Books

Leviathan

PETER KEOUGH — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 16:54:21 GMT

Roberto Bolaño's 2666 may be the Great American Novel
Jorge Luis Borges wrote of the desert as a labyrinth without walls or center, unending and inescapable. That's a fair description of Roberto Bolaño's last work, the 912-page opus 2666 .

DIABOLICAL: Bolaño’s tantalizing, often unfinished digressions are part of his genius.

Jorge Luis Borges wrote of the desert as a labyrinth without walls or center, unending and inescapable. That's a fair description of Roberto Bolaño's last work (he died in 2003, age 50), the 912-page opus 2666. His book, however, does have a circumference of sorts, a circular narrative that begins, like his previous novel, The Savage Detectives, with academics (in Detectives they were poets) searching the wastelands of the Sonora province of Mexico for a legendary writer and ending . . . well, it's hard to say, somewhere in that general vicinity. It offers innumerable passages that cohere into a sense of immanent revelation, some of them contained in single multi-page run-on sentences, before dissolving like blowing sand. Like Moby Dick, it confronts the nature, the ubiquity, and the elusiveness of evil. And as such it can also make a claim for being the Great American Novel, both North and South.

The academics' story is told in the first of five sections, "The Part About the Critics." They include four literature professors from different European countries, three men and a woman, who share an obsession with Benno von Archimboldi, a mystery author who over the decades has turned out novels with titles like TheLeather Mask and Bifurcaria Bifurcata. Little is known about him except that he is Prussian and very tall and that he served on the Eastern Front in World War II. The quartet attend conferences on Archimboldi and engage in passionate discussion, and their bonds heat up into something more than Platonic. At last, following up a lead, they head to Mexico where a sighting of the octogenarian legend has been reported.

Sounds deadly? Not when every page veers off on a tantalizing, often unfinished digression — like the one about the painter whose masterpiece is a canvas adorned with his own severed hand — or includes tossed-off descriptions of the everyday like "It was raining in the quadrangle, and the quadrangular sky looked like the grimace of a robot or a god made in our own likeness." [9] Or when the quartet arrive at their destination, Santa Teresa, a fictional city where — as in the real city of Ciudad Juárez, on which it is based — hundreds of women, mostly workers in local factories, have turned up raped and brutally murdered, a serial-killing spree that's been going on since 1993.

Table of content

BILL BEUTTLER — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 18:11:17 GMT

Jim Harrison’s road trip
Jim Harrison’s fiction and essays are built from his particular blend of earthiness and erudition.

HARUMPH: Cellphones are as hated by Harrison’s protagonist as female behinds are adored.

The English Major | By Jim Harrison | Grove Press | 268 pages | $24

Jim Harrison’s fiction and essays are built from his particular blend of earthiness and erudition. He’ll quote Rilke, Neruda, Joyce, and other such heavyweights; he’ll also talk of less lofty passions: booze, food, hunting, fishing, dogs, long-distance driving, and naked women. He’ll ruminate on some philosophical conundrum or other, then bring you up short with a cockeyed laugh line.

Harrison’s new comic road novel, The English Major, isn’t as ambitious as the novella collection Legends of the Fall (1979) and the novel Dalva (1988), the books that earned him literary renown. But it’s worth spending time with.

It opens with Cliff, 60, preparing to depart from the Northern Michigan farm he has worked since giving up teaching high-school English more than 25 years earlier. Cliff’s wife of 38 years, Vivian, a late-blooming real-estate shark, has recently divorced him. His beloved bird dog, Lola, has just died. Cliff decides to drive out to visit his and Vivian’s gay only child, Robert, in San Francisco. Before setting out, he finds a childhood memento in an old trunk, a child’s jigsaw puzzle of the lower 48 states. He brings it along and begins discarding the corresponding puzzle pieces for the states he passes through en route.

In Morris, Minnesota, Cliff is joined by a favorite former student, Marybelle, now 43, who wears him out with frequent acrobatic sex over the next few days but does little to set his soul right. Cliff writes approvingly, or disapprovingly, of virtually every meal he has on the trip, works in a little fly fishing with his alcoholic doctor friend in Montana, and pays Sylvia, a young woman with an exquisite derriere, $300 to let him sketch her nude. When Sylvia finally disrobes, Cliff nearly passes out from forgetting to breathe.

Female butts come up a lot. Cliff is told twice that male monkeys will give up lunch to view photos of female monkey butts. His son informs him that his response to Vivian’s worrying about having a big butt — telling her “there’s nothing wrong about a big butt” — showed how out of synch their marriage had become. “Once I tried to detox the butt situation by saying that her butt was only big because her mother’s butt was big,” Cliff elaborates. “That didn’t work.”

Beating a dead horse

JACK KEROUAC AND WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 20:20:27 GMT

An excerpt from And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks
I got home about 3:45 after eating breakfast at Riker’s on the corner of Christopher Street and Seventh Avenue

Back beat: At last, Kerouac and Burroughs's co-authored noir novel, And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, resurfaces. By George Kimball.

1) Will Dennison
THE BARS CLOSE AT THREE AM ON SATURDAY nights so I got home about 3:45 after eating breakfast at Riker’s on the corner of Christopher Street and Seventh Avenue. I dropped the News and Mirror on the couch and peeled off my seersucker coat and dropped it on top of them. I was going straight to bed.

At this point, the buzzer rang. It’s a loud buzzer that goes through you so I ran over quick to push the button and release the outside door. Then I took my coat off the couch and hung it over a chair so no one would sit on it, and I put the papers in a drawer. I wanted to be sure they would be there when I woke up in the morning. Then I went over and opened the door. I timed it just right so that they didn’t get a chance to knock.

