Book Reviews

FICTION Peter Carey is experienced and distinguished enough, with a dozen novels and a pair of Booker Prizes to his name, that heknew wellwhat he was getting into with Parrot & Olivier in America. His latest is a thick, meaty period piece, inspired by Alexis de Tocqueville's 1831 tour of the United States. It spices dry Jacksonian history with period-appropriate picaresque. And, as the title hints, it's a buddy comedy, complete with a mismatched toffee-nosed master and wily servant groping toward mutual respect and affection in the strange, egalitarian atmosphere of frontier America.The pitfalls of this premise are all too obvious. Period fidelity restricts the outlandish imagination that built an outback cathedral in Oscar and Lucinda. Likewise, the alternating-chapter master-servant pattern the book follows means we sometimes spend time with effete and self-deluding aristocrat Olivier that we would rather pass with Parrot, the sharp artist and forger sent to keep tabs on His Nibs. Despite these challenges, Carey's skill wins out — both by presenting Tocqueville's trenchant observations on the American character with a contemporary credit-crunch hindsight, and by managing his characters' reconciliation so deftly that history recedes into the background.

—Justin Bauer

Courage and Consequence

POLITICS Beware, gentle reader — for all the sins committed before he ever took up his pen, Karl Rove's worst offense may be in destroying the joy of books altogether. "Books were my savior," he writes in Courage and Consequence: My Life as a Conservative in the Fight. "You can blame them for my love of politics, and the career it produced." Enough to make the most ardent librarian go a little Fahrenheit 451. That statement comes during a surprisingly revealing opening chapter on Rove's family background, including his parents' breakup and his mother's subsequent suicide. It wraps up, however, with an effortless slide into the sort of offense-as-defense attack that is the Kingmaker's specialty, denouncing journalists who reported on his father's alleged homosexuality as attacking Rove himself. It's a tactic Rove uses throughout the book, painting himself as woefully misunderstood — characterizing the underhanded attacks which turned his name into shorthand for dirty tricks as little more than honest mistakes and journalistic smears. He wouldn't lower himself to such tactics, he insists, because they simply aren't effective. That he says this while slipping in long-refuted jabs at Al Gore and Barack Obama makes his aw-shucks approach about as convincing as saying "We don't torture because it doesn't work" while refilling your crystal waterboarding pitcher. Rove's canonizing of his president, who he refers to as having "more charm and charisma than is allowed by law" at their first meeting, becomes more rabid and distorted as he defends the Iraq war and the administration's Katrina response. But wonkish readers of whatever political persuasion may still find it easy to get wrapped up in the chapters detailing Bush's races for governor and president, as modern politics' most Machiavellian mind delights in numbers and strategies.

—Shaun Brady

Still Midnight

CRIME No doubt, Scottish author Denise Mina knocks out a right good sentence. Her snappy dialogue trips just as quickly off the tongues of criminals, cops and victims as the curses spill out in her main character's working-class Glaswegian accent. Still Midnight, Mina's latest tartan noir, is the first in a new and likely beloved series featuring coarse and conflicted detective sergeant Alex Morrow. A botched kidnapping spins quickly off into the parallel stories of Morrow, a cop who wears the chip on her shoulder as proudly as her stripes; Pat, the handsome amateur crim with a heart of gold; and Aamir, the aging shopkeeper mistakenly kidnapped by bumbling Pat. Although Still Midnight has all the right noir ingredients — sordid streets, red herrings, bitter backstories, bigotry, injustice, curdled dreams and hardened heroes — Mina overcooks her images and metaphors early in the novel, allowing her characters to wallow a little too long in their own neuroses before the story really starts clicking. The novel is most absorbing when Morrow sets her inner turmoil aside by focusing on the investigation at hand. Unfortunately, Mina seems more interested in analyzing her cop's bilious affect than paying much heed to the crime she's out to solve.

