CLEA SIMON

Murder, she wrote

CLEA SIMON — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 23:22:30 GMT

Interview: Tana French's deep crime novels
"It’s always more fun to write people who are really messed up or really vicious."

Tana French’s background as an actor has made her value character — which explains the psychological depth of her wonderfully literate crime fiction. In town to read from The Likeness (Viking), the follow-up to her Edgar-winning debut, In the Woods, the Dublin-based author discussed means, motive, and opportunity.

In both your books, backstory plays a major role. Do you think the past determines the future?
I think there is a context in which life takes place. I’m a big believer in crime being shaped by context. Not in any way that people aren’t responsible for their crimes, but an individual’s psychology shapes whatever goes on around them, whether it reaches a moment of violence or not.

Backstory seems important to your protagonists, as well.
In In the Woods, Rob Ryan’s mind was cracked straight across at the age of 12, and when the book starts, he’s actually doing pretty well. He’s got a career he loves, he’s got a partner and best friend, but when pressure is brought to bear on this crack, it starts to deteriorate — not just his memory but his whole idea of who he is. Cassie [Maddox, Rob’s partner and the protagonist of The Likeness] was orphaned very early, and her life has been creating roots.

To an extent, it seems to me that for people who were interested in these questions of action and consequences, of identity and past and present, it would be natural to become detectives. Because as a detective you’re doing something very much like what mystery writers and mystery readers do. You’re fascinated by the process of discovering answers — not just by the answers themselves, but by the process. There’s an interplay between who they are and what they do, and that works both ways. The strangeness in their pasts comes through in their identities and what they do.

Each of these books has a different protagonist, and the one you're working on now features a colleague of Rob and Cassie, Frank Mackey. Does this mean that each character has only one story?
I know the standard thing is to write a series of books about the same detective. But what I’m interested in are those crucial turning points in people’s lives where you know that whatever you decide in that situation, you’ll never be in the same place again. In the Woods was that for Rob — the decisions he made have shaped the rest of his future, probably not in very healthy ways. The thing is, people only have a certain number of turning points. So I could keep dumping this poor guy into high-stakes, life-changing situations, or I could dilute it and write about less important situations in his life, which I wasn’t sure I wanted to do. I kind of envisioned Rob spending the next couple of years trying to patch himself together. I wasn’t sure he’d have that much of a story. Or I could change the narrator. Cassie is interesting and hadn’t had a chance to tell her story, so I wondered what might happen in her life, what she might be doing next.

Spy games

CLEA SIMON — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 15:03:21 GMT

Alan Furst’s “Night Soldiers” novels
The gray afternoon, the loveless assignation, the endless bureaucracy.

AFTER SMILEY: The complexity of Furst’s tales put him in the forefront of the latest wave of espionage writers who play on the moral ambiguities of “the good war.”

The Spies of Warsaw | By Alan Furst | Random House | 288 pages | $25

The gray afternoon, the loveless assignation, the endless bureaucracy. By any measure, the clandestine world of Alan Furst is as far from that of centenarian Ian Fleming’s as John le Carré’s. But as his evocative new The Spies of Warsaw shows, Furst’s spies — particularly his latest, the dashing Colonel Jean-François Mercier — merit a little more romance than the cold, small clerks of le Carré’s world, at least more than George Smiley ever had.

Warsaw, Furst’s 10th novel in the “Night Soldiers” series, opens, like its predecessor The Foreign Correspondent, with an assignation. Edvard Uhl, a senior engineer at a Breslau foundry, has been lured into an affair. His big, brassy lover, who styles herself the Countess Sczelenska, just happens to have “friends” who would like Uhl’s help in obtaining plans for armaments manufactured at the German foundry. Unlike The Foreign Correspondent, which viewed such a meeting through the cold eyes of a waiting assassin, Uhl’s romance is experienced firsthand, doubts and all. “And was she a countess? A real Polish countess? Probably not, he thought. But so she called herself, and she was, to him, like a countess.” Self-deception is only one of many layers shielding the citizens of Eastern Europe in autumn, 1937, as the continent grinds toward war.

The sex enjoyed by Mercier is equally loveless — “a man of the world, a woman of the world, a brief, pleasant adventure, all memory courteously erased” — but the participants more honest. Mercier is a lone wolf of a hero. An aristocrat, a graduate of the prestigious Saint-Cyr military academy, Mercier serves as France’s military attaché in Warsaw, a wound from the Russo-Polish war of 1920 having necessitated his move into the diplomatic service. From here, he runs Uhl and the “countess,” and undertakes other little adventures with the help of his bluff Polish driver, Marek. Like his Saint-Cyr classmate, Charles de Gaulle, Mercier believes Germany is planning to invade. But Pétain and his cohort are in power, and all Mercier can do is file reports and wait.

