Our Picks: Books

No matter. In the age of the echo chamber, popularity and talent and lofty ideals, when combined with a tendency to split hairs, will only win you the widespread resentment of other, far less popular fallen idealists. It's not surprising, then, that Franzen is garnering a new wave of contempt in anticipation of the Aug. 31 release of his new novel. Thanks to a gushing, preemptive New York Times review ("a masterpiece of American fiction") and reports that Obama himself, at this very moment, may just be perusing the pages of "Freedom" on Martha's Vineyard, we are forced to encounter Franzen much as we encounter the faintly competitive urban perfectionists he portrays in his new novel: We have just enough information to revile him, but not enough information to truly understand him.

Or at least, that's how Franzen quite cleverly begins his story. We meet Patty and Walter Berglund first through the neighborhood gossip about them. There is nothing at all wrong with this couple, and that's precisely what's so wrong with them. "They paid nothing for their Victorian then killed themselves for ten years renovating it," Franzen writes, and we know this pair immediately. As Franzen puts it, they are the sorts of privileged liberals who have the time to wonder, "Was bulgar really necessary?" and "How elaborate did a kitchen water filter actually need to be?" Patty Berglund, an overachieving homemaker, alienates her neighbors with her relentless attention to detail, yet she sprinkles self-deprecation into all of her conversations, to the point where they wonder if such exaggerated self-loathing is the tic of someone who is "trying to spare the feelings of less accomplished homemakers" -- or maybe she's just trying to disguise her superiority complex.

The almost cartoonish exaggerations and gossipy distance of the first section of the novel are a neat trick, really: By the time Patty's overzealous child-rearing backfires and her intolerance for those who don't share her values starts to emerge, we're primed to enjoy watching her take a hard fall.

This is when Franzen brings us in closer, in an autobiographical segment ostensibly written by Patty herself, about her childhood, the mistakes she made in child-rearing, and her regrets concerning her marriage. Thanks to a particularly brutal betrayal by her socially conscious but somewhat callous parents, Patty's overbearing nature is soon rendered not only understandable, but almost valiant. And yet, Patty remains a recalcitrant, demanding, obnoxiously pushy force throughout the course of the novel, always saying too much and then regretting it, always lavishing love and attention on her favorite son while showing inadequate appreciation of her devoted husband. We sense that Patty's many resources -- time, money, love, luck -- only bring her the luxury of misery. It's as if the more room she's given to thrive, the more she creates enemies and neglects her allies and eats herself alive. Patty is a delectable reflection of the times, in other words: good intentions undone by pent-up anger, misguided devotion, and the insatiable demands of an oversize ego, an ego that goes unchecked because Patty has the impulse control of a small child.

Even as Franzen sets forth this conflicted modern archetype and others -- at once loathsome and likable, self-deluded and admirable, self-serving and self-sacrificing -- he dares to nurture his affection for each of them. He has the same sense of humor about his characters that John Updike once did: He pokes fun at them, but he delves into their pasts so we can see how their weaknesses and flaws were once adaptive traits that pulled them out of dead-end situations. Walter Berglund strikes us as a self-righteous, prim little man, until we see how he's dedicated most of his life to taking care of his alcoholic father and misguided but sweet mother, no matter the cost. His friend Richard Katz is a prototypical egocentric rocker type, with all of the effortless charisma and lady-slaying tendencies that entails, but his devotion to (and envy for) Walter hints at an undercurrent of self-loathing beneath his ennui. Walter and Patty's son, Joey, is the ultimate blustery, handsome golden child whose petulant lashing out at his parents would be intolerable, if not for the loyalty and sweetness in him that he has trouble accessing and expressing. It's hard not to feel for these characters. Although we're often suspicious of their motives or question their loyalty and goodness, we still want them to get what they want, even when we know it's all a big, misguided mistake.

