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Wednesday, Sep 13, 2000 8:02 AM UTC

What to read: September fiction

From a surreal, carnal coming-of-age set on Coney Island to a wicked, gossipy story of the literary life, our critics pick the best books.

By Salon's critics

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The leaves haven’t started falling yet, but reviewers across the country are already wading through piles of books — and “fall preview” issues are lying pretty thick on the ground as well. We’re not about to recommend any book to you unless we’ve actually read it first, and you’ll find longer reviews of the major September releases in Salon Books throughout the month (so far, we like the Margaret Atwood, the Kazuo Ishiguro and the Michael Chabon). But there are plenty of less flashy titles to reach for if none of the big books strikes your fancy. According to publishing tradition, this is the month when more challenging fiction starts appearing in bookstores, but if some of our September picks are more serious than sunny, they’ll richly reward everyone who reads them.

Coney
By Amram Ducovny
The Overlook Press, 320 pages

Think Isaac Bashevis Singer with an intermittent but unflappable hard-on — and there you have Amram Ducovny’s “Coney,” a strangely beguiling coming-of-age story studded with fantastical forays into sexual mayhem. Harry Catzker, the novel’s protagonist, idles away his 15th year roaming the streets and alleyways of Coney Island circa 1939: He turns a budding naturalist’s eye on a pack of feral dogs, tracking their comings and goings and their curious infighting; he barrels down the boardwalk on his bicycle, racing his imaginary nemesis, a German liner captain whose ship lurks on the horizon; he engages the family’s boarder, a Polish imigri and Yiddish poet named Aba, in gloriously poetic conversations up in the backyard cherry tree; and he gets beneath-the-boardwalk blow jobs from Schnozz the old penny arcade owner.

Whoa there — what? Precisely. This debut novel by Ducovny, the father of “The X-Files” star David Duchovny and the author of 10 previous nonfiction works, seesaws between sweet, sepia-toned interludes from Harry’s adolescence — with some old-timey gangster intrigue thrown in for momentum — and jostling episodes of carnal pandemonium that include a circus-freak orgy, Harry’s deflowering at the hands of Fifi the Fat Lady and a wheelchair-bound crime boss and his dwarf henchman having sex with both ends of a prostitute while playing an invented game of cards on her back. Like Jerzy Kosinksi before him, Ducovny uses a child’s imagination as a device to explore the nether region between the probable and the improbable. The result is a saucy and affecting fable of Jewish life in America, an alluringly lurid novel bursting with a Gogolesque coupling of tragedy and comedy and twinkling with the decadence of Coney Island, that playground of yore of American desire.

–Jonathan Miles

Norwegian Wood
By Haruki Murakami
Vintage, 296 pages

Haruki Murakami is best known in this country for his distinctive and surreal novels like “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle” and “A Wild Sheep Chase.” So it comes as no small surprise that the book that first earned him fame in his native Japan turns out to be a tender, straightforward coming of age story.

Published abroad in 1987 but only now translated and published here, “Norwegian Wood” introduces us to Toru Watanabe, a successful businessman who finds himself overwhelmed with emotion when he hears a muzak version of the Beatles classic on an airplane. As he swoons over the musical madeleine, he’s transported back to his days as a university student in Tokyo in the late ’60s and his anguished love for two women — fragile, enigmatic Naoko and wealthy, elusive Midori.

Watanabe vividly recounts his conflicts and complications, including the pain of watching Naoko slip out of his grasp and into madness. Along the way, he only occasionally veers into the maudlin, preferring instead to pepper his recollections with unexpected, welcome flashes of humor. While skillfully chronicling his helpless regard for the women who change his life, he broadens the picture. Here are dead-on observations of the frivolities of youth — the erotic escapades, the eccentric roommates, the pretentious multiple readings of “The Great Gatsby,” the endless nights of drinking and flirting and playing guitar.

Watanabe’s wry digressions only serve to make the impending disasters more believable — when, until we are very old, are we more susceptible to suffering than when we are very young and very sure of ourselves? Watanabe is hip deep in tragedies — his best friend commits suicide, Midori’s father wastes away and dies — but he boldly declares, “I’ve chosen to live.” Like all true survivors, though, he carries his past like a scar — it marks him, it’s part of him, but it only hurts when he reopens the wound.

The awkward fumblings and lonely regrets of a romantic college student may not be unique, but Murakami has such a warm, unaffected style it’s impossible not to be drawn in, and the setting — the Far East during the Free Love era — gives the novel an exotic shimmer. Like the song that haunts its hero, Murakami’s tale is a melancholy memory of what was and what could have been, a deft combination of adult wisdom and youthful heart.

–Mary Elizabeth Williams

Lying Awake
By Mark Salzman
Knopf, 181 pages

It’s rare these days to find Roman Catholic spirituality treated with the same straightforward, respectful sense of wonder as, say, Tibetan Buddhism, but “Lying Awake” does just that. The fifth novel by Mark Salzman, author of the acclaimed “Iron & Silk,” this slim, spare, beautifully written book tells the story of a Carmelite nun facing an agonizing personal decision. Sister John of the Cross has a rich, mystical spiritual life that includes frequent visions and ecstasies, many of which inspire the poetry that has won her a small following and financed much-needed repairs to her tiny, cloistered order’s monastery. But her visions are often preceded by blinding migraine headaches that leave her incapacitated, unable to participate fully in the rigorous life of her order. Should she follow her doctor’s recommendation that she undergo surgery to treat an epileptic disorder that is causing the migraines? The surgery threatens to confirm her deepest fear: that her visions have been false — not a sign of God’s proximity but merely a symptom of illness.

With a matter-of-fact ease that doesn’t exoticize Sister John’s intense religiosity, Salzman conveys her thought processes: When her prioress orders to her to stop reading in her cell at night — the others have noticed the light coming from under her door, and her wooziness during the day detracts from her presence in the community — he writes: “Sister John’s heart sank. Writing had become as important as prayer to her — it was prayer — but she also knew that the more perfectly a nun submitted to the will of the Superior, the more perfectly she submitted to the will of God. She directed her thoughts to her Innocent Spouse, who was executed for crimes he could not commit, and accepted her penance with a nod.”