Flying high

CLEA SIMON — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 21:32:45 GMT

Interview: Jonathan Miles’s airport novel
There’s nothing new about the complaint as literature, says author Jonathan Miles.

There’s nothing new about the complaint as literature, says author Jonathan Miles. Describing his fiercely funny debut novel, Dear American Airlines (Houghton Mifflin), the author cites the Book of Job as a predecessor. But in this short novel, Miles, who also writes the New York Times’ “Shaken and Stirred” cocktail column, touches on a particular contemporary problem as his protagonist, poet-turned-translator Bennie Ford, finds himself stranded at O’Hare Airport.

You write about alcohol, and your protagonist is a recovering alcoholic. Is there anything autobiographical about Bennie?
No, except I would say that the two things do seem a little irreconcilable. Alcohol fascinates me on so many levels. How can something that can enhance life so beautifully also destroy it so completely? That’s why I’m fascinated by bars. This is where you find people at their happiest and their saddest, really in extremis. As a writer, you’re trying to find people at either end of the spectrum. Fortunately, for me it enhances life.

Your book must already have been in production when American Airlines cancelled 3000 flights in April. But did you choose American for a reason?
Yes, they in fact were responsible for the situation that was the seed of the novel. What happened to Bennie happened to me. I was flying from Memphis to New York, we were supposed to have a 45-minute layover in Chicago. We landed in Peoria and were bused to O’Hare, and I spent the night under a table at a Wolfgang Puck restaurant, composing this enraged letter. It’s that terrible feeling when you’re stranded eight hours because of weather and you walk out and it’s a perfect day. They’re always blaming it on some funnel disturbance over Denver.

But also, of all the airline names, that was certainly the most evocative. Also, they seemed to be the most likely to not go out of business during the writing of this novel.

In addition to being in transit, isn’t Bennie very much a character in transition?
I’m not going to lie and say that I thought too much about the metaphorical idea of that in the writing. It certainly plays into this idea of movement, and how we move through life. You can say that Bennie has made these transitions, these flights from one thing to another. But it’s only when he’s stranded, forced to be immobile, that he’s forced to take a reckoning of all these movements. It’s the idea of shedding these layers to get to the core of himself.

Shaping the Crescent

CLEA SIMON — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 15:15:49 GMT

The making of New Orleans
Even before Katrina wreaked its havoc on New Orleans, a popular T-shirt proclaimed the city “Third World and Proud of It,” and numerous more-literary types have long referred to it as the “northernmost Caribbean city.”

Ned Sublette

The World That Made New Orleans: From Spanish Silver to Congo Square | By Ned Sublette | Lawrence Hill Books | 352 pages | $24.95

Even before Katrina wreaked its havoc on New Orleans, a popular T-shirt proclaimed the city “Third World and Proud of It,” and numerous more-literary types have long referred to it as the “northernmost Caribbean city.” Anyone who has spent time there knows the truth of both these claims, how a mix of crime and culture, poverty and idiosyncrasy, distinguishes this Louisiana port town. How New Orleans became so distinctive, however, is another question, one that musician and author Ned Sublette attempts to answer in his new book.

Sublette’s thesis, supported by exhaustive research, is that today’s New Orleans was shaped by the overlapping of six cultures, three open and three shadowed, as the French, Spanish, and finally the Americans colonized that bend in the Mississippi, bringing along enslaved Africans from the Senegambia (Senegal River) region, Kongo, and Ouidah.

These influences were consolidated, according to Sublette, by the 1791 revolution in Saint-Domingue. As former slaves fought to establish Haiti, “the second independent nation in the hemisphere,” the battles became mythic, and the island’s legend grew to be the “ghost that haunted New Orleans.” Sublette focuses on this revolution as a turning point throughout the New World, documenting how it triggered waves of immigration and reactionary push-back that lasted for decades. By the time Louisiana achieved statehood, in 1812, according to this view, the die was cast. The book’s official end is 1819, but Sublette looks farther to see that culture surviving, and still relevant, as Mardi Gras Indians face off even after Katrina.

