Books

Scarlet letters

CAITLIN E. CURRAN — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 04:23:03 GMT

The uptight killjoy in us
Sarah Vowell’s fifth book, The Wordy Shipmates (Riverhead) — released on October 7 — examines New England Puritans with a meticulously researched, critical-yet-comical eye.

A smoker’s tale

JAMES PARKER — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 00:28:23 GMT

Will Self’s The Butt
Somehow one is surprised — if one is a semi-conscious literary journalist like me — by the discovery that Will Self has continued to produce books.

SILVER HAZE: The hoaxy, displaced, reality-TV feel is part of the recipe here — as is Henderson the Rain King.

The Butt | By Will Self | Bloomsbury | 368 pages | $26

Somehow one is surprised — if one is a semi-conscious literary journalist like me — by the discovery that Will Self has continued to produce books. So dashing and weird and telegenic a figure did he cut back in the early ’90s, when The Quantity Theory of Insanity and My Idea of Fun were coming out, that it seems he should have broken up by now, like a band, or passed onto some other, fresher phase of notoriety, like a housemate from The Surreal Life. Still, a writer writes, always (as Billy Crystal tells his students in Throw Momma from the Train), and here we are with his seventh novel, The Butt, the surprisingness of which is compounded by the fact that it’s very good indeed.

Tom Brodzinski, vacationing en famille in a Third World tourist trap, flicks his cigarette end off the hotel balcony; it lands with a flesh-creasing hiss upon the scalp of an elderly fellow guest, whereupon Tom is pitched into a netherworld of liability and tribal justice, attorneys and witch doctors. As part of the reparation proceedings, a local medicine man makes a ritual incision in Tom’s thigh: “The makkata closed in on Tom and knelt. He was clickety-clacking with his slack dry purse lips.”

Devout viewers of reality TV will of course be reminded of the Discovery Channel’s 2006 series Going Tribal and the famous “penis inversion” undergone by its host, Bruce Parry, among the Kombai tribesmen of West Papua. “The makkata’s breath was now on the front of his [Tom’s] shorts, and Tom could smell it despite the vegetal rot of the jungle.” The hoaxy, displaced, reality-TV feel is part of the recipe here. Add a dollop of Kafka’s The Trial, one small Joseph Conrad (peeled and sliced), half a Graham Greene, a squirt or two of Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King, and simmer it all over a low Flann O’Brien. . . . Mmm, tasty!

Pilgrims’ progress

CHRIS WANGLER — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 00:24:52 GMT

Amitav Ghosh's Sea of Poppies
India, 1838. The opium business is booming, and drug money fills the British Empire’s coffers, offsetting a trade imbalance created by imports of Chinese tea and silk. But now the emperor wants the drug trade stopped.

AUTHENTIC: This one is worth the trips to the appended glossary.

Sea of Poppies | By Amitav Ghosh | Farrar, Straus and Giroux | 528 pages | $26

India, 1838. The opium business is booming, and drug money fills the British Empire’s coffers, offsetting a trade imbalance created by imports of Chinese tea and silk. But now the emperor wants the drug trade stopped.

Along the Gangetic plain northwest of Calcutta, the British East India Company has persuaded peasant farmers to abandon their crops and grow only poppies, which are then processed in the Inferno-esque Sudder Opium Factory. With the first opium war looming, the cash cow seems ready to keel over, leaving famine and poverty for the hapless locals. This is the backdrop of Sea of Poppies, Amitav Ghosh’s eighth novel, the first in a projected trilogy, and his first book to be shortlisted for the Booker Prize. (This year’s winner will be announced October 14.)

Deeti, the moral center of the book, tends a poppy field. Her husband is an addict who works in the factory. When he dies, she decides she would rather be burned to death on his sati pyre than submit to her sexually predatory brother-in-law. At the last second she is rescued by a towering untouchable named Kalua. They become lovers and flee, making their way to Calcutta to sign up as girmitiyas, or indentured servants, aboard the Ibis, a schooner bound for Mauritius.

A half-dozen other characters, collected from an array of racial and linguistic backgrounds, also scheme their way on board under the watchful eyes of the British. The most interesting is in shackles. Raja Neel Rattan Halder, a genteel Bengali raja, having failed to pay his debts, has been framed as a forger, stripped of his holdings, and sentenced to a penal colony on Mauritius for seven years. He is reduced to cleaning excrement, lice, and filth off his cellmate, a half-Chinese opium addict whose withdrawal symptoms have rendered him nearly inhuman.

By the time she sets out, the Ibis has been transformed from a battered former slave ship into a fateful “vehicle of transformation,” where rules of caste and empire will be either broken by hopeful exiles or enforced with brutality by the ship’s guards. Although the pilgrims are all in some way victims of the opium trade, the real theme of Sea of Poppies is the alternately terrifying and liberating prospect of migration across the “Black Water” of the Indian Ocean. “On a boat of pilgrims,” says Deeti, “no one can lose caste and everyone is the same.”

Interview: John Hodgman

CLEA SIMON — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 00:16:20 GMT

One man's operating system
Long before John Hodgman became universally recognized as the systems-challenged PC in Apple’s ads, he was writing fake trivia for such publications as McSweeney’s and the New York TImes Magazine.

Long before John Hodgman became universally recognized as the systems-challenged PC in Apple’s ads, he was writing fake trivia for such publications as McSweeney’s and the New York TImes Magazine. Discussing his new book, More Information Than You Require (Dutton), he explains how a former clarinetist-turned-literary agent could become the face of a reviled computer and, possibly, one of the smarter humorists on the planet.