Of course, the really impressive feat here is Franzen's larger portrayal of the misguided mistakes of middle-class America: the delusions we indulge in our pursuit of happiness, the ways we neglect the greater good for the sake of our little family units, and the difficulty of setting aside our personal needs to save a world on the brink of total collapse. We're free, yes, and we use our freedom to build our own little fussy, claustrophobic, granite-countertopped islands, while the rest of the world goes straight to hell around us. Sooner or later, with our racing thoughts and our cruelly competitive urges, we join them there, Maui vacations and Wakefield furniture be damned.

"Freedom" is a multilayered, richly imagined novel, full of big ideas and provocative characters and a riveting plot. But even as we delight in Franzen's characters and understand how they got to be the way they are, we don't quite feel how it is to be inside their skin. Maybe that's because the characters themselves seem to watch their own actions from a distance. When Patty is pushed to the brink of ruining everything she's built, she remains oddly detached. "There came to her, with curious vividness, a kind of PowerPoint list of names in descending order of their owners' goodness." When Walter becomes tempted to give in to an obsessive distraction that's been dominating his life for several months, he never seems to lose himself to it completely. "There was no controlling narrative: he seemed to himself a purely reactive pinball in a game whose only object was to stay alive for staying alive's sake." Even moments of extreme passion are described with all of the feverishness of high-level diplomatic negotiations: "He would have liked to just be held by her for a while, but her body had other ideas, and his own body agreed with them."

This distance may reflect a conscious attempt by Franzen to capture the alienated thinking of the modern neurotic. There are heated arguments, dark nights of the soul and crystalline moments when something new is revealed about this or that character, but even the players involved observe most of it from the psychiatrist's leather chair. "Walter was frightened by the long-term toxicity they were creating with their fights," Franzen writes of a low point in Walter's marriage. "Her level of distress seemed borderline dangerous," Joey rationally observes of his depressed girlfriend. At another point Joey wonders, "Why had he stuck with Connie? The only answer that made sense was that he loved her." Even as Franzen zooms in, the messy, indistinct core of each character's experience is never fully breached. And when the emotionally catastrophic events take place, they're described in retrospect or observed with casual indifference: "On the whole, he felt that his decision not to dive from the bridge in Washington had been a good one."

At other times, Franzen uses intellectual distance to demonstrate the impossibility of separating the personal from the political. As betrayal and death and other twists loom on the horizon, we're treated to lengthy passages on how to resolve the estate of the deceased, or we disappear into the folds of mountaintop removal mining in West Virginia. These diversions fit into the rather tight premise of the novel, concerning as it does the push and pull of capitalist pressures against honoring the greater good. As much as we might enjoy a more visceral experience of Patty or Walter or Richard, these are characters who never quite manage to get to the heart of any matter without being led astray by their own neuroses.

Ultimately, "Freedom" is a complexly layered, richly imagined domestic tale about personal responsibility that dares to challenge the long-term global ramifications of our most private choices. Because, when even the hair-splitting idealists among us are ricocheting around in their little pinball machines instead of standing up for what they believe in, the world really is in big trouble. 

As the Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Gail Caldwell observes in her new memoir, "Let's Take the Long Way Home," profound grief, like the pain of childbirth, is something we're mostly "wired to forget" because we couldn't go on if we knew it was waiting for us out there somewhere. "Remembering the suck and force of death," she writes, "is like trying to hold water in your hand." Emotionally, it's another country, one we hope to visit rarely. And so, when we do arrive on its shore, we're foolishly amazed to learn that some literary idol like Didion or C.S. Lewis has been there, too, and can describe it so exactly. In better times, we give their memoirs to bereaved friends because these books can provide them with a kind of companionship that we, for all our sympathy, can only offer from afar.

"Let's Take the Long Way Home" is not like most grief memoirs in one important respect: It's about losing a friend, not a parent, child, sibling or spouse. Caldwell's best friend, the writer Caroline Knapp, died within weeks of being diagnosed with cancer in 2002; she was 43. While Caldwell describes this in the book's opening sentence as "an old, old story," it's also a new one because the friendship between Knapp and Caldwell was the product of unprecedented historical conditions. Both women were single by choice, living happily alone (Knapp once wrote an essay for Salon titled "The Merry Recluse"), and devoted to their vocations.

