F I C T I O N
Abe: A Novel of the Young Lincoln
By Richard Slotkin
Henry Holt, 478 pages
Cultural historian Richard Slotkin set himself the task of taking the handful of known facts about Abraham Lincoln's early life and imagining, in novel form, how Lincoln came to transcend the violence, inertia and racism of his "white trash" background. The result is, yes, partly an unstinting account of hardships and racial hatred among the 19th century American rural underclass, but it's also a grand frontier adventure (with a climactic trip down the Mississippi as a homage to "Huckleberry Finn"), starring the man who comes closer than any figure in American history to being a genuine folk hero brought to life.
For all his titanic inner struggles, his dark rages and his great destiny, Slotkin's Abe is tremendously endearing. Whatever we'd like to believe, history tells us that poverty and oppression tend to make people mean and small, not noble. Lincoln was one of the rare ones to take a higher path. Because of that, his heritage belongs to the whole of humanity, not just Americans. With this novel, Slotkin wipes the cosmetic sheen of patriotism off Abe's face, blows off the dust of portentous history and gives him back to us, fresh.
Excerpt | Order a copy | Original Salon review
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Being Dead
By Jim Crace
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 196 pages
Joseph and Celice, two long-married zoologists in their 50s, are murdered during a romantic moment on an English beach. As their bodies lie decomposing, Joseph's hand still grasping Celice's ankle, Jim Crace's bold and affecting novel begins its work. Crace intertwines several threads: He looks backward over the happy moments, the disappointments and the compromises of Joseph and Celice's lives, reconstructs the events of the day on which they met their deaths, offers a naturalist's view of what's happening to the corpses and tells the story of how their sullen, still-rebellious adult daughter learns that they've been killed and reassesses her own life.
Written in an assured, thoughtful, canny voice, "Being Dead" glows with surprising humor, not least in the many zoological details Crace invents to fill out his protagonists' careers. This unique novel's focus on two deaths becomes, paradoxically, a way to celebrate life: This life may be all there is, Crace suggests, but if we allow ourselves to love and be loved, and to notice the teeming world around us, we're part of something larger than ourselves.
Excerpt | Order a copy | Original Salon review
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Lying Awake
By Mark Salzman
Alfred A. Knopf, 182 pages
A simple, uncluttered novel about the unfathomable challenges of the spiritual path, "Lying Awake" takes Sister John of the Cross, a Carmelite nun who lives cloistered in a Los Angeles monastery, through the hardest decision of her life. The nun suffers terrible headaches that give way to ecstatic mystical visions and manic bouts of writing. Her poetry and essays have brought her the respect of her fellow sisters and much-needed funds to the monastery itself; her books have become bestsellers. Then she learns that all of it -- headaches, visions and creative furor -- are the result of a form of epilepsy caused by a small but operable lesion on her brain. Should she agree to surgery that will end her increasingly unmanageable seizures but will also destroy their gifts? Does the bodily source of her visions nullify their spiritual significance?
Salzman sets Sister John's dilemma against the background of the carefully rendered routine of the cloister and a religious philosophy that views life as a series of often baffling tests. But "Lying Awake," written by a non-Catholic, is about more than just the trials of faith; it speaks to all who pledge their lives to a mystery -- whether it's art, or justice, or even something as commonplace as marriage -- and find themselves transformed as a result.
Excerpt | Order a copy | Original Salon review
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The Name of the World
By Denis Johnson
HarperCollins, 129 pages
This slim, nearly perfect novel is narrated by Michael Reed, a man who has been suspended in a state of grief in the four years since his wife and young daughter were killed in a car crash. He's at the end of a temporary appointment teaching history at a picture-perfect Midwestern university, and it's slowly sinking in that he's also at the end of his rope. Alternately drifting, stumbling and crashing through the final days of his brief academic career, he decides to start making contact with the people around him, including a raunchy, free-spirited female student who takes him into some unexpected territory.
Denis Johnson nimbly merges his serious themes -- loss, sorrow, the possibility of personal transformation -- with a feather-light satire of academic silliness and inertia. "The Name of the World" is so graceful and easygoing, its prose so full of charm and sly humor, that you barely register its great ambition; Johnson's poignant, devastating gravity sneaks up and taps politely on your shoulder.
Excerpt | Order a copy | Original Salon review
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White Teeth
By Zadie Smith
Random House, 448 pages
Zadie Smith's first novel is an exhilarating, hilarious fictional ride through contemporary London. Smith has created a large and irresistible cast of characters, chief among them the plodding, good-natured Archie and the crafty, proud Samad, a working-class white and a Bengali Muslim who are best friends from their World War II days. Archie's young Jamaican wife, Clara, who's escaped a strict Jehovah's Witness upbringing, manages to befriend Samad's fierce, shrewd wife, Alsana. The two couples' children, the half-black Irie and the Bengali twins Millat and Magid, navigate the social minefields of an adolescence unfolding between cultures, defying their parents' expectations in continually surprising ways. By turns whimsical, satirical and wise, always generous, "White Teeth" makes multiculturalism seem not just an inevitable outcome of British colonial history but a ticket to the kind of deeper awareness of human nature that makes us want to read novels in the first place.
Excerpt | Order a copy | Original Salon review
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