Salon.com > Heller McAlpin

Imagining H.G. Wells' sex life

Wed, 28 Sep 2011 00:01:00 +0000

When it comes to novels about famous people, two roads diverge in a yellow wood. Writers of historical fiction tend to stick to the more traveled road paved with facts, a route that leads to novelized or dramatized biographies; sometimes they choose to focus on a specific period or event in a person's life, which was Colm Toibin's approach in "The Master," about Henry James' last years. Taking the less familiar fork -- Tom Stoppard's specialty in drama -- involves imagining sometimes outlandish scenarios or clearly fictitious what-might-have-beens that feature real people or a mix of actual and made-up characters. Cynthia Ozick's "Dictation," which invents freighted interchanges not just between Henry James and Joseph Conrad, but between their secretaries, is a recent journey down this path.

“The Call”: A wry take on rural life

Wed, 17 Aug 2011 00:19:00 +0000

Yannick Murphy's last novel, the alluring "Signed, Mata Hari" (2007), channeled the seductive voice of the glamorous Dutch-born exotic dancer who was executed by the French in 1917 for purported espionage. With "The Call," Murphy returns closer to home -- way closer -- though not to the tough, gritty New York City of the 1970s described in her autobiographical coming-of-age tale, "Here They Come" (2006).

"The Call" takes the form of a series of wry, terse bulletins about the stresses and joys of work and family. The narrator -- or diarist -- is a veterinarian who lives in rural Vermont with his wife, a harried homemaker/writer, their three children, and their two Newfoundland dogs. (Yannick Murphy lives in rural Vermont with her veterinarian husband, three children and two Newfoundlands.) If this sounds prosaic, let me stress that "The Call" is anything but: It is fresh and beguiling on several levels.

The man behind “Charlotte’s Web”

Tue, 28 Jun 2011 00:24:00 +0000

Fifty-nine years after its publication, "Charlotte's Web" is the best-selling children's book in U.S. history. Hurray for that, because literature -- juvenile or adult -- doesn't get much better. In "Charlotte's Web," a seemingly simple story about a pig whose life is saved by a spider, E.B. White managed, without pomposity, preachiness, or condescension, to encompass issues of mortality and the power of both friendship and the written word. (It's always struck me that it really wasn't "SOME PIG," but "SOME SPIDER" -- a spider who could convey a convincing message in writing.) How did he do it? That's the question Michael Sims set out to answer in "The Story of Charlotte's Web," which offers an engaging, distilled, highly focused biography of White.

“The Cookbook Collector”: “Sense and Sensibility” for the digital age

Mon, 26 Jul 2010 18:45:00 +0000

Looking for a delicious read? Allegra Goodman has whipped up a delectable mix of intelligence, relevance, wit, romance, moral complexity, bibliophilia, dot-com start-ups and family secrets in her luscious fourth novel, "The Cookbook Collector." Seriously, if charm weren't such a maligned sweetener, I'd flag that ingredient, too.

One of the joys of being a critic is sampling a new talent early and then returning for heaping platefuls of the increasingly accomplished fare served with each successive book. Goodman is a stellar example. When she was barely out of Harvard, she published two sparkling collections of stories focused on quandaries facing assimilated American Jews in the late 20th century. Her first novel, "Kaaterskill Falls" (1998), concerned a small, separatist Orthodox Jewish community in the Catskills threatened by issues of inheritance, intergenerational conflict and real estate development. She followed with "Paradise Park," a tale that pursued the identity crisis of American Jews through the spiritual quest of its appealingly flaky narrator, a sort of Jewish Anne Lamott. Her odyssey takes her from a Molokai marijuana farm to a Bialystoker Hasid rabbi who asks plaintively, "Why is it that those of us who are born Jews look for answers in every single religion but our own?" before quipping memorably, "Some of my best Jews are Friends."