Redmond
O'Hanlon's Trawler: A Journey Through the North
Atlantic
"For
O’Hanlon, at least, the trawlerman’s
journey is largely about running nets through deep,
hidden places within himself. Doubtless, a book
about the sea’s abysmal depths would have
been compelling, but this one certainly has its
delicious moments of comedy and existential terror."
Top
Stella
Rimington's At Risk
"At
Risk has an impressive hook for readers who
prefer their thrillers to be quick, intense and
above all realistic: it was written by Stella Rimington,
who joined Britain’s Secret Service (MI5)
in 1969 and served as its director general from
1992 to 1996.
Top
Thomas
Fahy's Night Visions
Thomas
Fahy’s debut thriller has nearly enough
momentum to stave off a reader’s growing
concern that the plot might not be as strong as
it promises in the early pages.
Top
Carl
Hiaasen's Skinny Dip
No
one will ever accuse Carl Hiaasen of being a subtle
novelist. He paints his satires with broad, broad
strokes. But no one will accuse him of being boring
or slow, either. Skinny Dip, his eleventh
novel, is true to form.
Top
John
Gimlette's At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig:
Travels Through Paraguay
To borrow from
Voltaire, if magical realism didn’t exist,
Paraguay would invent it. Only it would be even
darker and more nightmarish than what we have
on the shelves today.
Top
Joe
Eszterhas's Hollywood Animal
"If
Eszterhas had given his readers simply this childhood
memoir, it would have been a powerful little book,
and it would have helped replace the boorish,
misogynistic role he’s perceived as playing
with some of his louder screenplays."
Top
François
Bizot's The Gate
"Wordsworth
famously described poetry as the overflowing of
emotion recollected in moments of tranquillity.
Bizot certainly waited long enough to recount
his ordeals in a Khmer Rouge prison camp, but
by his own account, the tranquility will never
come."
Top
Thomas
Sanchez's King Bongo
"Squeezed
into a short multi-plot summary, King Bongo
certainly sounds familiar. But its settings, characters
and thematic development keep it fresh."
Top
Re-Thinking
Nabokov
"Nabokov
is often trounced as an intellectual snob, a literary
mandarin. With his complex plots and prose that
draws on French, English and Russian (just to
name three), he delights in laying traps for the
unwary reader because he wants to prove his superiority.
So the argument runs. In truth, as Boyd demonstrates,
Nabokov is the most charitable of authors. He
always gives the reader more than one path to
his destination. In Nabokov’s teaching days,
Boyd relates, he told his students: 'Curiously
enough, one cannot read a book; one can only reread
it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and
creative reader is a rereader.'"
Top
Patricia
Carlon's Who Are You, Linda Kondrick?
"Every
time I pick up a new Carlon title I tell myself
to slow down and savor the experience—but
I can't. Her prose is so expertly lean and fast
that I consume the book in a single night, and
then I spend a year waiting for the next one."
Top
Caedmon
Spoken-Word Recordings Go Digital
"This
year, Caedmon celebrates its fiftieth anniversary,
and in addition to releasing new recordings of
classic literature (like Philip K. Dick's The
Minority Report and Other Stories, read by
Keir Dullea), it continues to digitalize its backlist.
Arthur Miller, Charles Bukowski, Ernest Hemingway,
James Joyce and Edgar Allan Poe are among the
classic writers who have made it onto CDs, and
the list is growing."
Top
Rich Cohen's
Lake Effect
"Lake
Effect is about the friendship of young men
when girls are desired but still unfathomable
objects, about bonds forged in cheap beer and
borrowed cars and aimless adventures and talk
late into the night, when it all feels important
and exciting in some way you can't quite define
and you can't imagine ever wanting any of it to
change. And then it all changes, until there's
nothing left of it but old stories you can't quite
explain to your wife and in-jokes you no longer
understand scrawled in your high school yearbook."
Top
Ben Marcus's
Notable American Women
"Imagine
a Mandelbrot pattern with its endlessly magnifying
geometric complexities and you get some of Notable
American Women's frenetic, hyperreal obsessiveness.
And like a Mandelbrot pattern--and opposed to,
say, an Antrim novel--the real focus here (both
yours and Marcus's) seems to rest on the hallucinatory
kaleidoscope of images, rather than the storyline
itself."
Top
Henry
Petroski's Paperboy: Confessions of a Future
Engineer
"The
author of books such as The Pencil and
The Evolution of Useful Things, Petroski
has a gift for rendering the ordinary in unexpectedly
intriguing detail. Very large sections of Paperboy
are devoted to the finer points of newspaper delivery,
such as the range of techniques evolved to accommodate
thick papers, thin papers, and Sunday papers with
their stack of supplements. It's the sort of matter
you might never otherwise have given a second
thought to, like the million other components
of everyday living, but once you've learned about
it, you can't imagine why you never wondered about
it before."
Top
Pagan Kennedy's
Black Livingstone: A True Tale of Adventure
in the Nineteenth-Century Congo
Black
Livingstone is by
turns an adventure story and a sobering look at
both American and European history, as well as
a biography of a man who managed, in his own largely
non-political way, to fight the darkest tendencies
of his time. It's a remarkable story, notable
not only for its thrilling sense of adventure
but for the fact that it's so little known today.