Four people came into the room. Now I’ll tell you in a general way who these people were and what they looked like since the story is mostly about two of them.

Phillip Tourian is seventeen years old, half Turkish and half American. He has a choice of several names but prefers Tourian. His father goes under the name of Rogers. Curly black hair falls over his forehead, his skin is very pale, and he has green eyes. He was sitting down in the most comfortable chair with his leg over the arm before the others were all in the room.

This Phillip is the kind of boy literary fags write sonnets to, which start out, “O raven-haired Grecian lad . . .” He was wearing a pair of very dirty slacks and a khaki shirt with the sleeves rolled up showing hard muscular forearms.

Ramsay Allen is an impressive-looking gray-haired man of forty or so, tall and a little flabby. He looks like a down-at-the-heels actor, or someone who used to be somebody. Also he is a southerner and claims to be of a good family, like all southerners. He is a very intelligent guy but you wouldn’t know it to see him now. He is so stuck on Phillip he is hovering over him like a shy vulture, with a foolish sloppy grin on his face.

Back Beat

GEORGE KIMBALL — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 10:54:21 GMT

At last, Kerouac and Burroughs's co-authored noir novel, And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, resurfaces.
On a Sunday afternoon in December of 1997 I hooked up with the poet Jim McCrary at a Greenwich Village saloon.

And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks | By William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, edited and with an introduction by James Grauerholz | Grove Press | 224 pages | $24.

Beating a dead horse: An excerpt from And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks by Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs.

On a Sunday afternoon in December of 1997 I hooked up with the poet Jim McCrary at a Greenwich Village saloon. I’d come down from Boston to cover a fight at Madison Square Garden the previous evening, and Jim was visiting from Lawrence, Kansas, where he worked as an editor for William Burroughs Communications, still a thriving concern despite the death of its eponymous patron four months earlier.

After brunch and a leisurely afternoon passed watching football games on the pub’s TV, Jim suggested that we ring up James Grauerholz, a mutual friend (and, as Burroughs’s literary executor, McCrary’s boss) who was also in New York on business.

Grauerholz was still in the process of wrapping up his meeting, but suggested we take a cab over to meet him at Allen Ginsberg’s loft on East 13th Street. The poet had preceded Burroughs in death earlier that year, but somebody was evidently still paying the rent.

When we arrived, I was somewhat startled to find myself in the midst of what appeared to be a convocation of the Capos of the three Beat Families. The company included Grauerholz, Burroughs’s agent Andrew Wylie, Jack Kerouac’s brother-in-law John Sampas, Kerouac’s agent Sterling Lord, Allen Ginsberg’s secretary Bob Rosenthal, his protégé and posthumous editor Peter Hale, and Bill Morgan, the Beat archivist Ginsberg had entrusted with the disposition of his effects. The only significant heir not represented at the kitchen table that day was the estate of Jan Kerouac (Jack’s unacknowledged daughter who had died a year earlier).

Since our visit was purely social, we didn’t pry into the nature of the conference that had consumed the better part of the day, but McCrary’s speculation that the subject was “Okay, who’s got what left and how much can we get for it?” probably wasn’t far off the mark.

In October of 1999, a Sotheby’s sale entitled “Allen Ginsberg & Friends” fetched $674,466. The auction lots included everything from original manuscripts to Ginsberg’s writing desk and Uncle Sam top hat to an original copy of Lady Windermere’s Fan, signed by Oscar Wilde (it had been a gift to Ginsberg from Bono), to Kerouac’s 1939 football letter from Horace Mann, the Bronx prep school where he had been stashed to further hone his gridiron skills by Lou Little, the Columbia University coach.

Scarlet letters

CAITLIN E. CURRAN — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 04:23:03 GMT

The uptight killjoy in us
Sarah Vowell’s fifth book, The Wordy Shipmates (Riverhead) — released on October 7 — examines New England Puritans with a meticulously researched, critical-yet-comical eye.

A smoker’s tale

JAMES PARKER — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 20:04:49 GMT

Will Self’s The Butt
Somehow one is surprised — if one is a semi-conscious literary journalist like me — by the discovery that Will Self has continued to produce books.

SILVER HAZE: The hoaxy, displaced, reality-TV feel is part of the recipe here — as is Henderson the Rain King.

The Butt | By Will Self | Bloomsbury | 368 pages | $26

Somehow one is surprised — if one is a semi-conscious literary journalist like me — by the discovery that Will Self has continued to produce books. So dashing and weird and telegenic a figure did he cut back in the early ’90s, when The Quantity Theory of Insanity and My Idea of Fun were coming out, that it seems he should have broken up by now, like a band, or passed onto some other, fresher phase of notoriety, like a housemate from The Surreal Life. Still, a writer writes, always (as Billy Crystal tells his students in Throw Momma from the Train), and here we are with his seventh novel, The Butt, the surprisingness of which is compounded by the fact that it’s very good indeed.

Tom Brodzinski, vacationing en famille in a Third World tourist trap, flicks his cigarette end off the hotel balcony; it lands with a flesh-creasing hiss upon the scalp of an elderly fellow guest, whereupon Tom is pitched into a netherworld of liability and tribal justice, attorneys and witch doctors. As part of the reparation proceedings, a local medicine man makes a ritual incision in Tom’s thigh: “The makkata closed in on Tom and knelt. He was clickety-clacking with his slack dry purse lips.”

