Peck charges on for almost 6,000 words from there, flogging every misused dash and antecedent-less pronoun in two paragraphs from Moody’s memoir “The Black Veil”; calling the book “lies” and “criminal,” and then extending his fuck-you to the horse Moody rode in on. Peck lashes Moody together with Davids Foster Wallace and Eggers, Jonathans Franzen and Lethem, and assorted other Lit Boys as “heirs to the bankrupt tradition that began with the diarrheic flow of words that is ‘Ulysses’; continued on through the incomprehensible ramblings of late Faulkner and the sterile inventions of Nabokov … the ridiculous dithering of Barth and Hawkes and Gaddis … wasting of a talent as formidable as Pynchon’s … and the stupid — just plain stupid — tomes of DeLillo.”

“Hatchet Jobs,” a forthcoming collection of Peck’s critical flayings-cum-manifesto, will be Peck’s parting shot. He’s quitting reviewing in part because he hasn’t gotten the response he hoped for. After years of reviews just as withering, the Moody piece for some reason inspired a burst of articles in places like Salon, the Believer and the New York Times. The writers of the “think” pieces for the most part passed up the opportunity to debate the canon or the state of the art, poking instead at nonburning side questions like whether harsh reviewing is nice, or fair, or civil, or appropriate, or hurtful — or just good fun.

“They just quote the zingers,” Peck complains. “I’m quitting because there’s no point; I’ve become this class clown, the guy who hates everything.” In the thumb-suckers’ defense, it’s not always easy to pry Peck’s diagnosis of literature’s ills from the rhetorical flail of his essays — he conflates conventional apples like Franzen and Jeffrey Eugenides with unreadable oranges like William Gaddis and John Barth; he embraces, denounces and mischaracterizes modernism and postmodernism; he cops out in the afterword to “Hatchet Jobs” with unelaborated pronouncements like “the heart of the novel … is a diffuse locus of ideas and ideologies loosely tethered to a set of individual visions and personalities” and “literature is an act of revenge that aspires to elegy.”

But he’s right to lament a certain chilly remove in much serious contemporary literature, and in our interview, he succinctly names the problem as “books that point to other books rather than real life.” Literature has gotten insular; the brilliant literary tool of irony has been dulled to a nihilistic-yet-wimpy “whatever”; and too few books, as Peck puts it, “work toward a goal of rendering the truth of human experience rather than the truth of aesthetic expression.” He may even be right that a rude and aggressive gay man who grew up in a trailer home gets shut out of “a publishing context that’s quicker to embrace [Franzen, Eggers, Wallace, Moody et al.] than it is to embrace me because their message is more palatable.”

His strategy of denouncing the competition and the system, however, may backfire onto “What We Lost.” Not only has he alienated potential blurbers and reviewers in the cozy literary world; worse, he’s misrepresenting himself as a writer. The quality of his fiction is a pleasurable shock if all one’s read is his criticism. Moving, as I did, from the confused and nasty reviews (which he writes on a computer) to the clear, taut novels (composed in longhand) is like leaving a clanging boardwalk arcade for the roar and whisper of waves on sand. Peck’s fiction writing is visceral, risky yet controlled, lyrical and — especially in “What We Lost” — enormously compassionate.

Peck and I spoke in his East Village apartment on a rainy afternoon in November. It was the day “What We Lost” was being released, and he was understandably nervous about revenge-by-review. As it turned out, Andrew O’Hagan’s Nov. 16 review in the New York Times Book Review did stink of chickens coming home to roost. O’Hagan bizarrely asserted that “When gay men write about fatherhood, they are often ruminating about manhood,” because they won’t have children themselves, and then added that “it is not a book about his father’s farming episode [the book's ostensible subject] at all, but a rather oblique account of Dale Peck’s grapplings with the notion of male authority.” Unsupported by anything in the text or even Peck’s readily available biographical info (the subtext is certainly Peck’s own childhood, not that of his unborn sons), O’Hagan’s was not so much a hatchet job as a self-directed hand job. It was as if Peck hadn’t written a book: He’s gay, so his subject must be childlessness.

To write “What We Lost,” Peck interviewed his formerly violent, alcoholic father, Dale Peck Sr., about the older man’s childhood, which was even worse than the childhood he in turn inflicted on his own children. “What We Lost” is a generously embellished account of a year-and-a-half-long reprieve Peck Sr. had from the one-room house on Long Island he shared with seven siblings in two beds, along with a father who passed out in his own piss almost every night and a mother who hated her third son with a terrifying focus. She regularly beat him with a hose, kept food from him and, when a younger son was killed in an accident, told Dale, “It should have been you.”

One morning in 1956, Peck Sr.’s already-drunk father dropped off “the boy,” as he’s called in “What We Lost,” at the dairy farm of an uncle he’d never met. He worked the farm with his uncle and started running track at school, missing his brothers and sisters but enjoying the freedom from his mother’s Olympian spite and his father’s degradation. The boy is just unclenching, starting to trust in order, responsibility and the kindness of his aunt and uncle, when he’s abruptly returned to the chaos back home. There’s a harrowing scene of the boy and his big brother stalking the drunk “old man” through the pine barrens to lift his paycheck for the family. The story then leaps to 2001 and the trip Dale Sr., 10 years sober, and his 34-year-old son Dale Jr. make to the dairy farm.

What’s left out is the years in between. They’ve been covered before: Episodes of drunken cruelty bob to the surface of Peck’s three novels like a corpse carried down a river. Fifty pages of autobiography explode from the middle of his second novel, “The Law of Enclosures” (1996), where Peck repeats his suspicion, also hinted at in his debut, “Martin and John,” that his father struck the blow that ultimately killed his mother. Peck Jr. was almost 4 when she died, and three stepmothers followed in quick succession. Peck Sr. brutalized all of them, with the second getting it the worst. His father once dragged Dale Jr. and his sister Dalene out of bed to make them watch him put a gun to his third wife’s head and then to his own, before finally passing out. In that household, as Peck writes in “Enclosures,” “everything flew … her body, eight and a half months pregnant, over a chair — that was the morning she gave birth to her son — and her son’s body, across the dozen feet of the room we shared.”

The new book, with its tender portrait of the 13-year-old Dale, strikes me as a Jesus-caliber act of forgiveness. Peck says, “It may have taken my father 60 years to fix himself, and it’s ongoing, but I think he did. That’s what made me want to write ‘What We Lost,’ an acknowledgment of his ability to be true to his nature, which is a loving nature … In my fiction, there’s a divided aspect. I have to write the book where I go after my father’s jugular ['The Law of Enclosures'] and then I have to write the book where I lionize him. It’s very hard to put those two things together.”

Peck says he had a head start on the interviews he conducted with his father for “What We Lost” because “I knew a lot of this stuff from growing up.” He’s already told me that his father, a plumber, is “not a therapy type,” so I ask about the context of those first tellings.

What happens next on Peck’s living room couch is an eerie channeling. Peck grabs his empty coffee cup off the table and throws his head back and sucks at it. He slams the cup down and pokes his finger into my leg so hard it hurts for 10 minutes. His eyes narrow and he yells in an angry slur, “‘You fink you got it bad? I had it bad. My muvver used to beat me wif a rub-ber hose!’ That was the context,” Peck continues, his voice staying loud and furious. “Over and over again. ‘I’m going to get drunk and tell you why I’m such a bad father.’”