Salzman also shows the camaraderie and unexpected humor of the Los Angeles Carmelite cloister, within earshot of the freeway but worlds away, where Sister John lives a rigidly disciplined life with seven other nuns, each with a distinct personality. And he’s just as good at drawing a picture of Sister John’s unhappy childhood, through flashbacks to her life as Helen, an unloved girl abandoned by her mother to the care of weary, distant grandparents.

Sister John is a wonderfully appealing character, full of goodness but with real, human wounds, at times just as prone to bitterness and selfishness as anyone else. But perhaps Salzman’s biggest accomplishment is in writing a novel that explores Christian faith from an almost anthropological distance but still makes palpable the emotions that draw people to religious life. “Lying Awake” makes us — even, I’d bet, those for whom religion is a foreign country — understand what’s at stake in one woman’s conflict between a mystical, transporting faith and a more prickly, mundane faith grounded in responsibility to others in the here and now.

–Maria Russo

Joe College
By Tom Perrotta
St. Martin’s Press, 306 pages

Before I left my small everytown for college, my high school boyfriend would insist that the only reason I wanted to go to an Ivy League university was so that I could meet a guy who drove a Ferrari. Stupidly, I defended myself and my desire to attend a school with good academics. Yet that fall, seated in English class beside boarding school boys who ably discussed Faulkner novels I’d never heard of, I couldn’t help wondering whether they really did drive $140,000 cars. Tom Perrotta, the author of “Election” and “The Wishbones,” has written a smart, engaging novel about a New Jersey native trying to bridge the two worlds of Yale University and his hometown, where he helps his father drive the Roach Coach, a lunch truck. “Joe College” is funny, honest and a fabulous read, especially for anyone who’s tried to fit in and let go — and to figure out what parts of themselves to hold onto in the process. As Perrotta shows — rich, poor, private- or public-schooled — it’s a universal identity crisis.

“Joe College” takes place during the early ’80s, the years of Reagan, bloated capitalism and Hall & Oates. But unlike those wonderful John Hughes movies of the same era, in which Molly Ringwald is either the pretty, popular, wealthy girl in diamond earrings or the hard-working, dorky one from the wrong side of the tracks, Perrotta manages to see the educated elites and working-class folks as more than caricatures. And for the first time, for me anyway, the airbrushed ’80s become a little bit smudged.

Danny works in the university cafeteria and from his dishwashing station he observes the difference between his townie co-workers and his prep school classmates, between himself and the hilariously right-on a cappella groups that serenade the diners. He lusts after girls who wear $5 vintage dresses and baggy sweaters and dream about Wallace Stevens, while his girlfriend Cindy from home, a secretary who didn’t go to college, slips into tight designer jeans, bright new white sneakers and loads on the blue eye shadow. Her dream is to get a new car. During Danny’s spring break he faces the Mafioso lunch truck bullies who threaten his father’s business and his own life, but it’s Cindy, surprising Danny with some bad news, who forces him to confront who he is and who he really wants to be. At one point, however, Danny admits that his life is like “a car with no brakes careening down a dangerous mountain road. Get in my way and I’ll run you down.”

Perrotta treats these people fairly — no one is better or worse than anyone else, the “poor” kids don’t come out on top in the end. You don’t hate the rich ones. Even the elusive Jodie Foster, who attended Yale at the time and inspires gossip and lust in everyone, from Danny’s Roach Coach customers to his Yalie friends, just fits. She’s part of the landscape and no more special than Danny’s surly, privileged friend Max, who neglects his classes to study the history of assassinations, or Lorelei, the hot New Haven cafeteria co-worker whose “greaser” brothers beat a Yalie’s face in when she sleeps with him. Every character, like “Joe College” itself, is lovable, resonant and memorable.

–Suzy Hansen

Martin Bauman; or, A Sure Thing
By David Leavitt
Houghton Mifflin, 352 pages

There’s something admirably gutsy about a writer breaking the literary fourth wall and allowing himself to become a character. Too often, however, the concept outshines the execution. Authors treat their fictionalized stand-ins too gently, or worse, turn them into embarrassing manifestations of their darkest neuroses. How refreshing, then, to discover a protagonist who bears a strong resemblance to his creator and is neither a saint nor a prick. And what a wicked pleasure to read a quasi-memoir so full of bittersweet remembrance and delectable literary dish.

The story will be familiar to anyone versed in the author’s own career — a young Ivy Leaguer with as much moxie as talent becomes the writing world’s flavor of the week after publishing the first gay-themed story in a prestigious weekly. But as he air-kisses his way through the ranks of Manhattan publishing during the Reagan era, Martin Bauman embarks on a bumpy path in which success alternates with humiliating failure. He also falls in and out of friendships and rivalries, awakens to the growing AIDS crisis, and romances fellow writer Eli Aronson. Through it all, he’s dogged by the specter of his irascible mentor, the awe- and loathing-inspiring Stanley Flint, and by the fear he’ll fulfill Flint’s grim prophecy: that Martin’s need to please will doom him to hackdom.

Leavitt, whose own works, “Family Dancing” and “The Lost Language of Cranes,” earned him early acclaim, allows his alter ego to be both painfully aware of his youthful weaknesses and amused by them as well. Martin is a bit of a stiff, throwing around 50-cent vocabulary words and Cliffs Notes literary allusions, but he’s also observant, ambitious and unapologetically giddy at his heady proximity to the heavyweights of the publishing scene. Leavitt offers the right amount of ’80s glitter, with characters and events so thinly disguised that even the most casual follower of literary gossip will be able to chortle in satisfied recognition.

While the recollections of an insular world nearly 20 years past may have particular resonance for the cosmopolitan literati (when was the last time a roman ` clef seemed so likely to inspire eyebrow raising among the Hamptons set?), it’s Leavitt’s willingness to tweak himself as much as anyone else, and his gift for making his characters complicated and intriguing, no matter what degree of real life familiarity they inspire, that makes “Martin Bauman” shine. Martin may be too “eager to pounce on a sure thing” to fulfill his creative destiny, but Leavitt has the spark and gumption of a writer just hitting his stride.