Kennedy's fascination with Sheppard's story and
her affection for him as a dynamic, complicated
figure are apparent—and infectious.
Top
T.R. Pearson's
Polar
Ordinarily,
we would expect the foreground—the main characters
and the central plot—to be favored over the
background in a successful novel. Indeed, it would
defy the notions of 'primary' and 'secondary' to
invert their roles in a novel. And yet that's precisely
what T.R. Pearson has done in his latest novel,
Polar—and the effects, counterintuitively,
are shockingly entertaining.
Top
Paul Bowles's
The Stories of Paul Bowles
Paul
Bowles has finally received what a writer of his
stature deserves: a complete collection of his short
fiction, stretching from his first often brilliant
efforts in 1946 to his last, occasionally didactic
work in 1993. Ecco's new The Stories of Paul
Bowles is especially valuable to Bowles enthusiasts
because it offers stories that have never been collected
before. And since the stories (sixty-two in all)
are presented in chronological order, we can watch
Bowles establish and refine his central themes as
well as witness how his notion of the form changed
over nearly fifty years.
Top
Carl Hiaasen's
Basket Case
Basket Case's plot
isn't as convoluted as Hiaasen's last novel, Sick
Puppy. Where Sick Puppy was high farce,
Basket Case is a more traditional murder
mystery offering the standard genre-driven elements
(femme fatale, etc.) as well as some nicely
broad comic highlights (this is Hiaasen, after all).
Unfortunately, that means it lacks some of Sick
Puppy's speed and dizzying changes of direction
(traits at which Hiaasen excels). On the other hand,
it doesn't lack for zany comic antics, particularly
when it comes to comically absurd violence (another
Hiaasen trademark).
Top
Nancy Milford's
Savage Beauty:
The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay
The shock value of
a woman talking openly and even callously about
sexuality is lost on us today. Years ago, Madonna
taught us that women's underwear can be outerwear,
and Britney Spears's efforts to make lurid Lolitas
mainstream get edgier with each music awards show.
Cunningly composed poetry just won't cut the mustard
with us, these days. But Milford apparently likes
a tough sell when it comes to biographical subjects.
Her Zelda: A Biography jump-started critical
and popular interest in F. Scott Fitzgerald's artistic
but troubled wife, and I suppose she hoped to perform
the same task for Millay with Savage Beauty.
Top
Edna
St. Vincent Millay's The Selected Poetry of
Edna St. Vincent Millay
The fact that her
poetic style was conventional and easily understood
by the average reader (in ways that many of her
modernist contemporaries were not) certainly helped
sales, but it's always sex that moves the books,
right? And Millay, whose audience included an emerging
generation of freethinking women, was really like
a waggish, crossdressing Metaphysical poet in her
approach to love and sex.
Top
Allan Gurganus's
The Practical Heart
For
all its abundant stylistic variety, Allan Gurganus's
The Practical Heart: Four Novellas has a
single gesture, if not theme, at its center: in
each story, a character (usually middle-aged) looks
back at the past and mulls over its effect on him
/ her in the present. When, if not where, that past
lies is only a part of this superb collection's
creative diversity.
Top
Bobbie Ann
Mason's Zigzagging Down a Wild Trail
Despite the
characters' unhappiness (or perhaps because of it),
Mason's stories here are beautifully kinetic. Characters
wonder through snow storms and escape their dull
lives by catching a bus to a Mississippi casino
'boat.' The movement—'zigzagging down a wild
trail'—mirrors the character's unsettled states
of mind, of course, but it also makes for some fast
reading. And the comedy in Mason's stories tends
to sneak up on you delightfully too.
Top
Joan Didion's
Political Fictions
It's not Didion's fault,
of course, if her subjects are depressing. In fact,
this collection demonstrates that Didion is quite
simply one of America's best essay writers, with
a keen eye for detail and a knack for dogged deconstructive
analysis—to say nothing of her writing style.
Her elaborate sentence structures (she's particularly
enamored of sentence-stretching parenthetical points)
often read like intoxicating acrobatic maneuvers,
and the points she makes with them are so carefully
developed that one often feels they should be read
purely for the pleasure of watching them work, no
matter how depressing the subject.
Top
Katie Roiphe's
Still She Haunts Me
The strongest character
in Roiphe's book is, fittingly, Alice herself: the
object of Dodgson's desires (whatever their form)
and, by extension, ours. Roiphe's work with Alice
is particularly distinguished by the complexity
of her character development. Alice is no mere victim
of Dodgson's illicit desires; she is, even when
she first appears in the novel as a four year old,
fully cognizant of both the way people see her and
the way she can manipulate her own image for their
benefit (or shock).
Top
Salman
Rushdie's Fury
Fury's protagonist
has to carry more than his relatively uninteresting
character can handle. He's too passive—often,
he's simply a keen observer with a backstory—and
it weakens the novel's narrative thrust considerably.
