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Book Rate
A
digested book "review": cheap shots, glib commentary,
shameless advocacy of insidious ideology of social and economic
justice and idiosyncratic and totally arbitrary choices of books
that come our way via our gallant and steadfast UPS drivers and
other routes. Also, this is for 1) people who don't want to shell
out two hundred dollars for a subscription to Publisher's Weekly
2) Book lovers who are averse to reading reviews 3) Readers who
are not incited to mouth foaming at the mere mention of Toni Morrison,
Salman Rushdie and Don DeLillo and most importantly 4) for people
who trust us.
Maybe.
Note: (RB) = Robert
Birnbaum; (RLW) = RL
Whalen; (JT) = Janice Tsai; (MB) will someday equal Matt Borondy;
and soon enough there will be other abbreviations to deal with.
October 28, 2003
The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way in
the Twentieth Century –Paul Krugman (425 PP, Norton)
This volume collects nearly 120 of Krugman's Op–Ed
columns, which he has been writing for the New York Times
since he began in 2000. He is still officially a professor of Economics
at Princeton, but I dare say his great impact is as a well-versed
and armed gadfly to the sanctimony, hypocrisy and stupidity of the
Bush II presidency. Krugman on Krugman, "These days I often
find myself accused of being a knee-jerk liberal, even a socialist.
But just a few years ago the real knee-jerk liberal didn't like
me at all—one magazine even devoted a cover story to an attack
on me for my pro-capitalist views and I still have an angry letter
Ralph Nader sent me when I criticized his attacks on globalization.
If I have ended up more often than not writing pieces that attack
the right wing, it’s because the right wing rules now—and
rules badly. It's not just that the policies are bad and irresponsible:
our leaders lie about what they are up to." Get that people?
Our leaders are l-y-i-n-g. (RB)
30 Satires
- Lewis Lapham (263 PP, New Press)
The books that I am scrutinizing in this roundup do
provide ample evidence of my particular biases—though I would
choose a more specific noun such as 'perspective'. Far be it from
to characterize what that 'point of view' is. In any case, for me
Lewis
Lapham represents one of the special voices in the cacophonous
contemporary commentary on American civilization. These thirty pieces
are taken from the archives of Lapham's
monthly essays that are included in Harper's, the magazine
he has been editing for about two decades. This is his author's
note to 30 Satires, "Whether humor saves the reader
or the country, I have no way of knowing and cannot say, but for
the writer if the pages in his book, it’s the door open in
the wall of can’t and the way out of the fog of lies. Laughter
cannot help but breathe the air of freedom, by its nature deaf to
the voices of indoctrination or command, and I trust the joke to
strike more nearly at the truth than the sermon, the sales pitch
or the State of The Union address. Satire makes alliance with the
spirit of dissent and arms the writer with the hope of possible
escape from his own stupidity and fear. Any reader who finds in
these inventions something of the same happy prospect will have
put them to their intended use." (RB)
A Fierce Content: The Rise and Fall of The Progressive
Movement in America (1870-1920)
-Michael McGerr (395 PP, Free Press)
Michael McGerr is a professor of history at Indiana
University and is particularly interested in social and political
development of the modern United States. The progressive movement
resulted in the greatest wave of radicalism in American history
and McGeer's thesis is that progressivism's decline after WW I helped
reestablish the power of conservatism and ensured the primacy of
centrist political values. He argues that, "It is this story,
this remarkable rise and cataclysmic collapse, that set the stage
for the political life we now know so well. Americans' ambivalent
attitude toward politics and the state, our skepticism about reform,
our fear of government's power and our arms-length relationship
with political leaders have their roots before the ages of Franklin
Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan, in the few dramatic
decades at the turn of the previous century." Historian David
Nasaw concludes
that [McGeer] "…in the end, to be commended for recovering
the vitality of the movement for radical reform that 100 years ago
energized men and women to enter the public arena, united only by
their middle-class status, their fierce discontent with the way
things were and their faith that the future could be made brighter."
(RB)
Author Photo: Portraits 1983-2002
– Marian Ettlinger (173 PP, Simon & Schuster)
For many years Jerry Bauer seemed to rule the roost
of author portraiture. Sometime in the mid '80s, for reasons that
I will ascribe to the viral nature of celebrity culture, pictures
of writers became a bigger deal. And in the last few years the biggest
deal, it would seem, is the photographic work of Marion Ettlinger.
