchens, a longtime champion of left-wing causes who broke ranks to support President Bush’s war on terror, and, specifically, the invasion of Iraq.

At one point, the room filled with scattered hisses as Hitchens began to speak.

The author seemed to relish taking his detractors on. The serious threat posed by the Hussein regime, he said, is “a test of seriousness for you.... I wish you’d face it a little more stoically.” Then he asked audience members if they would have been prepared to suffer an Iraq governed by Hussein’s now-deceased son, Qusay.

A discussion about another nation’s transition from one-party rule was under way nearby, where experts on Mexico described that country’s groundbreaking 2000 election and its implications for residents north of the border. The election that year saw the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, lose the Mexican presidency after 71 years of continuous rule. Julia Preston -- a New York Times reporter and co-author of the book “Opening Mexico: The Making of a Democracy” -- described the difficulty of telling the story of a democratic revolution that lacked a central hero, on the order of Nelson Mandela in South Africa.

Eventually, she said, she and fellow reporter Sam Dillon, also of the New York Times, found their heroes in the dozens of everyday Mexicans who had steadily worked to bring more open elections to a country long dominated by a corrupt system.

Personal politics -- and the novelist’s tools in mapping them -- were the subject of a conversation with Leonard.

The author of “Get Shorty” said his characters must be believable. And they must be good conversationalists.

“If the character can’t talk,” Leonard said, “then he’ll be demoted” in the plot.

Sometimes that demotion can be lethal: the terminally dull, Leonard said, often have a better chance of being killed early on.

Later in the afternoon, radio talk show host Laura Schlessinger delivered a feisty talk loosely based on her new book, “The Proper Care and Feeding of Husbands.” Some fans waited over an hour in the heat to get a good seat.

With her trademark bluntness, Schlessinger said she found many wives didn’t realize “how insensitive and hurtful” they were being to their husbands. The conversation also drifted to some of Schlessinger’s other themes, including her concern that American mothers are chasing money and careers at the expense of a rewarding motherhood.

“When we tell people the essence of something as beautiful as child-rearing or marriage are one of a zillion options and they’re all equivalent ... I think that’s a travesty,” she said.

Authors and booksellers also seemed to relish seeing their readers in the flesh. Bob Holzapfel, 57, of the Tennessee-based Book Publishing Co., was busy selling books like “Becoming Vegan” and “Wheat Grass: Nature’s Finest Medicine,” at the tent he shared with another publisher.

“We usually deal with distributors and stores,” he said. “We hardly ever get a chance to hang out with the people who buy the books.”

A few hours later, author Glen David Gold was signing copies of his well-received novel “Carter Beats the Devil” at the Hi De Ho Comics tent. Gold said he wrote four really bad novels before he found success with “Carter,” and he said he always promised himself he’d try not to act like “a jerk” when he became an attraction at book fairs.

A few minutes later, he had a chance to keep his word when a woman mistook him for fellow novelist Michael Chabon.

Gold sweet-talked his way out of an awkward situation. The woman ended up buying his book and asking him to sign it.