How "The L Word" lost its intoxicating boundary pushing.
When “The L Word” premiered on Showtime two and a half years ago, I was intensely curious about it — all those gorgeous women, and all of them in that mesmerizing city of cars, canyons and hot tubs — Los Angeles! But I was too nervous to admit my excitement to anyone else, let alone watch it in company. I guess I was a little too curious, and slightly ashamed of how eager I — a straight girl in New York — was to drink in Jennifer Beals, Mia Kirshner and, my god, the outrageously sexy Katherine Moennig, making out (and doing so very much more) with other women.
However, thanks to the multiple airtimes — and my roommate’s bedtime of 10:30 — I could sneak watching it on my own, free of embarrassment. Eventually, as I was able to own up to my love for “The L Word,” I discovered — perhaps unsurprisingly to the rest of the general population — that all women with access to Showtime were obsessed with this show. Gay, straight, very straight — it didn’t matter. Everyone had someone to crush on — Moennig’s womanizing, androgynous Shane; Leisha Hailey’s too-cute, and very bisexual, Alice; and, in that first season, Karina Lombard’s Euro-trash femme fatale Marina. Jenny (Kirshner) was that women so many of us wondered if we were: straight, until we met the right (or very, very wrong) woman.
But now… I am back to being ashamed of my “L Word” love, but for a different reason. What started as an ambitious, artful series aiming to push the envelope of cultural acceptability has devolved into a nighttime soap opera so tedious it makes the later years of “Melrose Place” seem like the first season of “The OC.” Too many references? Let me put it this way: “The L Word” has become trash. Not just regular trash like “E!” or “90210″ reruns, but bad, bad trash — the kind so pungent and sticky that just being near it makes you feel yucky.
In an effort to push its characters — and boundaries — all over the place, the show’s writers have betrayed all of what once made it good. Shane, the intoxicating whore, became monogamous; instead of fighting off girls, she fights with just one, her girlfriend Carmen (Sarah Shahi). (No matter how hot Carmen is, watching them argue is boring.) Jenny? With her need to turn her partner Max (Daniela Sea) — a sweet pre-op FTM transsexual — into a statement, she’s overpoliticized the show. Speaking of… what’s up with the Gloria Steinem cameos? And what about killing off Dana (Erin Daniels)? It wasn’t enough to give her breast cancer, they had to make her die, within the span of a few episodes, and then have her two ex-girlfriends hook up to stifle their mutual grief.
No longer a brave exploration of smart, successful, driven women who have sex with other women, “The L Word” is just another Sunday-night drama full of desperate women who happen to be lesbians instead of housewives.
Cohen’s maternal grandfather, a former short-order cook, invented the sugar packet and Sweet ‘n’ Low, the artificial sweetener that made him a millionaire. Cohen’s mother was disinherited by her own mother, and his Uncle “Marvelous” Marvin, who took over the company, got into trouble with the FBI — a little thing they call tax evasion and criminal conspiracy. Then there’s Aunt Gladys, who hasn’t stepped out of the family home in Midwood, Queens since the Nixon administration, yet still manages to pull all the strings. With this book, Cohen aims to nail down what really happened in his clan’s highly mythologized saga. His digressions on the history of, say, Brooklyn or sugar or the Walburg banking dynasty, might strike some as padding, but he describes it all with an economical, pugnacious wit that never falters. The heart of the book, though, is a long, complicated and darkly funny family feud encompassing intrigues, sabotage and widely divergent stories about what really happened and when, and of course, who it can all be blamed on. 