Richard
Ford (who Ettlinger photographed some twenty tears ago [and
whose picture exhibits Ford's Ralph-Lauren-advertisement good looks]
and who has since gone on to be his own big deal) says a lot of
nice things about her in the introduction of this book. No matter
that I don't agree with any of them. Not even a Chip
Kidd-designed cover makes this book palatable for me. I am more
inclined to Dennis
Loy Johnson's view, "If a picture is worth a thousand words,
I'm not sure what words are behind Marion Ettlinger's photographs,
except perhaps, ‘My shoes are too tight.’ You could
say her photos represent yet another discouragement of intellectualism
in modern literature ….Or, you could say they just prove the
power of faceless storytelling - the story about that emperor who
wore no clothes, for example." Personally—and after all,
personal taste has a lot to do with this—I prefer Gerald Malanga's
pictures or Christopher Felver or even the Norman Rockwellesque
Jill Krementz. (RB)
Say That to My Face
– David Prete (187 PP, WW Norton)
Prete is an actor and writer in New York City and didn't go to Iowa
or Stanford and the ten stories in this collection didn't appear
in the New Yorker, McSweeney's or Zoetrope. Novelist
and NYU writing professor Darin
Strauss (Chang & Eng, The Real McCoy) opines, "To
read David Prete is to read fiction of effortlessness…his
gifts call to mind those of Raymond Carver. Only a profound talent
can write stories that are at once simple and deep." Uh huh.
(RB)
Diaspora: Homelands in exile
– Fredric Brenner (Vol. I 324 PP, Vol. II 158 PP, Harper Collins)
I first discovered Fredric Brenner via his delightful Jews/America/A
Representation (1996). I liked it so much I bought up as many
remaindered copies as I could find to give away. Anyway, Brenner
currently has a travelling exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum of
Art that runs until January 2004. The New York Times had
Grace
Glueck and Laurie
Goodstein writing about Brenner, which may or may not tell you
something. Diaspora, his two-volume book, is the result
of twenty-five years of globe trotting, taking over 80,000 images,
to record Jewish culture. Volume I is a distillation of this work
down to over 260 photographs. In Volume II, an illustrious group
of intellectuals reviews some 60 of the photos with commentary and
more. This is a stunning body of work and the only things that come
close are Susan
Meiselas' book on the Kurds, In the Shadow of History,
and Jack Delano's
work on Puerto Rico. (RB)
The Pleasure of My Company
– Steve Martin (163 PP, Hyperion)
It seems that performer and erstwhile award show host Steve
Martin (Shopgirl) has turned his somewhat serious
attentions to fiction. Will Hammer observes
in the Guardian, "In his reinvention as novelist,
however, Martin is making a canny move. For there is a certain novelty
value in reading a book written by the man who once made an entire
film wearing a suspiciously large prosthetic nose. And as Roxanne
(his Hollywood remake of Cyrano de Bergerac) showed,
novelty is what he does best. The Pleasure of My Company,
which is, in fact, his fifth venture into published prose, sees
a return to form: it is sweet, funny, slightly haphazard and ultimately
quite good." (RB)
Railroad Vision: Photography, Travel and Perception
– ed. Anne Layden (164 PP, Getty)
The thesis operating here is that the railroad and the train developed
almost simultaneously in the 1830's and affected each other's progress.
Anne Lyden writes, "The new medium of photography was employed
to faithfully portray the steam locomotives, trains, wagons, tracks,
bridges, tunnels and stations. In a bid to increase ridership railroad
companies commissioned photographers to document scenic attractions
and entice new settlers to the towns and dwellings springing up
along the new routes. All of this created a body of work that espoused
certain ideals, followed particular patterns of composition and
created images that spoke of a railroad vision." The twenty-three
color prints and one hundred and seven duotones that include 1860's
Edouard Baldus to mid 20th century Alfred Stieglitz, O Winston Link,
Walker Evans, Brassai and others do more than reify that point of
view—meaning that the unifying rationale, the photographs,
have their own powerful impact. (RB)
Inventing a Nation: Washington, Adams, Jefferson
– Gore Vidal (198 PP, Yale University Press)
Perhaps Gore Vidal, being a known contrarian, ought not have surprised
anyone with his dark and conspiratorial analysis included in Perpetual
War for Perpetual Peace: How We Got To Be So Hated. In
any case, Vidal has made study and consideration of American History
a life-long preoccupation, and this slender tome is a welcome counterpoint
to the hagiographies of David McCullough, Walter Isaacson and Joseph
Ellis. There is no one I would read on America than, perhaps, Howard
Zinn. Here's the opening paragraph, "In the fall of 1786,
the fifty-four-year-old president of the Potomac Company, George
Washington, late commander-in-chief of the American army (resigned
December 23, 1783, after eight years of active duty was seriously
broke). Majestically, he had refused any salary from the revolutionary
American government so seldom in useful Congress assembled. But
it had always been agreed that should their cause be victorious,
Congress would pay the General's expenses, which it did, with some
awe at Washington's meticulous bookkeeping and lavish way of life—Congress
had to cough up $100,000." (RB)
October 15, 2003
Don Quixote
–Miguel Cervantes translated by Edith Grossman (940 PP, Ecco)
Terry Gilliam's on going attempt to cinematize Miguel
Cervante's super classic
novel is a reminder that this is a story to be reckoned with.