–Mary Elizabeth Williams

Ice Age
By Robert Anderson
University of Georgia Press, 200 pages

“Deft” is one of those adjectives you frequently see bandied about in blurbs on the back of short story collections, and with good reason: it’s vital that short fiction have that blend of skill and elegance. A novel can be a looser, rangy thing, and a novelist can ease up and paint big broad strokes for pages at a time, while the limitations of the form mean that a short story writer must wield a finer brush. The problem with short fiction, though, for a committed novel-lover like myself, is the almost claustrophobic feeling all those teeny brushstrokes can create. For me, finding a story collection like Robert Anderson’s “Ice Age” was like rounding a corner in a museum and coming upon a roomful of Edward Hoppers. I was filled with a delightfully alternating current of strangeness and familiarity, and knew I was in the hands of an artist whose intelligence and yes, deftness, thrilled me.

The 10 more-than-slightly absurd stories that make up “Ice Age” range all over the globe in setting, from New York in the 1960s to Rome, to Spain, Texas, Los Angeles and a Gulf War field hospital, and Anderson mixes both wholly created characters and familiar figures from the real world. Thus we are plunked into the mind of Norman Mailer on the legendary night he stabbed his wife, Adele. Or we spend a lonely evening in a hotel suite in Rome with Leonard Bernstein while he ponders a message sent to him by a saint. Or ride with the recently dead Jimi Hendrix on his journey to the underworld of L.A. It is a testament to Anderson’s skill that these real people become true characters in his work, not caricatures. Mailer has certainly spent a lifetime self-advertising and has never seemed in need of an agency to get the job done, but filtered though Anderson’s sensibility — a voice that can describe a West Coast hipster’s accent as “a variation on that early hour jazz DJ who utters ‘Brubeck’ with a stuttered lick like brush against drumhide” — the posturing blowhard becomes understandably human. And when Anderson turns away from the celebrities to write about a Texas family who bring in extra cash by running a potter’s field in their backyard, he carries with him that same knowing surety that makes the absurd seem like the everyday.

Not everything in “Ice Age” works — a long monologue by a low-level mobster’s wife seems jarringly contrived — but such moments are exceptions in what is an otherwise exceptional debut.

–Edward Neuert

Assorted Fire Events
By David Means
Context, 182 pages

Just about halfway through this collection of pristine stories, David Means begins a new one by writing, “I don’t want anyone to die in my stories anymore.” The story that follows, “What I Hope For,” no more than a page and a half long, describes a nameless couple enjoying an idyll at a bed and breakfast, potpourri and all. It’s a bit dull, and yet a fairly funny joke, for Means is proving to his readers that death and grief are his beat, what he does best. Simple happiness doesn’t bring out the best in him. If his stories leave us in a state of melancholy, feeling the slightly sweet ache of wounds that will never heal, who are we to complain that they lack uplift?

A few of the stories here experiment with form — a man’s mind flickers back and forth between the adulterous affair he’s consummating and memories of his brother’s death by drowning; various endings are offered for the fate of a bereaved businessman who stumbles down some rural train tracks and into the clutches of a gang of violent outcasts; a series of paragraphs illustrates the beauty and horror of fire — but none of these stories are cryptic, or even hard to follow. Clarity, in addition to an abiding preoccupation with catastrophic loss, is a signal trait of Mean’s fiction. When he abandons the paved paths of storytelling, it’s always to track down the nature and workings of emotion. Wherever he follows it, this is the kind of moment he seeks: “You drive up to it stunned and bent over with anguish at the very central fact that what was once around your life — objects of so-called sentimental attachment — is now ash.”

A builder barely registers his own complicity in a shoddy construction that costs a little girl her life, while her mother suffers unearned guilt. The brief disappearance of a friend reminds a young man of a dead schoolmate he might have been kind to, but instead tormented. A hungry homeless man intrudes on a wedding that celebrates the launch of a doomed marriage. A widow discourages a suitor by showing him a videotape of herself making love to her husband. A man who collects memories of “pure gestures” runs over a movie camera when he learns that the particularly fine gesture he just witnessed has in fact been faked. Despite their contemporary setting, Means’ stories have an elemental quality with echoes (some more explicit than others) of Greek myth and tragedy. Like those ancient works, they’re not comforting in any obvious way, but to the patient, attentive reader they bring a deep, enriching sense of the gravity of life.

–Laura Miller

Worship of the Common Heart: New and Selected Stories
By Patricia Henley
MacMurray & Beck, 357 pages

Many of the 19 stories in Patricia Henley’s collection “Worship of the Common Heart” take place in the isolated parts of the Western United States or small towns of the Midwest, where a transient stranger or a wandering hired hand can shake up people’s lives almost as much as birth or death. It is in these stories that Henley is in her glory: stripped of distracting outside influences, she can tear open the chests of her characters and hang their insides out to dry in the wind. In the simplest places, populated by people with simple lifestyles, Henley can expose the tumult and complexity within.

Henley, author of “Hummingbird House,” a National Book Award finalist, wrote the stories in this collection over the course of 20 years, but the themes and the stark rendering of pain and beauty emanate from the same place, in a voice, uniquely Henley’s, that speaks through her strong, vibrant characters. Her people live where down-and-out mothers drink gin out of old jelly jars and smoke Virginia Slims, where families clash, divide and send young children to relatives’ homes and orphanages, where women work the land and lay naked and free in the sun after a day’s toil, and where the past and the present coexist bittersweetly in a warm, webby alcove of the mind.

Henley’s characters have names like Celestial, Birch and Rein. Some are nuns, some fruit pickers and some housewives. They’ve suffered difficult childhoods, years of disappointment and hard luck in love. Their men, their mothers or their fathers are usually absent, either in body or spirit. Often, Henley’s depictions of women, especially young women, recall those of Margaret Atwood; her subtle observations, and their sly intents, linger. In “Sun Damage,” Hannah forces her young daughter Meg to remain in the room every time Rex, the diaper deliverer, stops by — presumably to prevent anything scandalous from happening. Meg observes Hannah “put on a gold cross pendant that slipped perilously between her breasts. You would never notice Hannah’s modest neckline of her modest blouse if not for that cross.” Henley’s ability to show how religion, desire, right, wrong, prudence and pleasure can be welded together within the careful words of two natural, ambling sentences is one of her most thrilling talents. She can effortlessly move between past and present, memory and reality, without disturbing the momentum of the story. Instead, she raises the stakes.