There’s one phase in your first book, The Areas of My Expertise, that I just love: “the made-up truth.”
I wrote that book and I wrote that phrase, but then Stephen Colbert put it so much better, with the word “truthiness.” When he wrote that, my heart both leapt and sank, which caused me to go to the hospital. It’s such a perfect assessment of the new kind of truth that we are all wrestling with – and that I am profiting by.

Do we live in particularly funny times?
I think these times are possibly hilarious, but it’s a laugh to keep from crying hilarity. But I don’t know if that’s particularly unusual to these times. There have been difficult times throughout history, and that is why there has been humor. There was a lot of great Black Plague humor, for example. I don’t know if that’s true. If they existed, I’d love to read the transcripts of some Black Plague standup comedy.

I think that right now we live in extremely and refreshingly surprising times. I think what made the previous eight years sort of difficult was that they were no longer funny after a while. Unless you were a supporter of the Bush administration, and there are reasonable people who are, you got used to being told that it is raining when many, many people are urinating on you - and no one really questioning that.

For what it’s worth, John McCain is really keeping me guessing with what will happen next.

The New York Times has said he’d provide “a story a day”
Just this idea that he would seek to cancel the debate, or delay the date, that he would suspend his campaign and start it up again, the choice of Sarah Palin as a running mate, extremely risky and exciting for his base. You have to admire a man who is willing to roll the dice that way. Perhaps not admire him for his stable governance but admire him for keeping things interesting.

Ghost writer

NINA MACLAUGHLIN — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 04:55:20 GMT

The haunted world of Kelly Link
Salted throughout Kelly Link’s stories, you’ll find Buffy , Bust , Doc Martens, IM-ing, Target, Google, Vicks VapoRub, a T-shirt that reads I’M SO GOTH I SHIT TINY VAMPIRES.

FUNNY AND DARK: Aliens, young love, magic, and summer camp — all are grist for Kelly Link’s mill.

Salted throughout Kelly Link’s stories, you’ll find Buffy, Bust, Doc Martens, IM-ing, Target, Google, Vicks VapoRub, a T-shirt that reads I’M SO GOTH I SHIT TINY VAMPIRES. But while Link is not an author who shies away from referencing pop- and commercial-culture, nor is she some glib chronicler of the right-now. Her work — realm-straddling blends of fantasy, science fiction, fairy tale, and capital-L literature — possesses a mythic quality. She’s the rare writer who’s able to mix these of-the-moment items, products, and activities with the eternal, the timeless: quests, coming of age, entering a new world, death, and the day-to-day mysteries of being human.

“I am very, very fond of the kinds of fiction that get sort of stuck off in their own separate pens,” says Link over a smoothie on a sunny September morning this past week at Back Bay’s Trident Café, across the street from her now-shuttered former employer, Avenue Victor Hugo Bookshop. “There’s an energy there, and you’re able to break rules in more interesting ways.”

As author of acclaimed short-story collections Stranger Things Happen, Magic for Beginners, and, most recently, Pretty Monsters, Link has the ability to pull readers into her universe, and make them believe, even if only for a moment, in ghosts and zombies and haunted hats, in world-holding handbags, underworld visits, alien abductions, sinister rabbits, young love, and magic.

Writing the fantastic has long appealed to her. “The stories I wrote beginning in college” — she went to Columbia — “have always been stories that had ghosts in them, or gods, or stories that I thought of as fantasy or science fiction, and had elements in them that I felt did not belong with realistic or mimetic fiction. I wanted my fiction to read like mimetic fiction” — capturing the texture of real life — “but I wanted to be able to incorporate all the stuff that I really love as a reader.” In other words, her intent is to create stories that hold a mirror up to the world that we know, as well as toss in some fantastic special effects.

Salon’s Laura Miller, an early and ardent champion of Link’s, claims that Link has a voice unlike any writer she can think of. “She’s fearless about incorporating things that writers at that high level of artistry might be fearful of, like pop-culture, like genre,” says Miller over the phone from New York. “She refuses to see the need to corral that stuff off into a sub-literary area. All of it is grist for her mill.”

Hit men

MARK JURKOWITZ — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 07:23:17 GMT

George Kimball's Four Kings KO's the last golden era of boxing
At least one passage in Four Kings will get George Kimball cursed out in local bars.

MARVELOUS MARVIN: Hagler’s 1985 bout with Tommy Hearns was one of boxing’s great battles.

Four Kings: Leonard, Hagler, Hearns and the Last Great Era of Boxing | By George Kimball | MCBooks Press, Inc | 352 pagess | $22.95

At least one passage in Four Kings will get George Kimball cursed out in local bars. The author recounts how he scored the dramatic 1987 fight between Sugar Ray Leonard and Brockton’s Marvin Hagler for Leonard, affirming a decision that has gone down in Boston sports history as a miscarriage of justice. (Covering that fight for the Phoenix, I had it for Leonard also.)

However one saw the battle that ended Hagler’s career, it was an unforgettable installment in a series of fights that Kimball says helped “save boxing from itself in the post-Ali era.” The combatants — Hagler, Leonard, Tommy Hearns, and Roberto Durán — all fought one another, in some cases more than once, in a golden era from 1980 to 1989. Hagler-Durán and Leonard-Durán III were nothing special, but Hagler-Leonard and the “No más” Leonard-Durán fight were memorable, and both Leonard’s 14th-round knockout of Hearns in 1981 and Hagler’s third-round stoppage of Hearns in 1985 were among the greatest wars in boxing history.