Peck says he and his sister were only badly beaten themselves once each, Peck for a “faggy haircut,” but they saw their stepmothers beaten whenever their father drank. Peck conjectures that “my father’s violence was as much a correction by example as it was punishing his mother — keeping your woman in line. If his own father had kept his mother in line, she’d never have done those things to him. My father was never as incensed with my stepmothers as when they disciplined me.”

Peck says, his voice back to chatty, “All that chaos had a very progenitive effect; it’s like atomic energy. It made me a writer. I’m not that creative, I’m analytic, not in a logical way, but I’m always trying to put together extremes, to see what they generate. I don’t think I would have had the temperament or desire to turn real things into fake things if I hadn’t had such a complex set of things to reconcile.”

That reconciliation has produced layers of complexity in Peck’s fiction, but it may have clouded his judgment as a critic. It’s funny and touching how disappointed he is that his reviews didn’t spur more literary discourse: Part of him meant those outrageous, often cruel attacks as tough, and toughening, love. “I think I read more closely than 90 percent of the critics working,” he says wistfully. Later, he adds, “Jeffrey Eugenides was the only one who responded to anything I said.”

He calls his critical method “aggressive misreadings” à la Harold Bloom. “That’s how Bloom says literature grows,” he explains. “The anxiety of influence produces misreadings which in turn leads to this desire for differentiation that produces new kinds of literature.” I’m not sure if this is how Bloom meant it, but Peck’s suggestion, from his review of “Infinite Jest,” that David Foster Wallace “shut off his goddamn word processor and try to find someone who would passionately shove a dick up his ass” certainly qualifies as aggressive, and is not a reading that ever occurred to me, even when I was most annoyed by Wallace’s infinite footnotes.

Another reason Peck expected more literary back-and-forth is that he takes criticism of his own novels very seriously, adjusting when he agrees with a review. His first novel, “Martin and John,” came out in 1993 and was widely hailed for its “beauty,” “wisdom,” and “mastery of literary form … that belies [Peck's] 25 years.” Edmund White called it “the best book of the year,” and Michael Cunningham declared the “launch of an important career.” The book is a succession of linked stories told about Martin by John, who grows up on a farm with an alcoholic father, Henry, and battered mother, Bea, before moving to New York.

Young Peck focused not on the praise, however, but on the censure, and accordingly reshaped his second novel, which he already knew he wanted to be about a “long, unhappy marriage.” “‘Law of Enclosures’ was responding to my critics, who said the marriage in ‘Martin and John’ was very black and white,” Peck says. “The reviews said the father was this demon and the mother was this victim … The marriage hadn’t gotten the full complex treatment it deserved. I said, ‘They’re right,’ and I tried to rectify it” in his second novel, which also featured Henry and Bea.

When I ask why he’s so anxious that his possibly murdered mother not come off like a victim, Peck says, “I think one of the way we perpetuate our hurts is by not looking at the context in which they were produced. One reason my father was so violent is that he could only see how he was wronged and he was going to make other people see that, even if he had to hurt them to do it. When you put things in a larger perspective, you see that the things that happened to you happened in a bigger context.”

This echoes what Peck says about postmodernism, which he embraces despite his loathing of postmodern fiction writers like Barth, Gaddis and Pynchon. “The incredibly difficult but I think profound gift of postmodernism is that there’s no aspect of human knowledge or existence that can ever be fixed, except that phenomenologically we know we exist,” he says. “What postmodernism taught us to do — and that’s why I love Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel ‘Everything Is Illuminated’ so much — is to locate ourselves in context, not how the realists did or how the modernists did with their stream of consciousness. Rather than looking inward and trying to find out who I am, which is impossible, because we can’t see ourselves without prisms of language and culture, you can set up points of reference, maybe through refraction. But your points will constantly change and you have to, too, and that’s very real.”

I can’t help it; I go all Oprah on his ass. Perhaps, I venture, he learned about changing reference points earlier than most people, from a series of mothers and from a father who became someone else when he drank and from the early entwining of love, hate and fear.

Peck replies breezily, “Love and hate and fear are equally intertwined for all people, but I’m very fortunate because I have very vivid stories to dramatize that.” He says later, “I write my books in a series, and I’m placing the character of John in greater and greater contexts,” he says, perhaps to get to “something more positive.” This really is a man writing, as the cliché has it, for his life: Domestic violence is a gift and postmodernism is the religion through which he interprets it.

Late in the afternoon, Peck is raging, not for the first time, about Joyce and DeLillo’s bad, aesthetics-over-experience “message,” and I ask him, “OK, so what’s your message?” He’s tired by now from my badgering and the rain and the worry about how “What We Lost” will be received. He sighs. “When you talk about fiction themes you’re reduced to statements that are trite or simplistic but true, and my fiction’s message is, ‘We are all suffering and in our suffering we seem to like to make others suffer too and maybe there’s a way around that.’

“What’s my message?” The hatchet man shrugs. “‘Can’t we all be nicer to each other?’ But how do you make that true and believable?”

“Here I can keep the trophies and dangerous souvenirs I’ve collected from other worlds,” Superman explained. “Here I can conduct secret experiments with my super-powers and keep souvenirs of my best friends!” The fortress became a gimmick, convenient, for the retelling of tales, a window on Superman’s past adventures and a mirror of things to come. “I built it here in the polar wastes because the intense cold keeps away snoopers,” Superman said. Its precise location was never disclosed, only that it lay “in a region of ice and snow” and that no one would ever read the diary Superman kept there, a “gigantic book, made of metal,” which he wrote in Kryptonese with one of his fingernails, “while hovering in midair high off the Fortress floor.”

Apart from its “fabulous trophy room, housing the hard-won memorabilia of more than a thousand adventures,” Superman’s icebound lair — “the most glamorous hideaway in the entire universe!” — contained a secret laboratory, where he labored in vain to discover an antidote to kryptonite. There was also a zoo — an “interplanetary” zoo — and an array of exhibits, weapons, robots and tools, along with chambers dedicated to Jimmy Olsen, Lois Lane, Perry White and Superman’s real and foster parents — Lara and Jor-El, late of Planet Krypton, and the Kents, Jonathan and Martha, whose fortuitous truck-ride on the outskirts of Smallville allowed them to rescue the future Man of Steel, one sunny afternoon, from what might have been a fatal landing in a burning rocket “right out of the funny papers,” as Jonathan Kent said.

It wasn’t until 1949 that the Fortress of Solitude finally got a name; in 1962, Supergirl moved in, along with Superman’s fiercest opponents — Brainiac, Mr. Mxyzptlk, Lex Luthor, etc. — who existed as figures in the “Hall of Enemies” and were kept in check by kryptonite detectors and “booby traps of an unspecified nature.” The effect was to have everyone in the Superman saga present all at once, on demand, next to the miniature city of Kandor, once the capital of planet Krypton, now reduced to microscopic size and preserved inside a bottle, its buildings intact, its inhabitants alive, going about their business as if nothing had happened and hoping that Superman, one day, might restore them to their natural dimension.