At one point, Rushdie writes, "This about New
York Solanka liked a lot—this sense of being
crowded out by other people's stories, of walking
like a phantom through a city that was in the middle
of a story which didn't need him as a character."
The reader can't help thinking that Solanka himself
often seems crowded out of his own novel.
Top
At its most intriguing
moments, Taylor's biography raises a series of profoundly
compelling, if troubling, questions: what form would
Fitzgerald's fiction have taken without Zelda as
his model? What might have become of their lives
if Fitzgerald had taken doctors' advice and stopped
drinking? What might Zelda have achieved if Fitzgerald
had not so thoroughly blunted her own struggle for
creative expression?
Top
Many contemporary
readers may initially find Bragg's writing voice
to be a bit sentimental. In fact, it's not. He simply
explores—and shows—deeply felt, sincere
emotions, and what might strike some of us today
as sentimentality is actually Bragg's complete lack
of postmodern irony. Irony might be today's chosen
voice, but so much of Bragg—not just his subject
matter, but him—belongs to the past.
And I can't imagine someone doing a better, more
noble service to the past than Bragg does here.
Top
Again and again,
Bragg's stories evoke an unsettling, abiding feeling
that the world—especially today—isn't
as stable or as changeless as we would like. None
of us are shielded from sudden, catastrophic violence
or government-sanctioned or economy-driven loss
of freedom. Our fates, in short, are not always
of our own making, and Bragg excels at reminding
us of this frightening fact.
Top
James Tate's
Memoir of the Hawk
Some of these
poems make me think of automatic writing, as
if Tate were watching his hand curiously to
see what it would write next. Salvador Dali
might have liked these poems. (In fact, Tate,
like the great surrealist, seems intrigued with
spiders; in "Hotel of the Golden Dawn,"
an entire hotel is populated with arachnids
that keep the flies off a guests' eggs in the
morning.)
Top
Elizabeth
George's A Traitor to Memory
George's deeper themes—of
memory's frailties, of the lies we tell ourselves
to make life more palpable, and, perhaps most
importantly, of the enduring bonds that sustain
dysfunctional families—are admirable, and
they suggest George is hunting for big game here.
That doesn't mean the book is flawless, though.
Top
Patricia
Carlon's Death by Demonstration
Why Patricia Carlon,
the Australian master of psychological suspense,
has not seen her mysteries adapted to the screen
is...well, a mystery. Given how close she is in
tone and technique to Hitchcock, I can't fathom
why filmmakers have passed over her for so long.
Death by Demonstration probably won't find
itself on the top of many producers' project wish
lists, though.
Top
Charles
Gallenkamp's Dragon Hunter: Roy Chapman Andrews
and the Central Asiatic Expeditions
As a biographer, Gallenkamp
wisely avoids what he calls "unfounded psychological
analysis" on the grounds that an adventurer
like Andrews had little interest in philosophical
ponderings or soulful introspection. Surely, Andrews
could have been cracked open by a diligent therapist
willing to follow Andrews around and poke at him
with probing questions (his fear of water is particularly
tantalizing), but the chances of performing such
maneuvers now, given Andrews's taciturn record,
are slim. Besides, one has to wonder whether all
biographical subjects are rendered more complicated
by denying they are truly as focused on their stated
goals as they seem.
Top
Peter
Nichols's A Voyage for Madmen
As the race progresses
into the seemingly impassable Southern Ocean, Nichols's
text takes on an ominous quality of encroaching
doom. "The further I go," one yachtsman
writes in his logbook, "the madder this race
seems." Shrieking gales and eighty-foot waves
aside, though, the most compelling material may
be the shocker that comes two-thirds of the way
through the book: one of the contestants decides
to fake his journey and meticulously maps out his
feigned, record-breaking progress, which he reports
by radio daily to a thrilled audience back home.
Top
Haruki
Murakami's Sputnik Sweetheart
Sputnik Sweetheart's
metamorphosis theme is pure Kafka, but I think Murakami's
philosophical interests lean as much to the great
magical realist, Julio Cortázar: the solidity
of self is not merely questioned but nullified,
and the world into which the self formerly settled
cozily becomes a barren desertscape worthy of Antonioni
(who adapted Cortázar's short story, "Blow-Up,"
of course: it's a small ontological world).
Top
Haruki
Murakami's Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack
and the Japanese Psyche
One thinks, reflexively,
of Shiva Naipaul's account of the Jonestown cult
suicide (Journey to Nowhere), but Underground
is better, I think, both as an account of cult aberrations
and literary-level reportage. It's a fascinating,
if harrowing, account which has questions of fate
and, to paraphrase Frost, the train car not taken
at its center.
Top
Richard
Bernstein's Ultimate Journey
A reader casually stumbling
onto Richard Bernstein's Ultimate Journey,
in which Bernstein follows the path of a seventh-century
Buddhist monk from China to southern India, might
be forgiven for expecting the book to have an overtly
spiritual purpose. After all, the monk set out on
his five thousand mile journey along the Silk Road
with the purpose of finding the Ultimate Truth of
Buddhism. But the reader's casual assumption, reasonable
at face value, would be wrong.