With boxing in one of its periodic public downturns, Kimball cooks up some compelling nostalgia by recounting an era when great American fighters bestrode the planet. A former Phoenix sportswriter and long-time Boston Herald scribe (and current Phoenix contributor), he knows the game and, more important, the characters who inhabit it.

Unlike, say, Joyce Carol Oates and Norman Mailer — who have brought literary zeal to the “sweet science” — Kimball makes no effort to rhapsodize about boxing’s larger meanings. He offers instead a workmanlike insider’s view of the game that’s meant to comfort us with the thought that though the economic machinations behind the sport are often rancid, the warriors are honorable — at least with fighters of this caliber.

In the meantime, readers get a smorgasbord of fascinating yarns. Kimball recalls how Howard Cosell once had his toupee knocked off in a post-fight interview but soldiered on with the rug replaced backward. In a more serious vein: Boston promoter Sam Silverman, fearful of the more unsavory elements in the sport, used to pay someone to start his car. Then there’s the story of how Hagler and Hearns each got a private jet to fly around the country promoting their 1985 fight. Since one plane was more luxurious than the other, the two men agreed to split time on it. But when Hagler refused to give up his first-class ride, promoter Bob Arum had to get another one exactly like it to keep Hearns from canceling the tour.

Interview: Dennis Lehane

JIM SULLIVAN — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 06:48:48 GMT

Mystic River author's new The Given Day gets down and dirty in the North End circa WWI
Dennis Lehane’s big new book, The Given Day , is full of bloodshed, mayhem, power, corruption, and lies.

Dennis Lehane’s big new book, The Given Day, is full of bloodshed, mayhem, power, corruption, and lies. It recalls his best-known book, Mystic River, and his series of five Boston-set private-investigator novels. But those books are set in modern times. For the new 700-plus-page historical novel, the Dorchester-raised author wrote about the era when World War I was winding down and a recession was calling.

This one is set mostly in the dense, dirty, immigrant-packed North End, where class and ethnic tensions run high. Anarchists are threatening violent revolt. A flu epidemic breaks out. The underpaid and overworked police threaten a strike. The Given Day has magnitude of size and scope. Which leads to the obvious question . . .

Is this your stab at the great American novel?
I think you’re insane if you try to write the Great American Novel. I think it’s doomed to failure. But I did fall into that trap. About a year into this book, I did get that feeling — I could really be onto something good, the critics will love this. And that’s a recipe for disaster.

What snapped you out of that mindset?
What happened was this writer, who’s a real good buddy, Tom Franklin, we were driving across the Mississippi a couple of years ago on a mini-book tour. I was really hung up on the book, the book was kicking my ass. He said, “Did you write the book you want to read? ’Cause that’s law No. 1.” What he taught was, write the book you want to read. Hopefully that translates to something more, and people say, “Boy, did I enjoy that ride.”

Still, it’s a massive book and covers a vast expanse.
I wanted to make a book that was like the epics I liked when I was growing up, that have star-crossed lovers and huge urgent events. Ultimately, I’m kind of a hybrid writer, the bastard child of pulp and literary fiction.

The Given Day took five years to research and write — a long haul.
If you treat the process with any reverence, I think you write in a consistent state of fear, if not terror. “How the fuck am I gonna finish this? What did I get myself into? This is going to be the one everyone figures out I’m full of shit.”

Literary import

NINA MACLAUGHLIN — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 03:42:28 GMT

Ploughshares lands a new editor
One of the first things Ladette Randolph tells me is that she’s a fifth-generation Nebraskan, that her great-great grandparents settled there, that the landscape there, particularly in the western part of the state, where her novel is set, is “like being in the middle of the ocean — that kind of erasure.”

More different than alike

MIKE MILIARD — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 03:28:57 GMT

Searching for national identity in State By State: A Panoramic Portrait of America
In 1935, Franklin Delano Roosevelt established the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP) as part of the New Deal’s Works Projects Administration (WPA).

In 1935, Franklin Delano Roosevelt established the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP) as part of the New Deal’s Works Projects Administration (WPA). The FWP put the nation’s Depression-era writers back to work by sending more than 6000 journalists, novelists, and poets — including John Cheever, Kenneth Rexroth, and Studs Terkel — out across this great land to describe the country as they saw it. The most important legacy of the FWP were 48 state guides (plus volumes about the Alaska Territory, Puerto Rico, and the District of Columbia), published between 1937 and 1942.

Now, with the nation poised, perhaps, to plunge into another deep economic chasm, comes a new book directly inspired by those FWP guides. State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America (Ecco), is an anthology of 50 essays by 50 writers, edited by Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey, and a powerful reminder that, despite the intractable antipathy between red and blue, despite the creeping sameness imposed by chains and big boxes, despite the fact that 81 percent of its citizens feel the US has gone off the rails, this is still a wondrously diverse country, with great cause for self-confidence.

The FWP wasn’t extraordinary just because it put a lot of creative people back to work, says Weiland. Rather, he says, its real value came from the way the stories told by those writers, researchers, and archivists — Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and Nelson Algren among them — helped “reawaken a sort of raw American patriotism” after the gut-punch of the Depression.

The state guides’ motto was “To describe America to Americans.” And those were the same marching orders Weiland (deputy editor of the Paris Review) and Wilsey (a McSweeney’s editor-at-large) took when they sat down at a New York City watering hole and started compiling a list of contributors.