That doesn't mean either was isolated. At one point, Caldwell recalls how, in the days after Knapp's death, she comforted herself by making a list of her surviving close friends and posting it on her refrigerator: "These were the people I could call at three a.m.," she explains. "I never called anyone at three a.m., probably because I had the list." If Knapp had once been the first name on that list, she was never the only one.

The current age suffers from a failure of the imagination when it comes to intimacy between people linked by neither blood nor sex. Knapp and Caldwell first bonded as fellow dog owners and over the next six years they met up every few days to walk their dogs together and talk for hours. (The title refers to something Knapp would say in the car on the way home, a way of prolonging the conversation.) "Finding Caroline," Caldwell writes, "was like placing a personal ad for an imaginary friend, then having her show up at your door funnier and better than you had conceived." Although Caldwell still had both parents, back in Texas, and Knapp had her twin sister and an on-again/off-again lover they both referred to as "the last good boyfriend in America," they spent holidays and summer vacations together. After Knapp died, Caldwell "suspected no one would ever know me so well again."

Sociologists sometimes describe what Caldwell and Knapp had together as a "family of choice," and most of "Let's Take the Long Way Home" recalls how they made this miracle together. Caldwell was a decade older, an adventurous Westerner transplanted to Cambridge, Mass., book critic for the Boston Globe and an inveterate rule-breaker. Knapp, the good girl in the duo, was the daughter of a psychiatrist and an artist and had stayed in her hometown. She'd survived anorexia and alcoholism, and wrote a celebrated memoir about the latter. A history of alcoholism was something the two women had in common, although Caldwell rarely shared this fact with anyone besides fellow AA members. Both women were writers, of course, with a ravenous appetite for solitude, but also, as "Let's Take the Long Way Home" demonstrates, a great talent for friendship.

Caldwell's writing is serene, wry and meditative, rather than raw, but even so, it's clear she lost one of the most important relationships in her life when Knapp died. I half expected that someone would carelessly wind up offending her by not taking it seriously enough -- after all, the two women were "just" friends. To my surprise, the only person who ever tried to do this was Caldwell herself, who in the confusion and doubt of mourning would sometimes say, "Oh well, maybe we weren't that close." Anyone who heard this, she reports, "would burst out laughing."

"Let's Take the Long Way Home" is a slender and beautiful book, and if Caldwell's language occasionally fogs up with immaterialities, she never stoops to tear-jerking or sentiment. Which is not to say she won't make you cry. It might be something as simple as her first-page description of love's tempo that does it: "For years," she writes, "we had played the easy daily game of catch that intimate connection implies. One ball, two gloves, equal joy in the throw and return." Anyone who's ever had that and lost it -- or can imagine what it might feel like to lose it -- will recognize how precious it is. The losing isn't the exceptional part of this story; everyone loses something, sooner or later. The wonder lies in finding it in the first place.

Referenced in this article

Caroline Knapp's essay, "The Merry Recluse"

More Salon stories by or about Caroline Knapp

Also, it's a love story, and as super-sad as the title promises. Sometime in the next decade or so, Lenny Abramov, an indifferently effective sales representative for an outfit called Post-Human Services, meets Eunice Park, a Korean-American recently graduated from Elderbird College (the equivalent, I'm guessing, of Andover) with a double major in Images and Assertiveness. He's 39 and preoccupied with the bodily decay he hopes to correct if he can ever afford his own company's services: They sell "life extension" and "dechronification," but only to HNWIs (High Net-Worth Individuals — this is an acronym-crazed world we're talking about). Lenny is instantly smitten, bewitched by Eunice's blend of youthful beauty and surly attentiveness. She calls him "nerd face" and "old," but kindly adjusts his shirt cuffs and shows him how to properly brush his teeth.