Top
Peter Martin's
A Life of James Boswell
Let's face it: moving from
a damning portrait of debauchery to a sad portrait
of sexual addiction and morbidity is really a matter
of shading and interpretative insights. By my count,
Martin lists seventeen separate gonorrheal infections
for Boswell, and a man who expends himself on a
prostitute four times in a single night certainly
couldn't be termed chaste. On the other hand, Martin
certainly seems right to favor the 'complicated'
interpretation of Boswell's carnal excesses: they
suggest more a man in psychological turmoil than
they do a simple, carefree hedonist.
Top
John Banville's
Eclipse
Banville has written
twelve books now to great critical acclaim, but
widespread popular success has inexplicably eluded
him. I don't know that Eclipse will change
that; I can only say that I hope it will. He is
truly one of the most sophisticated, subtle novelists
working today, and it's nothing short of embarrassing
to see the money going to the legal thrillers while
the only works likely to survive the distance go
sinfully underappreciated in their authors' prime.
Top
Michael
Dibdin's Thanksgiving
Michael Dibdin has
already established a sterling critical reputation
as a mystery novelist, and he brings to Thanksgiving
the speed and efficiency of a no-nonsense mystery
writer who understands how to let his story progress
through quick, adept dialogue. Dibdin's pace is
fast without seeming relentless, and the effect—cinematic,
really—is whoppingly pleasurable.
Top
Dave Eggers's
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
I mostly liked this book,
though now of course I have to say what I didn't
like in order to prove that I am not a swinish slave
to popular taste, or trying to curry favor with
Dave Eggers. So okay. The word "fuck,"
along with its various derivatives and near-relatives,
was used more than I thought strictly necessary;
like the red chili sauce on the table at the Vietnamese
restaurant, a little "fuck" goes a long
way, though both are a matter of taste.
Top
Julian
Barnes's Love, etc.
Love, etc.'s
darker developments may disturb readers who enjoyed
the light, witty comedy of Talking It Over
(to which it is a sequel), but it's undeniably a
work whose deeper themes merit our attention, and
Barnes's cunning (if not exactly playful) presentation
of them is, as always, refreshingly adept.
Top
Amy Tan's The
Bonesetter's Daughter
LuLing's story—of
a childhood spent first with her Precious Aunt and
then in an orphanage during the Japanese invasion
that preceded World War Two and finally her immigration
to America—is engaging in itself, but it's
her character's jarring transformation that most
impresses the reader.
Top
Madison Smartt
Bell's Master of the Crossroads
While Master of the
Crossroads can be read alone, Bell's intentions
are so clearly epic—combined, the first two
volumes run to over twelve hundred pages—that
the trilogy begs our close and complete attention.
These are stunningly good, dense novels of lasting
importance, and as far as I can see, they achieve
everything they set out to accomplish.
Top
John S.
Littell's French Impressions: The Adventures
of an American Family
French Impressions
is a very funny book in many parts, as Mary struggles
to hold together family and home with two small
children and a bare grasp of the most rudimentary
French. I don't know if this book would be as entertaining
to a reader with no experience of travel with children,
but it is a welcome addition to the ranks of the
literature of wandering, a genre where children
are largely conspicuous by their absence.
Top
John Updike's
Licks of Love
While "Rabbit Remembered"
is arguably long enough to have been published on
its own, Updike seems determined to collect and
bind everything but his grocery lists, and he throws
in twelve short stories to accompany "Rabbit
Remembered." Frankly, he shouldn't have, if
only because some readers will be so unmoved by
them they may not read their way through to "Rabbit
Remembered."
Top
Angela Bourke's
The Burning of Bridget Cleary: A True Story
In the extended passages
where Bourke establishes the principal characters
and reconstructs the moments surrounding Bridget's
murder and burial, The Burning of Bridget Cleary
reads like a well-paced suspense thriller. But Bourke
is clearly up to something much more profound and
complicated. She's an expert on the Irish oral tradition,
and she does brilliant work deciphering the minutiae
about fairy belief that is vital to understanding
the Bridget Cleary case.
Top
M. Lee
Goff's A Fly for the Prosecution
Unfortunately, Goff plays
it straight, and who can blame him? The man's a
legitimate scientist and wants to be taken seriously
and not thought to be making wit at the expense
of the dead. The result, however, is a book that
skips quickly over the icky stuff and the backstory
on the bodies and instead spends a great deal of
time on rather dry technical laboratory details
with first instars and Berlese funnels and soil
fauna.
Top
Ted Koppel's
Off Camera: Private Thoughts Made Public
While he doesn't clarify
his stances by listing his political party affiliations,
it's readily clear that Koppel isn't exactly proud
of Bill Clinton's personal behavior in the White
House, has great misgivings about the way American
foreign policy is conducted today and is generally
unhappy about the direction America took in the
last years of the second millennium. But Koppel
reserves some of his greatest ire for his own medium,
network news.
Top
Dava Sobel's
Galileo's Daughter
In stepping away from the
familiar track of the Galileo narrative—man
of science versus power-mad Church—to bring
to life the lifelong devotion between daughter and
father, Sobel's book becomes finally, unexpectedly,
and most pleasurably, a love story.