“From the start, we knew we wanted a mix of different kinds of writers,” says Weiland. “We wanted the book to be as unruly and cacophonous and strange as the country itself.” So, casting a wide net, the pair started assigning states to their favorite writers, including George Packer (Alabama), Rick Moody (Connecticut), Dave Eggers (Illinois), Heidi Julavits (Maine), John Hodgman (Massachusetts), Jonathan Franzen (New York), Susan Orlean (Ohio), and Jhumpa Lahiri (Rhode Island).

The volume also includes thoughtful chapters by two graphic novelists (Joe Sacco and Alison Bechdel draw on their experiences in Oregon and Vermont, respectively), a musician (Sleater-Kinney’s Carrie Brownstein offers an impressively moving evocation of Washington’s wet verdure), and a chef (Anthony Bourdain pays loving tribute to New Jersey, with wit as caustic as the chemicals hovering over the “Garbage State Parkway”).

David Foster Wallace — 1962–2008

NINA MACLAUGHLIN — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 19:42:03 GMT

Overhead baggage
A story called “Forever Overhead” by David Foster Wallace appeared in the 1992 edition of Best American Short Stories .

A story called “Forever Overhead” by David Foster Wallace appeared in the 1992 edition of Best American Short Stories. It’s told in the second person; the “you” is a boy on his 13th birthday; and the whole of the story takes place in the time it takes the boy to walk along a pool, climb up the high-dive ladder, and stand at the edge of the board. It's a story that made me want to be a writer. Underneath the crystalline imagery and the perfectly captured adolescence, a subtle sense of terror presents itself. Thirteen, on the symbolic precipice of adulthood, the boy, on the diving board, faces the abyss — to leap is to disappear.

Four years ago, about the time DFW’s short-story collection Oblivion came out, I revisited the 1992 anthology, and read DFW’s author statement at the back of the book. “I’m not all that crazy about this story,” he wrote. To him, it “seemed the product of a young writer who was straining to make a personal trauma sound way deeper and prettier and Big than anything true could ever really be.”

DFW, who hanged himself this past Friday in California, possessed a brain that was crowded with doubt — about his own ability, sure, and in the larger sense, the ability of any of us to adequately express anything.

But when it comes to expressing, DFW is unmatched in his ability to project images on the front of a reader’s brain; he makes the reader see and feel with such clarity, such precision. In his piece on tennis star Roger Federer, the game is so viscerally rendered, you hear the pop of the ball off the racket, feel the muscles between your own shoulders tense in anticipation of the next swing.

Best known for his magnum opus Infinite Jest, DFW was oft lauded for being funny. But his great strength was not provoking laughs; it was provoking horror.

And not horror born of disgust or repulsion at the gruesome or monstrous (though there’s some of that). More so, he evoked the low-grade panic, the twitchy boredom, the unbearable tedium of what he referred to in his 2005 commencement address to Kenyon College as the “day-to-day trenches of adult experience.” In “The Soul Is Not a Smithy,” from Oblivion, a child has nightmares “about the reality of adult life,” the type of nightmare “whose terror is less about what you see than about the feeling you have in your lower chest about what you’re seeing.” An apt description of the way it feels to read DFW’s work.

Positively Phil

RICHARD BECK — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 20:32:10 GMT

Roth goes back to college
We all know Philip Roth’s preoccupations.

FED UP: One of Portnoy’s favorite words takes on new resonance in Roth’s latest novel.

Indignation | By Philip Roth | Houghton Mifflin | 256 pages | $26

We all know Philip Roth’s preoccupations. They have, after all, been preoccupying the man for 28 books now, and there is nothing in his 29th, Indignation, that will leap out as a new concern. The great thrashings of male adolescence and the intersections of individual will and American history are the subjects of this strange and powerful little novel. The name on the cover is almost gratuitous. Like we wouldn’t know that this is Philip Roth?

The hero of Roth’s knotty parable is Marcus Messner: Jewish, anxious, smart, born and raised in Newark. His mother is motherly, in a fairly bland way. (Here, as is frequently the case with Roth, it’s the men who are awarded complex personalities while the women move along the familiar paths.) His father is a kosher butcher, and Marcus grows up helping out. Marcus loves his father, loves learning how to do the unpleasant things that have to be done, and so it is acutely painful when his father suddenly becomes fearful that Marcus might die. “What is this all about, Dad?”, Marcus asks after one of his father’s irrational, overprotective outbursts. His father cries, “It’s about life, where the tiniest misstep can have tragic consequences.” Angry, fed up — heartbroken, really — Marcus heads to the well-kept Ohio campus of conservative Winesburg College. It is 1951.

At Winesburg, Marcus encounters the things one tends to encounter at college: inexplicably malicious roommates, pompous administrators, sex. It happens that, in an unexpected way that I shouldn’t spell out completely, Marcus’s father is right, that the tiniest little missteps can bloom into tragedy. Although it never fully enters into the scene until the novel’s epilogue, the Korean War hangs like a specter over Marcus, who realizes that it’s either straight A’s or the draft.

This gnawing fear gives intensity to Marcus’s fervid introspection. Roth’s long sentences take deliberate steps, homing in, ruthlessly, on their subjects. Here is Marcus seeing his mother, who is planning to divorce her anxiety-ridden husband: “Now suddenly she was herself, ready and able to do battle, and I was the one at the edge of tears, knowing that none of this would be happening had I remained at home.” There is considerable force in the little moral that closes off that sentence, and even more pathos in the sentence that follows. “It takes muscle to be a butcher, and my mother had muscles, and I felt them when she took me in her arms while I cried.”

