Books

Never Say Smile

CAITLIN E. CURRAN — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 00:45:22 GMT

Annie Leibovitz highlights her career
Could there be anyone cooler to have for a photography teacher than Annie Leibovitz?

Excerpt: The School on Heart's Content Road

CAROLYN CHUTE — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 15:59:35 GMT

One week only: an exclusive excerpt from the acclaimed author's new novel
In the cold parlor of the St. Onge farmhouse, deep in the old collapsing couch, sort of wrapped in the couch, in its waves of whimpering springs and hills of upholstery of frazzled blue nap, are 15-year-old Brianna and Gordon.

At first glance, the surface of Carolyn Chute's prose ripples with a loopy, hippy-like playfulness. Think Richard Brautigan. Readers who delve deeper into any part of her quartet of novels soon realize, however, they have entered a world of Faulkneresque drama. Chute's latest book, The School on Heart's Content Road (excerpted here), once again pits the free-spirited residents of an off-the-grid New England commune in the fictional town of Egypt in the very real state of Maine against the rapacious forces of 21st-century commercial, mass culture.

The School on Heart’s Content Road | By Carolyn Cute | Atlantic Monthly Press | 352 pages | $24

Time chugs on. Late afternoon of a mid-September day.
In the cold parlor of the St. Onge farmhouse, deep in the old collapsing couch, sort of wrapped in the couch, in its waves of whimpering springs and hills of upholstery of frazzled blue nap, are 15-year-old Brianna and Gordon. His thick legs are stretched out, feet on the rug. She has her legs curled under her as she leans toward him and he is looking at her, face-to-face. His face normal, hers stretched by birth defect.

He smells of the hot fields and hot work, perhaps even some chaff in the seams of his faded blue T-shirt. She places her hands on his shoulders; her hands and her body and work shirt and jeans smell of the woods and of hot work too — of a logging operation, specifically, woods-spiced with skidder grease and a smoodge of pink bar-and-chain oil — and she looks steadily into his face and she does not giggle. She is his wife now. She takes herself for granted. She sees his eyes on her face and on her bright ripply hair, which falls over her back and over her shirtfront. These eyes of his are filled with her sweaty, woodsy, cigarette sweet opulence . . . his eyes and his being are drawn to her, pulled to her, stuck. As in a web, yes.

She says huskily, "We are mind into mind. We are getting mixed up." He smiles, in a twinkly, restrained way.

She sees his 40-year-old eyes crinkle at the sides, eyes the palest she's ever known, like some great big cat. She almost giggles. They are on the edge of so many sort ofs and almosts as she leans closer, now forehead to forehead. This is painful to him as he is becoming farsighted, but he doesn't draw back. He accommodates.

Here comes the sun

JIM SULLIVAN — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 20:54:17 GMT

It's All Right
It's All Right

Leviathan

PETER KEOUGH — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 16:54:21 GMT

Roberto Bolaño's 2666 may be the Great American Novel
Jorge Luis Borges wrote of the desert as a labyrinth without walls or center, unending and inescapable. That's a fair description of Roberto Bolaño's last work, the 912-page opus 2666 .

DIABOLICAL: Bolaño’s tantalizing, often unfinished digressions are part of his genius.

Jorge Luis Borges wrote of the desert as a labyrinth without walls or center, unending and inescapable. That's a fair description of Roberto Bolaño's last work (he died in 2003, age 50), the 912-page opus 2666. His book, however, does have a circumference of sorts, a circular narrative that begins, like his previous novel, The Savage Detectives, with academics (in Detectives they were poets) searching the wastelands of the Sonora province of Mexico for a legendary writer and ending . . . well, it's hard to say, somewhere in that general vicinity. It offers innumerable passages that cohere into a sense of immanent revelation, some of them contained in single multi-page run-on sentences, before dissolving like blowing sand. Like Moby Dick, it confronts the nature, the ubiquity, and the elusiveness of evil. And as such it can also make a claim for being the Great American Novel, both North and South.

The academics' story is told in the first of five sections, "The Part About the Critics." They include four literature professors from different European countries, three men and a woman, who share an obsession with Benno von Archimboldi, a mystery author who over the decades has turned out novels with titles like TheLeather Mask and Bifurcaria Bifurcata. Little is known about him except that he is Prussian and very tall and that he served on the Eastern Front in World War II. The quartet attend conferences on Archimboldi and engage in passionate discussion, and their bonds heat up into something more than Platonic. At last, following up a lead, they head to Mexico where a sighting of the octogenarian legend has been reported.

Sounds deadly? Not when every page veers off on a tantalizing, often unfinished digression — like the one about the painter whose masterpiece is a canvas adorned with his own severed hand — or includes tossed-off descriptions of the everyday like "It was raining in the quadrangle, and the quadrangular sky looked like the grimace of a robot or a god made in our own likeness." [9] Or when the quartet arrive at their destination, Santa Teresa, a fictional city where — as in the real city of Ciudad Juárez, on which it is based — hundreds of women, mostly workers in local factories, have turned up raped and brutally murdered, a serial-killing spree that's been going on since 1993.

