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Olivier's sons, worried for their father's safety after the random murder of his best pal and chess-opponent, are committed to spiriting him out of South Africa, but Olivier won't submit. After all, he argues, he has Magrieta, his petulant black housekeeper, to look after him, and also Antje of Bengal, the ghost of a 17th century slave executed for the poisoning of her master and lover's wife. To appease his children, nonetheless, Olivier agrees to take in a lodger. Enter Tessa Butler: 29, caustic and carnal, "with dirty feet and a smudge on her cheek," and "nowhere else to go."

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Dangerously thin, dressed in a pleated black dancer's skirt with black leotards below and tight black ribbed shirt above, Amber appeared torn between death and disco.

The cop was squinting at the Polaroids so intently that it appeared the developing process was of telepathic origin.

But, even more than these, Durkee calls to mind the early Barry Hannah -- rattling his lingual sabers, jitterbugging on the edge of absurdity, lobbing lit firecrackers at his startled audience. "Rides of the Midway" is a manic, sloshed, whiny, fizzy, horny, noisome and wondrous novel.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2001/02/21/durkee/feed/ 0 http://www.salon.com/2000/11/15/barthelme_2/ http://www.salon.com/2000/11/15/barthelme_2/#comments Wed, 15 Nov 2000 20:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/review/2000/11/15/barthelme At some point, in the mid- to late '80s, you were forced to take a side: You were either for or against minimalism, that listless mode of fictioneering said to reflect, with its stripped-down rhetoric and its slo-mo portrayal of the quotidian, the flatness and the anomie of American existence. (One hesitates to say "life.") The minimalists themselves, unanimously hating the label, skirmished with their detractors in the pages of magazines and book reviews: Less is more, said one side; less is ... less, said the other. And not only was less less, the latter charged, minimalism was dehumanizing, they claimed, and amoral, and trivial, and linguistically soulless. "'Around the house and in the yard' fiction," as the maxi-minded Don DeLillo described it, about "marriages and separations and trips to Tanglewood." And on some counts, this reviewer must weigh in, the detractors were right. Minimalism wrought fiction that seemed, at its worst, little more than Dick-and-Jane stories for grown-ups: See Dick watch TV. See Jane frown. See Dick eat baked chicken. The end. It was literature with a message that could fit inside a fortune cookie: Nothing happens and nobody cares.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2000/11/15/barthelme_2/feed/ 0 http://www.salon.com/2000/10/19/harrison_3/ http://www.salon.com/2000/10/19/harrison_3/#comments Thu, 19 Oct 2000 19:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/review/2000/10/19/harrison The novella is a strange and stubborn beast. It dwells along literature's brambly edges, somewhere between the shadow-strewn forests of the novel and the tidy, fenced-in pastures of the short story. Little wonder, then, that Jim Harrison should be drawn to the novella form. Harrison has been prowling the literary edges for four decades now, stubbornly eluding the snares of critical reduction -- including such dim taggings as "macho" and "regional" -- while producing a body of work so lushly idiosyncratic as to thwart even the gentlest efforts at classification.

The novella suits Harrison. Not for him the constricted focus and pinprick epiphanies of the short story; even his sentences, with their roundabout subjunctive clauses and hydra-headed coils of thought, cry out against containment. And though he's penned his share of novels, most recently 1998's "The Road Home," Harrison's glibly wounded narrative voices seem better suited to the unbroken intensity that the novella form can provide. Not surprisingly, then, his three previous collections of novellas -- "Legends of the Fall," "The Woman Lit by Fireflies," and "Julip" -- are considered by many to be the brightest stars in Harrison's galaxy of work.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2000/10/19/harrison_3/feed/ 0 http://www.salon.com/2000/09/13/bilger/ http://www.salon.com/2000/09/13/bilger/#comments Wed, 13 Sep 2000 19:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/review/2000/09/13/bilger It is doubtful that this reviewer, sitting midst my hounds in one of Mississippi's woollier rural corners, can fully grasp the awe bound to gape the jaws of most readers of Burkhard Bilger's "Noodling for Flatheads." Few people outside the South, for instance, have even heard of catfish grabbing (the "noodling" of the title being an Okie variation), the peculiar and treacherous practice wherein barehanded folk wrestle up giant flathead catfish from their underwater lairs. And while most members of the bookish public are vaguely aware of activities like cockfighting, coon hunting and moonshining, they tend to associate them with an America long past -- when presidents were nicknamed Old Hickory, coonskin caps were all the rage and men and bears shared the same roadways, at about the same speed.