Holy roller

DANA KLETTER — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 19:33:45 GMT

Marilynne Robinson’s Home
Marilynne Robinson’s Home is haunted.

GLORY: Robinson’s novel reads like a powerful, unresolved hymn.

Home | By Marilynne Robinson | Farrar, Straus and Giroux | 336 pages | $25

Marilynne Robinson’s Home is haunted. It’s a novel filled with allusions to and echoes of scripture, parable, and psalm. But a restless discomfort unsettles what might be serene. It’s a hymn left unresolved, the final chord dissonant rather than reconciled.

The novel returns to the characters and the mid-’50s Iowa town depicted in Robinson’s 2004 Pulitzer-winning novel, Gilead. There is an African-American spiritual that assures us that in Gilead, we will find a balm that makes whole a fragmented “sin-sick soul.” Jack Boughton, 41, is the sin-sick soul returning after a 20-year absence to the house where his father is dying. Jack’s sister Glory is already there — 38 years old, lonely and fearful, returned in secret disgrace, having been deceived by her fiancé. Jack is a charming bounder, the perfect prodigal, favored, then fallen into ruin: a self-confessed thief, gambler, and drunk. “Come home,” goes the refrain of a favorite family hymn — home, the retreat of weary sinners. But at home Jack is troubled by the past and hopeless about the future. His father, a Presbyterian minister, declares him forgiven. Glory offers sympathy and camaraderie. Jack finds no solace or pardon.

Like Luke’s Prodigal Son, Jack sets himself to toil as his father’s hired man, pruning the overgrown gardens and restoring the DeSoto languishing in the barn. Sister and brother develop a tenuous understanding, a renewed love and delight in each other’s company. They struggle to comfort their father in his last days, but both grieve for lost loves, and the old man is an agitated presence. Disinhibited by illness, he confronts Jack with his failings, then retreats, fearful he will drive his son away again.

The Biblical “balm in Gilead” was not a salve; it was a question the broken-hearted prophet Jeremiah voiced as the Babylonians bore down on Jerusalem, a prayer for mercy as he heard the lamentations of his “poor people” on the eve of their enslavement: “Is there no balm in Gilead?” Haunting the heart of Home, as it did Gilead, are questions about mercy and sin, questions posed against the specter of slavery in America.

Winners and sinners

BARBARA HOFFERT — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 14:06:13 GMT

Barth, Bolaño, Roth, Morrison, and more
Ah, fall, when Nobel Prize winners are announced — and, now, when past winners turn up with more good reading.

HISTORY LESSON: Sarah Vowell looks back at Puritan life in The Wordy Shipmates.

Fiction
Ah, fall, when Nobel Prize winners are announced — and, now, when past winners turn up with more good reading. It’s A Mercy (Knopf; November 14) that TONI MORRISON has chosen to revisit the emotional territory of Beloved; her latest recounts a 1680s Anglo-Dutch trader’s cancellation of a debt in exchange for a slave girl whose mother wished her a better life. Everyone’s having a good time in JOSÉ SARAMAGO’s Death with Interruptions (Harcourt; October 6), since Death has decided that she needs a break.

More prize winners going for another gold: in PHILIP ROTH’s Indignation (Houghton Mifflin; September 16), a young man fleeing 1950s Newark — and his overwhelming father — encounters college life in far-off Ohio. Remember The Witches of Eastwick? They’re now The Widows of Eastwick (Knopf; October 30), courtesy of JOHN UPDIKE. Recent Booker Award winner ANNE ENRIGHT offers a story collection with Yesterday’s Weather (Grove; September 16). PER PETTERSON follows up his IMPAC Dublin Literary Prize winner, Out Stealing Horses, with To Siberia (Graywolf; September 30), in which two Danish children watch the Nazis march in.

Now that the late ROBERTO BOLAÑO has caught our attention, it’s time we read his masterpiece, 2666 (Farrar Straus Giroux; November 11), a complex tale of murder in Santa Teresa (read: Juárez) that will appear in a single-volume hardcover and a three-volume paperback. CARLOS FUENTES offers cozy vignettes in Happy Families (Random House; September 23); a ship called the Ibis floats across AMITAV GHOSH’s Sea of Poppies (Farrar Straus Giroux; October 14) en route to the Opium Wars.

And now for something completely different. In The Given Day (Morrow; September 23), DENNIS LEHANE moves away from crime fiction to paint a stark portrait of post–World War I Boston. And FRANCINE PROSE’s Goldengrove (HarperCollins; September 16), the study of a 13-year-old’s relationship with her drowned sister’s boyfriend, is not acid satire.

Stalin biographer SIMON MONTEFIORE revisits early-20th-century Russia in the debut novel Sashenka (Simon & Schuster; November 11); noted journalist IAN BURUMA also tries out fiction with The China Lover (Penguin Press; September 18), reimagining the life of film star Yoshiko Yamaguchi. Speaking of fictionalized lives: who knew that WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS and JACK KEROUAC got together to re-create friend Lucien Carr’s killing of David Kammerer? The novel, And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks (Grove; November 1), is appearing only now.

War correspondent

PETER KEOUGH — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 19:34:13 GMT

Paul Auster sheds light on Man in the Dark
So here he goes again, the writer known as Paul Auster, starting yet another novel, this time with the words “I am alone in the dark.”

AWAKE: Auster’s protagonist recognizes that stories, alternative worlds, movies, and words all offer only illusory escape.

