Must Read

Christmas insanity unwrapped

Laura Miller — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 18:01:00 PST

Every year, Christmas is directly responsible for some of the worst books to cross a reviewer's desk: stale, overfrosted sugar cookies loaded with the literary equivalent of artificial coloring and high-fructose corn syrup. But now all is forgiven because the season has inspired Hank Stuever to write "Tinsel: A Search for America's Christmas Present," a portrait of the holiday as it's celebrated in the booming Dallas exurb of Frisco, Texas. A delicately calibrated combination of rigorous reporting, observational humor and old-fashioned empathy, "Tinsel" is the book that saved Christmas for this curmudgeon. The first two sentences alone, with their vivid evocation of big-box America and the promise of more crackerjack prose to come, did the trick:

How memoirs took over the literary world

Laura Miller — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 18:01:00 PST

Has the memoir become the "central form" of our culture, as Ben Yagoda insists in his breezy new consideration of the form, "Memoir: A History"? Do I detect hackles rising from coast to coast at the mere suggestion? Today, autobiography is both very popular and widely reviled, for reasons that aren't always clear. People complain that the modern memoir is narcissistic, formulaic, pretentious and often falsified -- all true on occasion, though when pressed the accusers can usually list a few contemporary memoirs that they do admire. What is it about the memoir in its current form that makes it simultaneously so irresistible and so annoying?

Investigating his father's murder

Laura Miller — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 17:07:00 PST

In 1975, Ed Lazar was shot in a Phoenix parking garage stairwell by two men he'd never met. Thirty years later, Lazar's son, Zachary, an acclaimed novelist ("Sway"), began to investigate the murder in preparation for writing "Evening's Empire," a book he had been contemplating for as long as he could remember. No "solution" was called for in any conventional sense of that word: Authorities have known who killed Ed Lazar (two hit men affiliated with the Chicago mafia) and why (they were paid to do it by Ed's former business partner, Ned Warren) for years. But for Zachary, his father's death remained a mystery. How did a quiet, respectable suburban CPA like Ed Lazar, a man whose friends could make no sense of his violent end, wind up dying in what Walter Cronkite described on the CBS Evening News as "a gangland-style murder"?

Archaeologists behaving badly

Laura Miller — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 17:31:00 PST

During the early fall, publishers release the highest concentration of books by established writers -- many of which, incidentally, turn out to be disappointing, like this year's offerings from John Irving and Philip Roth. As a result, it's easy to miss fine novels by relative newcomers (who are also less tempted than the big names to phone it in). Tobias Hill's impressive "The Hidden," published last month as a paperback original, is a case in point. Hill, a British poet, novelist and short story writer, likes to take subjects conventionally associated with airport thrillers -- murder mysteries, quests for ancient treasure, conspiracies -- and crack them open to probe for more succulent literary meat. "The Hidden," set on an archaeological dig at the site of ancient Sparta, circles around the suspicious activities of some of the dig's team while dissecting the broken inner life of a young man who wants nothing more than to be let in on their secret.

Elizabeth Taylor: How to Be a Movie Star

Laura Miller — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 00:15:00 PDT

"Elizabeth Taylor" was one of the answers during a high-speed round of the party game Celebrities I played recently. The player had seconds to get his team to guess her name, and the first thing that popped out of his mouth was, "She twittered her heart surgery." The clue worked, but afterward we clucked over it: Not "National Velvet," not "Cleopatra," not "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" but Twitter? Poor Elizabeth Taylor. We were ashamed of ourselves.

The murder she didn't commit

Laura Miller — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 00:07:00 PDT

The first glimpse that Michelle Huneven offers of the main character in her new novel, "Blame," comes through the eyes of a dazzled child. Patsy MacLemoore is a blonde with long, tan legs and a perfect smile, and she's dating 12-year-old Joey's dashing uncle, Brice, scion of one of the grand families in the Southern California town of Altadena. She's also a newly minted history professor at a local college. On the surface, Patsy looks great, but in the course of an evening spent with Joey and Brice, she gets drunker and drunker -- also, more desperate: clinging to the elusive Brice and quizzing Joey about her uncle's "other girlfriends." Somewhere in there, she offers to pierce Joey's ears, but the result is lopsided, one hole higher than the other. "Just cock your head to one side," Patsy tells the girl, "and no one will ever notice."

