 Fiction + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+ + + + + THE FAMILY
MARKOWITZ
By Allegra Goodman
Farrar,
Straus & Giroux, 262 pages. Allegra Goodman writes circles
around most other young writers by not writing circles around
them. Her unfussy, matter-of-fact style borrows from Grace Paley and
Philip Roth, but in "The Family Markowitz," her new collection of linked
short stories, Goodman sounds like nobody else. You move through these
smart and slyly funny stories, about a cerebral and squabbling extended
Jewish family, with an increasing appreciation of her remarkable talent.
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Hypnotic. Not a novel
at all in the usual sense, "Reader's Block" is a brilliant accumulation
of references and allusions ("Roland Barthes died after being hit by a
laundry truck," "Tony Trollope, he was naturally called") sandwiched
between the author's notes on the book that he's pointedly not
writing. Pretentious? Not for a second. "Reader's Block" is both playful
and, as you gradually learn more about its narrator's solitary life,
remarkably poignant.
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This
remarkable and eccentric first novel is about two loners -- a shy young
librarian and the tallest boy in the world -- and the friendship that
alters their lives forever. McCracken has wit and subtlety to burn, as
well as an uncanny ability to tap into the sadness that runs through the
center of her characters' worlds. This book is so lovely that, when
you're done reading, you'll want to sleep with it under your pillow.
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Packed with grand,
deluded, eccentric and alarming characters, Rushdie's saga of a mongrel
Indian family -- told by its sole remaining scion, who's aging at twice
the rate of normal humans -- is lots of fun. Fatwa be damned -- Rushdie
has lost none of his joie de vivre, energy or humor. In fact, fear,
sadness and loss only provide more fuel for his robust story-telling
engine. There's plenty here about the imperative to create art in the
face of unpredictable repercussions, but no lectures or
self-righteousness, just a restless joyful appetite for life on this
flawed earth.
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Yes, the book is
perversely long, and the author's media persona drifts into
annoying-wunderkind territory on occasion, but this tale of parallel
lives in an elite tennis academy and a nearby halfway house has enough
flashes of that hard-found rarity, pure genius, to make up for all that.
There's a keen edge to Wallace's sometimes-flashy cleverness (in the
near-future setting of the novel, the years are named after sponsors'
products, rather than numbered). And, in one benighted former pillhead's
muddling toward dignity, "Infinite Jest" builds itself a solid
foundation of genuine wisdom.
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Nonfiction + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
+ MY DARK
PLACES
By James Ellroy
Knopf,
360 pages When James Ellroy
was ten years old, his mother was murdered, and her killer was never
found. From that point his life spiralled down into squalor: living in
filth with his ne'er-do-well dad, flirtations with right-wing extremism,
drug abuse, homelessness, petty crime and various creepy, voyeuristic
activities. Eventually he pulled himself together and became a crime
novelist with a cult following. This brutally honest memoir cuts deeper
than the bone, it goes to the marrow of self-hatred, self-pity and
misogyny that Ellroy recognizes in himself and his hard-boiled brethren.
Is he searching for his mother's killer as he scours the police records
on her case (a litany of bleak, emotionally toxic 1950s Los Angeles), or
for something else?
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An intense, elegant and ultimately
devastating memoir about the well-known novelist's search for
information about the father who died when she was seven. The more
Gordon finds out about him, however, the more he slips through her
fingers. Can it be that his entire life -- his age, his education, his
place of birth, his core beliefs -- was a lie? "Who am I," Gordon asks,
"if my father is not himself?"
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This is compulsively readable social
history, about the night in 1958 when Atlanta's oldest and most revered
synagogue was blown apart by fifty sticks of dynamite. Melissa Fay
Greene pulls together the disparate strands of this story -- about the
racial tensions between blacks, whites and Jews -- with a novelist's
careful eye. This is a masterful portrait of life in a Southern city at
the dawn of the civil rights era.
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Hendrickson traces
the grim history of the Vietnam War through the lives of five people: an
artist, an army nurse, a Quaker pacifist, a young Marine, and a member
of a Saigon family. All of their fates were shaped in part by the
central figure, defense secretary for the Kennedy and Johnson
administrations and, as Hendrickson portrays him, a technocrat tormented
by the moral consequences of his own hubris. This book manages the
impressive feat of conveying both the pomp of history and its intimate
impact on real people. If the author dips into florid boomer-journalist
romanticism a bit too often, he nevertheless often attains the tragic
heights for which he reaches.
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By some untraceable
miracle, McCourt turns the simple stuff of his memoirs -- a childhood
growing up dirt poor in Limerick, Ireland -- into an utterly captivating
book. Part David Copperfield, part Stephen Dedalus, the young McCourt
observes his long-suffering mother and charming, irresponsible drunkard
of a father with an innocent, loving, but coolly honest eye. It's not an
unusual life, but chances are that once you open this book, you'll find
yourself blinking, dazed and hopelessly charmed, wondering where the
last seven hours went.
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