Man in the Dark | By Paul Auster | Henry Holt | 192 Pages | $23

So here he goes again, the writer known as Paul Auster, starting yet another novel, this time with the words “I am alone in the dark.” Kind of sums it all up, doesn’t it? But as Samuel Beckett might have told him, you must go on, and so he does much as he has done in several books so far, spinning out a novel within a novel, a literary detective story without resolution, a page turner that just seems to run out of pages, with a glimpse at the end, perhaps, of some light.

August Brill, Auster’s persona, age 72 and incapacitated by a car accident, sits alone in a bedroom in his house in Vermont, tortured by old memories and current pains, unable to sleep. His wife, Sonia, is dead, his daughter Miriam mopes upstairs after being dumped by her husband, and his granddaughter Katya mourns the heinous murder of her boyfriend. A retired book critic, Brill decides to dispel the demons by inventing his own story. In it a 30-year-old magician from Queens with the concrete-sounding name of Owen Brick wakes up to find himself in a hole in the ground in a world that is much like the one he appears to have left, but with significant differences.

The good news is that in this world 9/11 and the Iraq War never happened. The bad news is that the country split apart in a bloody civil war following the disputed presidential election of 2000 and millions have died in the fighting. Brick, meanwhile, has been summoned from his world, or rather Brill’s, or rather Auster’s, to put an end to the war by assassinating the person responsible. That person (and this will be a spoiler for anyone who has not read any of Paul Auster’s work) is August Brill (and not Mr. Blank, as Brick had been told, the protagonist of Auster’s previous novel, Travels in the Scriptorium). Brill, as we know, has been writing the story in which this alternative history has been happening.

How is this possible? To explain it, a character in Brill’s novel refers Brick to the 16th-century Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno, who was burned at the stake for arguing that “if God is infinite. . . . then there must be an infinite number of worlds.” That may be so, but it also seems that Brill has been reading a lot of Philip K. Dick novels, if not the works of Paul Auster.

Out of this world

NINA MACLAUGHLIN — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 16:00:56 GMT

Benjamin Rosenbaum’s The Ant King
The worlds Rosenbaum creates feel less like a separate or “alternate” reality and more like a colorful, if complicated, extension of the one we know.

PLAUSIBLE: An abundance of sensual detail grounds Rosenbaum’s alien tales in the familiar.

The Ant King and Other Stories | By Benjamin Rosenbaum | Small Beer Press | 234 pages | $24

You could file Benjamin Rosenbaum’s debut collection of genre-blurring short stories under a number of categories: speculative or science fiction, fantasy, fairy tale, surrealism, irrealism, slipstream, postmodern parables. But the description that proves most accurate comes from one of Rosenbaum’s own stories: plausible fabulism. Put out by Small Beer Press in Western Mass, The Ant King and Other Stories zips along in a way that is lively, bizarre, and funny as well as dark, sinister, and sensual. Comparisons with Kelly Link and Aimee Bender are natural; there are also glimmers of Barthes, Barthelme, and Calvino — and, of course, a fleet of science-fiction writers.

Rosenbaum sent his first story to the New Yorker at age 13. He quit writing as a sophomore at Brown, where he pursued computer programming and religious studies, became a programmer, and then started writing again at 27. His dual university pursuits dance throughout the collection.

In the title story — a corporate-culture send-up and classic rescue quest, with echoes of Orpheus and Eurydice and on-line gaming geekdom — a character named Vampire spouts code-toadery: “What do you know about NetBSD 2.5 routing across multiple DNS servers?” In “Embracing-the-New,” there’s a sense of mythmaking. “How can the Godless really be godless,” asks an apprentice idol carver. “For without a god, a person would just be a shifting collection of memories.”

And though these stories are populated by wish-granting hedgehogs, a world-ruling piece of fruit, and a pack of kids out real-estate shopping, the worlds Rosenbaum creates feel less like a separate or “alternate” reality and more like a colorful, if complicated, extension of the one we know. There’s a sensuality that helps ground us in the otherwise alien scenarios. From “The Valley of Giants”: “The giants whisper and hum, placing their great soft lips against your belly, your back. They stroke your hair, and their fingers, as big as plates, are so delicate. . . . The giant women feed you from their breasts. . . . The milk is sweet and rich like crème brûlée.” In “Orphans,” a woman falls in love with an elephant. “He would hold me to his chest, and I would be bathed in the deep smell of him, wild and rich.” In “Red Leather Tassels,” a woman whose husband is eyeing another woman has sex with an ancient woodpecker. “George’s wife felt a pleasant, feathery tickling.”

Lucky, beautiful, and, now, holy

JIM SULLIVAN — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 20:26:27 GMT

Rev Run runs straight
He was the king of rock, there was no higher . The sucker MCs, they should call him sire .

It was the mid 1980s. He was the king of rock, there was no higher. The sucker MCs, they should call him sire.

He was Run, and his co-rapping partner was D.M.C. Along with DJ Jam Master Jay, they put Hollis, Queens, on the map and made Run-D.M.C. the crossover act of the first rap/rock era. “It was cool. I enjoyed it,” says Run. “It was new, it was great, it was happening. I was lucky, it was beautiful.”

Run — born Joseph Simmons, younger brother of rap mogul Russell — is now Rev Run, who hosts the popular MTV show Run’s House (Wednesdays at 10 pm), a Father Knows Best for the hip-hop generation. On August 23, he’ll travel to Brookline Booksmith to speak and sign copies of Take Back Your Family: A Challenge to America’s Parents (Gotham), a book he and wife, Justine, co-wrote with Chris Morrow.

