Salon's Summer Hardcover Picks

Salon's Summer Paperback Picks

BEACH READING 1998 | PAGE 1, 2, 3
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STEPHANIE ZACHAREK
In summer, the next best thing to taking a road trip is reading about one. In "Lone Star Swing: On the Trail of Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys" (Norton), Scottish writer Duncan McLean treks across Texas in a rented car (having gotten his driver's license just months earlier, on the other side of the road, no less) in search of clues to the life and music of his idol, Western swing superstar Bob Wills. McLean is a game and trustworthy guide: He's genuinely interested in meeting and chatting with Texans, especially the musicians who actually knew and worked with Wills, and the result is an earnest, off-beat, sometimes touching travelogue.

In his fast-moving, tough-talking and devilishly inventive novel "Bunny Modern" (Little Brown), David Bowman escorts us to the year 2020, showing us a world from which electricity has mysteriously vanished and fertility has taken a powder. It shouldn't be a particularly happy place, yet Bowman's book is cheerful in a sick sort of way. His sense of humor is breezily sophisticated and sufficiently cracked, but there are always real feelings lying beneath his sometimes goofy veneer.

And in his second novel, "Starting Out in the Evening" (Crown), Brian Morton builds a subtle, engaging story around three central characters: an aged novelist, the eager, shallow student who's hoping to write a thesis about his work and the novelist's daughter, who isn't much interested in reading her father's books but who loves him with fierce tenderness. Morton's style is refreshingly straightforward. Instead of bundling his prose in heavy-duty metaphors and flowery language, he shapes emotional contours for his characters out of simple, light layers. It's the kind of book that effortlessly makes you think and feel at the same time.

LAURA MILLER
In hot weather, give me the slim volume, where the sentences are so carefully sculpted that it doesn't matter how long I space out between reading each one. Restrained books seem cooler somehow. I'd recommend Jonathan Lethem's "Girl in Landscape" (Doubleday) to readers seeking something strikingly original, a combination of adventure, imagination, piercing domestic realism, intelligent wrangling with the mythos of the American West and one of the best 13-year-old girls ever written by a man (or anyone for that matter). It's the story of Pella Marsh, whose family relocates to a frontier planet where she faces off against a charismatic but domineering rancher and slowly shapes an adult self around the loss of her mother to cancer. Jo Ann Beard's autobiographical stories, in the collection "Boys of My Youth" (Little, Brown), mostly don't tackle weighty topics (except for a piece about the day a lone gunman killed several of her co-workers), but they have an easy, slangy, cantankerous charm that's nearly irresistible. Beard has uncanny powers of recollection, particularly when it comes to early childhood. Her memories of her 3-year-old self, a personality forming itself as raw drives collide bruisingly with the world, are refreshingly unsentimental -- tart as a glass of iced lemonade.

CHARLES TAYLOR
"Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years 1963-65" by Taylor Branch (Simon & Schuster), the second volume of Branch's projected biographical trilogy about the life of Martin Luther King Jr., is equal to the narrative, emotional and moral complexity of the Civil Rights Movement. Alternating between 1983 and 1996, "The House of Sleep" (Knopf), British novelist Jonathan Coe's labyrinthine tale of coincidence, missed connections and unexpected reunions, combines the farce of Wodehouse with the rage and compassion of Dickens. Smart, engaging and possessed of a becoming light touch, Laurence O'Toole deftly knocks every anti-porn argument on its head in "Pornocopia" (Serpent's Tail). What separates him from academics and social critics who've done the same thing is he's a fan and not ashamed to admit it. Slacker noir sounds like a genre invented by some young sharpie on the make. In her first novel, "Like a Hole in the Head" (St. Martin's Press), Jen Banbury doesn't feel the need to impress us with toughness, and she isn't ashamed of the emotion and fear behind her heroine's tough exterior. Banbury gets the mixture of comedy and thrills just right. Read it before the movie version slated to star the new patron saint of the terminally insecure, Calista Flockhart.

LAURA GREEN
1998 has been a good year, so far, for the pleasures of the traditional novel: imaginary worlds made solid by detail; characters and landscapes sympathetic in their familiarity and provocative in their particularity. I loved Anna Quindlen's "Black and Blue" for the wry voice of its damaged but courageous heroine, a battered wife on the run, although I wish Quindlen hadn't abandoned her to a damsel-in-distress plot at the end. Toni Morrison's "Paradise" offers her characteristic strengths: lush (if occasionally overinflated) prose; vivid re-creation of often hidden chapters of American history; and characters whose iron determination is beaten into strange shapes on the anvil of suffering. "Paradise" is also a page-turning psychological thriller, carefully woven of potentially disparate elements -- the interlocking narratives of women fleeing from the traumas concealed by the benign words "home" and "love"; the unusual setting of a historically black Middle-American utopia; the inevitable conflict between a carefully nurtured ideal of black self-sufficiency and the changing political realities of the 1970s. The fundamental mystery of "Paradise," however, is one that "Black and Blue" also addresses: How do our dreams of creation turn into nightmares of destruction?

PETER KURTH
Six months into the year and with dozens of new titles now safely in the dumpster, I can recommend three splendid books for summer reading -- two novels and a case history, each of them providing the kind of sweeping, enthralling read that's perfect for lazy days. Start with T. Coraghessan Boyle's "Riven Rock" (Viking), the novelized history of Chicago millionaire Stanley McCormick, heir to the "Reaper" fortune, and his feminist wife, Catherine, whose tortured marriage survived McCormick's incarceration with schizophrenia and gave them both whatever they knew of passionate, consummate love. Boyle is a wizard of word and detail, turning what might otherwise have been a grim study of madness and loss into a delightful valentine to the McCormicks and their circle. Similarly, in "A Widow For One Year" (Random House), John Irving trots out the best he has to offer in a rollicking family portrait that revolves mainly around love, sex and the nature of creative writers. It's familiar Irving territory but beautifully told -- wide, magisterial and, through the prism of Irving's black humor, deeply moving. Finally, I vastly enjoyed Philip Hoare's "Oscar Wilde's Last Stand" (Arcade), an account of the notorious "Billings Trial" in England in 1918, when the "Salome" dancer Maud Allan brought suit for libel against Member of Parliament and right-wing fire-breather Noel Pembleton Billings, whose wartime scare-tactics alleged that the Germans had a "secret list" of 47,000 prominent Britons who were secretly -- and not so secretly -- homosexual, and that Allan herself was a leading devotee of the "Cult of the Clitoris." A wonderful social history, chronicling the first of many "Trials of the Century" it demonstrates yet again that sexual hypocrisy knows no particular time, place or nationality: It is permanent and universal.

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