Lenny and Eunice's rickety affair unfolds in a New York City smartening itself up for a visit from China's central banker, "unofficially the world's most powerful man." In this economy, the most desirable commodities have prices pegged to the yuan. Something called the Bipartisan Party has taken over the government, and the hardline policies of Secretary of Defense Rubenstein are applauded by Lenny's parents — Soviet émigrés from way back who watch nothing but FoxLiberty-Prime and FoxLibertyUltra in the sanctity of the Long Island enclave Lenny describes as their "vibrant right-wing habitat."

The most slicing satire in this novel, however, is reserved for the technologized culture of everyday urban life; Shteyngart is the Joseph Heller of the information age. His characters carry networked devices called äppäräti wherever they go, emitting (willingly or not) such data as their cholesterol and stress levels, credit rankings, self-esteem and relationship history, as well as their off-the-cuff evaluations of friends and strangers. "Learn to rate everyone around you," a co-worker admonishes Lenny: The instantaneously broadcasted metrics include such categories as Personality, Sustainability and Fuckability. When a friend suggests that they "FAC" while hanging out in a bar, clueless Lenny has to be told that this acronym means "'Form A Community' ... It's, like, a way to judge people. And let them judge you." (Lenny, by the way, comes in last place among 40 in the category of "Male Hotness.")

Shteyngart's future America is a land of run-on corporate monikers ("LandOLakesGMFordCredit") and capitalized yet disturbingly vague careers: middle-class people work in either Retail, Credit or Media. Journalism as we know it has been replaced by "streaming" narcissists, whose "shows" consist of a mishmash of political commentary, health tips, celebrity gossip, nostalgia, porn and discussions of such Seinfeldian trivia as "the 'wah-wuh' sound of the doors closing on the 6 train versus the resigned 'sheesh' sound on the L." One of Lenny's best friends dates a woman "who spends about seven hours a day streaming about her weight" (her show's signature line is "Hey, girlfriend, gots muffintop?") Another friend streams critiques of U.S. foreign policy "intermixed with his own hardcore gay sex."

The peril in writing about satire this accurate is that it's tempting to list every clever little dart that lands right in the bull's-eye. I could go on about how perfectly Shteyngart captures the poignant, adolescent crudity adopted by Eunice and her girlfriends; their pet names for each other include "ass hoo-kah," "slut" and, of course, "betch." (They also shop for sportswear in the JuicyPussy line on a website called AssLuxury.) Since the narrative is divided between Lenny's old-fashioned diary entries and Eunice's e-mails and IMs, we know that behind all that pornographic faux swagger these girls are perilously vulnerable.

That's the difference between Shteyngart and the average literary satirist (or even an above-average one, like Martin Amis): his warmth. I almost attached the "mercilessly" to the word "accurate" in the first sentence of the paragraph above, but had to stop myself, because "Super Sad True Love Story" is in fact overflowing with mercy. In Eunice, Lenny sees two elements: the tough, family-first immigrant fiber inherited from her parents, which is what the two of them have in common, and a history-free American optimism manifested as commodity worship. He loves both. Watching her shop for clothes, he marvels at, and pities, her "attempt to extract meaning from an artifact that contained mostly thread. If only beauty could explain the world away. If only a nippleless bra could make it all work."

It's a high-wire act, pulling off a novel that's simultaneously so biting and so compassionate, and in his earlier books Shteyngart, while unfailingly shrewd and funny, wasn't always this tender. "Super Sad True Love Story" is indeed a sadder, and also a better, book. Perhaps it's the setting that brings it out in him: an America he could only truly love now that he thinks it's melting away. (He can make you feel the loss of Lenny's co-op apartment as a muted Chekovian tragedy, the passing of an era in 750 square feet.) That's what slips through Lenny's fingers in the personified form of Eunice Park, the fleeting, hopeless dream of escaping the universal fate of humankind. "Forget it, Lenny," you want to whisper in his ear. "It's Absurdistan."