Unlike the author’s earlier Cuba and Its Music, The World That Made New Orleans examines a range of cultural issues, from the impact of different kinds of slavery to a digression on the appearance of the word “vaudeville” in a 1736 manuscript and its possible origin in “voix de ville, voice of the town.” Music remains a touchstone, however, and Sublette’s research has both breadth and depth. In his attempts to understand the origins of the city’s distinctive sounds, he ranges from linguistics (tracing the word “funk” to both Middle English and Kikoyo) to first-hand accounts of the arrival of both the first European opera in 1796 and Congo Square slave dances. Influences, he notes, that often cross-pollinated, as in the work of Louis Moreau Gottschalk, the man he calls “the most important 19th-century U.S. composer,” a man who was raised within hearing distance of Congo Square.

General Tso’s way

CLEA SIMON — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 17:13:46 GMT

The path of a Chinese foodie
Behind every dish lies a story, and behind a cuisine, well, there may be a book.

STILL HUNGRY: Lee offers tasty tidbits but an unsatisfying meal.

The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food | By Jennifer 8. Lee | Twelve Books | 318 pages | $24.99

Behind every dish lies a story, and behind a cuisine, well, there may be a book. That’s the idea that New York Times metro reporter Jennifer 8. Lee started with in her debut collection, The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food. Through a series of loosely connected essays, Lee (whose middle initial signifies “prosperity” in her ancestral Chinese) examines the world around what we consider Chinese food, dissecting such American phenomena as fortune cookies, General Tso’s chicken, and those ubiquitous white take-out containers. Along the way, she also addresses the sociology of centuries of Chinese emigration, which has spread this so-called ethnic cuisine to Dubai, Mauritius, and tiny Hiawassee, Georgia. What she writes about is a culture within a culture, one that has adapted almost beyond recognition, and yet continues to be considered apart. “Our benchmark for Americanness is apple pie,” she writes. “But ask yourself: How often do you eat apple pie? How often do you eat Chinese food?”

There’s a lot to grapple with here. Lee’s prologue considers that night in 2005 when the multiple-state Powerball lottery was nearly bankrupted by a surprising number of winners. Nobody had cheated. But the winning numbers had also appeared through random luck in a fortune cookie. The fortune above the “lucky numbers” seemed auspicious: “All the preparation you’ve done will finally be paying off.” And superstitious diners from Minnesota to South Carolina had tried them. Lee returns to those fortunes at the book’s end, disclosing the Western roots of so many supposedly Confucian sayings, but the power of the cookie, which may have been a Japanese-American invention, has already made its mark: Chinese food is more American than apple pie.

That idea is the kickoff for Lee’s explorations. As an American child of immigrants, she grew up recognizing that the food her mother cooked bore little resemblance to the so-called “Chinese” cuisine of New York restaurants. When she takes pictures of one of this country’s most popular dishes, General Tso’s chicken, back to the general’s birthplace, she is met with disbelief, and outright disgust. Americans like meat, sweet things, and deep-fat frying, she reveals. And though she does delve deeper — discussing the fate of the surviving refugees of the shipwrecked Golden Venture, for example — she never quite matches that first moment of apple-pie revelation.

The Wire: And All the Pieces that Matter

CLEA SIMON — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 15:05:15 GMT

Nonesuch
The Wire is over, but the five-season drama lives on in the unforgettable characters and in this simmering HBO collection.

Shrink-wrapped

CLEA SIMON — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 18:11:43 GMT

Carol Gilligan steps into fiction
If ever a thinker stood for the idea of questioning authority, it was Carol Gilligan.

WALL JUMPER: As a psychologist and scholar, Gilligan broke down barriers, but her first novel doesn’t quite make it.

Kyra | By Carol Gilligan | Random House | 256 pages | $25

If ever a thinker stood for the idea of questioning authority, it was Carol Gilligan. The former Harvard professor and groundbreaking author of In a Different Voice (1982) redefined psychology in feminist terms. She broke down walls and reframed the discussion to be fairer, more accurate, and more relevant to contemporary lives.

That’s what the heroine of her first novel tries to do as well. In this slim but dense volume, Kyra is also an academic, a professor at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design who tries to demolish barriers while re-creating the idea of the city. Designing an ideal community on Nashawena, an uninhabited island off Martha’s Vineyard, she says, “I envisioned the settlement as a weave cast across the island . . . porous to the open spaces.”

