March 17-23, 2005
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Book Quarterly All-Fiction Special!
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By Eric Bogosian
Simon and Schuster, 272 pp., $24
Rick's a New York doctor facing a midlife predicament: Is he condemned to repeat his father's infidelities, or does he secretly want an extramarital affair? "I like my life," he tells himself, "it's just living my life that makes me unhappy." Billy and Reba are twenty-something brother and sister, recently orphaned, trying to sell their family's rural farm. Their banker tells them, "People are trying to escape the damned country, not move in. Take my advice, don't even put it on the market, or you'll regret it." One sibling unexpectedly becomes an overnight celebrity, while the other slowly deteriorates to the point of insanity. Rick's interaction with the two of them provide the backdrop of actor/monologist Eric Bogosian's second novel Wasted Beauty.
Bogosian sometimes seems to take the first word of his title literally, as there's a fixation with excretion throughout the story. "This is how you know someone, by changing their diaper, by taking their blood," Rick says of his patients. "Urine. Blood. Fecal smears. Semen [...] Like a five-dollar hooker. That's me, nothing but an old whore. Prostates. Bladders. Urethras." With word pictures like that, Wasted Beauty is not the ideal book to read on your lunch break.
But the dialogue is typical Bogosian. Moving to New York, the attractive Reba encounters Fred, a demented writer. "Oh, I bet you're a real heartbreaker, huh?" he says. "Bodies strewn all by the side of the road. I'm sure. Someone as beautiful as you, it's unavoidable." She replies, "I don't know about bodies. But I have my nasty side." Soon enough, she abandons Fred's lifeless body in his cluttered apartment.
Wasted Beauty is an effective novel but not outstanding. The shelves at Barnes & Noble already groan under the collective weight of novels with middle-aged characters ruefully contemplating affairs, and Bogosian's book lacks the poignancy of the characters in his one-man shows. While it's a brisk read for a 272-page book, you finish it by concluding Bogosian's simply marking time until his next play.
—Andrew Milner
Eric Bogosian will read Thu., May 5, 7 p.m., free, with Shalom Auslander, Free Library, Central Branch, 1901 Vine St., 215-686-5322.
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By Glen Duncan
Black Cat, 320 pp., $13
Nathan Clark is dead. That's all we know at the outset of English novelist Glen Duncan's disquieting suspense tale. Our protagonist is hovering above his own funeral like a bird, terrified but omniscient, with a newfound power to comb through the minds and memories of the people he left behind. It's a faculty he needs since he seems unable to remember anything on his own. With present-day action in Death of an Ordinary Man consisting of a burial, a whiskey-fueled wake and a hungover morning after, the real story happens in disjointed flashbacks as Nathan voyeuristically probes the thoughts and recollections of those gathered to pay their respects and neurotically comes to terms with his spectral state as he learns what got him there.
Duncan's storytelling is shaky and abstract as it jumps from Nathan's inner dialogue to the thoughts of those around him, from what Nathan sees unfolding in front of him to what happened years ago. In lesser hands, the technique could backfire -- some chapters hedge close, like a particularly lengthy, difficult yet revelatory sequence involving Nathan's wife, Cheryl — but Duncan works his motif well, knowing when to reveal pieces of the puzzle and when to hold back. Gradually, we see the Clarks not as an assembled group of upstanding mourners but a dismal family whose past is filled with dysfunction and tragedy. Sometimes humorous, sometimes erotic, more often sobering in its raw emotion and humanity, Nathan's journey is stunning and oddly sympathetic as he gets to know his wife, children and friends with such depth and intimacy it's almost like he's meeting them for the first time.
—John Vettese
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By Bob Flaherty
Perennial, 288 pp., $12.95
Talk about a buzzkill. Bob Flaherty's novel Puff, a shaggy-dog tale about the drug-hungry John and "Gully" Gullivan, is criminally boring beyond belief. An unimpressive saga about the brothers' efforts to score a bag of pot during a terrible blizzard is significantly unfunny, uninvolving and uninteresting.