A tiny protein that works in mysterious ways is the villain at the center of this elegantly spun tale of the quest to find out what elusive agent lies behind Mad Cow disease, scrapie and the brain disorder that has caused the descendants of one16th-century Venetian doctor to die of terminal sleeplessness. The story glides effortlessly from a canalside palazzo to Scottish sheep farms to the depths of the New Guinean jungles, where the members of a cannibal tribe succumbed to a plague called “the “laughing death.” Spotlight-hogging doctors battle, backstab and misbehave but eventually the culprits — christened “prions” by one media-savvy researcher — are identified. And, man, are they scary: unkillable by most conventional antibiotic and antiviral tactics — mostly because they aren’t even alive to begin with. Max writes so lucidly you hardly notice how much you’re learning, and the book’s suspenseful narrative never flags. This is science writing at its best. 
When Daniel Mendelsohn was a boy, he would walk into family gatherings and find that the mere sight of him would move his older relatives to tears. “Oh, he looks just like Shmiel!,” they would cry, in Yiddish. All Mendelsohn knew of Shmiel was that he, the oldest brother of his grandfather, had been killed, along with this wife and four daughters, by Nazis during the war. That crumb of information was tantalizing enough to inspire long-lasting curiosity and, as its subtitle makes plain — “The Lost” is Mendelsohn’s attempt to find out who these relatives were, and what exactly happened to them. After traveling thousands of miles, visiting the Ukraine, Israel and any place else where someone might have known someone else who knew his uncle, Mendelsohn discovers that the truth of what happened to his relatives was quite a bit more complicated — and surprising — than anyone had known. The story is gripping, but along the way “The Lost” reveals itself to be so much more than a Holocaust family memoir: it’s also a page-turning mystery, a lesson on how history is written and a work of religious scholarship. This is a book that you start and think: I have never read a book like this one before. 
Alice Sheldon had many selves. As a child in the 1920s, she went on safari through Africa with her socialite parents. She could fly planes and shoot guns. During World War II, she worked for military intelligence and after it, for the CIA. She was a clinical psychologist, and published a short story in the New Yorker. But her most daring and successful adventure in self-creation was posing for several years as a man, the innovative science fiction writer James Tiptree, Jr., who carried on many intense correspondences with such authors as Ursula K. Le Guin and Phillip K. Dick, until her real name and gender were discovered by tenacious fans. Everyone who knew “Tiptree” was flabbergasted to learn “he” was really a woman, but whether anyone really knew Sheldon — even her husband of decades, with whom she died in a suicide pact — is the question Julie Phillips pursues in this astute, sensitive and always fascinating biography. The life was remarkable, and so is the telling of it. 
If most food writing seems like an covert form of narcissism, Pollan explodes the genre out of its navel-gazing constraints and offers a rare, expansive view of what and how we eat. 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 formerly obscure South American grass that has manipulated humanity into making it one of the most successful plants on earth: King Corn — it’s in nearly every processed food. He highlights an obscure scientist without whose great invention — the synthesis of nitrogen fertilizer — billions of people could not have been born (or at least, not have been fed), and he explains 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 “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” — the sections on “industrial organic” farming and an entirely foraged meal are also revelatory — about this most basic of human needs. 
The unusual provenance of this novel — Eggers has written it in the first-person voice of a real man, Valentino Achak Deng, and all of the events in the story are true, although not all of them happened to Deng — is complicated. The result is sublime simplicity, the ego-less conveyance by Eggers of Deng’s plain-spoken, gentle, world-weary but never hopeless voice. One of the Lost Boys of Sudan, Deng saw his village destroyed by Arab militiamen as a little boy and fled alone into a chaotic landscape before joining a troupe of similarly dispossessed boys on an epic journey on foot to a refugee camp in Ethiopia. Hunger, thirst, lions, crocodiles and soldiers on both sides of Sudan’s civil war harried all of them and killed some. Deng finally made it to the promised land of America, but we know from the start that it proved to be no paradise. The novel’s framing device — Deng imagines telling his life story to thieves who beat and bind him while robbing his house and to the jaded officials who deal with the crime’s aftermath — is inspired; instead of making him pitiful, this silent appeal emphasizes Deng’s remarkable, ineradicable dignity. 