When Henley completes a story, a scene, even a paragraph, she leaves her readers slightly stung, but grateful at the gift of an unvarnished truth. By the end of “Worship of the Common Heart” doesn’t feel like separate stories. It feels as though you’ve read a satisfying novel, one that lovingly lays bare the story of an aged, weather-worn but still beating heart.

–Suzy Hansen

The Sugar Island
By Ivonne Lamazares
Houghton Mifflin, 205 pages

This debut novel by Cuban-born Lamazares paints a haunting, vivid yet elliptical picture of life on the island in the wake of the revolution. It’s the late ’60s and early ’70s, and the shadow of the unknown world beyond barricaded Cuba looms large for Lamazares’ heroine, Tanya. Her unhappy, erratic, desperate mother joins the rebel guerrilleras, returns, attempts a sea escape and eventually is taken away by the party for “rehabilitation,” leaving Tanya and her brother Emanuel to live in Havana with an old aunt. Defeated but still defiant, Mama rejoins the family and is assigned to work in a matchstick factory. By night, she is pulled into a neighbor’s Santerma rituals, and Tanya watches with growing horror as her mother slips ever farther away while grave, inchoate dangers seem to loom everywhere.

Full of well-chosen details and an understated emotionalism, “The Sugar Island” economically conveys a sense of life in Cuba: the deprivations, the bizarre juxtapositions of party rhetoric, Catholic rituals and voodoo, the small victories of tenacious Cubans determined to hold fast to their dignity and traditions.

But Lamazares’ central subject is really Tanya’s growing estrangement from her mother and the toll their fraught relationship takes on her as she grows to womanhood. The more Tanya learns of her mother’s slippery heart, the less she trusts that Fidel’s revolution is the sole cause of their misery. And yet the outward signs of the revolution’s corruption and failure are obvious. Eventually, Tanya is forced to choose between a perilous raft escape to Miami with her mother or a life in Cuba, left behind and watching her options crumble around her. Like the rest of the novel, what happens to Tanya in the end may seem to be full of the tragic ironies that are the lot of the Cuban-born, but Lamazares’ subtle intelligence manages to wrest imaginative possibilities out of even the most dire situations.

–Maria Russo

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Thursday, Dec 10, 2009 1:10 AM UTC

The best books of the decade

A tribute to the fact and fiction we wouldn't stop talking about in the 2000s

By Laura Miller

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We’ll spare you the overly ambitious sweeping statements. This has been a rocky decade, to say the least, and as many writers showed us just after the Sept. 11 attacks, we often can’t formulate our best thoughts about traumatic events until much, much later. If anything, looking back over the past 10 years of Salon’s books coverage, what’s most striking is the durability of fiction and memoir; the novels and autobiographies we were talking about in 2000 still feel important today, while the bloom tends to fade faster from the nonfiction of the moment.

For that reason, the nonfiction on this list steers away from the most avidly trend-setting treatises (Malcolm Gladwell, we’re looking at you!) in favor of definitive accounts of current events, penetrating histories and explorations of perennial human concerns. As for fiction, the most exciting thing to emerge in the 2000s has been the integration of genre elements into literary fiction: You no longer have to choose between good writing and good storytelling. But if the preceding two decades have seen the dismantling of the tyranny of rigorous realism, there are still masters (like Mary Gaitskill) working in that vein, and following it into rich new territory. The following lists are presented in chronological order.

FICTION

“The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay” by Michael Chabon
Two nice, mid-20th-century Jewish boys go to work in the nascent comic book industry, where the dreams and nightmares of the real world manifest themselves in the extravagant guise of entertainment for children. This buoyant tragicomic adventure story remains one of the most persuasive and gorgeously written depictions (and vindications) of the way popular culture transfigures our lived experience to become the modern-day equivalent of myth and folklore.

“The Corrections” by Jonathan Franzen
The Lambert clan tries to figure out a way to live honorably in a world of leveraged buyouts, pharmaceutically engineered moods, dot-com scams, mix-and-match lifestyles and the cult of Christmas. In this saga of a befuddled Midwestern family, Franzen manages to achieve something remarkable and possibly unprecedented: a merciless satirical look at contemporary life that’s also fundamentally generous and human.

“John Henry Days” by Colson Whitehead
A hack journalist gets hired by a travel Web site to write up a festival celebrating the folk hero John Henry. This brilliant, restless novel is about what happens when a cynical, opportunistic, media-steeped product of the Information Age collides with the mythic dignity of America’s past. The fact that both the hero and the freelancer are black only complicates and enriches this novel’s wit.

“The Fortress of Solitude” by Jonathan Lethem
A boy named Dylan comes of age in a bohemian household as one of the few white kids in 1970s Brooklyn. To the smooth and sinewy beat of the era’s soul soundtrack, this is a bruised paean to the author’s hometown, a meditation on American boyhood and a cautionary tale about the folly of trying to escape your past.

“Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell” by Susanna Clarke
Capacious, digressive, amply footnoted and very original, this is a classic historical novel — only the history it’s based on is (almost) entirely fantastic. Set in the early 19th century, it describes a Britain where magic was once a fairly common practice and is still the subject of serious scholarly study. With Austenian elegance and glorious imagery, Clarke describes the professional rivalry between the two eponymous master magicians; the result is nothing less than pure sorcery.

“Magic for Beginners” by Kelly Link
It’s almost impossible to choose between this collection and Link’s galvanizing 2001 debut, “Stranger Things Happen.” Her exquisite stories mix the aggravations and epiphanies of everyday life with the stuff that legends, dreams and nightmares are made of, from pop culture to fairy tales. Some of these pieces are very scary, others are immensely sad, many are funny and all of them are written in prose so flawless you almost forget how much elemental human chaos they contain.

“Never Let Me Go” by Kazuo Ishiguro
Kath, a seemingly ordinary British girl, goes to a special boarding school where she and her friends are groomed for a special fate while enjoying and suffering the loves and betrayals that come to young people everywhere. This odd, heartbreaking novel unfurls age-old conundrums about what it means to be a person; about the grievous sin of treating anyone, however unexceptional, as the means to an end; and about the unfathomable future that awaits each and every one of us.

