November 20-26, 2003

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Holiday BQ Shorts Fiction

My Life as a Fake

By Peter Carey Knopf, 267 pp., $24

The titular "fake" can refer to any number of characters in Peter Carey's ninth novel. The fake at hand might be the embittered Australian writer Christopher Chubb who, to avenge his own rejection from a magazine, conjures up a phony dead working-class character named Bob McCorkle and submits McCorkle's purple, pseudo-modernist poems for publication. Or, the fake may be the naive editor of that magazine whose life is ruined when it's discovered that the published poems are a hoax. The fake could be the flesh-and-blood form of Bob McCorkle, who spontaneously appears and haunts his maker, Frankenstein-style, in a cat-and-mouse game that spans three decades and a good part of the Eastern Hemisphere. Perhaps the real fake is the English editor Sarah Wode-Douglass, who stumbles upon Christopher Chubb in Kuala Lumpur 30 years later and, through a series of deceptions, attempts to procure his copy of the McCorkle manuscript for her magazine.

Carey, the accomplished author of True History of the Kelly Gang, is one of the best storytellers out there, and in his hands this unruly tale becomes a comic mystery that bubbles with the pace of a potboiler. Told variously from Chubb's, McCorkle's and Wode-Douglass' perspectives, the novel opens up into a series of small, curious narratives; behind each character is another story that may or may not be true. In Carey's world, the integrity of the narrator is clearly less important than his sheer likability. Their love of literature gives these characters another kind of integrity; all their forgeries and cons are performed in the service of poetry. But Carey shows us that artistic greatness, even if it's the product of a well-crafted hoax, is an elusive, true thing.—Elisa Ludwig

The Arbogast Case

By Thomas Hettche, translated by Elizabeth Gaffney Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 344 pp., $25

Hans Arbogast isn't the most likable protagonist. He's a boozer, a womanizer and a repeatedly unfaithful spouse to his wife, Katrin. Still, author Thomas Hettche generates an odd level of sympathy for the title character in The Arbogast Case, his fourth book and the first to be translated into English. A traveling salesman in a divided and tense 1950s Germany, Arbogast is convicted of the battery, rape and murder of East German refugee Marie Gurth, and handed a life sentence in prison. In reality, Gurth was a hitchhiker he picked up near the Black Forest while on the job. The two spent a day together and had a steamy fling on the side of the highway; mid-coitus, Arbogast realized the frail woman had somehow died. It's far from murder, but his side of the story doesn't rate highly with the judges at his trial. A quick 50 pages into the book and a damning testimony from a forensic specialist amusingly named Professor Maul has sent Arbogast to Bruchsal penitentiary; he spends the next 15 years proclaiming his innocence and pushing for a retrial. Hettche's prose is engaging and flows quickly, but is extremely variant -- seemingly detail-heavy scenes such as days in court and Gurth's autopsy fly by over two or three pages, while entire chapters are dedicated to describing Arbogast's isolation in prison. A sea of supporting characters doesn't make matters any less convoluted. The repeated inclusion of Phil Mohr, a curious journalist following the story, goes nowhere. Conversely, Katja Lavans, a forensics expert from Berlin who serves as a witness for the defense during the eventual retrial, provides poignant (if slightly contrived) subtextual commentary on the divide between East and West Germany. In the end, it's difficult to formulate a distinct opinion on Arbogast, but the relief felt when things start to go his way is nevertheless vivid. —John Vettese

The Pleasure of My Company

By Steve Martin Hyperion, 163 pp., $19.95

I have no problem laughing at people. Like when a sloppy drunk girl spills carb-free beer all over her sequined top. Or a jock makes a pass and the football winds up in the river rather than his receiver's hands. That's funny, laugh-out-loud stuff. It's harder to laugh at someone's obsessive-compulsive behaviors -- but in Steve Martin's latest novel, it's hard not to.