The four-hundred-year-old Don Quixote is not news, of course,
but a new translation by the inestimable Edith Grossman, who has
translated Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Mario Vargas Llosa and Alvaro
Mutis, among others, is. Depending on your feelings about Harold
Bloom, his introduction may be an endorsement or a kiss of death.
No matter, I see this tome as the perfect beach vacation book. And
even if I don't make it to some shoreline, I intend to take off
a few days soon to read it. (RB)
Best Non Required Reading, 2003 edited by
Dave Eggers and introduction by Zadie Smith (327 PP, Houghton Mifflin)
Houghton Mifflin, which has been lording it over the
Best American Stories since 1915 and has gradually added a number
of other titles (Best American Essays, Best American Sports
Writing, etc.), last year concocted this category edited by
David Eggers. Apparently he and a group of high school students
from the 826 Valencia writing lab choose a wide array of pieces
for this “collection.” Eggers from his foreword, "This
is the second year we've put this book together, and we're beginning
to have some idea what we're doing. But do we know exactly what
this book is? We do not…" Okay, so here's who is included:
Sherman Alexie, Lynda Barry, Judy Budnitz, Jonathan Foer, JT Leroy,
ZZ Packer and her brother George and, you know, some others. "What
the hell," is what we say. (RB)
Autumn of the Moguls: My Misadventures with the Titans,
Poseurs and Money Guys who Mastered and Messed up Big Media
– Michael Wolff (377 PP, Harper Collins)
There is no question in my mind that despite the seemingly
infinitely regressive and self-referential infotainment
that is manufactured in the NYC sounding board/echo chamber, Michael
Wolff (Burn Rate) does seem to cover media with a fearlessness
that is both interesting and these days singular. Wolff writes "This
Media Life" for New York Magazine (which he is reportedly
trying
to buy) and is a National Magazine Award Winner. The publisher
describes this book as being "ripped from the headlines."
Perhaps, a more accurate description would be that it originates
with many of the "This Media Life" columns. Still, the
acid-penned Wolff is worth reading. (RB)
Friends Along The Way: A Journey Through Jazz
– Gene Lees (358 PP, Yale University Press)
Songwriter and journalist Gene Lees, who was for a
time editor of the influential jazz magazine Downbeat and
has been publishing his Jazzletter since 1981, offers up
fifteen mini biographies from his five decades of writing about
jazz. Some of the personalities he talks about are orchestral arranger
Claus Ogerman, pianist Junior Mance, jazz broadcaster Willis Conover,
Bill Evans, manager Helen Keane, Stan Kenton, and band arranger
Pete Rugolo among others. (RB)
The Small Boat of Great Sorrows
– Dan Fesperman (308 PP, Knopf)
Baltimore Sun writer Fesperman's second novel
takes the character he introduced in Lie in the Dark, Vlado
Petric, formerly a homicide detective on the Sarajevo police
department, and placing him in the service of International War
Crimes Tribunal to hunt down a general responsible for a massacre
at Srebrenica. Sounds good to me. (RB)
Waxwings
– Jonathan Raban (281 PP, Pantheon)
Resident alien writer Raban, who has written at least two wonderful
books, Badlands and Passage to Juneau (those being
the only two of his I have read), tries his hand at fiction again.
This is second go at, as the British like to say, the senior service
having published his only other novel Foreign Land in 1985. This
time around Waxwings was long listed for the Booker Prize.
The story takes place in Seattle during what has been referred to
as the dot-com bubble or high-tech gold rush and pairs and contrasts
two very different immigrants riding the cresting economic wave.
Raban calls this a historical novel; "'The past is a foreign
country.' is the phrase that comes to mind and the Seattle winter
of '99 now seems like a strange and distant age of innocence…one
of the pleasures of writing the book was that I, of course, knew
the world that was waiting just around the corner for my characters,
but they didn't. That's why it is a historical novel." (RB)
October 7, 2003
Havana
-Steven Hunter (403 PP, Simon & Schuster)
Every once in a while (maybe more often) some northamericano
writer discovers the rich possibilities that flow from setting
a piece of fiction in magical Cuba. Steven Coontz, Gary Hart (as
John Blackthorn), Martin Cruz Smith—let's not forget Elmore
Leonard and Graham Greene—to name a few. Stephen Hunter, Pulitzer
Prize-winning film critic for the Washington Post and a
crime-story novelist, credits his editor Michael Korda for the idea
for placing his war hero straight arrow cop, Earl Swagger, in Havana.