Referenced in this article:

Salon's review of "The Russian Debutante's Handbook"

Salon's review of "Absurdistan"

Buy These Titles

Super Sad True Love Story

by Gary Shteyngart

• $15.21

Absurdistan

by Gary Shteyngart

• $10.80

The Russian Debutante's Handbook

by Gary Shteyngart

• $10.80

O'Brien's title deliberately echoes Edgar Allan Poe's tale of aristocratic degeneration,"The Fall of the House of Usher" -- fittingly enough, since both the real-life victim and the perpetrator of the murder at the center of this story counted Poe among their favorite authors. It also resembles "The Magnificent Ambersons": if not the novel by Booth Tarkington (which I haven't read), then definitely Orson Welles' great, butchered film based on it. While it's the story of a homicide, it's also an account of how a once-great American family fell from vitality into decay even as the pastoral nation they helped to build was transformed into an industrialized dynamo.

The Walworths were an old New York State clan who traced their ancestors back to a lord mayor of London, specifically, the one who killed Wat Tyler, leader of the peasant revolt of 1381. The first American Walworth came to this country in 1680 and the family reached its pinnacle with Reuben Hyde Walworth, the last man to hold the position of chancellor of New York state. The chancellor was a magistrate who essentially ran the state's legal system; Reuben preferred to do this from the parlor of his large house in the spa town of Saratoga Springs. That he was able to do so, O'Brien writes, perfectly illustrates the "coziness" of his position.

So it was a shock when Mansfield, son of the late, esteemed chancellor, was shot dead in a New York City hotel room in 1873. Even more shocking was the fact that Mansfield's own son, Frank, had pulled the trigger. Then, as now, the media seized on sensational trials with relish, denouncing Frank as the perpetrator of a crime -- parricide -- considered exotically barbaric, the stuff of Greek myth. It was, the Brooklyn Eagle announced, "the blackest deed of modern times," committed by the scion of a once impeccably respectable and well-connected New York dynasty. Inflaming the scandal was the much-remarked "coolness" of the culprit, whose "utmost calm" and dandified appearance made him an emblem of heartless, fashionable youth. The New York Herald saw in Frank Walworth "a depth of depravity that we shudder to contemplate ... A nameless horror takes possession of the mind."

O'Brien, a noted critic and editor in chief of the Library of America, might be expected to fill "The Fall of the House of Walworth" with explanations and context, spelling out for his readers what the events he describes signified in the rapidly changing world of late 19th-century America and suggesting parallels in the present day. Rather daringly, he refrains from this, providing only the minimum of background information required to make the story intelligible. His readers are left to draw their own conclusions and meanings from the story of the Walworths and their fall, which is what really makes this book like a novel.

It's those evocative empty spaces, where O'Brien invites us to speculate on such mysteries as the possible vein of insanity running through the Walworth line, that give this book its remarkable eeriness. Like Frank's daughter, Clara, the last of the Walworths, sequestered in the clan's half-derelict Saratoga mansion in the book's opening sentences, we, too, are permitted to roam these forsaken rooms on our own recognizance.

O'Brien was fortunate: The Walworths were prodigious writers -- of letters, journals, poetry, monographs and, yes, novels. He enjoyed exceptional access to their inner lives, thanks to an archive in Saratoga that allowed him to study "these individuals from many angles and at times with great intimacy."

Mansfield, the victim, was a tragicomic figure, the author of what one contemporary observer characterized as "dish-water little novels": overwritten potboilers full, according to O'Brien, of "moaning winds and impenetrable gloom, bells tolling at midnight, ominously deserted metropolitan streets, cells in which unnamed prisoners were brutally punished." Each of these books featured "the same essential self-portrait: the protagonist was always an isolated hero of rare genius and moral worth whose qualities had gone somehow unappreciated by those around him." Once, when Mansfield wrote of a mistreated younger brother who discovers "the key to the buried gold of lost Atlantis" hidden in a portrait and ventures into Kentucky's Mammoth Caves to find it, he achieved a modest popular hit.