Part of the problem is its poorly told narrative. Flaherty writes far more eloquently than his not-so-bright protagonists might speak, making them sound smarter than they should. There are a few keen observations peppered among the insults, but they feel completely inauthentic. Flaherty's characters are street-smart kids hoping to get one over on the priest, the cops and almost everyone else they encounter, but their naive plans lack credibility. What's more, their story — trying to combat the pain of a dying mother with the pleasure of getting high — has no poignancy.
Furthermore, what the characters do find hilarious — e.g., three guys mimicking the same obnoxious conversation into sequential pay phones at a bus station to screw with people's minds — is really not all that amusing. Neither are the various episodes involving John's disgusting bodily functions.
Puff seems to delight in chronicling the protagonist's every intestinal humiliation — from puking up an entire blueberry pie, to having to take a shit behind a building — to no purpose.
It is expected in this kind of coming-of-age novel that the characters will become sidetracked from their central mission, and in the process, fall in love, learn a valuable lesson and ultimately grow up. Sadly, all this happens without the least bit of novelty or inspiration. John gets laid, John learns to appreciate his family, John understands what it means to be a man. Readers, however, will quickly realize that Puff is simply a bunch of stale smoke.
—Gary M. Kramer
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By A.L. Kennedy
Alfred Knopf, 304 pp., $25
In this ponderously self-helpish and Oprah-fied culture, romantic love has been wrung dry of its elixir of beautiful insanity, narcotic passion and tortured-ever-after. We should be grateful, albeit selfishly, that this is not so in the whiskey-sodden "paradise" of Hannah Luckraft, a career alcoholic in Glasgow, Scotland, so devoted to her vocation that her binges seem like transcendental journeys through the minutiae of pedestrian human exchanges.
One of these turns into a bleary, disjointed affair with a fellow drunkard, Robert Gardener, a hack dentist.
Together they marinate like cocktail onions in bruised vodka and prove that the presence of booze does not always compromise the presence of love. In Hannah's world, one where no great trauma, other than an estrangement with her brother, exists to excuse her addiction, love blooms, not in spite of or because of alcohol. It gives birth to love and inflames the desire — the desire to drink. Drinking is neither a crutch nor a compulsion here. It is a constant like flowing tap water, and despite the fitful nights of sloshed sex and pub fights between the lovers, the impulse is to cheer for their success and put off their demise in the same way one shuns the ominous creep of last call.
Drunk or sober, they are useless to anyone but each other, and it seems only fair they should self-destruct together. Sadly, or thankfully, they don't. Author Kennedy makes no apologies for that in her writing, which is clear, brilliant and crackles alternately with wit and despair. There is no championing of sobriety or justification for Hannah's alcoholism. Kennedy has the skill for turning what could be maudlin into something so real it breaks one's heart for all the right reasons. And that is what makes this such a frustratingly good read, like trying to break the anesthetizing hold of an antidepressant and never quite making it to that deliciously dangerous low.
—Angelina Sciolla
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By Francine Prose
Harper Collins, 432 pp., $24.95
Inspired by a hit of Ecstasy, a 32-year-old white supremacist walks into the offices of the World Brotherhood Watch foundation and declares himself an ex-piece de Aryan resistance. Vincent Nolan, the eponymous "changed man" of Francine Prose's new novel, could go about his life change in any number of ways, but America being what it is, he opts to turn his apostasy into a career move.
Brotherhood Watch is only too happy to help, and their relationship quickly becomes one of mutual exploitation. The human rights organization is the pet project of Meyer Maslow, a Holocaust survivor and humanitarian activist as dedicated to helping the oppressed as he is to advancing his book sales. He eagerly pimps out the turned Nazi as a fundraising tool and media hors d'oeuvre while Vincent receives a modest stipend with room and board.
Maslow's lieutenant, Bonnie Kalen, is the proverbial woman behind the great man. Part fund-raiser, part His Gal Friday, she's a freshly dumped divorcee with two kids in the burbs and an ego the size of a thimble. When she's elected to house Vincent, the stage is set for more than a little sexual-familial tension.
