BQ Reviews

1) You Know When the Men Are Gone

To many Americans, Fort Hood, Texas, is the site of 2009's shooting spree, during which an Army psychiatrist, perhaps suffering a psychotic break, killed 13. The event brought national attention to the peculiarities of life on military bases, places connecting war and home where thousands of soldiers live with their families between deployments. Siobhan Fallon's debut story collection depicts just this life — and as an Army wife and former Fort Hood resident, she's uniquely positioned to take us behind the heavily guarded base gates. Fallon writes with compassion for military life, and with an eye for detail and gentle irony. (A sign exiting the base reads, "You survived the war, now survive the homecoming," in an effort to prevent driving fatalities.) Her characters are generally good-hearted people trying to keep their sanity and their families together amid the excruciating circumstances of modern service: a wife discovering a seductive e-mail sent to her husband in Iraq, a sergeant fearing for a female translator's life. To many readers, these circumstances will be intriguing enough, but those hoping for a fresh understanding of aggression or PTSD will be disappointed. The spectrum of war fiction runs from nihilism to lionization, and Fallon unfortunately tends too much toward the latter. Despite her skill and sensitivity, she seems reluctant to explore the darkest territory of Army life and love, showing the bruises and pains but rarely ever the soul of violence. Amy Einhorn, 240 pp., $23.95, Jan. 20.

—Katherine Hill

2) Decoded

We get it, Hova, you're from New York. We've been well aware for quite some time. What we really want is to understand what it's like being Jigga: a rapper, a businessman, husband to the hottest chick in the game, even a rumored member of the Illuminati. But those who pick up Decoded hoping for a juicy tell-all from the entrepreneur of hip-hop will feel far from satiated. Jay-Z — the artist formerly known as Shawn Carter — keeps his cards close to his chest like any good hustler, and lets readers peek in only on the necessary details. In picking apart 36 songs practically line by line, he deciphers (or, one might say, decodes ) his artistic license — how one word has two meanings, when a line gives a nod (or a dis) to another artist, how a phrase aids a flow. Sure, the exercise ties the title of his book into a neat little bow, but nothing more: The whole thing is more like a majorly extended set of liner notes than an autobiography. Maybe we're all just a bunch of gossip hounds, but wouldn't circumstantial evidence help to paint a clearer picture? Then again, Jay makes it clear that his privacy is paramount. He's letting us in on a genre, a movement, even — but not a life. Spiegel & Grau, 317 pp., $35, Nov. 16

—Julia West

3) Zone

"Sometimes you come across books that resemble you," Francis Mirkovic recognizes, stuck on an overnight commuter train. "They open up your chest from chin to navel, stun you." He's gutted by a collection of novellas about the Lebanese civil war, its atrocities and betrayed alliances mirroring his own obsessions. Mirkovic's flight to Rome, which constitutes the setting and all the action of Mathias énard's Zone , will end with the former spy trading a suitcase of old secrets for anonymity. But for the span of his journey, he's alone with his thoughts and memories, which spill out over 500-odd pages in a single impressionistic sentence, occasionally touching on Beirut but picking up each of the great atrocities of the 20th century in turn, from the Spanish Civil War to the Holocaust, from his own involvement in the right-wing Croatian brigades in the '90s to the modern-day strife of the countries that ring the Mediterranean, the zone of the title and his specialty as an intelligence officer. This is a lot of ground to cover. The resulting gush of prose is at turns graphic and surprising, but is most often a little tedious. Charlotte Mandell's clear translation prompts the question of what a book as style-dependent as énard's loses in translation, and whether all Mirkovic's shocks and horrors blur together in the French. In English, though, the character is luckier than the reader: He's got a great novella, but we're stuck on a slow train with a long-winded seatmate. Open Letter, 517 pp., $16.95, Dec. 31.

— Justin Bauer

4) An Object of Beauty

Charming, dry and sardonic is the manner in which Steve Martin sails through the smooth, cool seas of An Object of Beauty , a mix of cautionary tale and discussion of art-world trends through the last three decades. The art of Beauty comes easy to Martin, a longtime collector and (casual) historian. There's a bold confidence and droll wordiness to his carefully detailed realizations of artists, dealers (like Leo Castelli), trends and collectors, with snippy wit. That Martin is equally knowing and loquacious while rummaging through personal intrigues and moral/financial indiscretions makes him a better (or maybe more commercial) writer than even the lovely, vacant Shopgirl portended. Narrated by a journalist in a voice not unlike Martin's, the tale follows Lacey, an ambitious art-dealing young woman who'll stop at nothing to further her position in New York City's rarified gallery universe. If her zeal for success ceased at sleeping with artists and patrons, that'd be fine, but Lacey lurches into sleaze, felonies and questionable deals — the true sins of the art world. Martin scribbles down all the un-merry minutiae, the aesthetics and the crime and the lack of the moral compass with equal aplomb; the whole mean affair is actually reminiscent of Breakfast at Tiffany's (the scabrous book, not the movie) if transferred to the go-go Manhattan of today. Grand Central, 304 pp., $26.99, Nov. 23.

— A.D. Amorosi