“Veronica” by Mary Gaitskill
A model with a fluorescent, dirty past winds up as a nobody with hepatitis who cleans offices for cash and dwells on her memories of an unlikely friendship with an older woman who died of AIDS. There’s nothing feel-good about “Veronica,” but this novel is so alive, so streaked with colors and spiked with sharp edges, that reading it is almost a tactile experience. It’s a perfect, slicing portrait of a sad, once-beautiful woman who doesn’t want — or deserve — our pity, but who ultimately earns our compassion.

“On Beauty” by Zadie Smith
Conservative black Brits of Caribbean descent move in down the street from a leftish, mixed-race family in an East Coast college town. In Smith’s hands the classic fodder of academic satire becomes miraculously endearing and sympathetic, a tale of two families that explodes with vitality, curiosity, enthusiasm and love for human beings and the perplexing situations they get into.

“A Person of Interest” by Susan Choi
In this Hitchcockian tale, an undistinguished Midwestern math professor finds himself the object of rumors and suspicion when a more celebrated colleague is killed by a mail bomber. A nuanced consideration of what it means to fit in, and of what we owe to the people around us, “A Person of Interest” eschews obvious answers. At once a tragedy of character and a tale of suspense, this novel is a seamless integration of the political and the personal, beautifully written and impeccably unsentimental.

NONFICTION

“A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius” by Dave Eggers
Even if you haven’t read Eggers’ memoir about raising his younger brother after the deaths of their parents, you’ve felt its effect. An entire literary generation fell under the spell of Eggers’ playful, ingenious, self-reflective style (and that was only the beginning of a brilliant career as an author, editor, teacher, collaborator and all-around impresario). Often mischaracterized as merely “ironic,” that voice found a fresh, exhilarating way to approach life’s devastating truths without succumbing to knee-jerk pathos or solemnity.

“The Battle for God” by Karen Armstrong
A year before Muslim extremists brutally invaded the awareness of every Westerner, Armstrong, a former nun, published this essential, lucid consideration of the fundamentalist mind-set and its roots. During a decade when the conversation about religion has degenerated into pointless duels between screeching polemicists, she has brought a measured, open-minded wisdom to questions of faith and its place in the modern world.

“Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America” by Barbara Ehrenreich
At the suggestion of an editor, journalist Barbara Ehrenreich attempted to live for two years on the wages of the average unskilled American worker. She worked as a waitress, maid and Wal-Mart clerk, shacking up in dives and dining on fast food, in an effort to find out how America’s working poor make it. Her answer: A lot of them don’t. If her efforts to suggest remedies are often rebuffed by her own subjects, her visceral dispatches from the ragged fringe of the American dream remain indispensable.

“The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq” by George Packer
A political liberal covering the Iraq war for the New Yorker, Packer initially supported the invasion as a way to rid the world of a bloody dictator but later came to view it as a wasted opportunity. The result of his reporting is among the most measured, thoughtful and self-examining of the many books on the conflict, taking in not only the theorists who justified it, but also inexperienced soldiers, frustrated reformers, the worried and grieving home front and ordinary Iraqis. Anyone looking for a better, deeper, broader understanding of the war will find it here.

“The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11″ by Lawrence Wright
Six years after Sept. 11, Wright produced the definitive account of the terrorist attacks and how they happened, from the fanatics who conceived and orchestrated the plot to the intelligence agencies that failed to anticipate and thwart it. He developed an expertise on the subject so deep that in time those same agencies tried to utilize him as a source and even tapped his phones. Yet for all the knowledge that went into “The Looming Tower,” it reads as sleekly and compellingly as a top-notch thriller.

“The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals” by Michael Pollan
Inexhaustibly inventive and imaginative, Pollan jazzes up what could have been a dreary jeremiad about the “industrial food chain” by inviting us to view the modern American diet as the triumph of a South American grass that can currently be found in every processed food: King Corn. From the scientist who transformed the world by synthesizing nitrogen fertilizer to a calculation of just how much oil goes into “making” one conventionally raised steer (about a barrel), there’s an observation to blow your mind on nearly every page of this hugely influential exploration of what we eat.

“Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic” by Alison Bechdel
This graphic memoir is an investigation of Bechdel’s childhood, spent in the ornate Victorian house that her father obsessively restored and maintained. After she came out of the closet to her parents at 19, her mom delivered a return whammy: Bechdel’s father had a lifelong history of affairs with men, including teenage boys. Not long after, he died under ambiguous circumstances. Bechdel’s years of drawing a serial comic strip have honed her ability to convey oceans of feeling in a single image, and the feelings are never simple; “Fun Home” shimmers with regret, compassion, annoyance, frustration, pity and love.

“The World Without Us” by Alan Weisman
How would the earth be changed if the human race simply and suddenly vanished? Weisman uses this startlingly elementary question and its fascinating answer to suggest just how artificial our grip on the planet has become. Within days, subway tunnels would flood and collapse, subdivisions would be shattered by frozen pipes and devoured by mold and termites. For some reason, this doomsday scenario is more thrilling than depressing; it beguiles us into doing what often seems beyond our power — picturing a much healthier planet and considering a less drastic way to get there.

“Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood” by Mark Harris
Film critic Harris takes the five nominees for the best picture Oscar of 1967, and uses them, and the stories behind them, as lenses to examine the tectonic changes that were taking place in the movie industry and American society as a whole. “Bonnie and Clyde,” for example, embodied the birth of a hip new internationalism, and “The Graduate” spoke for youth culture and its romantic discontents. This is criticism at its best, well- and widely informed, with an enlightening fact, anecdote and insight on virtually every page.

“The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective” by Kate Summerscale
Part true-crime narrative, part cultural history, Summerscale’s exploration of a notorious case of child-murder in 1860 is above all an inquiry into our culture’s lasting and seemingly all-pervasive fascination with detectives and detective stories. Her hero is one of the very first investigators at the newly formed Scotland Yard, who inspired such writers as Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins. Summerscale uses the mystery to crack open not only the allure of the detective as a fictional diviner of guilt and innocence, but also the curious details and ugly truths about everyday family life concealed behind the most respectable facades.