Alas, this was the one thing Superman couldn’t do, along with neutralizing kryptonite. From time to time, when it suited a plot, he managed to shrink himself down, hop in the bottle and pursue his adventures in the Kandor of old, but not for long, and not without risk. In fact, the past can never be recaptured, only re-created and experienced fresh. It’s a lesson Superman might have learned if he hadn’t known everything already, and it’s the message, if there is one, of Jonathan Lethem’s astonishing book — “that to find one’s art is to kill time dead with a single shot … Maybe to perfect a thing,” Lethem observes, “was to destroy it.”

“Like a match struck in a darkened room,” his novel begins: “Two white girls in flannel nightgowns and red vinyl roller skates with white laces, tracing tentative circles on a cracked blue slate sidewalk at seven o’clock on an evening in July.” These are the Solver sisters, Thea and Ana, shining “like a new-struck flame” in the eyes of Dylan Ebdus, the currently five-year-old hero/narrator/recollected protagonist of Lethem’s mighty “Fortress.” The sisters are blond and beautiful, strangers, like Dylan, in a rundown New York neighborhood made up principally of browns and blacks. It’s 1972 and the Solvers are “the new thing, spotlit to start the show … The girls murmured rhymes,” Dylan thinks, or “were murmured rhymes” — it’s hard to tell “in the orange-pink summer dusk, the air and light which hung over the street, over all of Gowanus like the palm of a hand or the inner surface of a seashell.”

Gowanus is a part of Brooklyn, of course, not Krypton or Kandor, and Lethem is the new poet of Brooklyn — the new Whitman, even, whose bold imagination and sheer love of words defy all forms and expectations and place him among this country’s foremost novelists. Five years in the making, “The Fortress of Solitude” is Lethem’s “spiritual autobiography,” proudly claimed as such and following magically on the heels of 1999′s award-winning “Motherless Brooklyn,” the novel that introduced a detective with Tourette’s syndrome to the United States and marked Lethem’s departure from the hybrid but definitely marginal genres in which he’d previously worked — mysteries, westerns and sci-fi’s, sometimes all three at once. To say that Lethem bends the rules, pushes the envelope and extends the possibilities of fiction is to state only part of the case. He’s defiant, delicious, in his refusal to be pinned.

“I’ve been really rewarded for what a lot of people in the past have been punished for,” Lethem said in a recent interview, “which is refusing to repeat myself … I think my growth since my first published story [in 1989] is much, much larger than my growth previous to it.” On the second page of “Fortress of Solitude,” Dylan Ebdus will accidentally kill a kitten, one of “five, six, seven” in a litter that “squirmed … among the rubble and fresh-planted vines and the musky ailanthus sheddings” of his Brooklyn backyard, not yet “gentrified” from lowly Gowanus into upscale Boerum Hill, but already changing from an authentic, coherent, real-life neighborhood into a remodeled world of chocolate lattes and yuppie restaurants, with names like “Breuklyn,” “Berlin” and “The Gowanus Tart Works.” Dylan’s parents are among the first white folks to arrive, as Lethem’s were in the early 1970s.

“Dylan was too young to understand what he’d done, except he wasn’t,” Lethem writes about the murdered kitten; his parents “hoped he’d forget, except he didn’t.” It’s hard for Dylan to recall, nevertheless, in this and other cases, “whether he’d been there and watched it himself or only heard every detail, burnished into legend.” Either way, he’s afflicted with guilt, not just about the kitten, but about his own white status, his “middle class,” his intrusion on what he knows, deep down, is not really his world. Dylan’s father is an angry, lonely, bohemian painter who spends most of his time in his studio — his fortress of solitude — working on a hand-painted film that will never be finished, “painting at his tiny lightbox, making his incomprehensible progress.” His mother is the exact opposite, a gregarious Brooklynite and incorrigible hippie, half-mad with desire, who will abandon her family, send Dylan to public schools to teach him what’s what, and toss him straight out the door to play on the street with whatever dark children might happen along. Some are friendly, some hostile, and some dangerous, but most — the lion’s share — are merely indifferent, like the city itself and its streets.

“Dylan didn’t recall giving out his name,” Lethem remarks at one point, “but everyone knew it and nobody cared what it meant. They might bother sometimes to mention that he looked like a girl but it wasn’t apparently his fault. He couldn’t throw or catch but that was just too bad. Not everyone could was the general drift.” Early on, Dylan discovers that there are “two worlds” to navigate, inside and out, and knows “that he’d felt a yearning preference already then, that before the years of seasons, the years of hours to come on the street … he’d wished for the Solver girls to sweep him away into an ecstasy of blondeness and matching outfits, tightened laces, their wheels barely touching the slate, or only marking it with arrows pointing elsewhere, jet trails of escape.”

But the girls never did that; instead, they moved away and left Dylan alone, the only white child on Dean Street. Soon, he meets a new neighbor, Mingus Rude, four months older and light years beyond, half-black, half-white, the son of a one-time Motown singer fallen on luxury and cocaine days. Mingus becomes Dylan’s best friend, mentor, protector, betrayer, lover and partner in crime and adventure. He’s a former boy scout and future crack addict whom Dylan wants to “read like a language,” to keep for himself, to emulate, imitate and eventually exculpate, when life, as it will, takes them down different roads. Together, Mingus and Dylan collect comic books, stolen from local bodegas. They play ball, go to school, jerk off and “tag” the walls and trains of New York with Mingus’ distinctive signature, “Dose” — graffiti art of a time and place now lost to all but the camera and the mind, memory’s silent shore. Add to this a “flying man” with delirium tremens and a magic ring that bestows superpowers on those who wear it — the power of flight, the gift of invisibility — and, along with Mingus’ plain brown corduroys, “anything was possible, really.”

“If,” says Lethem. “If Mingus Rude could be kept in this place, kept somehow in Dylan’s pocket, in his stinging, smudgy hands, the summer wouldn’t give way to whatever came after. If. If. Fat chance. Summer on Dean Street had lasted one day and that day was over, it was dark out, had been for hours.”

“The Fortress of Solitude” knows no literal, actual time, even though the first part, called “Underberg,” ranges more or less chronologically over Dylan Ebdus’s childhood, from his mother’s disappearance and his father’s awkward efforts to make up for her absence to the “yoking” and bullying Dylan endures on the street; his academic success; the arrival of Mingus Rude’s shiftless, bible-thumping grandfather; a languid summer in Vermont; the rise of disco, punk, rap, crack, and the cataclysmic turn of events that puts an end to childhood for Dylan and Mingus both. The book is a Bildungsroman in the exact sense, the story of Dylan’s self-development in the context of place and time. It’s also a comedy, a history and a fantasy, where the strange and supernatural mix freely with the solid and austere, as they do in life, in memory, in everyone’s autobiography.

“Second grade was first grade with math,” Lethem explains: “Fifth grade was fourth grade with something wrong. Nothing changed outright. Instead it teetered. You’d pushed futility at Public School 38 so long by then you expected the building itself would be embarrassed and quit.”

Or this: “It was entirely possible that one song could destroy your life. Yes, musical doom could fall on a lone human form and crush it like a bug. That song, that song, was sent from somewhere else to find you, to pick the scab of your whole existence. The song was your personal shitty fate, manifest as a throb of pop floating out of radios everywhere.”