The Pleasure of My Company, which follows Martin's critically and commercially successful novella, Shopgirl, focuses on a young recluse named Daniel Pecan Cambridge. He delights in creating "magic squares," a la Ben Franklin, and enters -- and wins -- a pie company's Most Average American essay contest twice. In a classic Martin line, the local headline reads: "Insane Man Chosen as Most Average American."

Daniel's relationships are tethered to the neighborhood block around his house -- just as he is -- until a psychiatry student/social worker, Clarissa, helps him chip through his neuroses. As she comes to know Daniel's many quirks, he learns to step on curbs, use light bulbs with varying watts and iron his pillows. Daniel's structured, lonely existence suddenly changes when Clarissa's ex-husband takes custody of her son, and Daniel saves him from abuse.

You will laugh with Daniel as he explores his tics and mistakes -- and you'll cheer as he embarks on the road trip of his life. Martin's subtle, dry humor makes this ordinary tale of a man yearning to break free an extraordinary adventure. —Amy L. Webb

All Meat Looks Like South America: The World of Bruce McCall

By Bruce McCall Crown, 120 pp., $29.95

For three decades now, the inimitable Bruce McCall has entertained readers with his uniquely cutting wit and galvanizing illustrations. Both his writing and his art are flawlessly refined, yet beneath the pristine veneer lurks a sinister whimsy, a perspective so distinctly depraved that his satirical edge defies comparison.

All Meat Looks Like South America is a magnificent exhibition of McCall's unorthodox essays and etchings, selected by the author from his numerous contributions to Vanity Fair, The New York Times and The New Yorker as well as gallery showpieces and many never-before-seen creations. The Third Reich, old Hollywood, 1925 New York, Richard Nixon, George Bush and, yes, even the history of Canada's butter tarts: Veritably nothing and no one is spared from McCall's merciless rod of ridicule.

There isn't one anemic work to be found within these pages, and there are several standouts that warrant particular attention. "The Hippest Cruise Ship on the Seven Seas" features an actual Amazon rain forest, 24-hour sushi restaurant and Rehab Therapy Clinic, presumably for its "Cocaine Class" passengers. "A Remoteness Apart" elegizes one of the more obscure heroes of the Civil War, a half-man, half-bird Union soldier ("The Boys would rather cook him than soldier with him!" writes a sergeant). And "Medical Miracle: The Doctor's Waiting Room of Tomorrow!" is a futuristic health-care utopia, with a strolling violinist instead of office Muzak, a seven-hole putting green and a timed device that automatically ejects bathroom occupants after five minutes.

"It may not impress you, but it amazes the hell out of me that this book has been 20 years in the making," remarks McCall in his introduction. That being said, it has been well worth the wait. All Meat Looks Like South America, with each and every high-gloss reproduction, demonstrates why he is the foremost print satirist of our age. —Frank Halperin

Vernon God Little

By DBC Pierre Canongate, 288 pp., $23

Teenage Vernon's best friend, Jesus, murders 16 of his classmates and then turns the gun upon himself. Denied an outlet for their grief and rage, the citizens of Martirio, an underdeveloped Texas border town, turn their attentions upon Vernon. A sketchy CNN correspondent fans their suspicion, painting him as a dangerous sociopath. Vernon is innocent but he has some complicated family secrets preventing him from clearing his name.

Characterization is not the author's forte. Sure, as a narrator, Vernon is compelling enough: a potty-mouthed, panty-obsessed loner, prone to lies of omission and wild schemes. But Vernon God Little lacks another two-dimensional character. Vernon's mother, his neighbors and the folks he meets along the way are shallow, selfish, obese and semi-literate to the point of total caricature. In fact, they bear an uncanny resemblance to the gun-toting maniacs that pass for Americans in Wim Wenders films: "Americans" rather than Americans.

Nor does Vernon God Little fare well as social commentary. When Vernon finally ends up in the dock, he does so as a participant in a dystopian reality television show. This is the kind of thing that Ishmael Reed does so well, but in DBC Pierre's hands it boils down to a crude sociological thesis: "Mass media is dehumanizing." Yes. And?