Not so hereabouts: My local saloon is strewn with men happy to show off the scars on their forearms from belligerent catfish; lost coon hounds wander into my yard every autumn; and moonshine goes for a dollar a shot at a juke joint one county over (and is best drunk, I've found, mixed weakly with Mello Yello). But hereabouts, as I'm ever reminded, isn't America proper, or properly American. Having written my share of magazine articles on topics similar to those included in this book, I know the weird glee that befalls Manhattan editors when apprised of such arcana. "That's so ... bizarre," comes the inevitable response. Perhaps, but then what's toting a bag full of dogshit while walking your pup through the city? The South, I'll contend, has no exclusive license on the bizarre.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2000/09/13/bilger/feed/ 0 http://www.salon.com/2000/08/15/welch/ http://www.salon.com/2000/08/15/welch/#comments Tue, 15 Aug 2000 19:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/review/2000/08/15/welch One of the central questions of contemporary American Indian literature -- indeed, perhaps the central question -- is how to live in the floaty interstice between two cultures: one trampled and impounded, sequestered into arid corners, and the other, that of the tramplers, bigoted and unwelcoming. How to live, as Chickasaw poet Linda Hogan once wrote, with "your hands in the dark of two empty pockets."

It's the question N. Scott Momaday probed in his shattering masterwork, "House Made of Dawn," and it's one visited frequently in the work of Sherman Alexie, Indian lit's most visible current exponent. It's also a question that 60-year-old James Welch, a poet and novelist of Blackfeet and Gros Ventre descent, has been quietly brooding over for four decades now, most notably in the novels "Indian Lawyer" and "The Death of Jim Loney." Now comes "The Heartsong of Charging Elk," in which Welch poses that same question in more exotic terrain -- in Marseille, France, where in 1889, history tells us, an Oglala Sioux named Charging Elk, hospitalized with broken ribs and influenza while on tour with Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, found himself stranded after the show moved on without him.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2000/08/15/welch/feed/ 0 http://www.salon.com/2000/06/13/earley/ http://www.salon.com/2000/06/13/earley/#comments Tue, 13 Jun 2000 19:05:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/review/2000/06/13/earley Of all the literary styles represented in last year's "20 Writers for the 21st Century" issue of the New Yorker, Tony Earley's was the one you'd most likely take home to Mama. Unlike that smart-alecky David Foster Wallace or that grouchy Sherman Alexie or -- especially -- that icky William Vollman, Earley's writing seemed blithely inoffensive. It was polite, sincere and ineffusive; conservative but not reactionary; ambitious but not difficult; charming but not flirtatious. In this regard, Earley seemed a rather unlikely member of that diverse and sassy cast, as if Opie Taylor had stumbled onto the wrong stage set. "The Wide Sea," included in that issue, was excerpted from Earley's debut novel, "Jim the Boy," which readers have been eagerly awaiting since his inclusion, three years prior to his New Yorker coronation, in Granta's "Best of Young American Novelists" issue. (Earley, like Chris Offut, had the curious distinction of being named one of the nation's best young novelists without ever having published a novel.)

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2000/06/13/earley/feed/ 0 http://www.salon.com/2000/06/08/banks_2/ http://www.salon.com/2000/06/08/banks_2/#comments Thu, 08 Jun 2000 18:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/review/2000/06/08/banks Over the course of 13 books, Russell Banks has veered from mannered Barthelmean formalism ("Family Life") to grainy naturalism ("Trailerpark") to vast symbolic and historical sweep ("Cloudsplitter"), but nowhere is his range more clearly evident than in his four lesser-known short-story collections, represented in "The Angel on the Roof" by 31 examples of what he calls "the best work I have done in the form over the thirty-seven years since I began trying to write." Unlike, say, John Cheever, who in assembling his own collected stories chronologically made visible the grand arc of his career, Banks has chosen to group his "thematically and dramatically"; the result is an often jarring ride through four decades of multifarious modes and techniques. If that sounds like a criticism, it isn't: Career-compendium story collections, ranging as they do over so much distance and time, inevitably suffer from straight-through reading. (Even Cheever is still best served in small courses.) Nonetheless, the breadth and reach and sheer variety of Banks' voices and themes often make the present collection dizzying.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2000/06/08/banks_2/feed/ 0 http://www.salon.com/2000/05/22/strauss_2/ http://www.salon.com/2000/05/22/strauss_2/#comments Mon, 22 May 2000 11:58:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/review/2000/05/22/strauss You have to give Darin Strauss credit, at the very least, for his daring: Who but the most fearless of writers would attempt to describe the interior experience of one of a pair of Siamese twins engaged in sexual intercourse? Maybe Charles Bukowski on a maliciously giddy binge, or perhaps Barry Hannah, with a throaty Gothic cackle. But Strauss has little in common with these writers. His prose rolls along as softly as music from a flute; it's daintily filigreed, keenly sincere and always empathetic. Moreover, his depiction of the twins' sex lives isn't done for effect -- or rather, I should say, not for cruel or prurient effect. Its purpose, like the novel's, is to demonstrate the full range of humanity that these very human oddities embody.