—Char Vandermeer

The Day I Shot Cupid

SELF-HELP Someone really needs to tell Jennifer Love Hewitt that writing books makes her ass look fat. Not since the publication of Richard Speck's She's Really Not That Into You, So Why Not Purchase a Ski Mask and Some Duct Tape has a more ill-conceived collection of dating and relationship advice been unleashed upon the public. Calling Hewitt's first venture into the world of writing a "breezy read" would be like calling Adolf Hitler a "wee bit of an anti-Semite": The average Wasilla High dropout could finish this collection of lists, single-page quotes, cartoons and workout tips (yes, workout tips) in under an hour. The chapter dealing with the "Texting or Sexing" debate is a lengthy three pages long, although it's so cringingly poorly written that it feels as if you're working your way through the Bhagavad Gita. While The Day I Shot Cupid: Hello, My Name is Jennifer Love Hewitt and I'm a Love-aholic fails on the romantic-advice level, it succeeds brilliantly as a document of the madness that gripped the American Empire in its final days. For that, we thank you, Jennifer H.P. Lovecraft Hewitt.

—Rodney Anonymous

Bite Me: A Love Story

FICTION Something's askew in the universe when Twilight scribe Stephenie Meyer rides the bat-outta-hell vampire train to J.K. Rowling-level fame and fortune while a truly brilliant craftsman — Christopher Moore — toils in (relative) obscurity. His third vampire romp, Bite Me: A Love Story, continues where Bloodsucking Fiends (1995) and You Suck (2007) left off, with the adventures of Tommy Flood; his hot vamp girlfriend, Jody; their Goth minion, Abby Normal; Chet the Giant Hairless Cat; and The Animals, Tommy's posse of night-shift shelf stockers turned vampire fighters. Moore, author of last year's Shakespeare-inspired Fool, pens the anti-Twilight: These vamps do precious little whining, instead quipping and fucking nonstop while battling vampire kitties, assisted by an orange-socked samurai and The Emperor of San Francisco (a street dweller who, like several characters, also pops up in Moore's non-vampire novels — an extra treat for fans). Moore's bloodsuckers follow genre rules, of course, with a few twists concerning mortality and animals, and a talent for "misting" — becoming fog to escape trouble. Imagine an R-rated Buffy, a funny True Blood, a Twilight minus all that angsty posing, and you're still only halfway to Bite Me's down-and-dirty grown-up fun.

—Mark Cofta

HISTORY The cold, arctic winds and serious snowfall that blanket Anthony Brandt's new work of nonfiction makes our Philadelphia winters look pretty tame. The Man Who Ate His Boots puts readers in the shoes of the amateur Royal Navy explorers as they set out on a quest for a shortcut to Asia through the chilly waters north of Canada after the Napoleonic wars. The book follows three main trends, and one harsh reality, of the British pursuit: the search for a quick and profitable circumspection of Spanish Central and South America in the 17th and 18th centuries; the tacit realization that ice would keep the passage closed to viable commercial traffic; the incorporation of the search into British national character following their defeat of Napoleon in the early 18th century; and finally, people getting trapped and eating other people. Peppered into these thematic bases are lengthy explanations of the politics, people and logistics involved in the main push north between 1818 and 1850. While these give invaluable insight, they are slow interludes between the much more harrowing adventures of John Ross, Edward Parry and the man with the boot in his mouth, John Franklin.

—Tom Tiballi

Your Presence is Requested at Suvanto

FICTION Maile Chapman's debut novel makes a great case for commanding titles. Your Presence Is Requested at Suvanto — yikes! The very words induce a chill, but at the sametime beckon the reader in, deep into the snowy Finnish countryside, to Suvanto, an early-20th-century convalescent hospital, where Finnish and American women rest their troubled bodies and minds. No surprise, all is not well at Suvanto. The patients can be difficult, and often inscrutable, as they band together against their caretakers, unsettling even Sunny Taylor, the consummate nurse, who has escaped troubles of her own in America. With the arrival of a particularly unruly patient named Julia, and an American gynecologist harboring progressive ambitions, the atmosphere of Suvanto, already laden with institutional anxiety, becomes almost impossible to control. "One danger of constant observation," Chapman writes ominously, "is that all the world, even tragedy, comes to seem anecdotal." In our post-feminist times, we tend to romanticize women's liberation or else ignore it altogether, but Chapman's eerie (if at times aloof) novel reminds us of the personal pains endured on that road to progress — and the roaring silence of the female body just before it found its voice.

