August 14-20, 2003

book quicks

Everyone’s Burning

By Ian Spiegelman Villard, 176 pp., $18.95

Addiction has been treated so Dry and gently of late (hello, Augusten Burroughs) that it's dizzying to see and feel someone reveling in the bloodlust of obsession like Ian Spiegelman. Like recently heralded debut author James Frey (A Million Little Pieces), the Details mag scribe has made himself a nuisance, having shown loathing, in interviews and columns, for soft, smarmy smartypants like Dave Eggers and Rick Moody. "Put your clever (drug) money where your mouth is" could be his motto; he's written what's turned out to be a burned-down (but not out), harried novel.

There's no anger, blame or the need for 12-step self-forgiveness in Spiegelman's prose even when -- at heart -- there lies a sentimentalist. It's not hard to be sentimental about the rush. Rough, raw and urbane, Spiegelman likes his prose grand and gallows-humored. It's an inner-city blue room of obsessive self-hatred, sexual kinks and dysfunctions without empathy. Spiegelman's main man, Leon, and his buds Rahmer and Ortiz, terminally preteen while tripping through the aged booze and coke of their numb lives, seem most alone when joined as one. Hang on to these characters; it's their exploits and the blunt details of their foamy filth that line Burning. Spiegelman's sadomasochistic first-person is more mood piece than narrow narrative -- a laconic, blank-stare landscape as opposed to a portrait of a man dead without the flatlines. Chilling stuff. — A.D. Amorosi

Single Wife

By Nina Solomon Algonquin, 300 pp., $23.95

Grace Brookman tolerates her husband's periodic disappearances; he is a prize-winning journalist who works hard and keeps late hours. But at the start of this frothily good novel Laz has run off for good. "He left as if he were going to the bank or to buy the Sunday Times," says Grace, a lifelong Manhattanite, and doesn't return. Days turn into weeks and into months.

Rather than confess her situation, Grace creates an elaborate lie that Laz is not just around, but everywhere. She leaves dishes in the sink and the toilet seat up so their housekeeper won’t suspect his absence, and sends flowers to herself on their anniversary so eyebrows don’t get raised. She even leaves coffee for her doorman, just as her husband did each morning.

Solomon displays a knowing sense of timing and keeps the humor coming. Laughs aside, though, there's a stirring meditation on independence and marriage here. Grace's attempts to cover up for Laz force her to live his life, not hers. When Grace realizes this, she backs off and rediscovers her interests in sculpting and writing. In the end, absence does not make the heart grow fonder in this intensely likeable tale, but stronger. — John Freeman