Salon's Summer Hardcover Picks

Salon's Summer Paperback Picks

BEACH READING 1998 | PAGE 1, 2, 3
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SCOTT ROSENBERG
In a strange publicity stunt for his new saga of Internet-industry back-stabbing, "Burn Rate" (Simon & Schuster), Michael Wolff decided not to include an index in the book -- an index is only available on the Web site. Wolff claimed that he didn't want people just pulling the book off store shelves to look up their own names and find what he said about them. After reading "Burn Rate's" accounts of Web entrepreneurs' devious tactics -- including Wolff's own -- you might fairly assume that the no-index move is instead a ploy to build traffic on the book's site. In any case, "Burn Rate" is a lot better at storytelling than at name-dropping. For all the author's self-importance and dubious sincerity, and despite the book's failures of analysis and insight, it's a genuine page-turner. And its vision of an industry built on a sheer determination to incinerate investors' money is one that will keep a lot of executives awake at night, long after they've located their own names in its pages.

KATHARINE WHITTEMORE
"I had rediscovered my saline psyche," is how Jimmy Buffett puts it. He means the sea. When he's not looking for that lost shaker of salt, it seems, he's out on the bonefishing flats of the Keys, or getting mystical about the rips off Nantucket, or examining, as the song says, "that Caribbean soul I can barely control." His nice 'n' lazy newest work is "A Pirate Looks at Fifty" (Random House). It really is the perfect beach reading; yes, there's decent biographical stuff, but really the book is about beaches, or at least the water that laps upon them and the moods that produces. We're talking phrases like "paradise" and (don't go there) "mental Tiger Balm." The man's boat is even named Euphoria. Now, I'd bet Mr. Margaritaville himself would pick Peter Fonda's "Don't Tell Dad" (Hyperion) to imbibe this summer. In "Pirate," Buffett recalls how much "Easy Rider" influenced him, especially the scene where "Peter and Dennis [Hopper] are quickly pounced upon by a harem of hippie chicks, who get naked, give them dope, and ..." Fonda's book is better. But the two men are of a piece. There's the repressed childhoods (Buffett is a Catholic school victim, Fonda is wrecked by his demanding dad and suicidal mom), the drug years ("mushroom salads" for Pete, "Marley-sized spleefs" for Jim), the therapy, the fierce love of sailing. They're both beach bums, really, who made enough green to stay out on the blue. Lucky for us, they can even write.

DAVID ULIN
For me, 1998 has so far been a year of brevity. One of the books I've most enjoyed has been among the shortest, while the other wholeheartedly embraces the aesthetic that less is more. The first is Abigail Thomas' "Herb's Pajamas" (Algonquin), a collection of four loosely linked short stories that revolve around loss -- the common currency connecting all of Thomas' characters, whether they know it or not. Spare, elegant and eschewing any hint of false resolution, these narratives share only the most fleeting moments of intersection, which imbues them with the touching serendipity of real life. Equally powerful is Grace Paley's "Just As I Thought" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), a volume bringing together nearly four decades of essays and journalism that becomes a moving record of the author's political times. Paley is one of our national treasures, renowned for her exquisitely rendered fictional miniatures, and the pieces here operate with similar subtlety and, er, grace. Still more riveting, however, is Paley's hard-headed, and unreconstructed, radicalism; even at 76 -- and unlike too many of the lefties with whom she came of age in the 1950s and 1960s -- she refuses to back down.

SALLY ECKHOFF
Gayl Jones had such a terrible time last winter -- her volatile husband committed suicide, and she's been in a psychiatric hospital -- that people forgot to talk about her new novel, "The Healing" (Beacon Press). Jones is said to be shy, but her book is brightly colored and simmering with energy. She can write talking-to-yourself sentences like J.P. Donleavy, jingling chains of speech about sardines, racehorses, just about anything.