Devout viewers of reality TV will of course be reminded of the Discovery Channel’s 2006 series Going Tribal and the famous “penis inversion” undergone by its host, Bruce Parry, among the Kombai tribesmen of West Papua. “The makkata’s breath was now on the front of his [Tom’s] shorts, and Tom could smell it despite the vegetal rot of the jungle.” The hoaxy, displaced, reality-TV feel is part of the recipe here. Add a dollop of Kafka’s The Trial, one small Joseph Conrad (peeled and sliced), half a Graham Greene, a squirt or two of Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King, and simmer it all over a low Flann O’Brien. . . . Mmm, tasty!

Pilgrims’ progress

CHRIS WANGLER — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 00:24:52 GMT

Amitav Ghosh's Sea of Poppies
India, 1838. The opium business is booming, and drug money fills the British Empire’s coffers, offsetting a trade imbalance created by imports of Chinese tea and silk. But now the emperor wants the drug trade stopped.

AUTHENTIC: This one is worth the trips to the appended glossary.

Sea of Poppies | By Amitav Ghosh | Farrar, Straus and Giroux | 528 pages | $26

India, 1838. The opium business is booming, and drug money fills the British Empire’s coffers, offsetting a trade imbalance created by imports of Chinese tea and silk. But now the emperor wants the drug trade stopped.

Along the Gangetic plain northwest of Calcutta, the British East India Company has persuaded peasant farmers to abandon their crops and grow only poppies, which are then processed in the Inferno-esque Sudder Opium Factory. With the first opium war looming, the cash cow seems ready to keel over, leaving famine and poverty for the hapless locals. This is the backdrop of Sea of Poppies, Amitav Ghosh’s eighth novel, the first in a projected trilogy, and his first book to be shortlisted for the Booker Prize. (This year’s winner will be announced October 14.)

Deeti, the moral center of the book, tends a poppy field. Her husband is an addict who works in the factory. When he dies, she decides she would rather be burned to death on his sati pyre than submit to her sexually predatory brother-in-law. At the last second she is rescued by a towering untouchable named Kalua. They become lovers and flee, making their way to Calcutta to sign up as girmitiyas, or indentured servants, aboard the Ibis, a schooner bound for Mauritius.

A half-dozen other characters, collected from an array of racial and linguistic backgrounds, also scheme their way on board under the watchful eyes of the British. The most interesting is in shackles. Raja Neel Rattan Halder, a genteel Bengali raja, having failed to pay his debts, has been framed as a forger, stripped of his holdings, and sentenced to a penal colony on Mauritius for seven years. He is reduced to cleaning excrement, lice, and filth off his cellmate, a half-Chinese opium addict whose withdrawal symptoms have rendered him nearly inhuman.

By the time she sets out, the Ibis has been transformed from a battered former slave ship into a fateful “vehicle of transformation,” where rules of caste and empire will be either broken by hopeful exiles or enforced with brutality by the ship’s guards. Although the pilgrims are all in some way victims of the opium trade, the real theme of Sea of Poppies is the alternately terrifying and liberating prospect of migration across the “Black Water” of the Indian Ocean. “On a boat of pilgrims,” says Deeti, “no one can lose caste and everyone is the same.”

Hardly getting over it

DAVID ANDREW STOLER — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 06:30:52 GMT

David Foster Wallace, 1962-2008
As you probably know by now, on September 12 Wallace hung himself after a long battle with depression.

In a 1996 interview with Charlie Rose, David Foster Wallace explained what turned him on about writing and reading. “There’s this part of what makes art magical to me,” he said, “that’s redemptive and instructive — where when you read something you go, ‘My god that’s me, I’ve lived like that, I’ve felt like that — I’m not alone in the world.’ ”

As you probably know by now, on September 12 Wallace hung himself after a long battle with depression. I can’t pretend that I have much to add to the eulogies of him and his work that have appeared pretty much everywhere since — I never met the man and, though I read nearly everything he wrote, I’m neither a critic nor a literary luminary.

But what I do want to say is that I’d never have written a word for the Phoenix, would never have become a serious writer, had it not been for David Foster Wallace. He was my hero, first because of the way he wrote, but soon after because of something more important: he changed the way I look at the world in such a significant way I consider it one of the greatest gifts anyone has given me.

In 1996, just out of school, I was the DJ at a popular club near India Point. It was a pretty good gig, except that after a while it became, quite simply, boring.

So I started bringing a Phoenix up into the booth with me, and I remember reading two pieces there that have led to everything in my life that has come since. The first was by and about a guy trying to become a postal worker; the second was a review of a book by an author I’d never heard of: A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, by David Foster Wallace.

The article was good, but what I remember most about it was feeling, as I was reading it, that I could do this. Of course, I had no idea how. That was where the review came in: it raved about Wallace’s book, I went out and bought it, and nothing for me would ever be the same.

There was the language, to start with — it was unlike anything I had ever seen, the blistering speed of it, but mostly the way Wallace’s intelligence mixed with a vernacular that more closely resembled the way I thought than anything I had before encountered.

David Foster Wallace — 1962–2008

NINA MACLAUGHLIN — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 19:42:03 GMT

Overhead baggage
A story called “Forever Overhead” by David Foster Wallace appeared in the 1992 edition of Best American Short Stories .

A story called “Forever Overhead” by David Foster Wallace appeared in the 1992 edition of Best American Short Stories. It’s told in the second person; the “you” is a boy on his 13th birthday; and the whole of the story takes place in the time it takes the boy to walk along a pool, climb up the high-dive ladder, and stand at the edge of the board. It's a story that made me want to be a writer. Underneath the crystalline imagery and the perfectly captured adolescence, a subtle sense of terror presents itself. Thirteen, on the symbolic precipice of adulthood, the boy, on the diving board, faces the abyss — to leap is to disappear.