Chang and Eng Bunker, the famously conjoined brothers for whom the term "Siamese twins" was coined, were born in 1811 in a tiny fishing village near Bangkok. Fastened to each other by a flexible swath of ligament at their chests, they shared only a common navel. As adolescents, they were feted in grand style at the royal palace in Bangkok by King Rama III, who was fascinated by the "double-boy" his kingdom had produced. (His predecessor, Rama II, was far less fascinated; when told of the twins' birth, he immediately issued a death warrant, which was never executed.)

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2000/05/22/strauss_2/feed/ 0 http://www.salon.com/2000/05/16/gilbert/ http://www.salon.com/2000/05/16/gilbert/#comments Tue, 16 May 2000 16:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/review/2000/05/16/gilbert In this breezily appealing first novel, Elizabeth Gilbert presents us a heroine as smart, sly, plucky and altogether winning as her own prose; it's difficult, in fact, not to develop a knee-weakening crush on both. At the age of 18, Ruth Thomas has hair so black and thick "she could sew a button on a coat with it"; her face is roundish, with an "inoffensive nose," and though she's saddled with "a bigger rear end" than she'd prefer, she pays it little mind, for she's not, as Gilbert writes, "that kind of girl."

Instead, she's this kind of girl: independent, stubborn, wisecracking, laconic, self-consciously rugged -- a feminist with little interest in agendas but with scads of tomboy drive. In short, just what you might expect the daughter of untold generations of irascible Yankee lobstermen from a remote Maine island to be, and then some.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2000/05/16/gilbert/feed/ 0 http://www.salon.com/2000/04/25/weathers/ http://www.salon.com/2000/04/25/weathers/#comments Tue, 25 Apr 2000 16:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/review/2000/04/25/weathers For those obsessive followers of the 1996 Mount Everest debacle who have a hankering for yet another angle on the story -- and after four prior books, two films and innumerable press accounts, obsessive seems more than a fair qualifier -- this latest report, penned by a member of Jon Krakauer's famous expedition, offers few if any revelations. Those still in search of a smoking gun should look elsewhere. In fact, Beck Weathers, the middle-aged Texas pathologist/mountaineer who arose from the ice a hairsbreadth from death after 22 hours in the storm, takes careful pains in "Left for Dead" to avoid any of the rancorous blame calling that has so defined the debacle's aftermath.

Weathers hails Krakauer's bestselling "Into Thin Air," which targeted for partial blame the late Anatoli Boukreev, a rival team's guide, as the "definitive account." But he also lauds Boukreev, who left Weathers and a teammate half-buried in the snow while saving three of his own clients, as a hero:

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2000/04/25/weathers/feed/ 1 http://www.salon.com/2000/03/20/thomson/ http://www.salon.com/2000/03/20/thomson/#comments Mon, 20 Mar 2000 17:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/review/2000/03/20/thomson After 18 days of forced sexual slavery, during which the unnamed protagonist of British writer Rupert Thomson's disquieting sixth novel, "The Book of Revelation," is chained to a wall by his punctured foreskin and forced to dance portions of "Swan Lake" (chain and all), used as an hors d'oeuvres platter for a swanky dinner party at which his penis is the dessert, crudely tattooed on his hip and sodomized with a strap-on dildo, the man is dumped, safe but spent, on a lawn in an Amsterdam, Netherlands, suburb.