Deborah Eisenberg’s short stories seem ready-made for this age of overcommitment. In just a few deceptively straightforward pages you get all the depth, breadth and nuance that other writers require whole novels to build. The stories in this newest collection are all tinged to one degree or another by 9/11, but the attacks don’t feature as significantly as the depredations of age, psychiatric fragility and that chronic weakness of Eisenberg characters, self-doubt. (Tellingly, the one story here that makes 9/11 its main focus — the title story, unfortunately — is the only disappointment.) What lifts Eisenberg’s work above the usual fiction in this mode is her uncanny ability, shared only with Alice Munro, to conjure an entire multifarious life in the span of a few incidents. This gives her stories an unusual suspense; you’re always waiting for the moment when the spell takes its effect and a human being materializes right before your very eyes. 
It makes perfect sense that the best novel about 9/11 — a collective memory by now encrusted in a layer of pieties — would be a biting satire. Kalfus chronicles the awful divorce of New Yorkers Joyce and Marshall; things have gotten so acrimonious that when each one suspects the other has died in the tragedy, they both secretly rejoice. Don’t mistake this for a book about how 9/11 affected our personal lives, though. Instead, it’s for every nice middle-class American who pleads astonishment at the malice and savagery of the attacks. Kalfus shows us that the far-off national conflicts we find so baffling and complicated actually work a lot like a really bad divorce — both are furious clashes between people who can’t get along but who also can’t escape each other. And let’s face it: Most of us know a lot more about divorce than we do about the Middle East. The novel’s story — rich with betrayals and outrageous antics and a couple of expertly drawn and miserable kids — never staggers under its thematic load. It remains always razor sharp, true to life, light on its feet and sneakily tragic. 
Novels about African dictatorships are supposed to be dour and educational, the literary equivalent of Brussels sprouts — good for you if not especially tasty. The great Kenyan novelist Ngugi Wa Thiong’o capsizes that formula with “Wizard of the Crow,” an outrageously entertaining, madcap political farce set in the fictional nation of Aburiria, whose despot is known only as The Ruler and has been running things for as long as anyone can remember. When the book’s educated but destitute hero, fleeing a police constable, tries to throw the cop off his trail with a sign boasting of the awesome powers of the Wizard of the Crow, he inadvertently sets himself up as the sorcerer du jour. Soon, he’s mixed up in the affairs of scheming government ministers, fatuous businessmen, a ruthless political climber and an elusive band of rebels. The novel is full of disguises, mistaken identities, tall tales, slapstick, hairs-breadth escapes and double-crosses. Ngugi’s political satire is deep enough to apply to Midwestern regional marketing managers in addition to strutting West African tyrants — aren’t all tyrants the same, after all? — because its real subject is human folly in all its many, hilarious and heartbreaking forms. 
This is not your grandfather’s Civil War novel, but who would expect that from Stephen Wright, that rare combination of literary wild man and flawless prose stylist? A Candide-like figure named Liberty Fish — child of a renegade Southern belle and the Yankee abolitionist she eloped with — joins the Union army and wends his way back to his maternal grandfather’s plantation. Along the way, he meets all sorts of people — pirates, soldiers, preachers and con men — most of them driven half (or all the way) mad by their inability to make the American dream of freedom and the American reality of race add up to anything plausible. At the end of his journey he finds the heart of the nightmare in its ultimate, florid, night-blooming manifestation: his demented grandfather, Asa, trying to create — avant Norman Mailer — a white negro. This novel is a plummet down the black rabbit hole of American utopianism, with the brakes off and the seat belts removed, and it’s one hell of a ride. 
The enormous mistake Mitt can never admit 
Is China our future? 
The next generation of color geniuses 
I found my orgasm 
A witty, tragic series concludes 
Pick of the week: Escape from Putin’s cult 
What are Republicans thinking? 
Freedom of religion is freedom from religion 
Reality, exploded 
Now Mitt’s refusing to debate 