Earl signs on as a contacted killer for the CIA in 1953, about the
time young Fidel Castro launches what became the 26 July Movement
with a ludicrous (in its ambition, not the resulting bloodshed)
attack on the Moncada barracks of the Cuban Army. Hunter's plot
line is conventional and mildly interesting, but his insistence
on casting budding revolutionary Fidel as a bumbling buffoon makes
it hard to take much about this novel seriously. Speculating on
authorial motivation can be interesting sport, but I would hate
to think that this cartoonish casting of Castro was written to appeal
to the perpetually angry gusanos of Southern Florida. Or maybe Hunter
believes this stuff—he does manage to use the word 'commie'
in his acknowledgments. My suggestion: read or see Graham Greene's
Our Man in Havana. (RB)
Lost Tribe: Jewish Fiction from the Edge
- ed. Paul Zakrzwewski (512 PP, Plume Paperback original)
This is the literary anthology time of year, and this collection,
which is misleadingly titled—I'm referring to the 'Edge' part—does
contain a stellar line up of young, talented writers, including
Aimee Bender, the James Brown of Contemporary fiction, Steve Almond,
Nathan Englander, Judy Budnitz, Jonathan Foer, Gary Shteyngart and
more. You might be wondering, as I was, the reason for putting together
a collection of Jewish-American writers (I'm waiting for the definitive
bald-headed white men anthology myself). Editor Paul Zakrzewski
(who is the Literary Director of the Jewish Community Center of
Manhattan) was “inspired to compile this collection as he
observed the surfacing of young, critically acclaimed Jewish writers,
which he has dubbed the 'post Roth' generation.” Okay, why
not? (RB)
The Healing Art: A Doctor's Black Bag of Poetry
- Rafael Campo (209 PP, WW Norton)
I'd be embarrassed that I missed this book when it came out a few
months ago, but then I would be indicating even more evidence of
my own narcissism. Campo is an award-winning poet, essayist, teacher
and a physician. This book is a simple brief for his argument that
poetry has the power to heal—"it can assuage the spirit
and profoundly affect health." Campo illustrates his stance
citing poems by William Carlos Williams, Mark Doty, Marylyn Hacker,
Audre Lorde, Alicia Ostriker and others, suggesting how they have
curative powers. Campo writes, "Fully aware of all that is
ultimately unknowable about how we suffer and die—from my
vantage point at the precipice of the hospital bedside, where even
the most sensitive and accurate measurements of physiology (however
appreciatively and beautifully described by all the Nulands and
Sacks of this World) cannot assuage—I provide these readings
and analyses not as complete explications of the power of this work,
but rather as an invitation to consider and to feel the full scope
of that power, which must consist at least in part of the uniquely
human capacity for empathic aspirations, our mightiest common dream,
arises not from the practice of medicine, not of literary criticism
or philosophy, but only from great poetry." (RB)
Never Mind The Pollacks
- Neal Pollack (260 PP, Harper Collins)
Who would have thought that a nice Jewish boy who attended to a
tight-sphinctered university like Northwestern (where he lists Joseph
Epstein as a favorite teacher) would in few short years commandeer
American literature? Good thing, then, this totally unlikely thing
didn't happen. But what has happened is that Pollack
has had his Anthology of American Literature published
at the McSweeney's imprint and his musings, posturings, letters
to editors and other fusillades appear in a variety of so-called
respectable periodicals. And coincident with the BOOK TOUR for this,
his first novel, Pollack and his band The Neal Pollack Invasion
are embarking on a massive North American rock tour. By the way,
the novel is a sort of epic history of rock and roll as told through
two critics, one eerily resembling the legendary Lester Bangs. (RB)
The King is Dead
– Jim Lewis (259 PP, Knopf)
Jim Lewis (Sister) currently hails from Austin, Texas,
which should immediately brand him as fashionably hip. I first came
across Lewis at Slate
where he administered an appropriate lashing to that Nixonian lap
dog Diane Sawyer for her egregious hounding of Natalie Maines of
the Dixie Chicks. As a Texan proud to hail from the same Texas as
the Dixie Chicks, Jim Lewis is my kind of writer. Notwithstanding
his zip code of choice, Lewis' third novel tells the story of a
WW II hero father and a movie star son, and as Lynn Hamilton points
out, "The Selbys, … intersect with the [20th] century's
key institutions: war, Hollywood, illegal immigration, industrialization
and violent crime… Lewis explores the underbelly of American
society—from the Tennessee Valley Authority's eviction of
poor African Americans to the failure of the U.S. military to protect
its minority soldiers during the world wars." (RB)
/12
–Eliot Weinberger (83 PP, Prickly
Paradigm Press)
I owe The
Literary Saloon gratitude for leading me to Prickly Paradigm,
"The old-time pamphlet is back, with some of the most challenging
intellectual work being done today. Prickly Paradigm Press is devoted
to giving serious authors free reign to say what's right and what's
wrong about their disciplines and about the world, including what's
never been said before. The result is intellectuals unbound, writing
unconstrained and creative texts about meaningful matters"
and to Eliot Weinberger, the author of a number of collections of
essays, Works on Paper, Outside Stories, Written Reaction: Poetics,
Politics, Polemics and Karmic Traces. He also the
primary translator of Octavio Paz into English. Among his translations
are the Collected Poems of Octavio Paz 1957-1987, Jorge
Luis Borges’s Seven Nights, and Vicente Huidobro’s
Altazor. Weinberger was given PEN's first Gregory Kolovakos
Award for his work in promoting Hispanic literature in the United
States, and in 2000 he was the first American literary writer to
be awarded the Order of the Aztec Eagle by the government of Mexico.