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Laura Miller is a senior writer for Salon. She is the author of "The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia" and has a Web site, magiciansbook.com. More Laura Miller.

Wednesday, Dec 9, 2009 11:11 PM UTC

Radio discussion of 2009′s best books

Laura Miller and others talk about the year's best books on NPR

By Laura Miller

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Salon readers who’d like to hear me talking about my favorite books of 2009 should check out this episode of the NPR call-in show, “On Point.” Even better, you’ll get recommendations from David Ulin, the editor of the Los Angeles Times’ books section, and Carol Besse, co-owner of Carmichael’s Bookstore in Louisville, Kentucky, as well as the show’s impressively well-read readers. A particularly nice touch was having Carol and I read short excerpts from some of our choices.

Laura Miller is a senior writer for Salon. She is the author of "The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia" and has a Web site, magiciansbook.com. More Laura Miller.

Wednesday, Dec 9, 2009 1:09 AM UTC

The best fiction of 2009

Sex, ghosts and infant monkeys featured in the finest storytelling of the year

By Laura Miller

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One woman seating on a bench and looking at two black frames in an art gallery. Concepts: art, museum; culture, space; room; exhibition.(Credit: Claude Dagenais/two Humans)

All best-books lists are pretty subjective, none more so than a list of the year’s best fiction. For example, I probably experienced the most unadulterated readerly bliss this year while buried in the pages of Lev Grossman’s “The Magicians,” but then the quirky theme of Grossman’s novel — how a child steeped in literary fantasy like the Chronicles of Narnia comes to terms with the ambiguous nature of adulthood — is virtually the same as that of my own nonfiction book. They even have almost the same title! And the author is a good friend. If that’s not too many caveats for you, dear reader, then you can consider this a strong recommendation.

The truth is, there’s enough great fiction out there that it makes sense to reach for a certain breadth, balance and variety. This year’s Booker Prize short list was so good, it’s tempting to simply reproduce it, but an all-Brit list would be as cockeyed as, say, an all-male one. In the end, we’ve kept the Booker crowd down to just two. Hillary Mantel’s “Wolf Hall” was neck and neck with A.S. Byatt’s “The Children’s Book,” but a shade more celebrated, which tipped the balance in favor of Dame Antonia.

Behind all the more ephemeral trends — vampires, Swedish mysteries, etc. — most readers still seek the same thing in great fiction: a sojourn, however brief, into another world and into the hearts and minds of the people who inhabit it. Here’s our list of five books that made that happen in 2009.

“The Children’s Book” by A.S. Byatt
This ravishing epic of the Edwardian era traces the lives of several interlocking families, at the center of which is Olive Wellwood, who is based on the great children’s novelist E. Nesbit. The novel begins with an idyllic amateur production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” in the English countryside and winds through a series of often disturbing revelations about the participants. Their shared obsessions include fairy tales, the Arts and Crafts movement, social utopias and sex, but perhaps the most striking of all Byatt’s themes is the drive to create and how it shapes (some would say distorts) the personalities of those possessed by it; nobody writes better about this than she does. This a classic Byatt fusion of fact and uncannily luscious imagery, mixed in the ideal proportions: not too hot, not too cold — just right.

“Await Your Reply: A Novel” by Dan Chaon
This elegant page-turner begins with three seemingly disconnected characters — a man in search of his long-lost twin, a high school girl getting the hell out of Pompey, Ohio, and a college student succumbing to the criminality he believes is in his blood — all fleeing across forgotten stretches of the American heartland. Its theme is identity and the theft thereof, but also our national dream of jettisoning our old selves and becoming someone new. Chaon is that rare novelist who can combine intricate, suspenseful plotting with fully realized characters and unfussily lovely prose, but his great achievement here is the tenderness with which he explores the enigma at the center of the novel: What does it really mean to have a self, and what do you have left if you’re foolish enough to throw it away?

“Chronic City” by Jonathan Lethem
A great New York novel should aim for the universal by way of the parochial. The Manhattanites in Lethem’s near-future/alternative-now metropolis experience all the crises and travails of 21st-century life in a slightly more concentrated form. (It takes a novelist of exceptional talent and nerve to make you believe that matters of moment can hang on the outcome of an eBay auction.) A former child star coasting on his fading fame, a brilliant but terminally eccentric rock critic, a sarcastic ghostwriter and an activist turned municipal bureaucrat stumble through a city riddled with unreliable rumors, insufficiently explained disasters, dilettante millionaires, imperious celebrities and other signs and wonders. What they — what all of us — yearn for in a world full of engineered appearances and emotions is the truly beautiful and the truly moving. Can they find it, and will they even recognize it when they do? On this you can count: “Chronic City” is the real thing.
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“Love in Infant Monkeys: Stories” by Lydia Millet
This collection begins with a short story about Madonna going on a grouse hunt, which might sound like an inauspicious start for a book whose theme is loss on an epochal scale. Guess again: With immense confidence, Millet takes a motley assortment of famous or pseudo-famous figures — Thomas Edison, David Hasselhoff, the zoologist from “Born Free,” a Sharon Stone impersonator — and gives each a transformative encounter with an (often imperiled) animal. The result, a cumulative effect formed by all the stories in the collection, draws illuminating connections and comparisons between the trivial and the eternal. Millet’s vision is startling, as often tragic as it is hilarious (and she can be very, very funny), but always shot through with the mystery of existence, a gift we can barely manage to appreciate even as we carelessly steal it from the rest of the earth’s denizens. “Love in Infant Monkeys” is a slyly and unsentimentally profound exploration of what human beings can (but very seldom do) learn from our fellow creatures.

“The Little Stranger” by Sarah Waters
Waters takes one of narrative literature’s most venerable genres — the ghost story — into fresh territory. Haunted houses usually stand as metaphors for misbegotten psychosexual situations. In “The Little Stranger,” Waters masterfully redeploys the gothic tale to address the great theme of the British novel: class. During the lean years after World War II, a rural physician ingratiates himself into the remnants of a local “old family” as they rattle around their decrepit but still beautiful mansion. In time, eerie manifestations of some indistinct yet malevolent force begin to torment the house’s aristocratic residents. What — or, rather, who — is causing the strange noises and mysterious stains? At once innovative and genuinely creepy, “The Little Stranger” is an astonishing performance, right down to its devastating final sentence.
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Laura Miller is a senior writer for Salon. She is the author of "The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia" and has a Web site, magiciansbook.com. More Laura Miller.