Interview: Art Spiegelman

MIKE MILIARD — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 12:19:36 GMT

Drawing conclusions
"When you don't understand a painting, you assume you're stupid. When you don't understand a cartoon, you assume the cartoonist is stupid."

I'll start with a quote from Chris Ware that I know you're fond of: "When you don't understand a painting, you assume you're stupid. When you don't understand a cartoon, you assume the cartoonist is stupid."
You're starting in the right place. That high/low divide. Maybe we're past it, I have no idea. But it didn't seem like that in the '70s. And maybe even now we're temporary residents where all the bums get kicked out next year when the next fad comes along. You're starting at the back, which is good, because the back essay was meant to explain the front, which was meant to explain the book, which leads you through wormholes back and forth through all three sections.

So, in the back, there's this thing that describes my cartooning life from age 10 to 24, in which I had this calling to be a cartoonist, but it didn't have anything to do with breaking the boundaries until I got a syndicated strip offered to me, which I decided would be a fate worse than death, when I was still in high school. It eventually led to underground comix and bubblegum companies. Neither zone was that interested, or would say the word 'art.' Bubblegum cards, of course, are art, everyone knows this, but it's not something you toot your own horn about. Underground comix were proud of being ephemeral. They appeared in underground newspapers, on disposable newsprint, on underground comics pamphlets that you keep rolled up in your back pocket, and if you re-read one, it's because you just don't remember that you read it before.

But the notion of a comic to re-read, that was not quite where I was coming from, even though a lot of the cartoonists I admired were refugees from art schools. And after putting in time and learning how to draw people trucking, and pervert pirates and lesbians and whatever, I found my way into some zone, which wasn't exactly the identical zone that my betters and elders were traveling, and that had to do with coming late to the stuff on the other end of the hyphen, the high-art stuff, and after growing up somewhat suspicious of it as a hoax and a racket because I didn't understand it, and it was making me feel stupid, as Chris Ware pointed out, I just began to get drunk on it. At least the art from the late 19th, early 20th century. And similarly, I began ... well, that's a little bit different ... I was going to say I began reading harder books. But I was always reading harder books more than I was looking at harder pictures. But the whole thing came together in a notion of, 'Well, why can't I use comics as a medium of self-expression. It was already happening in underground comics, but to really pursue it as a possible end, as opposed to the more casual notions that came with the medium. That had me breaking a taboo among my peers: it's snooty, upward-striving gibberish to call yourself an artist. Let it go. But the idea of having an audience that would attend to the work, rather than just simply float over it, was rather intriguing to me. Because I knew, as someone who grew up in the communication arts, which they portray on that Mad Men AMC show...

Table of content

BILL BEUTTLER — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 18:11:17 GMT

Jim Harrison’s road trip
Jim Harrison’s fiction and essays are built from his particular blend of earthiness and erudition.

HARUMPH: Cellphones are as hated by Harrison’s protagonist as female behinds are adored.

The English Major | By Jim Harrison | Grove Press | 268 pages | $24

Jim Harrison’s fiction and essays are built from his particular blend of earthiness and erudition. He’ll quote Rilke, Neruda, Joyce, and other such heavyweights; he’ll also talk of less lofty passions: booze, food, hunting, fishing, dogs, long-distance driving, and naked women. He’ll ruminate on some philosophical conundrum or other, then bring you up short with a cockeyed laugh line.

Harrison’s new comic road novel, The English Major, isn’t as ambitious as the novella collection Legends of the Fall (1979) and the novel Dalva (1988), the books that earned him literary renown. But it’s worth spending time with.

It opens with Cliff, 60, preparing to depart from the Northern Michigan farm he has worked since giving up teaching high-school English more than 25 years earlier. Cliff’s wife of 38 years, Vivian, a late-blooming real-estate shark, has recently divorced him. His beloved bird dog, Lola, has just died. Cliff decides to drive out to visit his and Vivian’s gay only child, Robert, in San Francisco. Before setting out, he finds a childhood memento in an old trunk, a child’s jigsaw puzzle of the lower 48 states. He brings it along and begins discarding the corresponding puzzle pieces for the states he passes through en route.

In Morris, Minnesota, Cliff is joined by a favorite former student, Marybelle, now 43, who wears him out with frequent acrobatic sex over the next few days but does little to set his soul right. Cliff writes approvingly, or disapprovingly, of virtually every meal he has on the trip, works in a little fly fishing with his alcoholic doctor friend in Montana, and pays Sylvia, a young woman with an exquisite derriere, $300 to let him sketch her nude. When Sylvia finally disrobes, Cliff nearly passes out from forgetting to breathe.