Four years ago, about the time DFW’s short-story collection Oblivion came out, I revisited the 1992 anthology, and read DFW’s author statement at the back of the book. “I’m not all that crazy about this story,” he wrote. To him, it “seemed the product of a young writer who was straining to make a personal trauma sound way deeper and prettier and Big than anything true could ever really be.”

DFW, who hanged himself this past Friday in California, possessed a brain that was crowded with doubt — about his own ability, sure, and in the larger sense, the ability of any of us to adequately express anything.

But when it comes to expressing, DFW is unmatched in his ability to project images on the front of a reader’s brain; he makes the reader see and feel with such clarity, such precision. In his piece on tennis star Roger Federer, the game is so viscerally rendered, you hear the pop of the ball off the racket, feel the muscles between your own shoulders tense in anticipation of the next swing.

Best known for his magnum opus Infinite Jest, DFW was oft lauded for being funny. But his great strength was not provoking laughs; it was provoking horror.

And not horror born of disgust or repulsion at the gruesome or monstrous (though there’s some of that). More so, he evoked the low-grade panic, the twitchy boredom, the unbearable tedium of what he referred to in his 2005 commencement address to Kenyon College as the “day-to-day trenches of adult experience.” In “The Soul Is Not a Smithy,” from Oblivion, a child has nightmares “about the reality of adult life,” the type of nightmare “whose terror is less about what you see than about the feeling you have in your lower chest about what you’re seeing.” An apt description of the way it feels to read DFW’s work.

Positively Phil

RICHARD BECK — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 20:32:10 GMT

Roth goes back to college
We all know Philip Roth’s preoccupations.

FED UP: One of Portnoy’s favorite words takes on new resonance in Roth’s latest novel.

Indignation | By Philip Roth | Houghton Mifflin | 256 pages | $26

We all know Philip Roth’s preoccupations. They have, after all, been preoccupying the man for 28 books now, and there is nothing in his 29th, Indignation, that will leap out as a new concern. The great thrashings of male adolescence and the intersections of individual will and American history are the subjects of this strange and powerful little novel. The name on the cover is almost gratuitous. Like we wouldn’t know that this is Philip Roth?

The hero of Roth’s knotty parable is Marcus Messner: Jewish, anxious, smart, born and raised in Newark. His mother is motherly, in a fairly bland way. (Here, as is frequently the case with Roth, it’s the men who are awarded complex personalities while the women move along the familiar paths.) His father is a kosher butcher, and Marcus grows up helping out. Marcus loves his father, loves learning how to do the unpleasant things that have to be done, and so it is acutely painful when his father suddenly becomes fearful that Marcus might die. “What is this all about, Dad?”, Marcus asks after one of his father’s irrational, overprotective outbursts. His father cries, “It’s about life, where the tiniest misstep can have tragic consequences.” Angry, fed up — heartbroken, really — Marcus heads to the well-kept Ohio campus of conservative Winesburg College. It is 1951.

At Winesburg, Marcus encounters the things one tends to encounter at college: inexplicably malicious roommates, pompous administrators, sex. It happens that, in an unexpected way that I shouldn’t spell out completely, Marcus’s father is right, that the tiniest little missteps can bloom into tragedy. Although it never fully enters into the scene until the novel’s epilogue, the Korean War hangs like a specter over Marcus, who realizes that it’s either straight A’s or the draft.

This gnawing fear gives intensity to Marcus’s fervid introspection. Roth’s long sentences take deliberate steps, homing in, ruthlessly, on their subjects. Here is Marcus seeing his mother, who is planning to divorce her anxiety-ridden husband: “Now suddenly she was herself, ready and able to do battle, and I was the one at the edge of tears, knowing that none of this would be happening had I remained at home.” There is considerable force in the little moral that closes off that sentence, and even more pathos in the sentence that follows. “It takes muscle to be a butcher, and my mother had muscles, and I felt them when she took me in her arms while I cried.”

Holy roller

DANA KLETTER — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 19:33:45 GMT

Marilynne Robinson’s Home
Marilynne Robinson’s Home is haunted.

GLORY: Robinson’s novel reads like a powerful, unresolved hymn.

Home | By Marilynne Robinson | Farrar, Straus and Giroux | 336 pages | $25

Marilynne Robinson’s Home is haunted. It’s a novel filled with allusions to and echoes of scripture, parable, and psalm. But a restless discomfort unsettles what might be serene. It’s a hymn left unresolved, the final chord dissonant rather than reconciled.

The novel returns to the characters and the mid-’50s Iowa town depicted in Robinson’s 2004 Pulitzer-winning novel, Gilead. There is an African-American spiritual that assures us that in Gilead, we will find a balm that makes whole a fragmented “sin-sick soul.” Jack Boughton, 41, is the sin-sick soul returning after a 20-year absence to the house where his father is dying. Jack’s sister Glory is already there — 38 years old, lonely and fearful, returned in secret disgrace, having been deceived by her fiancé. Jack is a charming bounder, the perfect prodigal, favored, then fallen into ruin: a self-confessed thief, gambler, and drunk. “Come home,” goes the refrain of a favorite family hymn — home, the retreat of weary sinners. But at home Jack is troubled by the past and hopeless about the future. His father, a Presbyterian minister, declares him forgiven. Glory offers sympathy and camaraderie. Jack finds no solace or pardon.