—Katherine Hill

The Dark End of the Street

STORIES Neither especially titillating nor thrilling, the entries in The Dark End of the Street: New Stories of Sex and Crime are rarely the stuff of sexy noir. The subtitle promises tales to get the heart racing, but there is too little Kiss Kiss Bang Bang in these pages. It's possibly damning with faint praise to say that Michael Connelly's "The Perfect Triangle" may be the best of the bunch. His story of a lawyer helping out a stripper he's smitten with is pulpy and satisfying. Other highlights include Laura Lippman's "Tricks," about a con artist gigolo and his mark, and editor Santlofer's "Ben & Andrea & Evelyn & Ben," which features an adulterer whose inability to keep it in his pants leads to murder. But while the concept of the collection — sex and crime, broadly defined — allows for all kinds of genres and interpretations, a majority of the entries are tame — or just lame. Janice Y. K. Lee's "Deer" seems more suitable for The New Yorker than this volume. Moreover, when Francine Prose opens "The Beheading" with, "As a child, I was fascinated by decapitation," one might expect it to be provocative, or at least interesting. But like most of the stories in Dark End of the Street, it simply comes up short.

—Gary M. Kramer

FICTION Spanning over nine years in the life of scientist Michael Beard, Solar gives itself plenty of time, and room, to delve deeply into the protagonist's psyche. Beard's brain, despite all its genius, is, as it turns out, an uncomfortable place to be. Solar presents an exacting portrayal of a man ironically intent upon saving the world as a distraction from his own personal drama. As is now his forte, or at least trademark, author Ian McEwan focuses an unflinching lens on the oftentimes surprising ways humanity expresses itself. In his drive to uncover every cranny of Beard's character, McEwan has a tendency to be meandering (in an out-of-place trip to the Arctic) and overly detailed (in accounts of every single meal), occasionally employing contrived plot devices (readers be warned: The book's back blurb whittles out about two-thirds of the plot, requiring patience to reach the end). Despite these shortcomings, the character of Beard, and his endless self-absorption, remains engrossing and believable. For all his flaws, Beard is perversely sympathetic, as we watch in suspense while the many elements of his life — multiple affairs, research on solar energy and other surprises — build to a train-wreck finale.

—Emily Currier

Contested Will

HISTORY James Shapiro, Shakespearean scholar at Columbia University, admits that the controversy over the literary authorship of Bardic works is too vast to cover in one volume. With Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? he doesn't seek to solve any mysteries, but chronicles them into a fascinating comedy — and tragedy — of errors. Adding credence to fakes were the existence of bastard plays and the early suggestion that many works were collaborations. And of course, scandal — that anyone from Christopher Marlowe to the Earl of Oxford were ghost writers — and rumors — that Will's inside knowledge of the court can be explained by his amorous relationship with the Virgin Queen — abound. How's that for Shakespearean? With a rogue's gallery of literati and Shakespearean scholars from every century hence to back him up, Shapiro's witty investigation into these known theories is conducted with peerless authority; simply, it's a history of the quest to prove and disprove if Shakespeare was Shakespeare. Shapiro not only repairs the historical record of literary conspiracy, but reveals the reasons, both academic and mythic, why they will never die.