Nevertheless, Mansfield Walworth seems to have been bad nearly from birth; even Frank's harshest critics acknowledged that the father was, in the words of the Sun newspaper, "savage, sottish and licentious." The son's motive was to protect his mother, from whom his father had separated but to whom Mansfield still sent letters overflowing with profane curses and mortal threats. He would kill her, both of her sons and her brother, he swore. He had already beaten her in the past, on one occasion nearly biting off her finger. Mansfield also ran up debts on an anticipated inheritance his father knew better than to leave to him and was briefly arrested on a charge of suspected treason during the Civil War.

Veering from the appalling to the pitiful to the ridiculous, Mansfield is a fantastic character, as is Ellen, his wife -- also his stepsister. The two fell in love after his widowed father married her widowed mother and while the two young people were under the sway of Mansfield's brother, a charismatic Roman Catholic priest. (O'Brien traces a thread of religious mania through the generations of Walworths.) To rebel against the starchy Yankee Presbyterianism of the chancellor and his forebears, Mansfield and Ellen embraced an extravagant Romantic emotionalism. Mansfield never ceased to regard himself as a persecuted Byronic figure, but Ellen soon learned better.

In the later sections of the book, O'Brien seems understandably impressed with Ellen, who blossomed into a woman of great energy, discipline and initiative after her husband's death. She became a historian, an activist (for historical preservation) and the first woman elected to the Saratoga school board. She studied law, ran a boarding school, co-founded the Daughters of the American Revolution and was appointed director of the Women's National War Relief Association during the Spanish-American War. Yet she constantly struggled against the dead weight of her children, almost all of whom seemed to carry some version of the Walworth curse: Frank never recovered from his ordeal, one daughter joined an austere, fanatical convent and her youngest son became a hermit living in a "hut" in the forests of Virginia before cutting his own throat.

Perhaps it's for the best that they finally died out, yet O'Brien's book makes their decline so moodily diverting that I decided to check out the Walworth Mansion the next time I'm in the Saratoga area. Alas, as the final two sentences of "The Fall of the House of Walworth" explain, "It was demolished in 1955. A gas station occupies the site today."

"Zoo Story" unfolds over the course of six years, and while it lures you in with the elephants (and tigers and chimps), it's Salisbury who really sets the hook. Despite a tempest of animal-rights protests surrounding the elephants' sale to Lowry Park, the wild creatures seemed to settle in pretty well. Salisbury, however, enjoys an apotheosis and suffers a downfall, a story entailing mutinous zookeepers, the tragic death of one of the zoo's residents by Salisbury's own hand, a wife's thoughtless mistake, shady business dealings, and the most irresistible news hook of all time: runaway monkeys.

French makes a conscientious attempt to address the ethical snarls of zookeeping -- a practice that many animal-rights activists would prefer to see entirely eliminated but also the only means of survival for some endangered species. Zoos are, he writes, the ironic manifestation of our "wish to love and protect other species even as we scorched their forests and poisoned their rivers and shoved them toward oblivion." He never presents zoos as an unqualified good, but given that the book's impressively intensive reporting required him to spend countless hours hanging out with the zoo's staff and describing events from their point of view, that's where the sympathies of "Zoo Story" gravitate. French quotes from statements issued by anti-zoo factions, but did not, apparently, interview them, so they come across as distant hecklers, jeering from far beyond the margins of the main events.

The book originated as a series of feature articles for the St. Petersburg Times, and it must be said that French's style here never rises above the workmanly, meat-and-potatoes standard of the daily newspaper. On the other hand, it's also blessedly free of the padding so often found in more "writerly" and less journalistic nonfiction books; there's no potted history of zoos and no labored effort to incorporate the author's "personal story" into the narrative -- even though the acknowledgments reveal that, when he started reporting on the zoo, French was afraid of animals.