Like Luke’s Prodigal Son, Jack sets himself to toil as his father’s hired man, pruning the overgrown gardens and restoring the DeSoto languishing in the barn. Sister and brother develop a tenuous understanding, a renewed love and delight in each other’s company. They struggle to comfort their father in his last days, but both grieve for lost loves, and the old man is an agitated presence. Disinhibited by illness, he confronts Jack with his failings, then retreats, fearful he will drive his son away again.

The Biblical “balm in Gilead” was not a salve; it was a question the broken-hearted prophet Jeremiah voiced as the Babylonians bore down on Jerusalem, a prayer for mercy as he heard the lamentations of his “poor people” on the eve of their enslavement: “Is there no balm in Gilead?” Haunting the heart of Home, as it did Gilead, are questions about mercy and sin, questions posed against the specter of slavery in America.

Winners and sinners

BARBARA HOFFERT — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 14:06:13 GMT

Barth, Bolaño, Roth, Morrison, and more
Ah, fall, when Nobel Prize winners are announced — and, now, when past winners turn up with more good reading.

HISTORY LESSON: Sarah Vowell looks back at Puritan life in The Wordy Shipmates.

Fiction
Ah, fall, when Nobel Prize winners are announced — and, now, when past winners turn up with more good reading. It’s A Mercy (Knopf; November 14) that TONI MORRISON has chosen to revisit the emotional territory of Beloved; her latest recounts a 1680s Anglo-Dutch trader’s cancellation of a debt in exchange for a slave girl whose mother wished her a better life. Everyone’s having a good time in JOSÉ SARAMAGO’s Death with Interruptions (Harcourt; October 6), since Death has decided that she needs a break.

More prize winners going for another gold: in PHILIP ROTH’s Indignation (Houghton Mifflin; September 16), a young man fleeing 1950s Newark — and his overwhelming father — encounters college life in far-off Ohio. Remember The Witches of Eastwick? They’re now The Widows of Eastwick (Knopf; October 30), courtesy of JOHN UPDIKE. Recent Booker Award winner ANNE ENRIGHT offers a story collection with Yesterday’s Weather (Grove; September 16). PER PETTERSON follows up his IMPAC Dublin Literary Prize winner, Out Stealing Horses, with To Siberia (Graywolf; September 30), in which two Danish children watch the Nazis march in.

Now that the late ROBERTO BOLAÑO has caught our attention, it’s time we read his masterpiece, 2666 (Farrar Straus Giroux; November 11), a complex tale of murder in Santa Teresa (read: Juárez) that will appear in a single-volume hardcover and a three-volume paperback. CARLOS FUENTES offers cozy vignettes in Happy Families (Random House; September 23); a ship called the Ibis floats across AMITAV GHOSH’s Sea of Poppies (Farrar Straus Giroux; October 14) en route to the Opium Wars.

And now for something completely different. In The Given Day (Morrow; September 23), DENNIS LEHANE moves away from crime fiction to paint a stark portrait of post–World War I Boston. And FRANCINE PROSE’s Goldengrove (HarperCollins; September 16), the study of a 13-year-old’s relationship with her drowned sister’s boyfriend, is not acid satire.

Stalin biographer SIMON MONTEFIORE revisits early-20th-century Russia in the debut novel Sashenka (Simon & Schuster; November 11); noted journalist IAN BURUMA also tries out fiction with The China Lover (Penguin Press; September 18), reimagining the life of film star Yoshiko Yamaguchi. Speaking of fictionalized lives: who knew that WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS and JACK KEROUAC got together to re-create friend Lucien Carr’s killing of David Kammerer? The novel, And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks (Grove; November 1), is appearing only now.

War correspondent

PETER KEOUGH — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 19:34:13 GMT

Paul Auster sheds light on Man in the Dark
So here he goes again, the writer known as Paul Auster, starting yet another novel, this time with the words “I am alone in the dark.”

AWAKE: Auster’s protagonist recognizes that stories, alternative worlds, movies, and words all offer only illusory escape.

Man in the Dark | By Paul Auster | Henry Holt | 192 Pages | $23

So here he goes again, the writer known as Paul Auster, starting yet another novel, this time with the words “I am alone in the dark.” Kind of sums it all up, doesn’t it? But as Samuel Beckett might have told him, you must go on, and so he does much as he has done in several books so far, spinning out a novel within a novel, a literary detective story without resolution, a page turner that just seems to run out of pages, with a glimpse at the end, perhaps, of some light.

August Brill, Auster’s persona, age 72 and incapacitated by a car accident, sits alone in a bedroom in his house in Vermont, tortured by old memories and current pains, unable to sleep. His wife, Sonia, is dead, his daughter Miriam mopes upstairs after being dumped by her husband, and his granddaughter Katya mourns the heinous murder of her boyfriend. A retired book critic, Brill decides to dispel the demons by inventing his own story. In it a 30-year-old magician from Queens with the concrete-sounding name of Owen Brick wakes up to find himself in a hole in the ground in a world that is much like the one he appears to have left, but with significant differences.

The good news is that in this world 9/11 and the Iraq War never happened. The bad news is that the country split apart in a bloody civil war following the disputed presidential election of 2000 and millions have died in the fighting. Brick, meanwhile, has been summoned from his world, or rather Brill’s, or rather Auster’s, to put an end to the war by assassinating the person responsible. That person (and this will be a spoiler for anyone who has not read any of Paul Auster’s work) is August Brill (and not Mr. Blank, as Brick had been told, the protagonist of Auster’s previous novel, Travels in the Scriptorium). Brill, as we know, has been writing the story in which this alternative history has been happening.