And this, above all: “Dylan Ebdus’s friendship with Mingus Rude lived in brief windows of time, punctuation to the unspoken sentences of their days … By the time Dylan saw Mingus again what had happened in between was too much to explain, for either of them. For Dylan sensed that Mingus had his own secret burden, his own changed world beating away under the silence. There was nothing to do but pick up where they’d left off, pool what they still had in common.” All around are the towers of solitude, some real and some self-imposed — the Brooklyn House of Detention, the distant towers of the Manhattan skyline, Dean Street’s one “abandoned house” and the emotional void of Dylan’s grown-up years. When the narrative shifts, midway through, from Lethem’s voice to Dylan’s, it comes as a violent shock. But that’s adulthood, after all, when the mixed and melted images of youth get stuck in the fixations of a fully formed personality. Only by going back and undoing — re-creating — can Dylan be set free, and, even then, you don’t know to what.

“We were in a middle space then,” Lethem concludes, writing of Dylan and his father, but perhaps of Dylan, himself and us all, “in a cone of white … moving forward at a certain speed. Side by side, not truly quiet but quiescent, two gnarls of human scribble, human cipher, human dream.” Look inside the bottle, as Lethem does, and you’ll see that they’re all alive, not frozen, but moving, just waiting to be brought back to size.

But Simmons, who arrived out of makeup and boasting a tan that would make George Hamilton turn deeper orange with envy, had his eye not so much on the fashions as on the big girls making their way down the catwalk.

“I love breasts. They make the world go ’round,” Simmons exclaimed, apparently mammariously overcome midshow.

And — call him a boob — but Simmons suspects he’s not alone on this. “Men appreciate a curvier woman, especially one with breasts,” he opined. “Women need to understand this, and show us their breasts more often.”

A plea as heartfelt as the song “Beth.”

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Simmons may like ‘em meaty but …

“All the cool musicians are vegan.”

– Alicia Silverstone on how flesh-eschewing rock stars make her heart sing, in the Toronto Sun.

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Make the check out to Mrs. Ritchie

The Material Girl is living up to her name.

Madonna has instituted a no-free-tickets policy for her current tour — and that includes her celebrity friends, too.

According to the U.K. Sun, Mick Jagger, Angelina Jolie, Naomi Campbell, George Michael and Elton John have all had to shell out $125 for tickets — and pay a booking fee to boot.

“The policy on her tour is that there are no comped tickets, not even for celebrities,” Madonna spokeswoman Liz Rosenberg told the New York Post. “If you want a ticket for one of her shows, you have to pay. Everyone is treated the same.”

While one source close to Madonna admitted that such egalitarianism has resulted in “a few raised eyebrows,” it bears noting that the celebs aren’t getting such a bad deal. At least one pair of ticket is currently going for more than $3,000 on eBay.

Elton, is that you?

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Lecter love … denied

“There are rumors that we shot a graphic love scene between Clarice and Hannibal that didn’t make the movie, but will make the DVD. Let me repeat. We never shot that sex scene.”

– Julianne Moore dismissing pesky rumors of forbidden “Hannibal” love, in the Chicago Sun-Times.

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Juicy bits

Fans of Jonathan Lethem’s book “Motherless Brooklyn” may be interested to know that Edward Norton is hoping to bring it to the big screen. In fact, the actor is currently at work writing the script himself. “The central character has Tourette’s Syndrome,” Norton tells the Toronto Sun. “That plugs right into things I relate to because I’ve always felt mildly, verbally Tourettic myself. I love the idea of anything like that that’s almost stream-of-consciousness, a character with his inhibitions almost clinically removed. That’s a great challenge.” That might explain (though not excuse) the Norton-penned stinker “Keeping the Faith.” Here’s wishing him better luck this time.

Speaking of better luck next time, Nicole Kidman is keeping her eyes peeled for her next Prince Charming. “I haven’t given up hope that, somewhere out there, somebody is waiting for me and I can fall in love again,” the ex-Mrs. Cruise tells the German magazine Journal fuer die Frau. “I am still very romantic. And I am sure that it is more beautiful to love properly and lose everything than never to know what love is.” A woman after Tennyson’s own heart, if not his succinctness …

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Miss something? Read yesterday’s Nothing Personal.

Conley is a trained sociologist and a career academic teaching at New York University. His book raises his own anecdotal experiences into a sociological light, making it a kind of memoir-plus. Yet it seemed to me the book ultimately comes down on the side of the personal, and on those terms it’s a triumph. Like any novelist arraying himself with inspiration for a long voyage into unknown territory, I took it as a hopeful sign.

A month or so later, I was lucky again, in coming across Phillip Lopate’s essay “The Countess’s Tutor” in the fifth anniversary issue of Doubletake magazine. Lopate’s description of his family’s move from Williamsburg, a Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn, N.Y., into largely black Fort Greene echoed Conley’s experiences, and my own, uncannily. It was all the more striking for the way certain rituals that had seemed so particular to my 1970s experience were already evident in the mid-’50s. Just like Conley and me, Lopate had been repeatedly posed an inexplicable and unanswerable question by the black and Hispanic kids on the streets where we lived: “What you lookin’ at?”

The three of us met in Brooklyn over coffee, cookies and a tape recorder in November to talk about it.

— Jonathan Lethem

Phillip Lopate: I really liked [Dalton's] book. It’s not easy to do the adult voice but keep the child psychology. And you got a plotline going in spite of this choppy episodic stuff that can happen when you’re talking about your childhood: “Then we did this, then we went around doing that.” There’s humor and perspective. Fortunately, Dalton did so many bad things when he was a kid that you didn’t have the problem of a goody-goody character. You had an embarrassment of riches.

One of the hardest things in writing about the kind of background we’ve had — being a white kid in a minority neighborhood — is that there’s a tendency to hero-worship the blacks or Hispanics and, underneath that, to patronize them and not, on some level, to be honest. You showed how attractive, for all kinds of reasons, black culture and Hispanic culture were for you, but you also showed that character putting a knife to your head.

I remember when I was much younger, and read an essay by Gregory Corso in Esquire where he talked about being white and being beaten up by black kids. It was the first time I’d ever read anything like that. You don’t know where to go with those feelings. What are you going to say? “I was oppressed too.” “Um … my oppression to me is the same as your oppression.” That’s why I think your tone of irony is so important.

Dalton Conley: Who actually knows why you got the crap beat out of you? I mean, all kids beat each other up. I’m sure I would be a very different person if I’d been 6-foot-5 and 220 pounds of muscle. The whole dynamic would have changed then, because toughness would have been on my side, regardless of race. It’s hard to know what went on, because I was a skinny white kid. In some ways I regret the way I titled the book. I wanted a punchy, quick title. But it makes people who haven’t read it think it’s “Oh, poor white boy complaining about reverse racism and being singled out and called ‘honky’ all the time,” and that’s not what I wanted to get across at all.

Lopate: No. But it’s not a bad title for a book.

Jonathan Lethem: This is exactly what I’m wrestling with: the difference between ordinary bullying and bullying with racial overtones. And then this — call it reverse racist bullying, for lack of a better term.

In those moments the wider context — that my tormentors were powerless in society and that I was a representative of the powerful majority — was right there with us, even at age 10, 12, 13. The impossibility of ever claiming racism as an issue was something I felt. If I pointed out what was going on I was automatically a racist. That silenced me.