All the artistry in "Zoo Story" comes in the form of scene-setting and storytelling, at which French most certainly excels. He sketches the difficult history of the zoo's longest resident, a chimpanzee named Herman who was rescued from animal dealers in Liberia and raised as the doted-upon third "child" in the family of an American mining executive. Chimps are fantastically strong for their size and unpredictably aggressive, so the family finally had to send him out of the house. Lowry Park was the closest zoo, and Herman's human "father" visited him there regularly, but the love lavished on the ape was an ambiguous gift. It left this miniature King Kong sexually fixated on human females (he liked blondes with bare shoulders, and raged at any man who touched the woman keepers he regarded as "his") and uninterested in breeding with his own kind.

Nevertheless, Herman appears in "Zoo Story" as the good alpha male, a sensitive diplomat adept at calming the histrionics that regularly flared among Lowry Park's chimps. (One primatologist characterizes the animals as "drama queens.") He stayed by the side of a baby who got his head stuck in some netting and took the group's most vulnerable and picked-upon member under his wing. So when, in the course of "Zoo Story," Herman falls prey to the Borgia-like scheming of the alpha female, it comes as a palpable shock.

In counterpoint to Herman, there's Lex Salisbury, basted with seemingly every cliché known to business journalism. He's a "hard-driving" visionary who can be "hell on the minions who toil beneath," who likes to "make his own rules" and flaunts a "larger than life" image involving a safari hat and a cheesy nickname -- El Diablo Blanco. French ponders the conundrum of Salisbury, who unquestionably pushed Lowry Park into the upper echelon of American zoos, but who eventually managed to alienate almost everyone who worked for him. His relentless ambition and self-confidence accomplished much, but it also led him to think he could get away with setting up a for-profit animal park on the side and with allowing that project to become hopelessly entangled with the not-for-profit Lowry Park zoo.

Salisbury's rise and fall would be a rich saga even if it didn't involve him taking up a shotgun to deal with the results of an inexperienced keeper's mistake. (The experienced keepers had mostly quit, protesting poor working conditions, an emphasis on commercialism over conservation and Salisbury's unrelenting demands for greater productivity.) Fate handed French (and Salisbury's critics) a precious gift, however, when in 2008, the CEO made a major error of his own by placing 15 patas monkeys on a moat-enclosed island in his pet project, Safari Wild. Salisbury hadn't taken into account two key facts: 1) Patas monkeys can swim and 2) they're "officially the fastest monkeys on Earth." The monkeys staged a jail break and for eight months roamed the greater Tampa area at will, stealing food, killing the batteries in tractors by playing with their switches all night and generally making Salisbury look foolish.

Likening the behavior of human alpha males to their animal counterparts is a bit of a gimme at this stage, but comparing and contrasting the nurturing leadership of Herman to the dictatorship of Salisbury -- something French does with admirable lightness -- is inspired. It's also sobering to watch young zookeepers, filled with winning enthusiasm and camaraderie, being ground down by the human world's equivalent of evolutionary pressure. "At the zoo," French writes, "every day was another lesson on living in a world where there were no more pure choices." And you don't even need to look in the cages to see that.

Referenced in this article: Thomas French's series of feature articles on the Lowry Park Zoo can be found on the St. Petersburg Times' website.

In other words, Frank looks like one of crime fiction's stock crusader types (although, thank god, he hasn't got a murdered family to avenge, the cheapest, tiredest device in the TV screenwriter's toolbox). He's the guy Raymond Chandler was talking about when he wrote, "Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid."

Frank, however, is in a Tana French novel, an environment that makes Philip Marlowe's L.A. look like a church picnic. French herself doesn't play by the rules, and the prime rule of crime fiction, no matter how grisly, cynical or edgy, is that the plot begins with a disruption of order (the crime itself) and ends with the restoration of it, albeit in some slightly battered form. The guilty parties are identified and usually punished, secrets are unearthed and, above all, the world returns to intelligibility, however bitter the message it has to tell.

