Book Quarterly: The Big Four

Our discerning critics review this season's most notable tomes.

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Published: Dec 2, 2009

Summertime

(Viking, 256 pp., $25.95, Dec. 24)

For readers who always wanted to know what South African novelist and Nobel winner J.M. Coetzee is like, his latest book is an irresistible tease. Presented as the raw materials for a biography, Summertime investigates the life of a South African novelist and Nobel winner named John Coetzee in the 1970s, when he was finding himself as a writer. There's just one catch: The subject of Summertime is dead while its author is still alive. But as it turns out, historical truth hardly matters in this deft, probing work of fiction, which offers fragments from the imagined Coetzee's diary and interviews with five people who knew him, including a former neighbor and lover, a cousin, the Brazilian mother of one of his students, and two colleagues. Their accounts paint a sympathetic but often unflattering portrait of an uncertain man and his uncertain country, revealing much about themselves in the process. As a fictional exploration of identity, Summertime ultimately tells us more about the writer Coetzee and his imagination than a straight memoir ever could.

—Katherine Hill

Changing My Mind

(Penguin, 320 pp., $26.95, Nov. 12)

Roughly half of this collection from Zadie Smith is devoted to writings on literature (E.M. Forster, Z.N. Hurston, D.F. Wallace), another quarter to film (including 18 snappy "multiplex" reviews). The remainder includes a few slices of memoir and a pair of utterly disparate but equally engrossing field reports — from bleak, war-ravaged Liberia and glitz-obsessed L.A. They're arbitrary topics, but what emerges is an impression of Smith as a truly interested — and, thus, interesting — person, who brings her infectious curiosity and undeniably potent intellect to bear on whatever happens to cross her path. The memoiristic pieces — focusing primarily on her recently passed father — help flesh out this portrait, and are touching in their own right. Though in this context they also serve simply to illuminate a different approach to the same broader concerns — about race, class, Britishness, interpersonal engagement, the connections between art and life — which recur throughout. But Smith's criticism, dazzling in its erudition and scholarly resourcefulness, but also lucid, approachable, enthusiastic and intimate, is ultimately just as revealing and emotionally compelling.

—K. Ross Hoffman

Under the Dome

(Scribner, 1088 pp., $35, Nov. 10)

The most difficult thing about Stephen King's new Under the Dome is simply lugging the thing from room to room while plowing through it. I expect that sounds snide, but it's not entirely meant to be. Given King's healthy page count (over 1,000) and his goals for this book ("I tried to write a book that would keep the pedal consistently to the metal," he writes in his author's note), it's absolutely necessary he grease the skids. Dome's setup comes from the Maximal King playbook ofThe Stand, rather than the chamber-piece Minimal King ofMisery.There's a big external threat: an inexplicable impermeable dome, set over a small Maine town like cake in a diner. There are a bunch of loose allegories (global warming, Iraq, Dick Cheney), but all lie neatly under the onrush of incident and accident that sends his town into a brutish state-of-nature spiral. In fact, King signposts nearly everything — characters are consistently introduced with a trait or an epithet, and any event or implication is made crushingly explicit, removing the need for memory or reflection. This makesDomequick and entertaining, but it'll stick with your biceps longer than your head.

—Justin Bauer

The Original of Laura

(Knopf, 304 pp., $35, Nov. 17)

When Vladimir Nabokov died in 1977, he left behind a stack of 138 handwritten note cards and explicit instructions to burn them. Well, oops. The now-published notes for what was to be Nabokov's final book are subtitled "A novel in fragments," but simply "fragments" would have been more apt: Nothing about this lyrical but scattered work suggests the cohesion of a novel. Characters appear and disappear, unpunctuated thoughts end mid-sentence, and whole sections of cards are erased and scribbled over. The wisp of a story tears forward, doubles back and stands perfectly still for pages at a time, while the author fills cards with nonsense and sex and lists of verbs. The Original of Laura is a dark, difficult book, but it offers an unprecedented peek into Nabokov's swirling, multilingual mind, where words are valued just as much for how they sound as for what they say. The aberrations that might be considered novelistic failures are actually Laura's strengths as a complex, fragmented piece of art — an appropriate swan song for a quickly fading man who coyly gave his final act an alternate title: Dying Is Fun.

—Lauren F. Friedman

Hack The Holidays
Nano Gardening
A Piece of Me
Dropping The Bomb
Bleu Christmas
Screen Saver
Page Turner
T-Shirt Gifts
Green Thumb Gifts
Book Gifts
Kids' Gifts
Food Gifts
Bath/Body Gifts
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