Female butts come up a lot. Cliff is told twice that male monkeys will give up lunch to view photos of female monkey butts. His son informs him that his response to Vivian’s worrying about having a big butt — telling her “there’s nothing wrong about a big butt” — showed how out of synch their marriage had become. “Once I tried to detox the butt situation by saying that her butt was only big because her mother’s butt was big,” Cliff elaborates. “That didn’t work.”

Beating a dead horse

JACK KEROUAC AND WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 20:20:27 GMT

An excerpt from And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks
I got home about 3:45 after eating breakfast at Riker’s on the corner of Christopher Street and Seventh Avenue

Back beat: At last, Kerouac and Burroughs's co-authored noir novel, And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, resurfaces. By George Kimball.

1) Will Dennison
THE BARS CLOSE AT THREE AM ON SATURDAY nights so I got home about 3:45 after eating breakfast at Riker’s on the corner of Christopher Street and Seventh Avenue. I dropped the News and Mirror on the couch and peeled off my seersucker coat and dropped it on top of them. I was going straight to bed.

At this point, the buzzer rang. It’s a loud buzzer that goes through you so I ran over quick to push the button and release the outside door. Then I took my coat off the couch and hung it over a chair so no one would sit on it, and I put the papers in a drawer. I wanted to be sure they would be there when I woke up in the morning. Then I went over and opened the door. I timed it just right so that they didn’t get a chance to knock.

Four people came into the room. Now I’ll tell you in a general way who these people were and what they looked like since the story is mostly about two of them.

Phillip Tourian is seventeen years old, half Turkish and half American. He has a choice of several names but prefers Tourian. His father goes under the name of Rogers. Curly black hair falls over his forehead, his skin is very pale, and he has green eyes. He was sitting down in the most comfortable chair with his leg over the arm before the others were all in the room.

This Phillip is the kind of boy literary fags write sonnets to, which start out, “O raven-haired Grecian lad . . .” He was wearing a pair of very dirty slacks and a khaki shirt with the sleeves rolled up showing hard muscular forearms.

Ramsay Allen is an impressive-looking gray-haired man of forty or so, tall and a little flabby. He looks like a down-at-the-heels actor, or someone who used to be somebody. Also he is a southerner and claims to be of a good family, like all southerners. He is a very intelligent guy but you wouldn’t know it to see him now. He is so stuck on Phillip he is hovering over him like a shy vulture, with a foolish sloppy grin on his face.

Back Beat

GEORGE KIMBALL — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 10:54:21 GMT

At last, Kerouac and Burroughs's co-authored noir novel, And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, resurfaces.
On a Sunday afternoon in December of 1997 I hooked up with the poet Jim McCrary at a Greenwich Village saloon.

And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks | By William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, edited and with an introduction by James Grauerholz | Grove Press | 224 pages | $24.

Beating a dead horse: An excerpt from And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks by Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs.

On a Sunday afternoon in December of 1997 I hooked up with the poet Jim McCrary at a Greenwich Village saloon. I’d come down from Boston to cover a fight at Madison Square Garden the previous evening, and Jim was visiting from Lawrence, Kansas, where he worked as an editor for William Burroughs Communications, still a thriving concern despite the death of its eponymous patron four months earlier.

After brunch and a leisurely afternoon passed watching football games on the pub’s TV, Jim suggested that we ring up James Grauerholz, a mutual friend (and, as Burroughs’s literary executor, McCrary’s boss) who was also in New York on business.

Grauerholz was still in the process of wrapping up his meeting, but suggested we take a cab over to meet him at Allen Ginsberg’s loft on East 13th Street. The poet had preceded Burroughs in death earlier that year, but somebody was evidently still paying the rent.

When we arrived, I was somewhat startled to find myself in the midst of what appeared to be a convocation of the Capos of the three Beat Families. The company included Grauerholz, Burroughs’s agent Andrew Wylie, Jack Kerouac’s brother-in-law John Sampas, Kerouac’s agent Sterling Lord, Allen Ginsberg’s secretary Bob Rosenthal, his protégé and posthumous editor Peter Hale, and Bill Morgan, the Beat archivist Ginsberg had entrusted with the disposition of his effects. The only significant heir not represented at the kitchen table that day was the estate of Jan Kerouac (Jack’s unacknowledged daughter who had died a year earlier).

Since our visit was purely social, we didn’t pry into the nature of the conference that had consumed the better part of the day, but McCrary’s speculation that the subject was “Okay, who’s got what left and how much can we get for it?” probably wasn’t far off the mark.

In October of 1999, a Sotheby’s sale entitled “Allen Ginsberg & Friends” fetched $674,466. The auction lots included everything from original manuscripts to Ginsberg’s writing desk and Uncle Sam top hat to an original copy of Lady Windermere’s Fan, signed by Oscar Wilde (it had been a gift to Ginsberg from Bono), to Kerouac’s 1939 football letter from Horace Mann, the Bronx prep school where he had been stashed to further hone his gridiron skills by Lou Little, the Columbia University coach.

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.

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 — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 17:43:21 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.