From DeLillo to Vonnegut, and Auster to Austen, the books of autumn offer machismo, memories and even a few good meals.
In the book industry, like the movie industry, fall is a season for probity and self-righteous bombast -- a time to furrow your brow and declaim about art with a capital "A." It's when publishers and studios trot out their biggest names and their grandest intentions, burnt offerings to the gods who sit on the year-end prize committees. It's also a slightly twisted time: It's when projects that most sane humans would dismiss with a flick of the wrist (Brad Pitt in Tibet? Dominick Dunne fictionalizing the Simpson murders?) begin to pick up a gold-flake patina of serious smarts and subterranean soul -- simply because they're released ... in the fall. Is that a whiff of wood smoke in the air, or just the smell of frazzled synapses? Publishers aren't kidding about the quality of the books rolling off the assembly lines this fall -- there are new works from Don DeLillo, A.S. Byatt, John Updike, Allan Gurganus, Carol Shields, Jamaica Kincaid, James Salter and Kurt Vonnegut, to name but a few. But don't be fooled by the high-minded chatter you'll witness on Charlie Rose. The simple fact is that, for publishers, fall is no longer much different from any other season. DeLillo and Co. may corner the media's attention, but the summertime flow of buttery popcorn books no longer slows down, not even for a nanosecond. Critics, schmitics. Underneath the solemn pronouncements about literary craft, here is a list of the bankable titles that the book industry is really hopped-up about this fall: Sidney Sheldon's "The Best Laid Plans" (first printing: 1,000,000 copies); Clive Cussler's "Flood Tide" (750,000 copies); Anne Rice's "Violin" (750,000 copies); Robert Ludlum's "The Matarese Countdown" (600,000 copies); Stephen King's "Wizard and Glass" (1,500,000 copies ); and Danielle Steel's "The Ghost" (1,200,000 copies). This doesn't include nonfiction from Tom Clancy, Dave Barry and Whoopi Goldberg. And you can bet that Warner Books will nearly double their 1997 profits with Kitty Kelly's forthcoming snarkography of the House of Windsor, "The Royals." By way of contrast, Farrar, Straus & Giroux is very excited about the prospects for Jamaica Kincaid's slender literary memoir "My Brother," which recounts her brother's battle with AIDS. They're printing about 75,000 copies. It's tempting, if foolish, to scan fall book lists looking to pin down cultural crosscurrents like so many stray butterflies. (In a magazine editor's fevered mind, two books that appear simultaneously on any subject -- calamari, zydeco, Zippy the Pinhead, flatulence -- is occasion enough to declare a trend and assign a 2,000-word cover story.) But it's impossible to look at the book world in 1997 and not be tempted to declare it The Year of Oprah. So great is her influence on publishers and readers -- women buy 70 to 80 percent of the fiction sold in America, and Oprah speaks to a solid chunk of that market -- that back in March the Times ran a long story that fretted about the "feminization" of literature. Now that women control the market, the Times asked, are publishers growing shy about publishing fiction by male authors or books with male protagonists? Or, to pick up on the Timesean subtext: Is fiction getting all wussy on us? Given the Times' fears about Oprah's success, the funny thing about the book world thus far this year is how shot full of testosterone it actually has been. It's as if a miniature backlash has kicked into gear. First came a slew of novels from the goaty old masters (Roth, Mailer, Bellow). Then hermits like J.D. Salinger and Thomas Pynchon poked their noses out of the snow. This was followed by the unexpected success of rugged Men-With-Clenched-Teeth-Against-the-Elements books such as "Into Thin Air," Jon Krakauer's chronicle of the 1996 Everest disaster, and "The Perfect Storm," by Sebastian Junger, upon whose cheekbones one could shave enough ice for a entire season of sno-cones. The current surprise bestseller? Charles Frazier's stark and elegiac "Cold Mountain," a novel about the Civil War. Furthermore, quite a few of this fall's big books feed concerns about political correctness right into the shredder. John Updike's ferocious new novel, "Toward the End of Time" (Knopf, Oct.), for example, is likely to have feminists -- and certainly Times' critic Michiko Kakutani -- spinning in their armchairs. Set outside of Boston in the year 2020, the book ostensibly describes the social chaos following a war between the U.S. and China. But what it really describes is one man's abiding preoccupations with death and sex, the latter preferably with firm young prostitutes. ("One advantage of the collapse of civilization," Updike's protagonist chirps, "is that the quality of young women who are becoming whores has gone way up.") Similarly, James Salter's luminous memoir "Burning the Days" (Random House, Sept.), about his days in the military and in the film and literary worlds, often feels like it should have been titled "A Rake's Progress." Salter seems to nail half the women on two continents. And already arriving in the mail are titles looking to cash in on the success of Krakauer's and Junger's adventure sagas. Among them: Anatoli Boukreev's "The Climb" (St. Martin's, Nov.), by a Russian climbing guide who was on Everest at the same time Krakauer was, and whom Krakauer later criticized; Jonathan Waterman's "A Most Hostile Mountain" (Holt, Oct.), which recreates a perilous Alaskan climb made 100 years ago by the Duke of Abruzzi; and Bruce Barcott's "The Measure of a Mountain: Beauty and Terror on Mount Rainier" (Sasquatch, Oct.). The editors of Outside magazine, the journal that spawned the current mania for Sports That Might Damn Well Kill You, will release "The Best of Outside." And then there are other musk-scented titles, such as Bob Paris' memoir "Gorilla Suit: My Adventures in Bodybuilding" (St. Martin's, Sept.) and Geoffrey O'Connor's "Amazon Journal: Dispatches from a Vanishing Frontier" (Dutton, Sept.). Prediction: These are the books you'll see poking out of your buff friend's gym bag. This Fall has a great deal more to offer, though, and as a Salon consumer service, here's an annotated list of some titles to look for -- and a few others to hide from. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - ILLUSTRATION BY CALEF BROWN |