How is this possible? To explain it, a character in Brill’s novel refers Brick to the 16th-century Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno, who was burned at the stake for arguing that “if God is infinite. . . . then there must be an infinite number of worlds.” That may be so, but it also seems that Brill has been reading a lot of Philip K. Dick novels, if not the works of Paul Auster.

Out of this world

NINA MACLAUGHLIN — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 16:00:56 GMT

Benjamin Rosenbaum’s The Ant King
The worlds Rosenbaum creates feel less like a separate or “alternate” reality and more like a colorful, if complicated, extension of the one we know.

PLAUSIBLE: An abundance of sensual detail grounds Rosenbaum’s alien tales in the familiar.

The Ant King and Other Stories | By Benjamin Rosenbaum | Small Beer Press | 234 pages | $24

You could file Benjamin Rosenbaum’s debut collection of genre-blurring short stories under a number of categories: speculative or science fiction, fantasy, fairy tale, surrealism, irrealism, slipstream, postmodern parables. But the description that proves most accurate comes from one of Rosenbaum’s own stories: plausible fabulism. Put out by Small Beer Press in Western Mass, The Ant King and Other Stories zips along in a way that is lively, bizarre, and funny as well as dark, sinister, and sensual. Comparisons with Kelly Link and Aimee Bender are natural; there are also glimmers of Barthes, Barthelme, and Calvino — and, of course, a fleet of science-fiction writers.

Rosenbaum sent his first story to the New Yorker at age 13. He quit writing as a sophomore at Brown, where he pursued computer programming and religious studies, became a programmer, and then started writing again at 27. His dual university pursuits dance throughout the collection.

In the title story — a corporate-culture send-up and classic rescue quest, with echoes of Orpheus and Eurydice and on-line gaming geekdom — a character named Vampire spouts code-toadery: “What do you know about NetBSD 2.5 routing across multiple DNS servers?” In “Embracing-the-New,” there’s a sense of mythmaking. “How can the Godless really be godless,” asks an apprentice idol carver. “For without a god, a person would just be a shifting collection of memories.”

And though these stories are populated by wish-granting hedgehogs, a world-ruling piece of fruit, and a pack of kids out real-estate shopping, the worlds Rosenbaum creates feel less like a separate or “alternate” reality and more like a colorful, if complicated, extension of the one we know. There’s a sensuality that helps ground us in the otherwise alien scenarios. From “The Valley of Giants”: “The giants whisper and hum, placing their great soft lips against your belly, your back. They stroke your hair, and their fingers, as big as plates, are so delicate. . . . The giant women feed you from their breasts. . . . The milk is sweet and rich like crème brûlée.” In “Orphans,” a woman falls in love with an elephant. “He would hold me to his chest, and I would be bathed in the deep smell of him, wild and rich.” In “Red Leather Tassels,” a woman whose husband is eyeing another woman has sex with an ancient woodpecker. “George’s wife felt a pleasant, feathery tickling.”

War stories

CHARLES TAYLOR — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 16:41:40 GMT

Mailer on the ’68 conventions
“We will be fighting for forty years.” Reading those words at the end of Norman Mailer’s 1968 Miami and the Siege of Chicago , you can’t help but feel a chill.

THE TIME OF HIS TIME: Mailer seems so brave precisely because he was so ready to risk looking foolish.

Miami and the Siege of Chicago | By Norman Mailer | New York Review of Books | 241 pages | $14.95 [paper]

“We will be fighting for forty years.” Reading those words at the end of Norman Mailer’s 1968 Miami and the Siege of Chicago, you can’t help but feel a chill. At that year’s political conventions, the GOP performed its Lazarus act on Richard Nixon’s political career in Miami and the Democrats appointed Hubert Humphrey as the public face of their self-destruction in Chicago while, in the streets outside, Mayor Daley’s storm troopers brutalized protesters and anyone else in their path. These were socio-political events begging for the exegesis that Mailer, that dogged visionary, could bring them. Wrong as often as he was right, Mailer seems so brave precisely because he was so ready to risk looking foolish.

In Miami and the Siege of Chicago, which he wrote on assignment for Harper’s, Mailer was not only perfectly attuned to the moment but prescient. The 40 years he foresaw were, he understood, years in which Nixon’s reign of law and order — the appeal to middle-class “forgotten Americans” — represented an end to the sober, careful conservatism that had always ruled the Republican party and the beginning of something more sinister, something whose logical endpoint is the radical right epitomized by George W. Bush. It’s a period that may now be coming to an end as the Republicans, like a cancer that turns on the good cells first, are destroying themselves after nearly destroying the country.

It’s in that context that a potentially unifying figure like Nelson Rockefeller had no chance to win his party’s nomination. And though Mailer says that considering Reagan for the office of president would be like imagining Johnny Carson in the job, he perceives the 57-year-old Reagan as the GOP’s equivalent of the rising young man waiting in the wings. “He had the presence of a man of thirty,” Mailer writes, “the deferential enthusiasm, the bright but dependably unoriginal mind, of a sales manager promoted for his ability over men older than himself.”

Off the beaten path

BILL RODRIGUEZ — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 21:40:04 GMT

William Walsh’s work spans from the porn business to Calvin Trillin
William Walsh first wrote Without Wax: A Documentary Novel as a short story about a young man caught up in the world of triple-X adult films.

RESTLESS WRITER Walsh.