That his torturers are women -- three, to be precise -- is certain to raise eyebrows on America's sensitive shores, as it did in Britain, though it's worth noting that Thomson isn't the first one to swivel the genders of Sadean stock; Quebecois writer Anne Dandurand toyed with the same premise, and with the same chilled, edgy language, in her 1985 short story "Histoire de Q," kindling a minor ruckus in Canadian literary circles. Unlike Dandurand's, however, Thomson's story revolves less around the obvious turnabout in roles -- an easy conceit that's hard to take seriously (can the Stockholm syndrome manifest itself as an erect penis? etc.) -- than it does around its far less obvious and very serious aftermath. Thus, what seems at first glance an exercise in subverted prurience blossoms into a disturbing fable of abuse, which begins, essentially, at the moment the women ditch their victim in that chipper Amsterdam suburb.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2000/03/20/thomson/feed/ 0 http://www.salon.com/2000/03/01/chatwin/ http://www.salon.com/2000/03/01/chatwin/#comments Wed, 01 Mar 2000 17:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/travel/feature/2000/03/01/chatwin How infinitely appropriate that Bruce Chatwin's first bona fide biographer be an amateur. I mean no disparagement by the term, which I use admiringly, even affectionately, evoking as it does that great tradition of free-range scholarship and catholic intellectualism of which Montaigne and Francis Bacon are just two kindred exemplars. For Chatwin himself fell into that camp; indeed, for the 20th century, one might say he defined it. In his small but superlative oeuvre, Chatwin (1940-89) fused fact, fiction, poetry, science and more than a little hoodoo, sometimes recklessly but always artfully, and always, at heart, as part of an impossibly ambitious attempt to explain the roots of human restlessness.

If his theories were crackpot (as many contend), they were beautifully crackpot -- the product of a brilliant amateur traipsing through any number of disciplines en route, he hoped, to mankind's nomadic quintessence. That Nicholas Shakespeare came to Chatwin as a novelist (and a talented one at that) seems thus a great boon. He treats his subject with an empathy that your assistant professor of literature, tearing at his hair over Chatwin's incessant fact-tweaking and uncategorizable writing, might not have mustered. Shakespeare's biography -- authorized though clearly uncensored -- is unflinching and myth-debunking, to be sure, but never cold or assaultive, a work of broad scholarship and indulgent affinity.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2000/03/01/chatwin/feed/ 0 http://www.salon.com/2000/02/14/alexie/ http://www.salon.com/2000/02/14/alexie/#comments Mon, 14 Feb 2000 16:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/log/2000/02/14/alexie "When I first heard the title of Ian Frazier's 'On the Rez,' his nonfiction study of the brief time he spent on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, I laughed out loud." Thus begins Sherman Alexie, the 33-year-old novelist, poet and Spokane-Coeur d'Alene Indian, kicking off his blisteringly aggrieved dismissal of Frazier's book in the Jan. 23 Los Angeles Times Book Review.

Alexie's laughter, however, quickly subsides. "What denial! What romanticism!" he writes, before whacking the former New Yorker staff writer with a litany of further charges: morbidness, objectification, commodification and a "startling lack of self-consciousness," to name just a few. The heart of Alexie's antipathy, nonetheless, seems embedded in the following lines:

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2000/02/14/alexie/feed/ 0 http://www.salon.com/2000/01/31/leary/ http://www.salon.com/2000/01/31/leary/#comments Mon, 31 Jan 2000 17:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/review/2000/01/31/leary The reviewer's temptation in vetting a book this atrocious is merely to step to the side and, via liberal quoting, feed the author, hand over hand, all the rope required for his own hanging. And while that's precisely what I intend to do, it isn't only Timothy Leary -- the turned on, tuned in and dropped out '60s drug guru (1920-1996) whose biography proved so absurd that David Gates, writing his obituary in Newsweek, felt compelled to inject, in passing, "We're not making this up" -- who deserves the blame. The editorial staff at Thunder's Mouth Press is just as culpable for releasing this wrongheaded ragbag of woefully dated rubbish -- perhaps even more so. Leary, after all, is dead, his ashes currently circling the earth in a lipstick-size capsule, while the Thunder's Mouth Press staff is presumably alive and even cogent, present evidence notwithstanding.