Monday, Dec 7, 2009 2:01 AM UTC

Introducing: What to Read

We pick the best book of the week, every week

By Laura Miller

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Books have been important to Salon from the very beginning — that would be 1995, when I joined a team of disaffected newspaper staffers cooking up a new kind of publication for the fledgling medium of the World Wide Web. We’ve reinvented ourselves a few times since then, but telling our readers about enlightening, thought-provoking, amusing and moving new books has always remained central to Salon’s editorial mission.

That hasn’t changed, although how we do it is about to. If you’re a longtime reader of Salon’s books coverage, rest assured that you’ll still be seeing the interviews, commentary and excerpts you’ve come to expect — even more of them, in fact. Over the next week, for example, we’ll be rolling out our lists of the best books of the year and of the decade.

Beginning on Dec. 14, look for the resurrection of one of our readers’ favorite features, What to Read, in a new format. Every Monday, I’ll present a book selected from an assortment of related new titles, tell you why I found this book exceptional and, when warranted, explain why others didn’t make the cut. What to Read will regularly recommend a book we think you’ll really love.

How will this be different from a traditional book review? Let me list the ways.

It’s no secret that the book review is an endangered species in American journalism. Industry-wide changes are behind a lot of this, but reviews themselves had become the dowdy wallflowers of newspapers and magazines long before the current crisis set in. Several factors have contributed to making book reviews a lot less stimulating than they ought to be.

First, there’s the traditional assignment process, something most readers know little about. Typically, a book review editor decides which forthcoming titles sound promising and tries to match each one with a reviewer who might have something interesting to say about it. Editors rarely have time to read the books themselves, so this involves a lot of guesswork. Yet even when the editor finds a title noteworthy, there’s no guarantee the reviewer will. The No.1 reason why so many book reviews come across as colorless is that they were written by people who aren’t especially inspired by their subjects.

Were the reviewer to pick the book in advance, there’s still no guarantee he’d produce an honest assessment. Perhaps he loved most of the author’s previous work and now that he’s finally got the chance to publicly sing her praises, he’s unwilling to admit that the new book isn’t among her best. Reviewers who are authors themselves can be hesitant to criticize because they know all too well how much work has gone into the thing and how badly negative reviews can sting. Often enough, a merely mediocre title gets covered (instead of passed over) simply because the editor and reviewer have already invested so much of their time in the review and have a slot to fill.

What to Read, by contrast, recognizes that most readers want to hear about the books that excite reviewers’ genuine enthusiasm, even if the reviewers have to wade through a lot of unexciting and downright disappointing titles to get to them. If I can’t find a book that’s worth your time (and mine) in a given week, I’ll say so.

Passionate reviews, while more fun to read, can still be unhelpful to readers when they know nothing about the person raving. Is she a sucker for coming-of-age stories or uncomfortable with pointed satire? Does he want every novelist to write like Hemingway or detest any touch of the surreal? As with movie critics, it helps to have a sense of the reviewer’s tastes, but that’s hard to come by when a publication’s reviews are written by an ever-changing cast of freelancers. I can’t promise you’ll always agree with me, but over time, you’ll have a better sense of how my preferences stack up against your own.

Lastly, book review sections rarely take into account the wide variety of our reading diets. We may be up for a challenging literary novel like Roberto Bolaño’s “2666″ every so often, yet blanch at an unending stream of the same. After tackling a serious doorstop we’re more likely in the mood for hard-boiled crime fiction or a breezy memoir. On any given day, we may want science fiction to expand our horizons or a quietly devastating short story collection to break our hearts. A novel that transports you to another world isn’t much good when at the moment what you really crave is meaty nonfiction that will teach you more about this one. Most readers’ shelves are a mix of the serious and the fun, Doris Lessing and J.K. Rowling, Saul Bellow and Elmore Leonard, Tracy Kidder and David Sedaris. I’ll be considering all sorts of good books, without respect to arbitrary genre distinctions.

What to Read will always aspire to do what the best criticism should: steer readers toward books they might enjoy and help them enlarge their understanding of whatever they read. I also hope that it will come to serve as a version of that fabled font of reliable tips, word of mouth — that is, the advice and opinions of a knowledgeable friend, in this case a friend who spends way too much of her time reading new books. By sharing more of the process of deciding which titles to spotlight, I aim to give you a better, fuller picture of my own criteria and tastes. And while the old Latin saying assures us that there’s no disputing of the latter, I hope to learn more about yours, too.

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Laura Miller is a senior writer for Salon. She is the author of "The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia" and has a Web site, magiciansbook.com. More Laura Miller.

Monday, Nov 23, 2009 2:01 AM UTC

Christmas insanity unwrapped

"Tinsel" investigates the allure -- and demented poignancy -- of America's holiday obsession

By Laura Miller

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Every year, Christmas is directly responsible for some of the worst books to cross a reviewer’s desk: stale, overfrosted sugar cookies loaded with the literary equivalent of artificial coloring and high-fructose corn syrup. But now all is forgiven because the season has inspired Hank Stuever to write “Tinsel: A Search for America’s Christmas Present,” a portrait of the holiday as it’s celebrated in the booming Dallas exurb of Frisco, Texas. A delicately calibrated combination of rigorous reporting, observational humor and old-fashioned empathy, “Tinsel” is the book that saved Christmas for this curmudgeon. The first two sentences alone, with their vivid evocation of big-box America and the promise of more crackerjack prose to come, did the trick:

Before the Black Friday dawn, the sky is still a mix of dark blue and the sick sodium-vapor saffron of the suburban night. I park by the Beijing Chinese Super Buffet and walk across the lot to Best Buy, where hundreds of people — some in their twelfth or thirteenth hour of standing in line — await the day-after-Thanksgiving doorbuster sale.