But all is not lost. Pierre has a gift for suspense. The axis of lies and improbabilities upon which the story turns are fairly thrilling. And as a morality tale, it works. Poor Vernon would not be out of place among the freaks and losers who steal, kill and find noses baked into loaves of bread in the Russian stories of a different century. Like the bodily excreta that obsess its narrator, Vernon God Little is, well, sticky. —Joel Tannenbaum

Old School

By Tobias Wolff Knopf, 195 pp., $22

In his first novel, celebrated memoirist and short-story writer Tobias Wolff plops us down in familiar territory. We've seen the all-boys-school setting in countless coming-of-age tales, the heroes of which are, more often than not, bright kids who don't quite fit in. Our narrator is one such boy, a "scholarship case" from Seattle who has made a place in a literature-centered New England prep school; or rather, he is the established writer looking back on his younger self's deceit and eventual struggle to tell the truth. The school celebrates its open-mindedness, its efforts to admit poor boys with no social standing -- an accomplishment in the early 1960s. More important here, though, are writing and all its trappings. The school has a tradition of inviting great authors to read on campus; each time, one boy wins an audience with the author through writing competitions that grow more contentious as the guests get more popular. Robert Frost, Ayn Rand (in particularly hilarious detail) and, finally, Ernest Hemingway, the pillar of writerly worship, are fought over. Along the way we are treated to myriad ways of looking at each incident in the narrator’s last year at school, as well as Wolff’s own insight into what it takes to be a writer. When our narrator falls into disgrace in his quest to meet Hemingway, it is easy to see how "telling the truth" is both freeing and imprisoning for him. Perhaps most interesting in the novel are the differing viewpoints on the writing life: Our narrator seems resigned when he tells us, "The life that produces writing can’t be written about." A woman who has given it up explains to the narrator that writing is "too frivolous. " It just cuts you off and makes you selfish and doesn’t really do any good." Though familiar, the story is a good one; it is easy to wish, however, that Wolff had kept the narrative voice consistent: His unease regarding "decisive endings" leads to a fractured, disembodied close to the narrator’s story. —Nancy Armstrong

Chronicle of a Blood Merchant

By Yu Hua, translated by Andrew F. Jones Pantheon, 263 pp., $23

A plate of fried pork livers and two shots of yellow rice wine, warmed of course. These are the simple rewards for Xu Sanguan whenever he sells his own blood for 35 yuan. Each time the protagonist in Yu Hua's latest novel, Chronicle of a Blood Merchant, peddles a part of his "ancestors," the event marks a milestone in his lifelong struggle to keep his family alive through famine, Mao's impetuous directives and his sons' illnesses. For a poor man who pushes a cart at the local silk factory, selling blood is the quickest but most dangerous way to earn emergency money. (The practice has made the news recently for infecting large populations of certain Chinese villages with HIV through use of dirty needles, though this hazard isn't mentioned in the book.) Xu sees his friends ail from cerebral hemorrhages and burst bladders, and also deals with the realization that his favorite son may not be his own progeny; he grapples with the natural instinct to protect him and look like the village fool. The story of a poor patriarch, whose foibles and hardships are brought to light, elicits admiration and compassion for the oft-ignored common Chinese man. Tales of tragic Chinese women become bestsellers.

Yu's previous novel, To Live, was the inspiration for Zhang Yimou's film of the same name. A member of the "experimentalist" movement of the post-Mao literary scene, Yu had his work banned in China. Last year, he was the first Chinese writer to win the James Joyce Foundation Award. This book and To Live were named China's most influential books of the last decade, and they're available in English for the first time this year.

The plot is so gripping, it binds the reader to the story despite some clunky English phrasing by the translator. Yu's tale of peasant life is heartbreaking, poignant and engrossing. —Helen i-lin Hwang