Lopate: It often shocked me that I was not being bullied. I was the only white kid at summer camp, and nobody picked on me. Why would they be even remotely threatened? There was no reason to pick on me. I felt a little bit ignored. It was their world. I experienced this confusion — feeling scared and threatened and wondering why there wasn’t more tension. And since I’m Jewish, I was threatened as many, if not more, times by the Irish kids, who waited outside Hebrew school, as by the black kids.

Conley: When you would go to, say, a different black neighborhood, to Harlem or to a different area of Brooklyn that was predominantly black, did you immediately feel a different dynamic? I know that when I would go to, say, Spanish Harlem — which is almost demographically the same as the Lower East Side — just because it was unfamiliar, and because I didn’t see the same faces hanging outside of the Puerto Rican social clubs as I did in my neighborhood, I did feel threatened in that way, which is sometimes remarkably absent in your own home area.

Lopate: I know what you mean, because where I grew up, in a black neighborhood, I definitely felt that people knew who I was, that I belonged. But a friend of mine who went up to Harlem one day was robbed, because everyone knew he didn’t belong there.

Lethem: I think there are invisible zones in neighborhoods. I knew when I was moving from the terrain that was dominated by the kids from Wyckoff Housing Project, as opposed to the kids from the Gowanus houses, because they had different turfs, and some of them knew you and nearly had an investment in protecting you. You were OK because you were recognized. Those invisible codes were at work.

When I first lived in this neighborhood, in the early ’70s, it was before there was an absolutely racial divide inside public housing. I had a couple of white friends inside the Wyckoff houses.

I knew a Jewish kid who lived there with his older brothers and his parents. The oldest of the brothers wasn’t tough, just older, a big chubby Jewish kid, and when I visited he would walk me out of the housing project. He knew he had to. He had his turf and he could escort me back home.

But it strikes me that before those codes are in place, there’s a degree of teaching that goes on. In Phillip’s essay where he writes about that question: “What you looking at? What you looking at?” I felt such recognition. I remembered how I felt I was being initiated into codes of deference — that until I’d learned how to move through the streets, I was going to be confronted.

Lopate: By the way, what is the solution to that question, “What you looking at?”

Lethem: Well, it’s by definition an unanswerable question. That’s the trick to it. You caught that beautifully in your essay: “How am I supposed to answer? What if I were looking at you, what would it mean? Why do I have to try to answer this question that has no answer?”

Conley: When you’re alone, or in that sort of street-level interaction, somehow the societal-level paradigm always gets flipped. I don’t know if it’s because when you’re poor and a minority in the United States that you’ve got nothing to lose, so just growing up that way makes you tougher. But it’s likely going to be the person who’s in the dominant group of society as a whole who acts very scraping and deferential in that kind of situation and says, “Nothing” when they’re asked, “What are you looking at?”

Lopate: You know, it was absurd, because I got so involved with jazz and blues, and I would walk down the street thinking, “I’ll tell them that I like jazz and blues.” And I had an almost scholarly relationship to the jazz and blues and I had a lot of black friends in high school, and they’d come over to the house, and I’d play them these things like the Five Blind Boys of Mississippi and they’d be so embarrassed. They’d say, “That’s the stuff my grandmother listens to.” And even when I was playing Charlie Parker, they had moved on. They were listening to organ and saxophone combos that were playing in Harlem. They weren’t listening to this. I had become a “Ph.D. in spadeology,” as they used to say.

The thing about power, though — I had an experience when I was about 13, 14 where my parents had a camera store near Myrtle Avenue, which was right by a big, black public housing project.

And they would send me in to try to collect, with these packets of photographs that had not been picked up — because people would send their pictures in, but then they didn’t have the money to collect them. So I’d knock on the door, and I’d hear the sound of pure terror. “It’s the man!” And I could have been 6-foot-5, I could have been the landlord, as far as they were concerned. They were behind closed doors, scurrying around saying, “Don’t open it!” and “What are we going to do?” In that situation it was very clear who was in the power seat.

Conley: I think sometimes it could break either way, in the sense that, for example, being called “honky” or any sort of racial epithet doesn’t work. It just sort of falls flat, like a bad pitch, compared to the reverse.

Something I talk about in “Honky” is the issue of “cultural capital” — a term sociologists use, which describes how my parents had a certain middle-class status no matter how little money they had. For example, when my local school got so bad, they might not be able send me to private school, but they could get a friend of theirs on the West Side of town to get me into the Greenwich Village school by lying about our address.

Coming from a family of artists, I knew all these totally useless references, in terms of any objective standard. But if I were to go to college, the fact that I knew who Jackson Pollock was would help me out in the interview. And so on.

Ironically, I think I was also advantaged because I sucked off the cultural capital of the neighborhood, in the sense that thinking of a quick retort to “What are you looking at?” or “Your mother’s so stupid she tried to alphabetize the M&M’s” was the perfect training for being an academic, for being a professor. That’s what we do. We sit around snapping on each other.

Lopate: I think in a way what you’re talking about, and again I identify with this, was your parents were bohemians. And it’s a strange class.

Lethem: I think it stands outside class …

Lopate: It pretends to be outside class. There’s no such thing as outside class, but it pretends to be, and there’s a kind of reverse snobbism. Just like my parents said, “Well, we’re living in the ghetto, but we’ve got the Bach records, and we know who Jackson Pollock is … We’re more sensitive.”

Lethem: Right, sure. Our parents cultivated an aesthetic of renouncing the things that were seen as middle class. I didn’t understand that we were as poor as the people in the neighborhood around us, but we were. I was insulated from that understanding by the book-lined walls and the people who would come over for dinner, the things that connected us to the world.

In fact, it was an enormous advantage when I finally got to college and met my ostensible peers, who were from the middle class but were often much more culturally deprived than I was.

Lopate: When I got to college, I went to Columbia, and I could not stop talking about the ghetto. And they would say, “Come on, Lopate, relax, you’re not there anymore.” Meaning, “You don’t have to be scared.” I wasn’t scared, I was boasting. And I felt like they didn’t understand something that was so important, that was reality. So I kept bringing the ghetto along with me.

Conley: I think you were more self-aware as a kid. Because for me it was quite the opposite. I longed for the lawns, the middle class, and when I came back from college after the first year at Berkeley, I asked my mother, “How could you ever raise your kids in a place like this without even grass and trees and a backyard? You’re so selfish.”

Now, of course, I would never have traded it for the world. I could never leave New York. I’m trapped here because of this experience, I think. And in some ways it’s very limiting. I’m envious of people who can feel comfortable in the malls and the backyards of suburban America.

Lethem: I grew up in a sort of hippie-Utopian atmosphere where my parents taught me to be oblivious to race. What I couldn’t have been prepared for was the way the community around me insisted that I learn to see myself as white. Even though I wasn’t insisting on their racial identity, they insisted that I understand mine. And they named it. I was the white boy. And I could never have produced the words “black boy.” I’d been trained it to feel it was unsayable.

Lopate: What’s your religion?

Lethem: My mother was Jewish and my father is a WASP from the Midwest.

Conley: Exactly the same.

Lopate: I gotta say, both my parents are Jewish, and I never thought of myself as white, I thought of myself as Jewish.

Conley: I never thought of myself as Jewish, I always thought of myself as white. Race so trumped any differences between ethnic groups within the white population.