In French's previous two novels -- the mesmerizing "In the Woods" and "The Likeness" -- and now with her third, "Faithful Place," she has introduced the insolvable and the uncertain into the rigorous mathematics of the detective story; she's the Kurt Gödel of crime fiction. A thread of the uncanny runs through "In the Woods," a thread that got finer in "The Likeness," and has in turn entirely vanished from "Faithful Place." But, as in those earlier books, French considers the possibility that some things can't be known or fathomed; in "Faithful Place" it's the detective, as much as anyone else, who simply refuses to see.

Frank is a minor character from "The Likeness," the boss of the Undercover Squad, a team whose work allows French to burrow into the puzzle of identity and its fragility, how easily it can become unmoored and capsize. As in the previous two novels, "Faithful Place" has a murderer who will be identified, but in the process of discovering that truth, the detective's own psyche will be dismantled. Detective fiction's legions of brooding sleuths have paid lip service to Nietzsche's observation that if you look long enough into the abyss, the abyss starts looking back. In French's novels, the person looking becomes the abyss.

Faithful Place is a cul-de-sac in a part of Dublin called the Liberties, once synonymous with poverty and working-class desperation. "Everyone I grew up with was probably a petty criminal, one way or another, not out of badness but because that was how people got by," Frank observes. He hates Faithful Place not for the crime but for the pettiness -- the pervasive gossip ("a competitive sport that's been raised to Olympic standards") and the narrow, Catholic censoriousness, the shriveled expectations and the cheap melodrama. His father is a brutal drunk and his mother has a black belt in manipulation with added superpowers in guilt, disapproval and schadenfreude. That's why, once he got out at the age of 19, Frank never came back and has kept Holly scrupulously away from his folks. "You don't meet my family," he explains to his middle-class ex, "you open hostilities."

Frank meant to run much further away; he planned to emigrate to England with his girlfriend, Rosie, on the night he left for good, 22 years ago. But Rosie never showed, and he'd always assumed she decided to leave without him. "Rosie Daly dumping my sorry ass had been my landmark," he says of this turning point, "huge and solid as a mountain." He blamed his "crazy" family for scaring her away. He never got out of Dublin, but he could not have settled on a more emphatic way of sticking his thumb in the collective eye of Faithful Place than by becoming a cop.

So when Rosie's mouldering suitcase and then the bones of Rosie herself turn up in a derelict house on Faithful Place, Frank feels the mountain of that ancient rejection shift, "flickering like a mirage and the landscape kept shifting around it, turning itself inside out and backwards; none of the scenery looked familiar any more." He enters into a complex and destabilizing negotiation with his own past and its legacy as he searches for Rosie's killer. He sees his parents again, sits on the stoop with his four siblings, feeling how "we fit together like pieces of a jigsaw," and tries to ignore the way the painstakingly constructed barrier between himself and Faithful Place begins to erode. The more he tells himself that he's utterly changed, the more it becomes apparent that he hasn't.

French's hypnotic storytelling remains in full force in this novel, despite having shaken off the dreaminess that suffused "In the Woods" and "The Likeness." This is Roddy Doyle territory, an excavation of that particular torture experienced by those who want to break out of a hopeless, working-class world but keep getting sucked back in by the loyalty that is its one redeeming quality. "Faithful Place" is wrenching to a degree that detective fiction rarely achieves: Frank -- a cocky devil who prides himself on his skillful lying and ability to play other people -- gets pulled apart psychologically as he pursues Rosie's killer, and the reader undergoes it with him. By the end, it's difficult to distinguish what the real crime is or who committed it.

Which is not to say that French doesn't solve the novel's technical mystery or that the answer isn't tightly cinched into her larger themes. Like Kate Atkinson, who has grafted the contemporary novel of manners onto the bones of the detective story in her Jackson Brodie series, French sticks to the genre's brief while conveying it into new territory. But where the Brodie books are all pretty much the same in tone and subject matter, French does something fresh with every novel, each one as powerful as the last but in a very different manner. Perhaps she has superpowers of her own? Whatever the source of her gift, it's only growing more miraculous with every book.