Recommended books

Stephen Kotkin, a professor of history at Princeton University and the Woodrow Wilson School, has written (with a contribution from Jan Gross, also a professor of history at Princeton) an account of just that, a version that briskly dispenses with several currently popular theories. “Uncivil Society” reprises arguments in Kotkin’s acclaimed 2001 book about the dissolution of the USSR, “Armageddon Averted,” but with even more concision. (“Armageddon Averted” was only 300 pages long; the narrative portion of this book clocks in at half that.) The history of the Cold War — especially on the Soviet side — often seems a soporific chronicle of dull, gray men in dull, gray suits hammering out dull, gray and largely incomprehensible treaties while dictating production quotas. Kotkin proves that this story, the epochal global event of our time, can be made fascinating when described with vigor, clarity and a cobweb-slicing scorn for cant and obfuscation.

“Uncivil Society” examines the end of Soviet-style socialism in three exemplary bloc states: East Germany, Romania and Poland. Kotkin complains that on this subject most analysts “continue to focus disproportionately, even exclusively, on the ‘opposition,’ which they fantasize as a ‘civil society.’” With the exception of Poland, where the Solidarity movement constituted a real counterpart to the Communist regime, this notion of a valiant resistance who modeled a better order and spearheaded the mass uprisings of 1989 falls, in Kotkin’s view, “into the realm of fiction.” And, while he credits the West for its “steadfast” containment of the Soviet Union (“whatever the mistakes and excesses”), Kotkin doesn’t seem to regard direct Western action as a significant cause of the collapse of the USSR, either. Instead, he views the whole thing as an “implosion”; the Soviet-style establishments (“uncivil societies”) simply gave up the ghost — in some cases even helping the dissolution along.

Why would any group in possession of so much power, enjoying privileges denied to the hoi polloi, willingly surrender? As Kotkin sees it, they were terminally demoralized. The Soviet bloc elites had promised (and, he insists, mostly believed) that Communism would provide a better alternative — a living, breathing reproach to the ruthlessness of capitalism. Forced to scrape by alongside booming postwar Western economies, the Communist states (particularly East Germany) had their noses rubbed in their failure on a daily basis. Media, from Western propaganda efforts like Voice of America to TV and radio intended for Western European audiences but picked up by audiences behind the Iron Curtain, made the superior consumer goods and political freedoms of the West common knowledge and the subject of much envy and yearning.

To placate their populations and build up their production capacity, the Soviet satellite states wound up borrowing heavily from Western governments, gambling on the success of future exports. But they never managed to make goods that the rest of the world wanted, and had to borrow more cash; Kotkin persuasively argues that the regimes in most of the bloc nations realized they were living on borrowed time by the late 1980s. Mikhail Gorbachev’s reform program, a reprise of the “socialism with a human face” promised (then squashed) in the Prague Spring of 1968, turned out to be ideologically and practically impossible. To admit that Soviet-style socialism could be reformed was to allow that it wasn’t already the best possible system, confessing to decades of lying and laying the whole apparatus open to revision and revolution while the tempting example of Western-style market economies waited right next door. “Reform amounted to autoliquidation,” Kotkin writes.

Above all, the Communist establishments proved incapable of fixing their states because they lacked “initiative, independent judgement and integrity.” Their monolithic bureaucracies, where advancement was based on loyalty and obedience to superiors as well as on ideological conformity, eliminated individuals with those qualities. “Incompetence in Communist systems,” writes Kotkin, “was therefore structural.” Oppressive state security apparatus minimized and marginalized any organized opposition except in Poland, where the Catholic Church provided an encouraging example of an alternative social institution. Yet even Solidarity had not really planned to take over the government, and only ascended (briefly) to power via the Communists’ spectacular mismanagement of electoral design.

When the bloc governments began to teeter, Kotkin argues, it was the littlest things that set them off. A pastor in Romania asked 40 elderly parishioners to protest his eviction from his home. Theology students gathered to pray for peace in a Leipzig church. An East German official misspoke at a press conference. These events, tipping points in an ongoing loss of credibility, triggered what Kotkin describes as “political bank runs” on the entire system. In days, spontaneous mass demonstrations filled the streets.

Unlike hard-liners of the past, the rulers of 1989 couldn’t count on Soviet tanks and troops to subdue the crowds and provide them with a “Chinese solution” (a reference to the Tiananmen Square massacre of that summer). Gorbachev had made it clear that the USSR would not step in to save their asses as it had in Prague in 1968. But above all, what did the establishment really have to defend? “Many Communists lost interest in preserving their own system,” Kotkin writes. “Not all, but a number, of party officials preferred to become an asset-owning bourgeoisie.” They could bloody their streets to sustain regimes they already knew to be economically untenable, or (for the few with a shred or two of wherewithal), they could start thinking about how to feather their post-Soviet nests.

In their introduction, Kotkin and Gross concede that this story — in which the brave and idealistic are largely sidelined and victory comes in the form of the exhausted capitulation of an incompetent villain — is “depressing.” However, it’s not, they sardonically note, as “disheartening” as the West’s current crisis, in which elites who were supposedly selected to run things via a free-market meritocracy were equally guilty of “spectacular incomprehension, lucrative recklessness and not infrequent fraud … We can only hope that the market and democracy prove their resiliency and good governance and accountability return.” I’m guessing, though, that they won’t be holding their breaths.

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.

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.
READ SALON’S INTERVIEW

“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.
READ SALON’S REVIEW

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.

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.