Of the essays in this slender volume Weinberger observes, "I
am a literary writer and not a political analyst …the six
essays should be taken as snapshots of what one person who reads
the newspapers was thinking on six given days in recent history."
Here's one of the snapshots, "A few days ago, a man listed
as one of the Sept 11 dead was discovered in a psychiatric hospital,
a total amnesiac who has no idea what happened to him or what has
happened since. On the same day, George W Bush told an interviewer
what the ‘saddest thing’ has been about his presidency:
He now has time to only jog three miles a day." (RB)
Train
- Pete Dexter (280 PP, Doubleday)
Considering that I have read and enjoyed everyone of Dexter's novels
from the National Book Award-winning Paris Trout to The
Paperboy, all I have to say is, "Read this book"…well,
actually I have more. This novel is set in Los Angeles in 1953.
The three main characters are Lionel Walk, a young black caddie
who is nicknamed Train by Miller Packard, a war-veteran detective
in the San Diego Police Department and Nora Still, the lone survivor
of a deadly yacht hijacking. Read this book! (RB)
Kansas Charley: The Story of a 19th Century Boy Murderer
- Joan Jacobs Brumberg (273 PP, Viking)
Cornell University historian Joan Jacobs Brumberg (Fasting
Girls: The History of Anorexia Nervosa and The Body Project:
an Intimate History of American Girls) tells the story of Charles
Miller, orphaned at the age of six, who rode the rails as "Kansas
Charley." He was hanged in Cheyenne, Wyoming in 1892 for killing
two young men in a boxcar. Janet Reno says of this book, "This
sad story makes it clear that youth violence is not new to the United
States and that we must renew our efforts to prevent it as well
as build juvenile justice systems that hold youthful offenders accountable
in a just, effective and compassionate manner that allows no excuse
for killing." Whatever the greater issues are this is a damn
good story. (RB)
October 1, 2003
What Was She Thinking: Notes on Scandal
– Zoe Heller (258 PP, Henry Holt)
By now, if you are aware of the prestigious British literary award
The Booker
Prize, you are aware that Zoe Heller (Everything You Know)
has been short-listed for this year's award. If you do not know
what 'short listing' is, you might consider doing some remedial
work before reading on. This novel's narrative engine is the obviously
illicit affair art teacher Sheba Hart has with one of her 15-year-old
male students. Need I say more? British-born Heller is a journalist
living in New York for the past ten years who currently writes "Zoe
Heller's New York" for London's Daily Telegraph. Because
I have an appreciation of Edmund White's writing, I gave some consideration
to this seemingly overheated appraisal, "This is the best novel
I've read in the past twelve months. Despite English self-deprecation,
it turns out that British fiction is better than American these
days—better paced, more psychologically acute, more daring
morally, above all more eloquent. Zoe Heller has imagined every
corner of her compelling story—the impossible loves of teacher
for student and of the evil, suffering for her upper middle class
friend and victim. With this one book, Heller joins the front
ranks of British novelists, right there with Amis and McEwen."
[italics mine] (RB)
How to Breathe Underwater
– Julie Orringer (226 PP, Knopf)
"There is a headlong narrative energy in Julie Orringer's
stories that I find quite remarkable," says Charles Baxter
(Saul and Patsy). Orringer has a literary pedigree that
I think as the French say seems de riguer for publishing a short
story collection; Iowa Writers’ Workshop and Stanford University's
Stegener Fellowship. The nine stories grouped here have appeared
in diverse literary journals such as Barcelona
Review, Ploughshares,
and Zoetrope.
By the way, Baxter is right on the money. These stories move forward
with a passionate urgency that takes you to some emotionally specific
and unusual interior places. If you can believe me, that's good.
(RB)
Shocking! The Art and Fashion of Elsa Schiaparelli
- Dilys E Blum (320 PP, Yale University Press)
Fashion designers have exhibited various degrees of artistic ambition
or (pretension) in the late 20th century. Elsa Schiaparelli, who
paled around and worked with Man Ray, Alberto Giacommeti, Salvador
Dali and Jean Cocteau, was the designer in the 193O's. Shocking!
is the catalogue of The
Philadelphia Museum of Art's exhibition of over 300 reproductions
of Schiaparelli clothing and accessories. (RB)
Crossing the Boulevard: strangers, neighbors, aliens in a new
america
– Warren Lehrer & Judith Sloan (398 PP, WW Norton)
This is one of the hippest
books I have come across in some time. Its typography and layout
are very well adapted to the message and story being told. Having
just spoken
with Michael Lesy and revisited his seminal Wisconsin Death
Trip I have been thinking about the attributes and limitations of
presenting visual information in a book. This is a portrait of Queens,
NY (112 square miles), the most ethnically diverse locale in the
United States (138 languages spoken here). The authors use the pedestrian
adverse Queens Boulevard (sometimes called "the Boulevard of
Death") as a central metaphor to explore the variety and range
of cultures that are woven into the social fabric of this community.