Lethem: I think I bridge your two experiences. In Phillip’s essay there’s this older idea that there were many ethnic zones — Italian, Jewish, Irish, Puerto Rican, black, Polish. Then there’s Dalton’s experience, which is essentially being in a neighborhood where the only issue is skin tone anymore.

In my childhood, by chance, I moved from one to the other. From first to third grade I was at a school where there were only blacks, Puerto Ricans and a scattering of motley hippie kids, like myself, who were white. That was Dalton’s reality, where the only question was, “Oh, I’ve got white skin.”

Then, for fourth grade, I moved to Carroll Gardens, an old Italian enclave [in Brooklyn]. There I was no longer in the minority by skin tone. But I was met with this very self-aware, self-defining majority of Italian kids, who didn’t welcome me either. They introduced me to those finer distinctions that belonged to the older Brooklyn, to Phillip’s childhood. “Oh, you’re Irish, you’re Italian or you’re a Jewish kid. Or we can’t help you if you don’t know what you are.” Which was sort of my problem.

Later I realized that the kids from the black housing project on the edge of the Italian neighborhood recognized the difference, too. My brother tells a story of being on Court Street and being surrounded by a bunch of black kids, who were ready to shake him down but weren’t certain he wasn’t Italian. And they said, “Hey, you a white boy or you Italian?” And my brother’s response was, “Well, wait a minute. What do you mean? Those Italian guys are white, too! If you’re going to take my money, take their money, too.” But the black kids didn’t see it that way.

Lopate: Oh, sure, they’d come after them with baseball bats.

Lethem: Yeah. Whereas you and I, Dalton, as the Jewish bohemian kids, whatever we were, there was no team with baseball bats to take vengeance for us.

Lopate: It definitely is quasi-generational. I was born in ’43, I came up in the ’50s, at a time when Jews were still very black identified. There was all this “Let my people go,” and my parents had the Paul Robeson records. There was this feeling that the Exodus story and civil rights were connected. There was a whole involvement in the NAACP, etc. And this was before the big falling out occurred in about ’64.

So if my parents taught me anything, it was to mistrust other whites a lot, and blacks somewhat, but not as much as other whites.

Lethem: My parents, who are about 10 years older than you, Phillip, had the same instinct, but perhaps it had just then become obsolete. Certainly the blacks in the neighborhood we moved into didn’t honor it.

Lopate: I don’t think the blacks honored it in my neighborhood, either. As Baldwin says in his essay about uptown, “Blacks see the Jews as a frontline of bill collectors.” But culturally, we felt a warmth. It didn’t last forever, but it was part of the scene.

Conley: Mine are about five years older than Phillip. And I think that in some ways, they probably had some of the same attitudes, but didn’t know at the time what they were getting themselves into, moving into a project. In fact, my father was horrified by moving into a cookie-cutter apartment. He thought it was the urban equivalent of tract housing. It wasn’t bohemian enough. But how could they know the overblown cultural symbolism the word “project” would take on over the course of the next generation? Now, partly because of the success of rap music, it’s become a certain badge of honor.

Lethem: Another generational difference is the enormous advance in Jewish assimilation in the years between Phillip’s childhood years and ours.

Conley: I totally agree. I didn’t even think about being Jewish until I went to California and I realized that I was in a stigmatized group. And then I reread my past. I literally read my high school yearbook and realized, “My god! All these people are Jewish!” Andy Epstein, who was tall and blond and blue-eyed and good looking — I would have never guessed that [he was] Jewish. I didn’t even think, “Epstein, of course he’s Jewish.”

That’s something new to our generation. The other kids, they probably thought I wasn’t Jewish. And the kids that I thought weren’t Jewish because they also had Irish names, they were Jewish too.

Lopate: You know, I want to talk about the issues of writing about this stuff, because I think we can only go so far with sociology, even though we have a sociologist here. I think that it’s still something that takes a certain courage to write about. It feels like a minefield. It feels dangerous. At least it did to me when I wrote “The Countess’s Tutor.” I felt like, “I’m going to get in trouble, but I’m just going to put this stuff out.”

I think one reason Dalton’s book is a triumph is that he does so well with the Dalton character. But every once in a while I would feel like you were trying too hard to understand. That is, I would feel that you were trying to explain that whites still had the power, so there were very good reasons for blacks to be responding in this way. Sometimes I would be grateful for those passages; I would think, “Well, he’s trying to get at a larger understanding.” And sometimes I would be not grateful for them and think, “Well, this is mucking up the prose.”

Conley: You’ve put your finger on one of the most difficult parts of writing a thematic memoir, which is not, like “The Liars’ Club,” so individualized. I’m trying to speak to larger issues. And it was a tightrope to walk. I can’t tell you how many more explanations I crossed out at the last minute. Now sometimes there are a couple of things I wish I did say, because it’s such a sensitive issue, and almost presumptuous for me to write, as a white guy. In some instances I violated the cardinal rule of “show, don’t tell.” Sometimes I put a sentence here or there that would nudge the reader in the right direction. But I hope those were far and few between.

Lopate: They were. It’s a near-perfect book. Really. But there’s a kind of cover-your-ass statement that we all know about, you know, like “Oh my god, I don’t want them to think that I’m a racist because this black kid beat the shit out of me.” But, you know, maybe at that moment you were a racist. And I felt like there was possibly even a certain anger that you weren’t putting in.

I feel that in nonfiction we have to tell as well as show. But it’s a question really of the kind of telling, and how to get a perspective which doesn’t feel like damage control.

Lethem: Damage control’s a great word for it. When you add race to those pure childhood experiences of fear or violence you create a confusion that has no good name. And so you’re afraid the only name for it is racism. To open your mouth at all is to make a mistake.

Lopate: I think it has to do with the Other, on the deepest possible level — that moment when the Other appears to us as nonhuman, or certainly not as fully human as we experience ourselves to be. And whether that’s the way a man feels about a woman, or whether that’s the way a white feels about a black or a black feels about a white, it is this issue of otherness. And I think that part of what political correctness has made us do is to jump and flinch. And what I’d like to see is just a little bit more sitting in the mud of confusion and saying, “You’re absolutely right. We all are fully complex human beings, but let’s not exaggerate our ability to be compassionate with everybody. Let’s recognize how hard compassion really is. Let’s not oversimplify.” You look like you want to disagree.

Conley: I don’t want to disagree with your assessment. I wonder, though, about the way it actually plays out in the sort of constant verbal abuse and constant jostling for position — how many roaches you had in your apartment, how old and dirty your sneakers were, whether your mom was a whore. There are things that would be so easy to say when anger is boiling. How does a kid who’s 9 already know that he can’t say something about how black the other kid is, if you’re white?

It’s always the sensitive issues that can’t be named. I don’t think it’s anything particular to race. If a kid is fat, kids will say so, immediately. Nothing’s stopping them. But picking on somebody about race or about class — even among young kids they’re already socialized that you never do this. If it was only being fat or being tall or short, a physical characteristic, we wouldn’t be so scared to say it. We could say, “Your mother’s so dark.” And then the person would just come back with, “Your mother’s so pale.” Somehow racism is different.

Lopate: I agree that racism is fundamental and important. What I’m really talking about is not what it’s like to be a kid, but our job as writers. And how do we touch explosive material without hedging too much?