“Tinsel” explores the considerable gap between the Christmases most Americans have and the ecstatic holiday nirvana they long for. One of the three Frisco families that Stuever follows is the Parnells, specifically Tammie Parnell, a 44-year-old mother of two whose titanic drive has been insufficiently tapped by the (supposed) dream job of affluent stay-at-home mom. The overflow of her energy goes into a business she calls Two Elves With a Twist (the second elf quit a couple of years ago, but who needs her?), which puts up interior Christmas decorations for McMansion dwellers who are too exhausted or aesthetically challenged to do it themselves. Rocketing around Frisco in an “enormous, Coke-can-red GMC Yukon XL” she calls “Big Red,” Tammie’s conversation reels from rhapsodies about how “blessed” she and her clients are to sassy capitalist mottoes: “Moving the merch! That’s what I’m all about.”

Stuever also got to hang out with the Trykoskis (Jeff and Bridgette), who erect one of those huge synchronized flashing light displays that attract visitors (and traffic) to the neighborhood from miles around. Possibly the most consistently gratified of all Stuever’s subjects, Jeff lives to construct this elaborate system, employing 50,000 lights and “$10,000 worth of sixteen-channel control boards” as well as a short-range FM transmitter so that spectators can tune their car radios to the soundtrack. (The song is “Wizards in Winter,” by the Trans-Siberian Orchestra, a number Stuever describes as “‘Stairway to Heaven’ for the men of America who put tens of thousands of Christmas lights on their suburban homes and program them to blink to music.”) Hired to design the lights for the faux Main Street of a local New Urbanist development called Frisco Square, Jeff becomes so obsessed that by the end of the book he’s buying a shipping container filled with 27,000 sets of LED lights from a factory in China.

Lastly, Stuever spent time with Caroll Cavaso, a single mother of two who has to finance her family’s Christmases on a considerably tighter budget; he meets Caroll and her 10-year-old daughter, Marissa, in the line for that Black Friday doorbuster. Tagging along with her, he attends a megachurch, where the pastor “casts himself as a fast-quipping, badass warrior for Christ. He is not above driving a bulldozer on stage to make his point.” Frisco is crawling with this breed of preacher; Stuever dubs the typical specimen “Reverend True Religion Jeans” purveying “Venus-and-Mars-style jokes about women and men and relationships, with props. (Don’t you hate it when your wife puts the toilet paper on the roll backwards? Don’t you just sit there and say, ‘Help me Lord’?)”

Despite his own aversion to personality cults and self-help pieties, Stuever clearly likes and respects Caroll, who finds much comfort in her church. The “true openness” with which she welcomes the pastor’s nostrums and prefab pep talks moves him. He could be describing his position on Christmas as a whole when he writes, “I believe in little, except, strangely, I do believe in believers.”

Though largely immune to the Christmas spirit, Stuever really does like people, and his generosity and curiosity save “Tinsel” from becoming a bitter and all too familiar diatribe against suburban vacuity. He gets consulted by Tammie on whether a mantelpiece display looks better with two or three angels. (“You’re really starting to understand your garlands,” she tells him. “I need you … You’ve got the eye, mister.”) He sits in on a tense gift-opening session at the Trykoskis’ place. (Jeff’s mother objects to his insistence that “we have to be at our house for Christmas, because of the lights.”) He marvels as Caroll badly sprains both ankles while working as a stagehand on the megachurch’s Christmas pageant and her fellow congregation members respond with self-absorbed indifference.

Stuever may have grown up in a similar Middle American milieu (Oklahoma City), but he’s now a pop culture writer for the Washington Post’s Style section and, furthermore, gay — though if he ever told any of his sources this, he doesn’t convey their response. Instead, he endeavors to insert himself gamely but unobtrusively into the action, helping Jeff with the extension cords, sniffling over a local radio station’s mawkish “Christmas Wish” segments with Tammie and tagging along to the Junior League’s ‘Neath the Wreath holiday bazaar. (Cutesy names are as common as boob jobs in this town.) He’s there when Eitan, a young Israeli working a kiosk at the mall, witnesses the mob assembled for the opening of Santa’s Village: “It’s insane. I have never seen a Santa Claus. He is like Paris Hilton here.”

Stuever spends a lot of time wandering through the Stonebriar Centre mall, and confesses that he enjoys it. Where misanthropes see only a palace of conspicuous and wasteful consumption, Stuever also recognizes that the mall is a place where people gather and wander, sometimes without buying anything. They are “falling in love, or kissing a child … In this carbed-out consumerismo are places and moments of true bonding, places to be seen and to see others, to simply exist.”

This is not to say that Stuever doesn’t recognize the demented poignancy of our Christmas complex. One of the book’s most fetching moments comes when he ruminates on the avid collecting subculture that’s formed around a manufacturer of miniature villages called Department 56, whose products are all Dickensian Victoriana and Bavarian cottages with dollops of painted snow. Department 56 even has a “Christmas in the City” line (featuring the new Yankee Stadium!), but Stuever notes that they have “never issued a Christmas world that actually resembles our own” — by which he means suburbs like Frisco. “There is no ‘box-store village’ series in which to place that Starbucks next to the Chili’s and the FedEx Kinko’s, which could sit on zone ‘pads’ in front of a porcelain Super Target or 24-hour Wal-Mart … There is no tiny Tammie flying down a tiny Dallas North Tollway in her tiny Big Red filled with tiny tubs of tiny garlands.”

For Stuever, the “village making and controlled reality” coveted by Department 56 buffs is “a constant theme everywhere I go.” Frisco — most of which was built in the past decade — is a similarly manufactured environment, purportedly everything its residents want in life, yet not the community they choose when it’s time to construct the perfect Christmas town out of little china knickknacks. Without belaboring any of his points, Stuever gently unveils a place where, in celebrating their most iconic holiday, people long for a past that never existed, beguile each other with bogus sentimental yarns, scare themselves with the imaginary menaces lurking “outside” their sanctuary and try to retreat further into a safety that actually bores them stiff. That’s Christmas, American style: a gingerbread house too small and sweet to move into, but we keep trying all the same.

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Laura Miller is a senior writer for Salon. She is the author of "The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia" and has a Web site, magiciansbook.com. More Laura Miller.