Included is a CD with 19 selections that include the voices of Queens
and this broad cross section of the new America. (RB)
The Hooligan's Return
– Norman Manea (385 PP, Farrar, Straus, Giroux)
This is a memoir of Romanian expatriate novelist Norman Manea's
life, external and internal. He has been the recipient of a MacArthur
Fellowship, the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship and author
of fourteen novels (The Black Envelope) and currently writer-in-residence
at Bard College. Chilean expatriate Ariel
Dorfman assesses Manea's story, "His ultimate home, he
seems to be whispering to us and perhaps to himself, is not Romania
and not the United States, but the very literature where he struggles
for meaning, the luminous book itself that he is writing and we
are reading in a world where he has just buried his mother and now
faces the final fatherless exile of death."
Cynthia Ozick adds her two cents, "We know when we've come
on a work of literature that alters, for the rest of our lives,
how we see, how we understand even that which we may have believed
we understood before. Primo Levi's The Drowned and the Saved
…and now The Hooligan's Return. I am profoundly grateful
for this living flesh and blood yet unearthly memoir." (RB)
Love Me
- Garrison Keillor (272 PP, Viking)
There are people who are unclear what kind of writer Garrison Keillor
is, and that question became a more real concern when he guest edited
Best American Stories (1998). I am one of those people.
Having said that, this novel, the rise and fall of a best selling
author— and ultimately his redemption — is one that Mr. Prairie
Home Companion does well by. (RB)
The Story Teller's Daughter
- Saira Shah (254 PP, Knopf)
British-Afghani journalist Shah was the on-camera reporter in the
rivetingly compelling documentary Beneath
the Veil that was aired in this country on CNN.
That film, of which some of the sorrowful details are recounted
in this book, takes her to Taliban-controlled Afghanistan ostensibly
to visit Paghman, her family's ancestral home, and the place that
her father had characterized as the most beautiful on earth. That
personal journey and reportorial quest bookends her years of journalistic
apprenticeship at the tail end of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.
This is an extraordinary and unforgettable story and Saira
Shah is a very brave and compassionate woman. (RB)
American Woman
- Susan Choi (369 PP, Harper Collins)
Susan Choi's (The Foreign Student) second novel was inspired
by the Patty
Hearst kidnapping story, which was a headline grabber in the
mid '70s. Choi, who admits to being too young to remember, does
recall that the mythology of that era was predominantly about the
activism of white middle kids. The protagonist of this story is
a radical activist twenty-five year old Japanese American woman
who has gone into hiding after participating in an anti war bombing
in the late stages of the Vietnam War. She is enlisted to help three
radicals including the daughter of a rich California newspaper magnate
escape to New York. To quote Francisco Goldman (The Ordinary
Seamen), "Few writers since Graham Greene have brought
such tender, insightful, poetic intelligent darkly comic writing
to the political thriller. I have to admit this novel made me frantic
with suspense— all I wanted to do was jump in and save its
unforgettable protagonist from her excruciating destiny." (RB)
No Matter How Much You Promise to Cook or Pay the Rent,You
Blew it Cauze Bill Bailey Ain't Never Coming Home Again: A Symphonic
Novel
- Edgardo Yunque Vega (688 PP, Farrar Giroux Straus)
The title of Puerto Rican born Yunque Vega's epic has more content
than some recent novels. The story centers on Vidamia Farrell, a
Puerto Rican/ Irish American teenager and her divided worlds—
the one of affluence represented by her Manhattan psychotherapist
mother and the Lower East Side of her traumatized Vietnam veteran
father who has put aside a career as a jazz pianist. Perhaps inspired
by James Baldwin's Another Country, a seminal literary
work of mid-century American literature, novelist Colum McCann raves,
"Big, brave, boisterous and brawling…comes out swinging
from the first sentence and leaves us, by the end in a perfect heap.
What a title what a family, what a sense of the city: This novel
is a mythic embodiment of our times and a wonderful inventory of
New York's human music." (RB)
An Open Book: Coming of Age in the Heartland
- Michael Dirda (326 PP, WW Norton)
Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post book critic and
essayist Michael Dirda, who grew up in what is now rust belt Ohio,
relates how his mother taught him how to read at the age of four.
Along with the joys of he gained through his bookishness was the
difficult relationship it caused with his steelworker father. Dirda's
passionate devotion to reading did lead him to move beyond his proletarian
roots and attend Oberlin College and the travel to Paris in 1968
at the age of nineteen, which is where this memoir ends. As a revealing
afterward, Dirda includes a list of the books he read in high school
with this observation, "…yes it does seem a little pretentious.