William Walsh first wrote Without Wax: A Documentary Novel as a short story about a young man caught up in the world of triple-X adult films while an undergraduate 20 years ago at Stonehill College. His cartoonishly endowed hero was pretty much the same, especially in being based in emotional realism, a kid just trying to survive.

The sunny side of smut: Sex makes the world go 'round in Without Wax: A Documentary Novel. By Bill Rodriguez

“I wanted someone who was sort of thrust into this world, based on circumstance rather than a need for attention or a drive to be part of that world,” Walsh says, sitting over a cup at the Coffee Exchange. “So if he were passively brought into that world, he would be a more sympathetic character.”
He used the prototype for Without Wax as well as other stories in his portfolio to get into grad school, earning an MA in writing at the University of New Hampshire. (Walsh’s day job now is at Brown University, where he is an administrator in the development department.)

The book wasn’t exhaustively researched. Walsh didn’t interview people in the pornography industry, for example. He did read some first-person biographies years ago, getting an idea of the production details and what it’s like being in a room making one of those films. The charm of the novel comes from what people think rather than the sexual calisthenics some of them accomplish.

“My own view, I think, is based on impressions from when I was younger, because I didn’t really encounter it in my daily life since I was in college,” he says. “I don’t think it’s something you have to examine closely in order to write about it.

“A few years ago I read some of the trade magazines, just to make sure I had the lingo down,” Walsh adds. “I was more interested in that part of it. I tried to minimize the amount of pornography that’s on display in the book, just to focus on how it’s produced and who’s doing it, and then how people respond to it.”

He wrote a short script for an adult film and included it in the novel, to get the mechanics out of the way. “Then the rest of it wouldn’t have to focus as much on the actual ac-tive making a film, how it’s made,” he says.

Car talk

AMY FINCH — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 16:04:58 GMT

A close look at driving
For days post-late-merge, Vanderbilt had feelings of guilt and confusion.

All it took was one rash “late merge” to inspire Tom Vanderbilt to write his tome on traffic. (He flouted “lane ending” signs till the last second, then barged his way into the adjoining still-open lane.) For days post-late-merge, Vanderbilt had feelings of guilt and confusion. Was what he’d done so wrong? He went on-line to Ask MetaFilter and drew plenty of riled-up responses. Fans of fairness proclaimed the righteousness of queuing up and waiting your turn; fans of physics cited the practicality of using all available space for maximum efficiency. That clash of opinions got Vanderbilt to thinking about how people’s attitudes toward driving reveal a lot about psychology and culture.

Vanderbilit has written for the New York Times, Slate, Rolling Stone, and a long list of other familiar titles. In a previous book, Survival City, he visited fallout shelters and other Cold War–era buildings to examine what it meant to live with a constant sense of vulnerability. In Traffic, he looks at what it means to go careering down the highway with no sense of vulnerability whatsoever. It’s more complicated than that, of course, but he does have some good ideas about our misguided approach to driving, some of them counter-intuitive, some not. To live longer, don’t drive on rural non-interstates. To be safer, jaywalk. To remain alive around 18-wheelers, don’t drive like a dope.

Vanderbilt asserts that “traffic culture can be more important than laws or infrastructure in determining the feel of a place.” In the ’60s, the ever-progressive Netherlands invented woonerven (“living yards”) in small towns. Woonerven have no high sidewalks, traffic signs, or crosswalks, but plenty of trees, flowerpots, cobblestones, and fountains. The boundaries between the worlds of pedestrian, bicyclist, and driver dissolve. Yet cars can’t go faster than walking speed (5 to 10 miles an hour), so, no surprise, the roads are safer.

Many of Vanderbilt’s findings are similarly unsurprising. Everyone considers himself/herself to be an “above-average” driver. SUV drivers are more apt to drive aggressively, yak on cell phones, and speed. Maybe that’s because they’re higher off the ground and don’t realize how fast they’re going.
Or maybe SUV drivers tend to be jerks, and maybe we’re just plain cocky about our imaginary driving skills. But Vanderbilt is not one to judge, sometimes sticking to the scientific approach beyond the point of logic. At length, he ponders the differing ways we choose parking spots and draws analogies to animals’ hunting strategies. Isn’t it possible that we spend forever looking for a great spot because we’re l-a-z-y?

Victim, not vixen

CLIF GARBODEN — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 19:59:43 GMT

Sex, death, and the filthy rich
Florence Evelyn Nesbit was the most beautiful woman who ever lived.

INNOCENT: Evelyn Nesbit at age 17, posed as half child and half woman by Photo-Secessionist portraitist Gertrude Käsebier.

American Eve: Evelyn Nesbit, Stanford White, The Birth of the “It” Girl, and the Crime of the Century | by Paula Uruburu | Riverhead Books | 372 pages | $27.95

Florence Evelyn Nesbit was the most beautiful woman who ever lived. So said many at the turn of the century, and looking back at the visual record of her youth, you’re hard-pressed to argue. She also had terrible taste in men and consequently became the central figure in a 1906 homicide scandal that claimed, and has maintained, the title “crime of the century.”

Nesbit’s father died young, and her waifish beauty, contravening the buxom-and-pudgy Victorian ideal, made her, at age 14, America’s most popular artists’ model. Evelyn took her charms to the Broadway chorus line, from which she was snatched by society architect Stanford White, who in turn befriended, supported, and, when she was 16, raped her, after which she became his underage mistress. Mentally ill Pittsburgh millionaire heir Harry Thaw vied for her attention; he took Evelyn to Europe, where he sadistically beat her as punishment for enduring White’s “seduction.”

