Fiction Reviews

Chronic City

One of Jonathan Lethem's characters recounts a Marlon Brando story early in Chronic City. The aging legend, faced with the prospect of kowtowing to a director best known for working with puppets, strides out for his take naked from the waist down, scotching a wide-angle shot. Perkus Tooth's gloss on the incident turns Brando's petulance into an existentialist stand — pointing out, really, thathe's no puppet. The story is a real one, recognizable like the sweet smell that periodically suffuses the city, or the billionaire mayor with the presence of "a gravitational sinkhole, a place where other men's hopes had gone to die." But Chronic City estranges Manhattan, literalizing recessionary anxiety by choking the financial district in sinister fog and setting an elemental beast loose on Second Avenue.Lethem's charming misfit cartoon characters, adrift in this landscape, repeat Pynchonian paranoia as stoned farce, caught in virtuoso drifts of authorial free-association. Each wraps himself tight in alienation or obsession, ensuring that even should their affairs work out, they're too timid to get their own pants off. It's as if they're afraid to find a puppeteer's hand up their backs.

The Lacuna

A lacuna, Kingsolver's powerful new novel explains, is "an opening, like a mouth, that swallows things," and Harrison Shepherd, 11, dragged from 1929 America by his husband-hunting mother, finds one offshore in Mexico. When tides cooperate, his underwater passage leads to a secret opening in the nearby jungle. Later, when Harrison mixes plaster, cooks, types for Diego Rivera and becomes Frida Kahlo's confidant, he defines lacuna as "a missing piece, a hole in the story." Kingsolver's no name-dropper: The passionate painters appear long before they're identified, and Harrison's lack of ego — he journals in third person — makes him a wise, incisive observer. Soon they're joined by Harrison's spiritual father, Leon Trotsky, whom they harbor from Stalin. Reality and fiction blend in a far-reaching tale, whisking Harrison to Asheville, N.C., where he finds success as a novelist and collides with postwar anti-Communist fervor. The witch hunt resonates eerily with today's strident partisan ranting as The Lacuna, like many great novels, uses the past to examine the present. Crafted from Harrison's notebooks, letters and clippings, The Lacuna contains twists, surprises and gorgeous prose — but no holes, only missing pieces revealed.

The Book of Genesis

The thought of Robert Crumb giving the Zap Comix treatment to the Good Book is enough to mortify the faithful and set atheists to salivating at the satirical potential. But Crumb's illustration of Genesis refuses to stoop to cheap shots, instead laboriously depicting every word. There's plenty of red meat for a graphic artist in this most action-packed of Biblical books — the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah is an inevitable highlight — but the artist's distinctive cross-hatched faces lend interest even to the endless begots. Crumb's major interest is in the way the Bible's scribes set out to undermine the power of matriarchal traditions — all the better to stock the piece with his trademark Amazonian women, breasts straining through their desert robes. But for the most part, the book is a lavish example of an artist delighting in the opportunities presented by the dense layers and simplistic blood-and-guts power of time-worn mythology.

Juliet, Naked

It's not a quiet "Eleanor Rigby" brand of loneliness that Nick Horby uses to such great effect in Juliet, Naked — it's more like Joy Division's "Love Will Tear Us Apart": The author's central figures embody an equally devastating, yet much more self-aware, postmodern version of the condition. The illusion of togetherness suddenly evaporates for each of them, and they're struck with the realization that they'd been deeply and desperately alone all along. Annie, railing against a partner she never loved and his obsessive-compulsive devotion to forgotten rock 'n' roller Tucker Crowe, posts an against-the-grain review of a recently released Tucker album. Her successful, if unorthodox, analysis drives her boyfriend into the arms of another woman and, like a magnet, sucks Tucker out of his 20-year silence, straight into her English orbit. During those lost years, Tucker surrounded himself with ex-wives who pity him and children who don't know him. His loneliness, like Annie's, just slowly happened as life went on around him. Recognizing kindred spirits, Annie and Tucker sweetly and powerfully begin making up for lost time.

The Lost Symbol

Dan Brown needs an editor. Though the Da Vinci Code author capably moved his usual mix of gloom-laden arcana, nail-biting suspense and personal quirk (in the form of ever-heroic Harvard professor Robert Langdon) from Europe's dark old corridors to those of Washington, D.C., he hasn't trimmed the pork. In fact, though The Lost Symbol is hurriedly paced, it's thudding and harried, messy and empty when you expect it to blossom forth with encoded fruit like a ripe plum. Having to go after the Freemasons rather than the Knights Templar comes with its own riches, and a scavenger hunt filled with the necessary mysteries is what Brown does beautifully — piling symbols onto glyphs onto rumors onto dusty hidden tomes. That formula never lets the reader down, and while remaining formulaic is both a prize (to fans) and a curse (to readers who want their authors to push the envelope), one thing that will never win out is lousy, overlong writing.

The Children's Book

The Children's Book is not for kids. It takes a mature reader to sort out the hefty novel's huge cast, created by two Victorian families and all their friends and relatives. These middle-class folks engage in the most advanced ideas of their era — socialism, Marxism, anarchism, anti-vivesectionism, theosophy, folklore analysis, women's rights, Fabianism. They celebrate a modern world of steamships, newspapers and electricity. Initially, it seems, they're living their utopian vision of human life to the fullest. But as the story unfolds, it becomes clear there's more afoot than individual righteousness. Family lines blur as parentage is questioned; relationships disintegrate as guilt, sex and greed enter the equation. This isn't a world opened up by enlightenment but real life, where people make bad choices, and connections between idealism and actuality lie only in the imagination.

By Philip Roth

Roth's second novella in as many years reads like a cautionary tale for thespians. If you happen to be an aging titan among stage actors, like protagonist Simon Axler, and feel rotten that your talent has dried up, maybe it's best to avoid the mental health system, painful affairs with 40-year-old lesbians, and time alone with shotguns. Early on, Roth writes masterfully about great actors' fragile brilliance. "The ability to speak and be spoken to on stage — that's what it came down to and that's what was gone." A chapter later, somehow, Axler's in bed with a lesbian and her green dildo. They even prowl a bar to find themselves another woman and Axler says, "You'd be in charge. You and the green cock." She replies, "You'd be in charge. You and the real cock." Should we laugh or cry? This implausible mess is Roth's message. Axler has no friends, no other talents, no other interests. He's baffled by loss, using sex to avoid loneliness and "the terror of going back to being completely finished." That truth about age and eroticism rings true, but the unrealistic affair leads this brief Roth book to a predictably sad end.

Dexter by Design

America's favorite serial killer is back — both on TV and in the fourth installment of the fictional series chronicling blood-spatter specialist Dexter Morgan. This latest book follows mild-mannered Dexter from his honeymoon in Paris, where the murdering mastermind plays dutiful husband to new wife and stepkids in what proves to be his most challenging case yet (he prefers bloody knives to French baguettes). Fans will recognize all the usual deadpan humor and carefully constructed plot lines that characterize Dexter's weird, tightly woven world. But this book delves even deeper into Dexter's Dark Passenger, that uncontrollable drive to murder anyone who meets his strict code of un-ethics. With a sweaty, almost sexual aggression (Lindsay's books are the macabre's answer to snuff), Dexter risks exposing his darkest secrets and losing his career and family. And just like the Showtime series, close calls, near-misses and drastic measures add up to an edge-of-the-seat read, even if it's impossible not to picture Michael C. Hall in the lead role.