Later that night, he’ll rap with his pal Kid Rock at Comcast Center. But rapping is now the smaller slice of Rev Run’s pie. The big piece is being a husband, father, and reverend, as evidenced by his show.

“This is my ministry to the world,” says Rev Run. “We have to serve in some way, in a different capacity, which happens to be a family ministry. Let’s show people how we pull together, show the love in our house.”

He sees the obvious comparisons to The Cosby Show — “professional black people making it and taking care of their kids.” But his literature is not unlike the good doctor’s, too.

In Take Back Your Family — “a by-product of what we’re already doing” — Rev Run discusses his youthful hijinks, which included weed, women, and wildness, and offers parenting guidelines. Among his pearls of wisdom: get rid of clutter, don’t spoil the kids, and run the house with a firm but loving hand.

He’s fortunate that his six kids (from two marriages) are not drawn to the vices he once pursued, he says, and follow the example of their now-mature father.

“That’s pretty crazy going from rapper to reverend,” says Rev Run. “Maybe I am the new Al Green on the hip-hop level.”

As for his transition into a holy man, he says he turned to God after 1988’s Tougher Than Leather album failed to match the sales of ’86’s Raising Hell, and he felt Run-D.M.C. was foundering.

War stories

CHARLES TAYLOR — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 16:41:40 GMT

Mailer on the ’68 conventions
“We will be fighting for forty years.” Reading those words at the end of Norman Mailer’s 1968 Miami and the Siege of Chicago , you can’t help but feel a chill.

THE TIME OF HIS TIME: Mailer seems so brave precisely because he was so ready to risk looking foolish.

Miami and the Siege of Chicago | By Norman Mailer | New York Review of Books | 241 pages | $14.95 [paper]

“We will be fighting for forty years.” Reading those words at the end of Norman Mailer’s 1968 Miami and the Siege of Chicago, you can’t help but feel a chill. At that year’s political conventions, the GOP performed its Lazarus act on Richard Nixon’s political career in Miami and the Democrats appointed Hubert Humphrey as the public face of their self-destruction in Chicago while, in the streets outside, Mayor Daley’s storm troopers brutalized protesters and anyone else in their path. These were socio-political events begging for the exegesis that Mailer, that dogged visionary, could bring them. Wrong as often as he was right, Mailer seems so brave precisely because he was so ready to risk looking foolish.

In Miami and the Siege of Chicago, which he wrote on assignment for Harper’s, Mailer was not only perfectly attuned to the moment but prescient. The 40 years he foresaw were, he understood, years in which Nixon’s reign of law and order — the appeal to middle-class “forgotten Americans” — represented an end to the sober, careful conservatism that had always ruled the Republican party and the beginning of something more sinister, something whose logical endpoint is the radical right epitomized by George W. Bush. It’s a period that may now be coming to an end as the Republicans, like a cancer that turns on the good cells first, are destroying themselves after nearly destroying the country.

It’s in that context that a potentially unifying figure like Nelson Rockefeller had no chance to win his party’s nomination. And though Mailer says that considering Reagan for the office of president would be like imagining Johnny Carson in the job, he perceives the 57-year-old Reagan as the GOP’s equivalent of the rising young man waiting in the wings. “He had the presence of a man of thirty,” Mailer writes, “the deferential enthusiasm, the bright but dependably unoriginal mind, of a sales manager promoted for his ability over men older than himself.”

Terror-fied

GEORGE SCIALABBA — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 18:44:12 GMT

Slavoj Žižek’s revolution
This new grand-theoretical manifesto might be completely daft.

OFF WITH THEIR HEADS! For Žižek, Mao’s Cultural Revolution was perhaps only a little too much of
a basically good thing.

I’m going to hedge my bets about Slavoj Žižek, the avant-garde Slovenian intellectual wild man and theorist of everything who has taken Europe and, lately, America by storm. In Defense of Lost Causes, his new grand-theoretical manifesto, might be completely daft. On the other hand, it might be magnificent, revolutionary, a giant step toward unraveling the riddle of History. I’ll wait to see what everyone else says before I decide.

In Defense of Lost Causes | By Slavoj Žižek | Verso | 512 pages | $34.95

In Defense of Lost Causesis a staggeringly ambitious book, ranging — or reeling — recklessly over vast swaths of music and film, literature and psychoanalysis, history and contemporary politics. It is nearly impossible to follow if you don’t have Western philosophy from Plato to Heidegger at your fingertips. Actually, it’s not much easier even if you do. Just when you think you’re beginning to get the hang of Žižek’s dense, allusive, paradox-laden argumentative style, you may run smack into a sentence like this:

The most difficult thing for common understanding is to grasp this speculative-dialectical reversal of the singularity of the subject qua Neighbor-Thing into universality, not standard “general” universality, but universal singularity, the universality grounded in the subjective singularity extracted from all particular properties, a kind of direct short circuit between the singular and the universal, bypassing the particular.

In fact, the flicker of a suspicion occasionally crosses one’s mind that this book and Žižek’s entire oeuvre are a massive sequel to NYU physics professor Alan Sokal’s now-famous spoof of postmodernist theoretical jargon. If so, it’s a brilliant success.

Bypassing a few particulars, we find that the “lost causes” Žižek is defending are revolutionary violence and the dictatorship of the proletariat. Robespierre, Lenin, and Mao may have gotten a few things wrong, Žižek acknowledges, but they were right about this. Against monarchical absolutism and capitalist exploitation, they affirmed radical egalitarianism — and they meant it. Whoever genuinely wills the end wills also the means.