Top
Robert Drewe's
The Shark Net
The serial killer Eric
Cooke's presence in Robert Drewe's new memoir certainly
isn't gratuitous: Cooke killed one of Drewe's friends
and was a Dunlop employee who sometimes made deliveries
to the Drewe house. Indeed, one marvels at first
that Drewe doesn't give Cooke more space in his
text. But Drewe is up to something far more subtle
with the Cooke material.
Top
Stephen King's
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
After publishing bestsellers
for more than a quarter of a century, Stephen King
is ready to let us in on the secret of his success.
Ready? There is no secret. A lot of reading,
a lot of writing, and knowing his gerunds from his
participials (as well as obsessively pulling up
adverbial weeds as they sprout) is the key to his
success. Disappointed? (And you thought it was going
to be so easy....)
Top
Alan Lightman's
The Diagnosis
The Diagnosis is
by turns a grimly black comedy and a bleak cautionary
tale. But it is also, in the end, simply an immensely
moving, sad story, particularly when Lightman shows
Chalmers's brightly burning love for his son, Alex.
The cautionary aspects of The Diagnosis may
make it necessary reading; its tragic elements—our
caring for Chalmers as a human—make it almost
unbearably haunting.
Top
Penelope
Evans's First Fruits and Freezing
The skill with which
Evans lays out her clues in First Fruits and
twists Kate's voice to show her profound underlying
vulnerabilities is astonishing: it's patient, intelligent
and even fugue-like in its subtle complexities.
It's impossible to anticipate where Evans will take
the plot, although the basic images and thematic
issues are laid openly before us—which is
a stunning achievement in itself.
Top
Mary E.
Wilkins Freeman's A New England Nun and Other
Stories
'Regionalist' shouldn't
of necessity be a pejorative term that implies primitivism
or merely an historical intention to capture 'local
color.' Freeman's stories often achieve something
quietly profound that lifts them above the domain
of local color into that more rarified plane of
universal values, but they often do it with
rather than despite the languid, beautifully
described, lazy quality of her fictional country
world.
Top
Patricia
Carlon's The Unquiet Night and The
Price of an Orphan
It's one of the publishing
industry's odd mysteries that Patricia Carlon's
superb psychological thrillers had to wait more
than thirty years to be published in America. She
has been compared—justifiably—to such
masters of the genre as Alfred Hitchcock and Patricia
Highsmith, and yet despite her having written more
than fifty novels and being translated into seven
languages, until Soho Press began publishing her
work four years ago, she was entirely unknown to
most Americans.
Top
Edmund White's
The Married Man
The Married Man
picks up its pace and sense of urgency in the final
one hundred pages, where, as the lovers travel to
Morocco for a final trip together, White's writing
becomes so beautifully sad that it's almost too
painful to read at times. Strangely, while reading
these pages, I found myself thinking of Catherine
and Frederick Henry's flight from the war in A
Farewell to Arms. Both couples are fleeing death—hopelessly,
of course—and trying to find a quiet respite
of love, but it's such an odd, unexpected comparison
that I won't belabor it.
Top
Charles
Baxter's The Feast of Love
Isolated as individual
voices, Baxter's characters appear inarticulate
on the subject of love. But read together, they
begin to define it surprisingly well, albeit indirectly.
Through the diverse, conflicting stories about love
and its various forms—sexual, self-reflected,
paternal, maternal—we seem to get a greater
understanding of the need for love and even perhaps
something of its form(s). Ironically, for a novel
that begins and ends in darkness, Baxter suggests
the Platonic source of love is, at least metaphorically,
light.
Top
Jan Dalley's
Diana Mosley
On a personal level, Jan
Dalley's new biography of Diana Mosley certainly
expands our understanding of the Mitford family.
But it's far more powerful as a cultural history
of a remarkably diverse period, from the hedonistic
1920s through fascism's heyday in the 1930s and
the worldwide reckoning that followed. And Diana
seems to be the perfect biographical subject for
such a history.
Top
Kevin
Patterson's The Water in Between: A Journey
at Sea
A cynic might point out
that Patterson's book puncturing the myths of travel
and adventure literature is being pitched, somewhat
inaccurately, by its publisher as "a high seas
adventure story." And the liberal sprinkling
of technical lingo—mizzen masts and whisker
poles and port forestays and halyards—might
leave landlubbers wishing for a glossary. What makes
the book succeed, however, is Patterson's strong,
insightful writing and his humor, much of it at
his own expense. If I had to spend months at sea
in a small boat, Kevin Patterson is the kind of
travelling companion I'd hope to have.
Top
Jamie
Zeppa's Beyond the Sky and the Earth: A Journey
into Bhutan
If Zeppa followed her story's
most obvious narrative trajectory, her book would
have all the makings of a Hollywood movie and not
much more. But Zeppa allows reality to intrude its
complexities and contradictions on the story. There
is a suffocating lack of privacy in her Bhutanese
village, and the burden of social disapproval. There
is little questioning of authority. There is a growing
civil unrest between northern and southern Bhutanese,
argued only in rhetoric and rumor. And a world without
VCRs and Calvin Klein is also a world without clean
water and sanitation, where children die of easily
preventable diseases.