But I don't think any of these books is beyond the powers of a reasonably
diligent teenager. The trick, of course, lies in actually wanting,
in being eager, to read them." (RB)
September 16, 2003
The Rabbit Factory
-Larry Brown (352 PP, Free Press)
It is a curious cast of characters that Mississippian Brown (Fay)
assembles for this novel. A septuagenarian husband who is having
difficulty satisfying his younger-by-thirty-years wife; an ex-con
butcher who began life literally in the garbage can his mother left
him in; a young pet-shop clerk and the pit bull he saved from the
sights of his father's rifle; a college professor and his declining
dog; a working girl trying to get over; a couple of hoods and a
one-legged maid who lost a limb when her father ran over her in
a boating accident. Will something interesting happen? You bet.
(RB)
Diane Arbus: Family Album
-Anthony Lee and John Pultz (168 PP, Yale University Press)
For photographer Diane Arbus, one of the suicidal female artists
of the last century (Sylvia Plath, Virginia Wolf, Anne Sexton),
perhaps her time has come. Considering the major retrospective of
Arbus' work at the San
Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which has an exhibition catalogue,
and that Arbus' photography has been well presented in book form
in the past, this oddity, which contains some previously unpublished
images, should have a compelling reason to exist. According to the
authors, they are testing her claim that she was putting together
a family album, and so they examine her interest in photographic
groupings. Images by Walker Evans, August Sander and Lewis Hine
are included to illuminate their thesis, we suppose. Arthur Lubow's
essay Reconsidering
Arbus is worth looking at. (RB)
The Fortress of Solitude
-Jonathan Lethem (511 PP, Doubleday)
Based on a couple of books, Jonathan Lethem made it unto some pre-millennial
lists as a person to pay attention to, a name to watch and all that.
And his last novel, Motherless Brooklyn, won the National
Book Critics Circle Award. This bildungsroman of the '70s
in America with two characters named Dylan and Mingus (I'll let
you figure out who is white and who is black) has already been bashed
by James Wolcott in that literary bible, the Wall Street Journal.
Wolcott begins his slice and dice by quoting Thomas Wolfe, "Only
the dead know Brooklyn" and ends with something (I'm quoting
from memory here) like, "Only the dead know what Lethem is
talking about, and they aren't talking." Perhaps this will
start a holy war in the battling literary camps currently establishing
the protocols of the snarkery. We say forget that. Read the book
and decide for yourself. (RB)
Library: An Unquiet History
–Matthew Battles (245 PP, Norton)
Matthew Battles, who works at the Houghton Library (which is the
rare books library) at Harvard, has written this sweet tome surveying
the history of the library from the archetypal Library at Alexandria
to the British Library America's own Library of Congress. This one
is a bibliophilic delight. Include me in. (RB)
Death by Hollywood
-Steve Bochco (274 PP, Knopf)
If TV producer Stephen Cannell can do it, I suppose Steve Bochco,
who is considered the father of the Second Golden Age of Television
and has Hill Street Blues, Doogie Howser MD, LA Law and
NYPD Blue (of course, there were also Cop Rock, City
of Angels, Murder One, Capitol Critters and Public Morals)
under his belt, can also write a novel. The opening lines are promising,
"There used to be a writer by the name of Merle Miller, who
wrote that people in Hollywood are always touching you—not
because they like you, but because they want to see how soft you
are before they eat you alive." Shoot, I'll bite. (RB)
Big Lies Joe Conason: The Right Wing Propaganda Machine
and how it Distorts the Truth
-Thomas Dunne (245 PP, St Martin's Press)
I'm sure lots of people will have fun with the dust-jacket blurb
by Princeton economics scholar Paul Krugman—who is also a
favorite whipping boy of the royalist forces in our midst, "Big
Lies is must reading for anyone who wants to understand America
today. It's an amazing tour through the wonderland of right-wing
mendacity that blinds Americans to the ugly truth about what's happening
in our country." New York Observer editor and Salon
columnist Conason (The Hunting of the President) takes
on Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, Bernard Goldberg and the rest of
the right-wing infotainers. As the inimitable Molly Ivins opines,
"There is no 'vast right wing conspiracy'— it's all right
out there in plain sight." (RB)
September 8, 2003
The Adventures of Augie March
–Saul Bellow (586 PP, Viking)
I am all for the sustenance of the hardcover edition of books,
and the publication on its fiftieth anniversary of Saul Bellow's
The Adventures of Augie March is one of those publishing-industry
gestures that speaks of beating hearts and warm blood in its higher
offices (which is not to say that this was an act of altruism).