"This is a periodical, a collection of 'highlights,' quick film clips of 'the great moments,'" Leary writes by way of posthumous introduction to this compendium of essays, speeches and feuilletons (a number of which appeared in Playboy and Hustler). Then he modestly adds, "If any." Oh, Dr. Leary, I'm sorry: There weren't any great moments, at least when you were writing about sex.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2000/01/31/leary/feed/ 0 http://www.salon.com/2000/01/27/krist/ http://www.salon.com/2000/01/27/krist/#comments Thu, 27 Jan 2000 17:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/review/2000/01/27/krist There's precious little breathing room in "Chaos Theory," Gary Krist's second thriller. The novel's breakneck action sequences -- foot chases, car chases, even dune-buggy chases -- tumble into one another like flotsam in a flood current, banging about in the froth. New dangers lurk at the bottom of every page, and there's nary a spot to be found for either reader or character to breathe a quiet sigh. It's a tight, dizzying if not altogether memorable read -- a swift and sleek whoosh of adrenaline for those nights when you don't give a damn what time the alarm is set for in the morning.

The title, of course, refers to the meteorologist Edward Lorenz's 1961 promulgation of what is commonly called the "butterfly effect": the theory that the flapping of a single butterfly's wing effects a divergence in the state of the atmosphere that, however minute, can ultimately produce a tornado in Kansas, say, or a monsoon in Indonesia.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2000/01/27/krist/feed/ 0 http://www.salon.com/2000/01/21/guttridge/ http://www.salon.com/2000/01/21/guttridge/#comments Fri, 21 Jan 2000 17:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/review/2000/01/21/guttridge Whether the public really needs yet another addition to the bulging canon of cold-air disaster books, there seems little doubt that the public wants more bulges in that canon. One has only to observe the snowy array of books that publishers have scurried to issue hot (or rather cold) on the bestselling heels of Jon Krakauer's "Into Thin Air" and Sebastian Junger's "The Perfect Storm," to see the evidence of a new industry maxim: Frostbite sells.

It would be wickedly unjust, however, to charge Leonard F. Guttridge with opportunism. This sturdy historian presaged the current ice vogue with "Icebound: The Jeanette Expedition's Quest for the North Pole" way back in 1986, when arctic-exploration tomes typically garnered their authors three-figure advances from the Naval Institute Press and a few lecture invitations from local cartography clubs. In his acknowledgments to his newest book, Guttridge confesses that after that effort he was determined to abandon the Arctic.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2000/01/21/guttridge/feed/ 0 http://www.salon.com/1999/12/09/moon_2/ http://www.salon.com/1999/12/09/moon_2/#comments Thu, 09 Dec 1999 17:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/int/1999/12/09/moon With the 1983 publication of "Blue Highways," his folksy travelogue through America's near-forgotten back roads, William Least Heat-Moon instantly established himself as one of the nation's preeminent travel writers. The book exploded: "Blue Highways" clung to the New York Times bestseller list for nearly a year, and critics adored it. Least Heat-Moon's sophomore effort, 1991's "PrairyErth: A Deep Map," an almost microscopically in-depth and exhaustive exploration of a single rural county in Kansas, garnered him similar sales and praise. These were cautionary but ebullient celebrations of America -- of its people and landscape and history -- all penned by a man determined to show, like the proudest of fathers, what idiosyncratic glories this homemade nation contains.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/1999/12/09/moon_2/feed/ 0 http://www.salon.com/1999/12/02/goodman_2/ http://www.salon.com/1999/12/02/goodman_2/#comments Thu, 02 Dec 1999 17:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/feature/1999/12/02/goodman Deep into the tempestuous events that form the climax of "The Beach," the fitfully precocious debut novel by Alex Garland about a beach commune gone bloodily awry, the narrator, Richard, is confronted by the ghost of a man who earlier slit his own wrists in the neighboring room of a Bangkok guesthouse. "The horror," is all the ghost will say, after appearing on the beach of the title. Richard is perplexed. "What horror?" he asks.

On its most obvious level, of course, this exchange is little more than a tart allusion to the dying words of Joseph Conrad's Mr. Kurtz; yet something else is happening beneath this exchange -- something much larger, and much closer not only to Garland's novel's dark heart, I think, but to the heart of contemporary masculinity as well. The "horror" the ghost alludes to comes soon enough: The formerly high-minded backpackers in the commune tear the limbs and entrails from three corpses in a berserk bout of atavism, an event that Richard observes with the sort of cold detachment that one more typically applies to, say, a Fox documentary.

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