Francine Prose (Blue Angel) has written a novel with an identity crisis: It stops short of flat-out satire but is not simply a midlife crisis romance. It ribs at feel-good multiculturalism and the inherent contradictions of "social change" as a profession. It brings us inside the heads of its characters, who belabor every moment with self-doubt until the reader feels equally beleaguered. A Changed Man tries hard, and it has its finger on the pulse of something prevalent in the culture right now, namely how everyone is aware of how their lives might fit into a media narrative. However much Prose's creations are involved in a career-furthering scam, they're ones supported by loftier desires to change for the better, be it in a personal or global context. Such dissonance makes for an interesting, if occasionally exhausting, read.
—John Dicker
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By Lauren Sanders
Akashic Books, 287 pp., $14.95
Lillian Ginger Speck, murderer, thinks her only crime is loving too much. She, like all adolescents, is smart enough to know exactly how much of her parents' stash of weed to steal without them noticing. She's an outsider, outside of everything, even her own newfound sexual desires. She brings a gun to her '80s high school graduation with the Julie Brown song running through her head, but it doesn't go off. Not yet, anyway.
Lauren Sanders' With or Without You is startling, shocking and heartbreaking. But it could also be a trashy read if it weren't so relentlessly grim. You want sunshine? Watch a sitcom. This is dark adolescent noir that gets to the heart of why an obsessed fan kills the object of her desire.
Sanders drowns the reader in water imagery; the book opens with that obsessed fan, Speck, bobbing in the bay, parachute pants bloated past their usual ugliness. She's pulled out by the cops, then blurts a confession. They tell her she watches too much television. Indeed, Speck has one bright spot in life: Brook Harrison, a girl from small-town Pennsylvania and the star of World Without End, a hit soap opera. Unfortunately, that bright spot is the thing that leads her to tragedy.
With or Without You is also a disturbingly accurate period piece. The '80s were ugly, and all of the ugliness — from Iran-Contra to cocaine to a bad painting on the back of a denim jacket — is in Sanders' book, so truthfully recalled they make you wince in recognition.
While a postmodern Holden Caulfield might skulk around the set of a soap opera to get closer to his favorite star, it's unlikely he'd fight to give an HIV-positive inmate a tattoo, then dab his lips with the blood. But Speck isn't Holden; she's Ophelia to the bone: misunderstood, in the nasty grips of unrequited love, brilliantly mad, and from the book's opening, drowning.
—Alex Richmond
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By Louise Welsh
Canongate U.S., 160 pp., $18.95
Christopher Marlowe, the rakish Tudor playwright often cited as second-fiddle to Shakespeare, has up until now avoided having his life turned into historical fiction. (Perhaps because of his preference for "if it bleeds it leads" revenge tragedy eschewed by the Bard, squeamish humanist that he was.) Finally bringing Marlowe to life is Louise Welsh, the Glaswegian writer who made her mark with The Cutting Room, a spine-chiller with cortex function. And what gives life to wordbound creations is what's explored here: As the short novel begins, fiery-tempered Marlowe is hauled in front of the Privy Council to answer charges he has been blaspheming in public by posting anarchic declarations, signed by Tamburlaine, his famously ungovernable creation.
As Marlowe chases the person using this alias, he embarks on a full flexing of free speech: defending the belief that declarations in fiction should not be extrapolated to indict the author; wondering how far to play nice with his wealthy patron, Francis Walsingham; and undone at times by his impulse to speak freely amongst supposed friends. The now celebrated literary era was also one of great censorship, and it appears nobody, not even his closest friends, believes a writer can remain beholden to no one.
While other authors would have spent ages in such lush territory, Welsh makes a difficult, self-disciplined choice. The length of the tale reflects the amount known about the most interesting corner of Marlowe's life. So she embellishes and imagines the days before Marlowe's demise, but doesn't stretch anything or embellish her embellishments. Her mellifluous recreation of the language, spoken in the alleyways away from the gaze of a heavy-breathing government, brings us a sense of the poetry of the age. But as we spend only hours in it, we, like Marlowe, feel time at our backs.