Must read: "Glover's Mistake"

Laura Miller — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 03:23:00 PDT

It's easy to underestimate Nick Laird's new novel, "Glover's Mistake," if you only dip your toe into the book. For the first couple of chapters it might be the literary equivalent of one of those early Hugh Grant movies, where the stammering hero trips over his own feet a few times before kissing the girl against a background of quirky, candied pop songs. It's the story of David Pinner, a lovelorn London schoolteacher in his 30s and a never-was artist who vents his frustrated intellect in an anonymous blog he calls (perfectly) the Damp Review. He critiques everything from films to "takeaways," but he finds it easiest "to write on disappointments. Hatreds, easier still."

What should I read next?

Allen Barra — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 03:20:00 PDT

"You eastern Europeans," says a character in Aleksandar Hemon's novel "Nowhere Man," "are pretty weird." Tell us about it.

Must Read: "How to Sell"

Laura Miller — Tue, 26 May 2009 03:23:00 PDT

Clancy Martin's crackling debut novel, "How to Sell," is the story of Bobby Clark, a 16-year-old Canadian who bails on high school to work at a jewelry store in Texas with his older brother, Jim. The Fort Worth Deluxe Diamond Exchange (and the retail jewelry trade in general, at least as depicted in "How to Sell") turns out to be extravagantly crooked, awash in bogus Rolexes, fake precious metal shares and kited watch orders. No sooner is Bobby off the plane from Calgary than Jim is feeding him bumps of coke out of a vial in the back of a Cadillac limo and inviting the boy to sleep with his head in his mistress' lap.

"Sag Harbor"

Andrew O'Hehir — Mon, 11 May 2009 03:39:00 PDT

One summer night in 1985, near the beach in the Long Island resort town that gives Colson Whitehead's "Sag Harbor" its title, Benji, the novel's awkward, African-American teenage hero, sees a firefly. Millions of those living symbols of ephemerality are glimpsed by millions of kids across every American summer, but this one gets Benji thinking.

"The Little Stranger"

Laura Miller — Tue, 05 May 2009 03:36:00 PDT

Ghosts are not supposed to exist, which is one reason why ghost stories are often about things that people try to deny. The rage and sexual longings of lonely, well-bred women, for example, infuse the two great classics of the form: Henry James' "Turn of the Screw" and Shirley Jackson's "The Haunting of Hill House." Sarah Waters' masterly, enthralling new novel, "The Little Stranger," hews to the essential aspects of the traditional ghost story: the big spooky country house with a tragic past, the peculiar noises and eerie events that slowly intensify into a terrifying assault, the blurring line between internal turmoil and external phenomena, the skeptical scientific observer nudged ever closer to belief. Yet Waters has boldly reassigned all these gothic motifs from their usual Freudian duties to another detail entirely: "The Little Stranger" is about class, and the unavoidable yet lamentable price paid when venerable social hierarchies begin to erode.

"The Song Is You"

Laura Miller — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 03:35:00 PDT

Among the characters in Arthur Phillips' 2002 novel, "Prague" -- Americans in their 20s searching for expat authenticity in 1990s Eastern Europe -- is a young academic trying to "quantify nostalgia, to graph it backwards into the misty and sweet-smelling past." He and his cohorts pine not for their own pasts (they've barely had any yet) but for other people's, as romanticized by historians, fans and filmmakers: Paris in the 20s, New York in the '50s, anything but the thin and flavorless here and now. The novel's title shrewdly epitomizes their imaginative displacement: Although it's set in Budapest, everyone there suspects that the better scene is really in Prague.

"The Seance"

Laura Miller — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 03:44:00 PDT

The late 19th century was, like our own time, preoccupied with the dividing line between the scientific and the paranormal. John Harwood's elegant new novel, "The Seance," describes the mixed fortunes of several characters who seem to be suspended over that line. Are they cursed by the past, visited by the dead, condemned by fate? Or are they deceived, by others and by themselves, about the nature of the universe and the human heart?

"The Believers"

Laura Miller — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 03:37:00 PDT

Thanks to the title, we know how we're meant to view the characters in Zoë Heller's new novel, "The Believers," even before we crack the book open. The believers in question are the members of the Litvinoff family, specifically Audrey, wife and mother, and her two daughters, Rosa and Karla. The paterfamilias, Joel, spends most of the novel in a post-stroke coma, having collapsed in the midst of a sensational trial. A storied leftist attorney manifestly modeled after William Kunstler, Joel met Paul Robeson as a kid at a red-diaper summer camp, worked for Martin Luther King Jr., and at the moment of his collapse had been just about to defend a member of "the Schenectady Six," Arab-Americans accused of supporting terrorism.