Then, how about this: Two rubes decide to bag a huge fat hibernating rattlesnake so they can sell the venom. The heat inside their truck revives Mr. Snake. Ow. Gordon Grice's "The Red Hourglass" (Delacorte), about mean nasty predators, is crawling with similar surprises. Grice comes off like a horror nerd, but you have to be weird to keep a tarantula on your kitchen table.

And here's the sleeper of the year: "Rhonda the Rubber Woman" (The Permanent Press). Norma Peterson, bless her, died of leukemia before her only book came out. Her 1940s tale of a teenage contortionist and her promiscuous mom is warm and inventive, yet has lots of bleak, lonely spots that give it wonderful tang and balance. Reading this feels like reaching through a yellow fog of years and grabbing a carnival prize.

ALBERT MOBILIO
Sun too bright for you this summer? Longing for dark shadows, dank recesses? You should crawl between the covers of Andrew Klavan's eerie thriller "The Uncanny" (Crown). Big-time Hollywood producer Richard Storm has made a string of movies based on classic English ghost tales, but when he comes to England to hunt down evidence of "one lousy uncanny thing" he finds himself plummeting through the black hole between fact and fiction. Klavan echoes 19th century Gothic masters like Edgar Allen Poe (M.R. James' ghost shows up for a cameo) to produce a speed-of-falling narrative whose plush cinematic visuals dizzy you even further. The whole gang's on board -- Nazis, witches, Norse gods, Arthurian legends -- and the ride is wicked good. In "Green Sees Things in the Waves" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), August Kleinzahler scores the rough jangle of everyday talk for poems whose music recalls the peppery bounce of Poulenc or Thelonious Monk's missing notes. Read slowly and listen to how he plunks and plinks the keys in "Tanka-Toys: A Memoir": "The clues to my being--/the bloody windsprint/the mashie niblick hanging/from a willow/the retreating aria/... Oh, I was freed/freed, I say/kneeling, teething/chopchopchopping/like a tractor piston/like an outboard coughing up lake." This new book is full of off-kilter yet dead-on observations that hover just above our recognition until their very sound trips the brainwire and the "little truth" falls into place; it's something you've always known, but now, as Keats said, it's been "proved upon the pulse." Kleinzahler's wiry tunes are what happens to unheard melodies when some smart cookie finds the volume switch.

DWIGHT GARNER
Ian McEwan's new novel, "Enduring Love," (Doubleday) has the most gripping opening passage you're likely to read in a serious novel this year -- a hot-air balloon is plummeting into an open field, and a series of onlookers rush toward it, hoping to rescue its two occupants. What none of these onlookers know is that this moment, and its tragic aftermath, will alter their lives forever. McEwan, one of literature's true black magicians, spins out this story with his enormous skill, and as always his writing is full of the kind of small pleasures (perfect sentences, acid observations) that poke you happily awake. By its close, "Enduring Love" has become a striking meditation on rationality and religion, on love's wilder states and on the nature of selfishness. How much do we give others? How much do we keep for ourselves? McEwan writes slim, interior novels; Richard Price writes sprawling, exterior ones. What links them is the ability to ensnare you with the sheer force of their narrative skills. Price's new novel "Freedomland" (Broadway), told in neon-lit prose, is an urban spin on the Susan Smith kidnapping case; it's about what happens when a woman is carjacked while her young son is sleeping in the backseat. The child goes missing, and a series of shrewdly drawn characters is sucked into the tale -- notably an affable community-based cop named Lorenzo and an aggressive local journalist named Jessie, who fights to get the woman's story. Price is known for the reporting he does before putting words to paper, and all the details here feel exactly right. Even better, "Freedomland" reads like a comet. Finally, I'd recommend Calvin Trillin's wry and self-deprecating new memoir, "Family Man" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Trillin claims that the sum of his childrearing advice is: "Try to get one that doesn't spit up. Otherwise you're on your own." But he's just, of course, being modest. This meandering book is stuffed with insight about how the Trillin family did manage to stay so close -- close enough that Trillin likes to joke that his apartment may someday become a stop on the Gray Line Tour of New York City as a place that houses "the last nuclear family in lower Manhattan."
SALON | June 15, 1998