Lethem: I want to throw your question back to you, Phillip. In writing that essay, do you feel that you unearthed anger in yourself?

Lopate: Well, I think I’ve certainly got fear. But you know, when I wrote “The Countess’s Tutor,” I was just as nervous saying that the woman I called the Countess was fat. When I described the kid who beat up my brother and compared him to a panther, I thought, “This is going to get me in trouble, this is stupid, don’t do this.” And I thought, “Well, but at that moment, the physicality is what impressed me.” And so this is the question: How do you describe people, knowing that you’re not going to take them on fully and walk in their shoes?

In Dalton’s book, there are clearly people whom he’s going to treat as basically loose cannons, who are totally scary — like the kid who put the knife to your head — and who are not really entered into that much. And then there are the friends, who are given much more reality. It’s funny, this may seem unfair to say, but in a way you’ve benefited from one of your friends being shot and paralyzed. It gave an arc to the story.

Lethem: This is interesting, because the writer’s guilt at using life stories is recapitulated, in this case, in the white kid’s guilt at surviving experiences which the black kid couldn’t. He ends up in jail for them; the white kid ends up in college in California. So similar to that “getting away with it,” which can be an aspect of the writer’s experience. “Oh, we’re all traumatized, but I’m the one who’s got the material afterwards.”

Conley: In some ways I still feel probably more racist than somebody who grew up in lily-white Indiana or somewhere. I tell a story in the book about how in Pennsylvania, where we went for the summer, my sister had a sleepover, and a girl told a ghost story about “the big nigger in the woods” with a complete lack of self-consciousness, just like a story about Bigfoot. In certain ways that’s more innocent, and less racist than I’m capable of being in my head at certain times because of my intimate knowledge of surviving these invisible racial and class wars on a daily basis for my entire childhood.

It’s sort of like being a spy — although I wasn’t a very good one because of my skin color. Your allegiances are compromised. Your knowledge of the “enemy” or the Other is so intimate that you become confused about where you’re coming from and what you feel.

Lopate: You asked me if I was still angry, and I think the answer that immediately came to mind was that most of the anger was at myself. And I think part of what happens when you cross those lines is that you end up internalizing both groups and you can’t help but take it out on yourself.

Conley: I take it out on others, in my head at least. I feel like when I’m with whites, I get so angry and so bitter, as if I practically identify myself as the secret black. Then, when I’m in an African-American or a Latino community, I still can’t resist the behavioral explanations of poverty. Like, look at my old neighborhood. It’s still got garbage and graffiti over it. People don’t clean it up themselves; it’s their own fault. I start getting angry and conservative and sounding worse than George Bush. If you averaged those two, I’m probably average, in terms of my racial attitude. But they’re really nowhere in the middle. They’re very extreme.

What the experience gave me was not any hard insight, but more emotionality about it. I’ve devoted my entire career to these issues because I’m still trying to figure out these contradictory emotions in some rational or scientific manner through sociology — as if I’m going to uncover the magic bullet, though I know I’m not.

Lethem: The book becomes an argument for literature as the only method for dealing with the experience.

Lopate: Yeah, but there are so many bad memoirs. It’s unusual to be able to laugh at oneself and have a sense of perspective, even if you haven’t solved the confusion. The chances of creating literature are very small.

Listening to you, I still think I get angry at myself, and I think the reason is partly a kind of self-distrust that comes from having been too many people. I can no longer trust that I am one thing and one person. I’ve created a chameleon personality that can actually get along with almost everybody. But I guess in some ways I see myself as an actor. That’s the training you get on the streets.

Lethem: Sure. By the time I got to college I could already tell that I was more a chameleon than any of the upper-middle-class or middle-class kids around me. I could haul out the ghetto moves for their entertainment, but I knew I was playing. I could also slide into their social context, but I knew I was playing at that.

Conley: I still feel totally uncomfortable in a white working-class context. Probably there’s where I feel the least comfortable, and next would be a minority context of any class. I’m most comfortable, increasingly comfortable, in white intelligentsia. But I think it’s related to a feeling of a lack of authenticity that is perhaps common to all writers, or to all people who are trying to spin reality.

Lethem: Among writers or academics you can look through anyone’s mask and know that it’s constructed. You know, as you become credentialized, as you publish a few things, you realize, “Oh, we’ve all manufactured this identity. No one was born to it. So here’s where I can be as natural, at least, as everyone else in the room.”

Nonfiction
“Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War” by Mark Bowden
“Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley” by Peter Guralnick
“Lost on Earth: Nomads of the New World” by Mark Fritz
“Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette” by Judith Thurman
“Show Me a Hero: A Tale of Murder, Suicide, Race and Redemption” by Lisa Belkin

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We confess we didn’t begin the process of choosing our 10 favorite books of 1999 with quite the enthusiasm we felt in the past three years of the Salon Book Awards. Is it millennial malaise, we wondered, that caused most of the readers we asked for suggestions to murmur listlessly, “I didn’t really read anything that blew me away this year”?

Of course, everyone had at least one exception to that ennui, and many of the books on our final list were the sole bright spot in some readers’ otherwise lackluster ventures between the covers. Others we like to consider our own “discoveries,” books we picked up with a sense of duty and put down with a sigh of profound satisfaction. Some of them, like Lisa Belkin’s “Show Me a Hero” and Mark Fritz’s “Lost on Earth,” went bafflingly unrecognized (in Belkin’s case, even by Salon) when first published. Others, like Stewart O’Nan’s “A Prayer for the Dying,” weren’t greeted with the kind of fanfare we passionately feel they deserve.

This, of course, was the year that J.K. Rowling’s “Harry Potter” books took over the bestseller lists with greater tenacity than any student radical occupying a dean’s office ever showed. We loved the “Harry Potter” books, too, and heartily recommend them to adults and children alike — but you didn’t really need us to tell you that, did you?

Each title on our 1999 list is one we wouldn’t hesitate to press into the hands of skeptical friends and relatives with the fevered recommendation of bibliophiles everywhere: “You’ve got to read this.” Some are chilling, some hilarious, others moving, but all of them had us spellbound, reluctantly looking up from their pages after hours of reading with the conviction that books like these are the reason we got into this daft line of work in the first place.

FICTION

Cryptonomicon

By Neal Stephenson

Avon, 928 pages

You don’t have to follow every kink in the Byzantine plot of Stephenson’s tour de force novel (thank God) to enjoy it thoroughly. “Cryptonomicon” juxtaposes a handful of eccentric mathematical geniuses enlisted as cryptographers in World War II with a band of contemporary high-tech entrepreneurs trying to set up a “data haven” in a remote jungle island near the Philippines. And while the book’s primary concern (beyond the allure of secrecy) seems to be the elaborately artful rituals of deceit that both war and business necessitate, Stephenson’s novel is also both a the-way-we-live-now portrait of the new information economy and a ripping World War II adventure that includes a grueling trek through the jungle and a riveting expedition to salvage a sinking submarine. It’s a hell of a ride that throws in, among other delights, theories of cryptography, mathematical charts of the sexual appetite and various famous figures from the birth of computing for good measure.