Top
Louis
Auchincloss's Woodrow Wilson
"For all the tragic
potential, it's the revealing glimpses Auchincloss
gives us of a Wilson at odds with the popularly
conceived, remote, coldly rational figure that might
move, even surprise, many readers. Can you imagine
Wilson, whom Henry Adams once described as "a
mysterious, a rather Olympian personage and shrouded
in darkness from which issue occasional thunderbolts,"
entertaining house guests with such comic impersonations
as 'the drunken man staggering about with a cowlike
look in his eyes, the heavy Englishman with an insufferably
superior accent and an invisible monocle, the villain
done with a scowl and a dragging foot'?"
Top
Michael
Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost
Anil's
Ghost almost feels like a thriller at times
with its ferociously addictive pull, but Ondaatje
is up to far more complex things here than most
thrillers pursue: complex themes; sophisticated,
extended backstories; and—perhaps most importantly—a
supreme attention to the artistic weight of each
sentence as an end in itself. Ondaatje (who has
published more books of poetry than he has fiction)
writes with an understated concision, moving with
a stunning smoothness between the past and the present
and breaking his chapters up into smaller sections
that seem to balance and hover over the text with
a magical, poetic glow.
Top
J.D. Dolan's
Phoenix: A Brother's Life
Unlike a novelist
pressed to manufacture motivation and explain the
inexplicable, Dolan never fully understands why
his brother stopped speaking to him, nor does he
try to convince his readers otherwise. Readers who
expect neat closure should probably stick to novels.
Dolan doesn't pull back when it comes to acknowledging
painful truths, and he isn't willing to fabricate
false endings, even when it would make everyone
(perhaps even some of his readers) happier. The
result is a searing, unforgettable work that rises
above the other entries in today's burgeoning memoirs
market.
Top
Mark Bowden's
Black Hawk Down
Ninety-nine Americans were
left on the ground in Mogadishu overnight, scrambling
to stay alive. By the time it was over, it would
be the longest firefight American soldiers had engaged
in since the Vietnam War. Remarkably, given the
conditions, only eighteen American soldiers died
and another seventy-three were wounded. By comparison,
at least five hundred Somalis died, and another
thousand or more were wounded. The casualty numbers
alone would suggest that the Americans won the battle.
But that's not how the White House or Congress saw
it.
Top
Pico Iyer's
The Global Soul
Lacking Rybczynski's
centralizing focus on architecture, Iyer often uses
himself and his equally multi-national (or perhaps
post-national) friends as his points of reference—perhaps
not a great tradeoff, but given his background,
it's justifiable as an essay device, if not a scientifically
accurate one.
Top
John Updike's
Gertrude and Claudius
John Updike undertook
something that could have been either a refreshingly
revelatory experiment or a creatively challenged
disaster: he wrote a prequel to Shakespeare's
Hamlet, with the focus shifted from Hamlet
to Gertrude (and, to a much lesser extent, Claudius
as well). Happily, the book turns out to be an
intelligent, engaging story. And the key to Updike's
success lies in his winning portrait of Gertrude
herself.
Top
Donald Antrim's stunning
new novel is so...unusual that well-grounded readers
might very well find themselves searching nervously
for similarities to known, stable works. Slyly,
Antrim welcomes such comparisons.
Top
Leonard
Guttridge's The Ghosts of Cape Sabine
From expedition
diary entries, Guttridge paints the excruciating
toll taken by isolation, darkness, cold and
hunger. "Most of us are out of our right
minds," one member of the expedition scrawled.
They were reduced to eating their own shoes
and clothes. Of the seven survivors, one was
found to have nothing but suppurating stumps
left at the end of both legs, the result of
severe frostbite; having held out so long, he
died on the passage home.
Top
Thomas Mallon's
Two Moons
Two Moons
is that rare achievement, an historical novel
that so completely transcends its genre that even
readers who shirk historical subjects will find
it makes for addictive reading. But it's not a mere
speed trick—a writer's gimmick—that
propels readers through the novel.
Top
Douglas
Coupland's Miss Wyoming
Coupland puts his strong
visual sensibilities and his Pynchonesque skills
at illuminating the Pop images that form the bedrock
of contemporary society to good use in Miss Wyoming.
But he's up to something radically different on
a larger, thematic scale. While Pynchon's adventures
in the semiotic maze are playfully comic, Coupland's
forays here have a decidedly moral tone.
Top
James Dickey's
Crux: The Letters of James Dickey
By and large, Dickey
is not setting out to impress the reader with the
weight of his poetic feeling in these letters, as
he did when writing for publication. Indeed, quite
often, he's setting out merely to complain or belittle
his fellow poets—which makes for wonderfully
entertaining reading, of course.
Top
Carl Hiaasen's
Sick Puppy
Celluloid evidence
to the contrary, Hiaasen has a remarkable knack
for farce-speed momentum, and in his latest novel,
he gives his characters (the good guys, at least)
more depth and sincerity than you'd expect in a
broad comedy.