"The Birthday Present"

Laura Miller — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 03:44:00 PST

Barbara Vine's new novel, "The Birthday Present," is a tale of two monsters -- monsters of the entirely human and not especially exotic variety, that is. One is Ivor Tesham, a young, rich and handsome Tory M.P. who, in 199o, arranges the pretend kidnapping of his married mistress, Hebe, as a sex game. The other is Jane Atherton, Hebe's drab and resentful school friend, who has been providing the adulterous wife with alibis for the evenings she spends with Ivor. The "kidnapping" results in a fatal accident on a London street, leading in turn to two crucial choices. Neither Ivor nor Jane, apparently the only ones left who know what Hebe was doing handcuffed in the back of a van, come forward with that knowledge. Each is motivated by pure selfishness, and a terrible machinery of chance and fate is set into motion.

"Lark and Termite"

Laura Miller — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 03:40:00 PST

Jayne Anne Phillips belongs to that small class of contemporary fiction writers who can never entirely shake the shadow of an early, very successful short story collection. (Others are Denis Johnson, Nathan Englander, Jhumpa Lahiri and Ethan Canin.) Although short stories are supposed to be unpopular (and are widely regarded by publishers as commercial long shots), the right collection by a young writer -- especially if it does or shows something not easily found elsewhere -- can arrive radiantly, glowing with the promise of splendors to come. By the time the novel appears, expectations have grown unrealistic, and a faint and often merited whiff of disappointment clings to it; it is the perfectly tasty entree served after a truly delicious appetizer, which, like all appetizers, benefits from offering no more than a taste.

All-American terrorist

Andrew O'Hehir — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 03:32:00 PST

Glen Duncan doesn't exactly write thrillers and doesn't exactly write literary novels. Indeed, the 43-year-old English writer has developed an intriguing and soulful fusion of the two, churning out intricately plotted page-turners that'll keep you up all night while their protagonists wrestle with God, the modern world's loss of meaning and the painful and awful facts of recent history. In "Death of an Ordinary Man," Duncan's hero was a ghost, trying to sort out his family's damage from the other side; in his 2007 novel "The Bloodstone Papers," he focused on a writer of Anglo-Indian ancestry (like Duncan himself) who's trying to track down the legendary con man who ruined his father's life.

"Serena"

Laura Miller — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 03:43:00 PST

There’s something unabashedly hokey about Ron Rash’s "Serena," a novel of love, hate and clear-cutting set in Depression-era North Carolina -- and I mean that in the best possible way. It resembles one of those high-end mid-20th-century bestsellers with a title lifted from Ecclesiastes and a movie version in Technicolor, directed by Douglas Sirk, with a tag line like, "They were as bold as the country that made them!" The good guys in this melodrama are good, the bad guys are really bad and the meaning of it all is crystal clear. There’s even a chorus of crusty old lumberjacks hanging around to comment on the action in case any readers fail to get the point. In an age when literary fiction is so intent on subtlety that it often winds up virtually inert, a novel with this much uncomplicated gusto and narrative drive is a rare thing; in the case of "Serena," it's also a welcome one.

"Winnie and Wolf"

James Hannaham — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 03:29:00 PST

For sheer number of innocent people exterminated under an infamous regime, Hitler is no match for Stalin. Yet our fascination with the fiery, scary Führer as "the incarnation of absolute evil," as Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel once called him, far surpasses our interest in practically all other hateful villains in modern history. In his highly imaginative novel "Winnie and Wolf," prolific British novelist and historian A.N. Wilson has taken an intriguingly dispassionate look at Hitler's inner circle. The novel, which came out in the U.K. last year, was nominated for the Man Booker Prize. Despite this high level of acclaim, readers may wonder why Wilson would bother taking a sober, realistic look at Hitler and thereby risk humanizing him. But among Wilson's 35 books is a biography of Jesus that is mostly about the impossibility of writing a biography of Jesus; Wilson is not one to back down from a challenge.

"Death With Interruptions"

Laura Miller — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 03:35:00 PDT

"Death Takes a Holiday" is a cinematic chestnut (based on a theatrical chestnut) that was remade into a Brad Pitt movie, "Meet Joe Black," in 1998. The premise is that Death decides to take a few days off in the form of a stilted but gentlemanly fellow, falling in love with a woman and -- as people are prone to do when caught up in a vacation romance -- deciding he doesn't really want to go back to his job. Despite the allegorical tinge of some of his novels, this material seems an unlikely choice for the Portuguese Nobel laureate Jose Saramago; it's dreamy and sentimental, rather than trenchant. Even unlikelier is the effectiveness of "Death With Interruptions," a book that takes turns at being witty and ravishing before it embraces, at the last minute, the soft center of its conceit.