—Lewis Whittington

The Boy with the Cuckoo-Clock Heart

FICTION The title sounds like the next single from some tragic emo band, and for good reason: Mathias Malzieu moonlights as frontman of the dark, romantic French rock quintet Dionysos. His novel is set to the uninspiring theme of boy meets girl, falls for girl, loses girl, and on and on. The plot, then, becomes merely a thin spine that supports the rich imagery and charming idea of a heart being replaced with a wooden clock. Jack is the poor sap with the prosthetic beater who scours Europe for Miss Acacia, the flame who sets his little cuckoo clock ablaze. But he's not alone. Jack is surrounded by characters: the witch-doctor midwife who delivered him and performed the great organ switch; her friend with the rusty spine and eggshells full of memories; a pair of whores (well, that's what they are); and a lovesick magician. Jack and his lady are teenagers in this 19th-century romance, which only ups the ante on the angsty, brooding, emo feel. It's easy to imagine that, were the story set in modern times, the only difference would be that they'd both be wearing eyeliner and snapping scowly MySpace photos in the bathroom mirror.

—Julia West

FICTION Steve Hockensmith's prequel to Quirk Books' hugely successful Pride and Prejudice and Zombies reignites a geeky love of all things Jane Austen — and all things undead. Hockensmith — this time with no help from an original Austen text — introduces us to the Bennet family, who begin preparing themselves for zombie warfare after they witness a corpse thrashing his way out of a coffin. We come to understand how the Bennet girls — so sweet and thoughtful in Austen's original — got schooled in monster murder, to hilarious effect. As the girls' prissy upper-class world becomes engulfed in zombie-riffic mayhem, brains — and other body parts — get munched on with gruesome delight by the previously dead. All the while, Hockensmith's wholly original novel maintains a proper Austenian voice in an entirely genteel setting: Gentlemen politely discuss their intense desire to kill mobbing zombies and ladies chase the undead with delicate butterfly nets. It's this ripe — and perhaps slightly twisted — contradiction to such a deliciously violent world that pushes Dawn of the Dreadfuls beyond standard second-book-in-a-series fare.

—Mandy Bee

Appetite for America

NONFICTION What was it like to be an American traveling cross-country in the late 1800s? According to Fred Harvey, it sucked. As Stephen Fried tells it in Appetite for America: How Visionary Businessman Fred Harvey Built a Railroad Hospitality Empire That Civilized the Wild West, Harvey was fed up with the accommodations that lined the nation's railways. So, over the next half-century, he built an empire of rail-side eateries and hotels that became famous for their service and quality. But that's not all: Along the way, Harvey basically invented the Grand Canyon as a tourist destination, jump-started the American Indian preservation movement, helped develop the National Park system and even became one of the nation's largest employers of women. Fried traces the growth of the Fred Harvey company from a hotel-and-restaurant chain to the huge conglomerate it became, using the narratives of the Harveys — Fred Harvey, son Ford and grandson Freddy — to guide the story. Along the way, the Harveys brush shoulders with some of American history's most iconic figures: Susan B. Anthony, Charles Lindbergh, Jay Gould and Judy Garland (to name a few), as well as multiple presidents. The book is engagingly written and packed with fascinating information, including an appendix of original Fred Harvey recipes — the orange pancakes alone sound worthy of an empire.

—Sam Kaplan

Ilustrado

FICTION This amazingly inventive debut novel, winner of the 2008 Man Asian Literary Prize, is a murder mystery heavy on autobiography that strains the limits of self-conscious metafiction. Similar in style to Junot Diaz and early Dave Eggers, Miguel Syjuco explores what it means to be a young Filipino writer nervous about his literary aspirations. Most surprising is that Syjuco has written himself into the book, as a main character compiling a biography of recently killed Filipino literary genius Crispin Salvador. The raw creativity that makes Salvador seem real is a truly remarkable accomplishment. The problem is that Syjuco splinters the novel into separate plot lines and alternating voices as he tries to cover centuries of cultural and political ground, and the modern Filipino diaspora, without finding a way to sustain the power of the brilliant prologue about Salvador. Instead, too many pages are devoted to personal dramas about a baby and a coke habit and sarcastic worldly wisdom. A clever, final twist justifies only some of all the flashy literary games. While Syjuco comes up a bit short, he does so while gambling big.

—Matt Jakubowski