Top
Patricia
Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley / Ripley
Underground
/ Ripley's Game
Tom Ripley, it would
seem, lives as a rudimentary quality—not mere
emptiness so much as an awareness of it: a largely
amoral ghost desperately in search of a soul. It's
Highsmith's wonderfully nuanced exploration of a
decidedly disturbing character that makes the first
installment in the Ripley series so engrossing—and
such a grand achievement.
Top
Brenda Maddox's
Yeats's Ghosts: The Secret Life of W.B. Yeats
By 1917, Yeats was
fifty-two and feeling increasing pressure to carry
on his family name. He'd enjoyed his late-blooming
life as a flirtatious bachelor, but now, he told
himself, he needed to settle down—and soon.
Yeats, who believed fervently in astrology, had
been advised that a marriage would be best accomplished
in October 1917, 'when the number of favorable planetary
conjunctions would be quite extraordinary.' Yeats
faced only one problem: he didn't have a bride,
nor did one seem likely to pop up soon.
Top
Jonathan
Raban's Passage to Juneau: A Sea and Its Meanings
Why, for God's
sake, would Raban leave his wife and four-year-old
daughter behind to sail a body of water that
had already killed seventy people in six years?
Not to fish, of course, though the Inside Passage
is a busy commercial fishing route. Not merely
to test his mettle either, as if the outing
were merely an Iron John of the Sea bestseller
in the making. White-knuckled aquatic adventures
aren't exactly Raban's cup of tea, though he
does have his fair share on the journey. Instead,
his motivation to light out for the watery territories
infinitely more complicated.
Top
John Cornwell's
Hitler's Pope: The Secret History of Pius
XII
When he began doing
the research for this book, John Cornwell didn't
set out to write a stinging condemnation. Of course,
Pius XII has often been accused of making inadequate
efforts to save Jews from Nazi prison camps, but
Cornwell believed (at least initially) that if Eugenio
Pacelli's 'full story were told—from childhood
on—his pontificate as Pius XII 'would be vindicated.'
So Cornwell approached the Vatican, he writes, and
told them he was on the Pope's side. Archivists
readily granted him access to previously unseen
material. Then the problems started.
Top
Dick Francis's
Second Wind
This is decidedly
a fast, easy read. And, as Francis always manages
to do, he's given his book that hard-to-define addictive
quality without turning it into a cheap page-turner.
He's a good, spare stylist, and the reader isn't
forced to wade through weak prose to arrive at the
solution breathless and beaten, in the tradition
of too many easy bestsellers. But Francis has produced
such wonderful mysteries in the past that the reader
can't help wishing he'd accomplished a little more,
this time out.
Top
William
Gibson's All Tomorrow's Parties
All Tomorrow's
Parties can be difficult to decipher at times,
and part of the reason lies in Gibson's unique writing
style. Jean-Luc Godard's films might be the closest
another artist's work comes to Gibson's technique:
they both use abbreviated scenes, confusing close
shots and jump cuts to disorient their audience.
Gibson's writing is wonderful when he pares it down,
but it suffers when he overworks it. But All
Tomorrow's Parties still makes for fun, heady
reading—particularly if you like your sci-fi
mysteries shrouded in a form-concealing gothic fog.
Top
Andrés
Martinez's 24/7: Living it Up and Doubling
Down in the New Las Vegas
It could only happen
in America: to generate material for a proposed
book, Martinez talks his publisher into giving him
$50,000 to blow on a month's gambling in Las Vegas.
And like that, Martinez is living in the
Vegas glitter, with his lodging and meals provided
free of charge once the hotels he stays in realize
he's a high roller—or at least one of the
people whom the casinos believe will leave a fair
proportion of their money at the table.
Top
Michael
Crichton's Timeline
Reading Timeline,
you can't help thinking how fast the movie will
be, if the screenwriter simply stays as close to
the novel as possible. Eye-catching premise, short,
crosscutting chapters, compressed time, breakneck
pace, characters with a single, easily conveyed
trait: Crichton probably comes as close to writing
pure Hollywood films in the novel genre as you can
get.
Top
Jon Swain's
River of Time: A Memoir of Vietnam and Cambodia
When Swain moves
on to Saigon, it is as if he has lost his first
love. He portrays his life in South Vietnam in a
harsher light, as he finds a cultural collision
between the French remnants of the old colonial
regime and the new and brash Americans, another
great power facing eventual defeat. Still, he finds
real love there as he begins a long affair with
the most beautiful woman in Saigon. Yet he leaves
her. As news comes of Phnom Penh's imminent fall
to the Khmer Rouge, he catches the last flight into
the capital. Many more adventures follow; Swain
attracts them like metal draws lightning.
Top
John Updike's
More Matter: Essays and Criticism
One definition of a good
essay might be that it teaches the reader something
he might never have learned otherwise. But a definition
of an even better essay might be that it teaches
the writer something he might never have
learned otherwise. And the fact that Updike seems
to learn as much from his essays as we do makes
More Matter a strong collection indeed.