Evelyn nevertheless married Thaw in 1905. They lived in Pittsburgh with his pious nouveau riche Presbyterian family, who held her in the kind of contempt today reserved for porn stars. Then while on a trip to New York, Thaw assassinated White during a musical staged on the roof of Madison Square Garden. The subsequent trials exposed Evelyn’s sordid past and set legal precedent for the insanity defense.

It’s a famous story, dramatized by Hollywood in the 1955 film The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing (which starred 22-year-old Joan Collins as Nesbit), and drastically reimagined as fiction by E.L. Doctorow in Ragtime. Nesbit herself published two, sometimes inconsistent, accounts: The Story of My Life (1907) and Prodigal Days (1934).

Never has this awful tale been better researched or described than in Hofstra University English professor Paula Uruburu’s American Eve, which sets a lot of records straight. To say that Uruburu takes Nesbit’s side oversimplifies the deep and subtle arguments she makes in the defamed showgirl’s defense. Uruburu defuses the obvious question — “What was she thinking?!” — by building a psychological profile in which sexual naïveté plus parental abandonment aggravated by an unearned notoriety based on looks alone adds up to certain doom. Is this telling the story from the “woman’s point of view?” Yes, but American Eve is by no means an exaggerated or strident feminist tract. And it is, after all, a woman’s story.

Tricky Dick

PETER KEOUGH — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 22:03:23 GMT

Philip K. Dick's second Library of America volume
The Philip K. Dick phenomenon might be petering out.

WHAT IS TIME? WHAT IS DEATH?: The two LOA volumes compose an unresolved fugue of philosophical and psychological obsessions.

Philip K. Dick: Five Novels of the 1960s & 70s | Edited by Jonathan Lethem | Library of America | 1148 pages | $40

The Philip K. Dick phenomenon might be petering out. At least if movie adaptations are any indication. They seem to flourish when the GOP is in power: Blade Runner during the Reagan administration in 1982, Total Recall under the elder Bush in 1990, Minority Report and A Scanner Darkly during the reign of George W.

Published last spring, the first Philip K. Dick volume in the Library of America series caught this wave at its peak. This new offering might not be so fortunate. Could renewed optimism and faith in the political system have dispelled the cynicism and the paranoia that draw readers to Dick? Never fear: the next terrorist attack, needless war, shocking assassination, economic collapse, or Republican administration will put the Dick industry back in business

In the meantime, Philip K. Dick: Five Novels of the 1960s & 70s, edited by Jonathan Lethem, who did the first volume, can be read in a more personal context. Taken together, the nine novels in these two collections compose an unresolved fugue of philosophical and psychological obsessions, mapping twists and turns in an exhilarating and terrifying mental labyrinth.

Rather than being simply an exercise about imperialism in an extraterrestrial setting, Dick’s 1964 novel Martian Time-Slip poses the kind of questions that might bug a brilliant mind cranked up on speed at three in the morning. Like, what is time? That proves a headscratcher on the sparsely settled Red Planet colony where Goodmember Arnie Kott, the crudely ambitious but nonetheless appealing head of the powerful Water Workers Local plumbing union, figures that what he needs to get ahead is a “precog,” someone with the gift of prophecy. For though the planet’s climate might not nurture much in the way of agriculture, it has spawned a generation of autistic children, and according to Dr. Glaub, a Martian psychiatrist, these enfants terribles suffer from an inability to experience time sequentially. Like God, they see everything happening at once in a single everlasting instance.

Islander

JON GARELICK — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 18:01:07 GMT

Julie Hecht’s self-help
There’s still time to spend some of your summer with Julie Hecht.

LIFE’S STORIES: Hecht’s narratives unfold like elaborate improvisations.

Happy Trails to You | By Julie Hecht | Simon & Schuster | 224 pages | $24

There’s still time to spend some of your summer with Julie Hecht. She’s been winning awards for her short stories almost since she began publishing them, first in Harper’s in the ’70s and then in the New Yorker starting in the early ’90s. Her two collections and one novel are told in the same first-person voice: that of an unnamed photographer who splits her time between East Hampton in the winter and Nantucket in the summer. Prickly, anxiety-ridden, deadpan-funny, vegan, this narrator doesn’t sound much different from her creator in the rare interview Hecht gave to the Believer in May. The jacket flaps of all Hecht’s books (which also include a collection of “talks” with Andy Kaufman, Was This Man a Genius?) provide the same bio: “She lives on the east end of Long Island in the winter and in Massachusetts in summer and fall.” The same author photo has been published with all four books.

Hecht’s stories read like elaborate improvisations. Almost plotless, they recount a loosely related series of events, all embellished with the narrator’s singular social observations, free associations, phobias, and obsessions. The title story of her first collection, Do the Windows Open?, is ostensibly about trying to overcome her fear of taking the South Fork bus from East Hampton to Manhattan. (The title gives you an idea of the base level of anxiety.) The recurring themes and characters include an unnamed husband who floats through the background offering commentary like a one-man Greek chorus. One character is referred to by a phrase that’s repeated verbatim and functions like a call-back in a comedy routine: “the world-renowned reproductive surgeon Dr. Arnold Loquesto.”

Hecht told the Believer that when people ask her what her stories are about she says, “They’re about the way things are now.” The domestic is always yoked to the global or the infinite, in the space of a paragraph, or even a sentence. And everywhere Hecht is marking civilization’s decline: from personal etiquette and the degradation of the English language to fashion to international catastrophes, the “Alfred E. Neuman president” and “the globally warmed-up days.”