—Juliet Fletcher
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By John Edgar
Wideman Houghton Mifflin, 192 pp., $23
Wideman, the first author ever to win the PEN/Faulkner award twice, writes in a relaxed, free-associating prose that explores questions of race and gender with an almost brutal frankness. A typical Wideman short story lulls you in with rhetorical prowess and clever word play, then whacks you over the head with unpleasant truths. In this respect, God's Gym is very much in keeping with its predecessors. These 10 stories, Wideman's first collection in a decade, are preoccupied with death, which emerges both as a recurring plot twist and a metaphorical theme. In "Weightlifter," the narrator has thought up a semicomical image of his long-suffering mother as a bodybuilder. His mother, however, takes it as an insult and, to his horror, dies before he can make amends. The twist, of course, is that while he commends her strength, he demonstrates his own weakness. In "Fanon," a biographer ruminates on intersections between the late post-colonial theorist's life and his own. While he attempts to complete his book, he gets caught up in memories of a lost love. "Sightings" tells of an academic haunted by the suicides of former colleagues.
The collection's true centerpiece is the masterful "What We Cannot Speak About We Must Pass Over in Silence," which was included in the Best American Short Stories 2004 anthology. It's the story of a man who learns of an acquaintance's death and becomes obsessed with finding the deceased man's son — a wild goose chase that begins with a memory of the man mentioning a visit to an Arizona prison. It's a testament to Wideman's empathetic gifts that we, in turn, mourn for a man about whom we have only anecdotal information.
—Elisa Ludwig
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Feral House, 268 pp., $24.95
Robert Silverberg is one of science fiction's most revered writers. So what was he doing in the 1960s writing one-off novels with titles like Sex Jungle, Cousin-Lover, Sin Ranch and Passion Patsy?
Making a lot of money, apparently.
A surprising number of modern novelists (Silverberg, Lawrence Block, Donald Westlake, John Jakes) supplemented their early income churning out "stroke books" — which is not a reference to the medical condition. These were paperback porn novels designed to be read with one hand, and they're paid tribute in Sin-A-Rama, a beautifully lurid hardcover packed with essays, memoirs and dozens of raunchy, I-can't-believe-they-published-this covers.
Thumbing through the pages is like taking a creepy trip through your grandfather's "secret" bedroom drawer. Did our grandparents even know about this stuff? Swingin' consumers of 1960s literary porn were clearly obsessed with a number of topics: wife-swapping (Neighborly Love, Partner's Choice, Naked and Swap Night, Why Not Swap?), bored suburban housewives (Every Wife in Sight, Sinburbia, William Women, Prowling Wives, Suburban Sexpot), office romance (Fringe Benefits, Horizontal Secretary, Expense Account Sinners, Erotic Executives) and, well, more wife-swapping (Snowbound Swap, 1, 2, 3 Swap!). No wonder Grandma always seemed tired.
As spicy as the titles and covers were, the stories inside were tame — not even worthy of late-night Skinemax. There are no blow-by-blow anatomical descriptions; instead you have cliched euphemisms like "an explosion in his loins" and "a low, deep animal groan" and invariably, "the fireworks were over." Oral sex, anal sex, sex toys and other staples of modern porn were verboten. For a while, writes Silverberg, even the word "it" was considered too racy — as in, "doing it."
Demand for these novels was so huge, even the mob eventually muscled their way into the paperback business. It's impressive how fast writers would — pardon the expression — grind these suckers out. For a few years, Silverberg, writing as "Don Elliott," was producing three 212-page porn novels a month, and his work habits were methodical: 16 to 18 pages before lunch, 16 to 18 pages after lunch, repeat for six days. For each, he received $1,200, which was a nice salary at a time when a five-bedroom apartment in Manhattan was only $150. But these novels also gave some of our best fiction writers a place to work the bad writing out of their system ("He often wanted to find out how good she was in bed, but he'd never even imagined himself actually doing it, especially with Sue's blessing.").