Top
Lise Eliot's
What's Going on in There? How the Brain and
Mind Develop in the First Five Years of Life
Luckily for such
a complicated subject, Eliot's style is straightforward
and clear. While she doesn't talk down to her readers,
she simplifies enough to enable non-scientific individuals
to understand the concepts, even if they don't memorize
the terms. This should be required reading for anyone
interested in realizing their child's potential.
Top
Michael
Knight's Divining Rod
Knight has a strong
eye as a writer (some of his imagery is breathtaking),
and his mastery of a somewhat experimental form
is astonishing, given his relative youth. But Divining
Rod is no mere exercise in style. Knight shows
great insight into his characters, and he puts his
skills to good use by letting us feel the suddenness
and unexpectedness with which his characters discover
things about themselves.
Top
Richard
Rhodes's Why They Kill: The Discoveries of a
Maverick Criminologist
Rhodes has produced
an odd hodge-podge of a book—part biography,
part criminology primer, part history, part true-crime
thriller with an intellectual twist. The transitions
between the disparate parts can be a bit clumsy,
but each is in itself interesting. And at times,
it's absolutely fascinating.
Top
David Hunt's
Trick of Light
While Trick of
Light is as addictive a page-turner as any other
thriller on the market today, somewhere along the
way it quietly becomes something more: a serious,
subtly complicated novel that offers its audience
a disturbingly unsettling take on what the world
around us may really be like.
Top
Stephen King's
Hearts in Atlantis
Repeatedly in Hearts
in Atlantis, King's characters—and, by
extension, King implies, all baby boomers—face
a critical question: when you pass from childhood's
innocence into that heart-shattering world of adult
experience, do you stand up against the worst things
experience tries to force on you? Do you defiantly
bring something of the innocent's splendor with
you or do you quietly give in? Do you, at least,
have the courage to try to defy it?
Top
John Darnton's
The Experiment
Steven Spielberg
has already bought the film rights to Darnton's
first novel (Neanderthal), and The Experiment,
with its science-outracing-ethics theme, seems ripe
for Spielberg as well. Who knows: a year or two
from now, we may be debating clones and Kantian
ethics the way Spielberg and Crichton's Jurassic
Park made us wonder about dinosaurs and DNA
replication.
Top
David Ball's
Empires of Sand
If you enjoyed reading
Victor Hugo and Jules Verne when you were a kid
and have spent your adult reading life secretly
wishing you could find the same sort of innocent,
melodramatic rush in print, you're in luck. In pace,
heft and story, Ball delivers nineteenth-century,
romantic adventures by the handful.
Top
Patricia
Cornwell's Black Notice
While Black Notice
is one of the better Scarpetta titles of late, Cornwell
would do her loyal readers a great favor if she
dropped the shouting matches and went back to what
attracted us in the first place: writing strong
fantasies about the dark world we all knew so well
as children, when the lights went out and the house
grew quiet and something...over there, in that corner...behind
you...creaked...
Top
Witold
Rybczynski's A Clearing in the Distance
A Clearing in
the Distance is something of a departure for
Rybczynski: it's his longest work to date and the
first to focus on a person rather than a concept
(in the past, of course, he's written about home,
weekends, airport design and city life, among other
things). Happily, he manages the transition quite
successfully—largely because, as he did in
his earlier books (and essays), he sticks to traditional
structures and writes in a casual, easily read voice.
Top
David L. Robbins's
War of the Rats
Robbins is a deft
storyteller who has learned that the best historical
novels use history merely as a backdrop in order
to allow human drama to develop in the foreground.
It's a rare skill among historical novelists; for
every hundred books of historical fiction, a full
ninety-eight spend most of their time wallowing
in the author's research. Fortunately, Robbins is
in the select category, and his research (while
superb) doesn't overshadow his novel—it enhances
it.
Top
John Keegan's
The First World War
Despite the awful bloodshed
and suffering, there's something strangely quaint
about the First World War. While it happened a mere
twenty years before the Second World War, it might
as well have been a century that separated them.
Top
Stacy Schiff's
Vera (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov)
It's happened before. A
biography of James Joyce's wife has been written,
as has one of F. Scott Fitzgerald's wife, and Ernest
Hemingway's assorted wives have shared space in
a joint biography. Nonetheless, skeptics might wonder
whether we really needed a biography of Vladimir
Nabokov's wife, Véra. After all, Nabokov
himself has been studied at length. Surely, one
might argue, Véra has vicariously gotten
all the attention she deserves.
Top
Tracy
Kidder's Home Town
The struggle against change
is a central theme in Tracy Kidder's Home Town:
should a town change at all? How much? And how can
someone stop it from changing for the worse?
Top
Celebrating
Ulysses: Sixteen Things to Do on Bloomsday
Bloomsday, on June 16,
offers some unique, occasionally even mind-bending,
celebratory rituals for the stout of heart.
Top
Appreciation:
Paul Bowles
It's Bowles's willingness
to reveal the abyss around us that rightly classifies
him at least partly as an existential writer. But
he isn't so easily pigeon-holed.
Top
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