Pulitzer prize winner, National Book Award winner and Nobel Laureate
Bellow's third novel is reverentially referred to by his friend
Martin Amis, "The Adventures of Augie March is the
Great American Novel. Search no further…" Odd then that
Amis did not write the Introduction to this new edition. But Amis'
friend Christopher Hitchens does, concluding, "The two key
words that encapsulate the ambitions of Bellow's novel are democratic
and cosmopolitan. Not entirely by coincidence, these are two great
stand-or-fall hopes of America. The two qualities that carry Augie
through are his capacity for love and his capacity for irony. These,
together with reason, are the great stand-or-fall hopes of humanity…"
Amen. (RB)
Strangers
-Taichi Yamada (translated by Wayne Lammers) (203 PP, Vertical
Books)
I wouldn't know about this book but for the fact that my new best
friend Chip Kidd has designed a slew of covers for the publisher
including this a novel by award-winning (too many to mention) television
script writer Taichi Yamada. The story centers on a middle-aged
TV scriptwriter who revisits the section of Tokyo where he grew
up. He encounters a couple that look very much like his parents
who had died in a tragic accident. Are they ghosts? Whatever they
are they provide the protagonist Harada with solace. But it is clear
to his neighbor Kei that something bad is happening as she urges
him to stop seeing these people. (RB)
…Wayne Lammers (the translator) does subtitles, too, when
he's not changing words to English for books. He once got an NEA
grant for translations. He's a talented
guy. (MB)
Politically Inspired: An Anthology of Fiction for Our
Time
–edited by Stephen Elliott (276 PP, MacAdam/Cage)
Stephen Elliott (What it Means to Love You) has compiled
29 (never before published) stories by Charles Baxter, ZZ Packer,
Jim Shepard, Anthony Swofford, Stewart O'Nan, and Elizabeth Tallent
and others that have been inspired by political events. For what
it's worth (which is up to you) Elliott comments on this book, "When
I originally told David Poindexter I was going to do this we were
both drunk and neither of us believed it. But people got involved
right away, and I learned one of the most important lessons of my
life: that if you do something good, you will quickly be surrounded
by good people who will help you." And I should note a portion
of the proceeds from the sale of this book will go to Oxfam America's
humanitarian response in Iraq. (RB)
The Truth about Celia
–Kevin Brockmeier (216 PP, Pantheon)
Patricia Henley spoke (as did others) highly of Kevin Brockmeier's
debut story collection, Things That Fall from the Sky.
And if my memory serves me well, Gail Caldwell was effusive about
this, Brockmeier's first novel. You can get a taste of his fiction
from this recently published story in The
New Yorker. The Truth about Celia is about the
disappearance of a seven-year-old girl in a small town as narrated
by her father. He recounts this profound loss from the point of
view of his wife, the policeman in charge and even his missing daughter's,
as they try to make sense of this emotional devastation. (RB)
Lucky Girls
-Nell Freudenberger (225 PP, Ecco)
It's quite possible that more has been written about Nell Freudenberger
than she has written. Having her career launched in the New
Yorker Debut Fiction issue in 2001 and the two years that elapsed
before the publication of her book that has Richard Ford opining,
"Every story in this remarkable collection reveal the emergence
of a prodigious talents" brought forth a
cascade of
legitimate
questioning of the latest plot twist of the ongoing publishing
industry saga. And some snide fratboy beer guzzling shadenfreuede
shaded
accounts. And finally even a
review of the writing. Poor Nell, she's a photogenic woman,
and she has been paid a handsome sum for a few short stories. (RB)
Chip Kidd
–Veronique Vienne (112 PP, Yale University Press)
You can wait for Part II of my soul-searing conversation
with (book cover) designer Chip Kidd sometime in November, or you
can wallow in McNews,
but the case in point here would be to look over the magic the Chipster
has wrought with over fifteen hundred book jackets to his credit
(including the cover to his own novel, The Cheese Monkeys).
Veronique Vienne, who compiled this monograph, teaches at New York's
School of Visual Arts and seems to know something about design.
And as this continues to be an era championing full disclosure,
I should point out that I fully expect that the endless stream of
(deserved) superlatives I hurl at The Chip will result in his designing
the cover for my oft-delayed, much-revised memoir, Bringing
In the Sheep, for some currently devalued currency. (RB)
The 6th Lamentation
–William Brodrick (387 PP, Viking)
Terms like 'slush pile' and 'foul matter' are bandied about in
the allegedly genteel publishing business. I suppose that if I had
such a thing as a 'slush pile' (any aggregation of correspondence
that is piled up in the least obtrusive place until its uncontrolled
geometric growth makes it obtrusive) this novel would have come
out of it. William Brodrick is a former Augustinian friar who left
his calling to become a barrister and now has written his first
novel. Despite the publisher's accompanying material referring to
the likes of John LeCarre and Alan Furst, there is much to recommend
this story of an aging and dying woman's wartime experience in the
French Resistance and its flashing back as she sees the face of
a suspected Nazi war criminal on TV. The Nazi seeks legal sanctuary
in a Gilbertinian friary and it remains for Father Anselm who gave
up in legal career for his religious vows to unravel the intricacies
of this fifty-year-old case. The story moves steadily ahead and
than back and then ahead and the Brodrick's insights along the way
mark him as, what do the reviewers say, "a promising new literary
voice." (RB)
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