They say you have to write a million bad words before you write a single good one; here, then, is a hardcover monument to many writers' first million words.
—Duane Swierczynski
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By Mary Gordon
Pantheon, 368 pp., $24.95
On Christmas night, 1998, Maria Meyers returns home from a holiday party to every parent's nightmare: a telephone message saying that there is an emergency involving her daughter, Pearl, a 20-year-old Wesleyan undergrad studying abroad in Ireland.
The problem is nothing so straightforward as a car accident or depression-induced suicide. Instead, Pearl has gone on a hunger strike and chained herself to a flagpole in front of the U.S. embassy in Dublin and is near death.
"Why" is the question that drives the narrative, making this ambitious work of literature read more like a suspense novel, as Gordon explains how the forces of history, politics, class and religion have worked to bring Maria, her surrogate brother Joseph, and in turn, Pearl, logically if not inevitably to the girl's hospital bed. At least readers should find it logical: Being a positive, proactive and practical person, Maria can't fathom Pearl's act of passive-aggressive pessimism.
In its broadness of scope, Pearl is closest to Gordon's 1992 novel, The Other Side. Still, spirituality reigns, as it almost always does with this sophisticated secular novelist. Case in point: an omniscient narrator who is probably God, and much musing about sin, guilt, forgiveness and redemption. So this book will be enjoyed most by people who are at least conversant in this language, although Gordon's psychological insight is reason enough to pick it up. For example, widower Joseph's admission that his life was both enriched and diminished by his marriage, as well as a mother/daughter reunion that is restrained and right-on.
Yes, Maria's more hopeful vision wins out at the end. The mother of the boy Pearl believes she had a role in killing forgives Pearl, and Pearl forgives her surrogate uncle/father Joseph for his late-book betrayal — with both an ease and grace that is hard to believe given what we know about them. And a few hospital scenes seemed ripped from a script of ER or even General Hospital.
But these are minor flaws in what is another in a string of Gordon literary pearls.
—Carolyn Wyman
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By Meg Wolitzer
Scribner, 320 pp., $24
This book suffers, like many of us, from that one event that can turn even the most open mind into a mound of quivering jelly: Parents having sex. Ripe with humor framed around a very realistic but quirky story about a family suffering a 30-year hangover from mom and dad's stellar performance in a graphically illustrated sex manual, The Position traces the effects of this passion play on an everyman suburban family starting in 1975.
The moment that Paul and Roz Mellow's children, then ages 6 to 15, find the Joy of Sex-like book, together they uncomfortably realize to their erotic dismay that despite the somewhat masqueraded hippie renderings ("Dad doesn't have a beard!"), the couple they're staring at is, indeed, their parental units and they're doing the wheelbarrow!
Perhaps what is most interesting about this playful premise is not the fact that it invites a certain amount of psychosis about sexuality but that the intricate details make the fiction believable without relying too much on cliche.
What could have just as easily become a period piece only ever stabs around at pop culture nuances (like macrame) but never gives itself over entirely to gimmick. While several of the characters themselves have sexual hang-ups as the result of 1970s-branded schlock, the sordid presence of sexually charged parents in the story manages to place the reader in the children's shoes. One doesn't feel removed from the story even if one is new to the time line.
In fact, the majority of the novel is actually set 30 years after the poignant adolescent moment is had, picking up with an estranged Mellow family debating a reissue of the troublesome book. As a result, The Position manages to be a novel about sex within the context of family (or is about family within the context of sex?).
The children as adults — bitter (Paul), late blooming (Claudia), gay (Dashiell) and wrecked (Holly) — are also recovering from their parents' divorce, making it a novel about relationships as well. The real worth of the story comes down to characters' growth — or lack thereof. Some, indeed, thrive on trauma, but mostly they learn that just because you grow up in the same house as kids won't mean you'll recognize each other as adults. It's the difference between frankness and fear that drives the story home, wherever one lives.
—Natalie Hope MacDonald
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