“If you say A — equality, human rights, and freedom — you should not shirk from its consequences and gather the courage to say B — the terror needed to really defend and assert the A.” No legalistic qualms, no liberal shilly-shallying, or the remorseless logic of domination will reassert itself and the blood of all its victims will be on the hands of the faint-hearted revolutionaries. You can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs; you can’t make a utopian smoothie without throwing a lot of everyday stuff into the blender.

Words, words, words

JEFFREY GANTZ — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 22:26:59 GMT

Ammon Shea reads them all for you
Who would do such a thing?

CHRESTOMATHIC That is, Shea is “devoted to the learning of useful matters.”

Can you judge a book by its title? You can if it’s Ammon Shea’s Reading theOED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages. What that title doesn’t answer is the question “Who would do such a thing?” Ammon Shea, it turns out, is not some dictionary dilettante hoping to read his way into the Guinness Book of World Records. Although he’s worked as a street musician in Paris, a gondolier in San Diego, and a furniture mover in New York City, his real business is words, and to that end he owns “about a thousand volumes of dictionaries, thesauri, and assorted glossaries.” Those would include seven different copies of the Oxford English Dictionary. No question he’s the man for the job.

Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages | By Ammon Shea | Perigee | 240 pages | $21.95

Reading the OED is laid out in 26 chapters, A to Z, with an “Exordium (Introduction)” and an “Excursus (Bibliography).” Shea begins each chapter with five or so pages describing his progress through the dictionary; that’s followed by anywhere from 10 to 30 words drawn from the OED and starting with the appropriate letter, for which he supplies, in the manner of Samuel Johnson, his own pungent commentary. For example:

Fard (v.) To paint the face with cosmetics, so as to hide blemishes. I suspect there is a reason no one ever gets up from the table and says, “Excuse me while I go to the ladies’ room and fard.” It seems to be very difficult to make a four-letter word that begins with f sound like an activity that is polite to discuss at the dinner table.

Shea’s selections are fun and edifying, but I was more engaged by his account of his own reading. The decision to dispense with modern technology (no reading on-line, or via overhead projector) and just sit down with the 20 volumes, for eight to 10 hours a day. The headaches, the grayed-out vision, the endless cups of espresso. The explanation of how the OED differs from other dictionaries. The distractions at home (car alarms, neighbors dancing and cooking salt cod) and the subsequent retreat to Hunter College Library. The attempt to introduce some fresh air into the project, which takes him to Central Park and then Hoboken and finally back to his HCL basement corner. His impromptu decision to attend the “biannual” (biennial?) convention of the Dictionary Society of North America, in Chicago. His musings on the word “set,” which alone takes up 25 OED pages. The observation that the OED “does not explain how to pronounce words that have not been in common use for hundreds of years for the simple and very good reason that the editors do not know how the words are pronounced.” (Does this mean that eventually we’ll all be text-messaging instead of talking?)

Murder, she wrote

CLEA SIMON — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 23:22:30 GMT

Interview: Tana French's deep crime novels
"It’s always more fun to write people who are really messed up or really vicious."

Tana French’s background as an actor has made her value character — which explains the psychological depth of her wonderfully literate crime fiction. In town to read from The Likeness (Viking), the follow-up to her Edgar-winning debut, In the Woods, the Dublin-based author discussed means, motive, and opportunity.

In both your books, backstory plays a major role. Do you think the past determines the future?
I think there is a context in which life takes place. I’m a big believer in crime being shaped by context. Not in any way that people aren’t responsible for their crimes, but an individual’s psychology shapes whatever goes on around them, whether it reaches a moment of violence or not.

Backstory seems important to your protagonists, as well.
In In the Woods, Rob Ryan’s mind was cracked straight across at the age of 12, and when the book starts, he’s actually doing pretty well. He’s got a career he loves, he’s got a partner and best friend, but when pressure is brought to bear on this crack, it starts to deteriorate — not just his memory but his whole idea of who he is. Cassie [Maddox, Rob’s partner and the protagonist of The Likeness] was orphaned very early, and her life has been creating roots.

To an extent, it seems to me that for people who were interested in these questions of action and consequences, of identity and past and present, it would be natural to become detectives. Because as a detective you’re doing something very much like what mystery writers and mystery readers do. You’re fascinated by the process of discovering answers — not just by the answers themselves, but by the process. There’s an interplay between who they are and what they do, and that works both ways. The strangeness in their pasts comes through in their identities and what they do.

Each of these books has a different protagonist, and the one you're working on now features a colleague of Rob and Cassie, Frank Mackey. Does this mean that each character has only one story?
I know the standard thing is to write a series of books about the same detective. But what I’m interested in are those crucial turning points in people’s lives where you know that whatever you decide in that situation, you’ll never be in the same place again. In the Woods was that for Rob — the decisions he made have shaped the rest of his future, probably not in very healthy ways. The thing is, people only have a certain number of turning points. So I could keep dumping this poor guy into high-stakes, life-changing situations, or I could dilute it and write about less important situations in his life, which I wasn’t sure I wanted to do. I kind of envisioned Rob spending the next couple of years trying to patch himself together. I wasn’t sure he’d have that much of a story. Or I could change the narrator. Cassie is interesting and hadn’t had a chance to tell her story, so I wondered what might happen in her life, what she might be doing next.