Excerpt | Order a Copy | Author Interview

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Motherless Brooklyn
By Jonathan Lethem
Doubleday, 311 pages

It’s a mystery with a solution that won’t surprise anybody, but months after you’ve read it what you remember is not the outcome but the endearing central character, Lionel “Freakshow” Essrog, a would-be private eye with Tourette’s syndrome. Lionel’s feverish brain sends the standard obscenities spewing out of his helpless mouth, but what fascinates Lethem about Tourette’s is its obsessive-compulsive mauling and molding of language; he turns pathology into poetry and gives his jittery, galumphing narrator a poet’s sensitivity. The story of this lost soul and his hunt for the killer of the penny-ante thug who rescued him from a Brooklyn orphanage is too sad and strange to sit comfortably in the contours of a genre novel, but the originality of Lethem’s hero and the sputtering joy of his tic-pocked language take the book to a level that not many novels, genre or otherwise, can match.

Excerpt | Order a Copy | Original Salon review

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Original Bliss
By A.L. Kennedy
Alfred A Knopf, 214 pages

An abused wife who’s lost her faith; a brilliant self-help guru addicted to violent porn: Although “Original Bliss” is, deep down, a conventional love story, you never get the feeling that you’ve been there before. In this funny, brutal and wonderfully touching book, Glaswegian novelist A.L. Kennedy doesn’t shy away from the big questions, but under her hard intelligence beats a heart of cotton candy. The book is a page-turner that teases you until the very end with the question: Can these two people, so wildly unlike and so clearly made for each other, escape their demons, spiritual and sexual, in each other’s damaged arms?

Excerpt | Order a Copy | Original Salon review

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Plainsong
By Kent Haruf
Alfred A. Knopf, 301 pages

A schoolteacher’s wife leaves him, and their sons (9 and 10) have to learn how to get along with her gone. A pregnant teenager, thrown out of her house, takes refuge with two ornery old bachelor ranchers, whose initial distress gives way in time to helpless, comical love. If Kent Haruf’s profoundly simple and sentimental novel about a few decent people in an unremarkable High Plains town had hit a single false note, the whole delicate structure would have crumbled. But not the least of the book’s miracles is the matter-of-fact lightness with which it sustains its melancholy sweetness; the greatest may be the ease (or seeming ease) with which it reconciles the all but irreconcilable legacies of Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner.

Excerpt | Order a Copy | Original Salon review

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A Prayer for the Dying

By Stewart O’Nan
Henry Holt and Company, 195 pages

Stewart O’Nan’s short novel takes place some years after the Civil War, in the bucolic town of Friendship, Wis., which with little warning finds itself quarantined during a catastrophic diphtheria epidemic and simultaneously threatened by an advancing fire. The narrator and Job-like hero — Friendship’s sheriff, preacher and undertaker all in one — has to make bitter choices, sealing off the town (and, thus, escape) as he watches his friends and loved ones die. And then he is left to learn that even the hardest choices can still be the wrong ones. The beauty and the horror are inextricably, almost obscenely joined; few novelists have gazed as unblinkingly on that union as O’Nan does in this great and shattering book.

Excerpt | Order a Copy | Original Salon review

NONFICTION

Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War
By Mark Bowden
Atlantic Monthly Press, 356 pages

A real nail-biter, Mark Bowden’s account of the 1993 raid on Mogadishu that resulted in the deaths of 18 American servicemen and more than 500 Somalis has been called one of the most accurate accounts of combat ever. With no experience in battle and little more with battle scenes, we can only testify that it’s a dazzlingly lucid, hair-raising depiction of total chaos. Bowden presents the conflict from dozens of points of view, including those of Somali civilians and of the United States’ elite Delta Force operators. If the ice-and-death adventure of Jon Krakauer’s “Into Thin Air” struck you as a bit slow, Bowden’s equally tragic blood-and-dust reporting masterwork will provide an even more potent shot of adrenaline.

Excerpt | Order a Copy | Original Salon Review

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Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley
By Peter Guralnick
Little, Brown and Company, 767 pages

The second and final volume of Guralnick’s massive Elvis project doesn’t hunt for meanings and it doesn’t judge — or at least, it tries not to. The singer’s life from October 1958, when he arrived in Germany to complete his tour of duty with the army, to his ugly and undignified death in the summer of 1977 wasn’t all downhill, and his triumphs — notably his 1968 television special and his first Las Vegas performances the following year — take his biographer just as high as they took his audiences. But for most of this meticulous chronicle of second-rate movies, second-rate recordings and increasingly erratic (to put it euphemistically) concert performances, Guralnick can barely conceal his exasperation and his sadness. Yet he never loses sight of his subject’s talent and generosity, and he answers it with a talent and generosity of his own. Out of his narrowly focused month-by-month record of Elvis Presley’s fall arises a terrible and, in its way, magnificent fable of American excess, arrogance, weakness and waste.

Excerpt | Order a Copy | Original Salon Review

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Lost on Earth: Nomads of the New World
By Mark Fritz
Little, Brown and Company, 294 pages

Reporter Mark Fritz lays out his tales of refugees and refugee workers with a short-story master’s feel for character and plot. He has a real talent for affability: Almost without exception he likes the people whose stories he tells, and while their hardships obviously matter to him, what captures his imagination and his skill is their personalities. His portraits of the uprooted encompass natives of lands as diverse as Germany and Iraq and Togo and Bosnia, but no one he writes about seems foreign; he puts us in his subjects’ shoes by showing us how very much like us they are. (And he drives home the point that there is no longer anything anomalous about their experience, reporting that in the mid-1990s, roughly one out of every 100 people on the planet was forcibly uprooted from home.) He also has a gift for making tangled clashes (the Liberian civil war, for instance) easy to follow without talking down in the process. Although Fritz’s subject matter is cruel, his book is strangely delightful — on one level an outcry against acts of inhumanity, but on another a celebration of our common humanity.

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Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette
By Judith Thurman
Alfred A. Knopf, 592 pages

Massive, research-packed biographies are often honored more for their comprehensiveness than for their readability; Thurman’s life of the sensual French writer is a glorious exception. Lushly textured and psychologically shrewd, it deftly digests the existing record and incorporates new material to provide an engrossing account of a fascinating and maddening woman. It helps that Colette’s life teemed with passion, scandal, intrigue (admittedly, some of it rather petty), perversity and celebrities, literary and otherwise. Thurman herself seems alternately dismayed, admiring and philosophical about her subject (“There was not an idea that could carry Colette away, or a sensation that couldn’t”), but her complex response only deepens this exemplary attempt to do justice to the mysteries of a woman’s life.

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Show Me a Hero: A Tale of Murder, Suicide, Race and Redemption
By Lisa Belkin
Little, Brown and Company, 311 pages

Belkin’s generous, intuitive story of the forced integration of Yonkers, N.Y., in the late 1980s and early ’90s is the kind of nonfiction book that writers attempting bold social novels (paging Tom Wolfe) might take as a challenge. It’s packed with compelling characters: the stern, idealistic judge who orders the city to build public housing in middle-class white neighborhoods (and nearly bankrupts the municipal government with fines when it defies him); the visionary but cold-blooded planner who believes that townhouses rather than high-rises will solve the chronic ills plaguing such developments; the little old lady in tennis shoes who starts out agitating against the housing and winds up advocating for its residents; the poor, struggling mothers for whom it is their last best hope; and the 29-year-old mayor who stands up to the local demagogues (their followers throw Pampers at him) and pays a terrible price.

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