But when the book opens, the walls seem to be winning. For starters, Kyra is very much aware of the difference between her girlhood and early married life in Cyprus, “where touching was commonplace,” and her current isolation as a widow in Puritan New England. She’s further constrained by the rigidity of academe, stuck in jargon-filled faculty meetings where “hegemonic” is “a four-syllable way of saying bad” and where she’s viewed as an oddity: “a conflict-free zone, an academic not seeking tenure, a woman not looking for commitment.” When this free-thinker meets a poetic Hungarian named Andreas, who’s in town to stage an untraditional Tosca, she seems to have found a soulmate. She joins him in re-envisioning the opera’s tragic ending; he sees the beauty of her island utopia. They fall in love and have transcendent sex (“I was holding my breath and then the smell of gardenias came into me”). But both are still bound by the invisible barriers of their tragic pasts, and by their own illusions, as well.

What happens between the two is predictable, but it does set the stage for the novel’s second half, which seems like the book’s true heart. Kyra reacts badly to what she perceives as a betrayal, and her reaction forces her into therapy. The same issues she faces at work and in love surface with her therapist, Greta. But with Greta, Kyra is finally able to see, if not always hurdle, those walls. Things come to a head when a colleague tells Kyra about a talk she heard Greta deliver, “When the Problem Comes into the Room: Turning Points in Psychotherapy with Women.” Kyra recognizes herself as the subject of the talk. Before long, the two are talking almost as equals — Kyra overcomes her resistance and Greta permits a redefinition of roles that reeks of pure fantasy, letting her client into her confidence and her heart.

Free speech

CLEA SIMON — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 16:11:43 GMT

Elizabeth Little’s word games
Twenty-six-year-old author (and Harvard grad) Elizabeth Little has had a lifelong love affair with language.

Twenty-six-year-old author (and Harvard grad) Elizabeth Little has had a lifelong love affair with language. As she makes clear in her surprisingly funny debut book, Biting the Wax Tadpole: Confessions of a Language Fanatic (Melville House), she swoons over verb forms and goes ga-ga over participles. Visiting from her home in Sunnyside, Queens, she chatted with me — in English — over coffee at Peets in Harvard Square and explained.

How many languages do you speak fluently?
I feel comfortable in French, Chinese, and Italian, and there are a number of languages where if I got a good two weeks of prep beforehand, I would be fine, like Spanish or Portuguese or German. But I’m actually going to Hungary on Saturday, and I’ve been trying to learn Hungarian, and I’ve been failing miserably. Its a Uralic language, with Estonian and Finnish, which are miserably difficult languages. What I’ll often do is just study the written language, look at how the nouns are formed or the verbs are formed, and I won’t necessarily focus on practical aspects — which I’ve found is somewhat to my detriment when I realize I’m going to be in Budapest and need to find important things like bathrooms. It should be an interesting experience.

So you don’t focus on learning practical phrases?
I don’t, actually. What I love are patterns of language and how they compare to other languages. How nouns work differently in Russian than they do in Japanese, for instance. As a result, I’m just as clueless when I travel as anyone else. And in fact, I’m a little bit hurt because I know all this linguistic theory and all these helpful tidbits, but when it comes to putting it into practice, you have to forget all of that and just blurt things out. And so I just get all tongue-tied and I’ll go, “But I know what the subjunctive should be!”

What is the easiest language for an English speaker to pick up?
Probably Danish or Dutch. They’re all Germanic languages, so they’re very closely related. Dutch in particular. If you look at it and read it, it reads very similar to English. As does Afrikaans, actually, but that’s slightly more politically loaded. So I’m not sure I’d recommend, like, ‘Oh pick up Afrikaans! Go offend people in South Africa!’ In German, there’s a lot of similarities as well, grammatically.

Making book

CLEA SIMON — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 15:57:22 GMT

Ben Katchor explains The Rosenbach Company
If obsession is at the core of The Rosenbach Company, says co-creator Ben Katchor, that only makes the pop musical a human story.

Ben Katchor

The Rosenbach Company | Jewish Theatre of New England, Leventhal-Sidman Jewish Community Center, 333 Nahanton St, Newton | November 17 at 8 pm; November 18 at 2 pm | $28; $26 seniors, students | 617.965.5226

If obsession is at the core of The Rosenbach Company, says co-creator Ben Katchor, that only makes the pop musical a human story. The musical relates the life of A.S.W. “Abe” Rosenbach, who was (with his brother Philip) possibly the most famous rare-book dealer in this country in the first half of the 20th century. “He was a man driven,” says Katchor, whose libretto and illustrations have been set to music by Mark Mulcahy. “He had a brother who drove him to make money, but it was all to serve his personal obsession with books.” The Rosenbach Company plays at the Jewish Theatre of New England this weekend, with Katchor directing and Mulcahy starring.

For Katchor, who’s better known for such graphic novels as The Jew of New York and Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer, such a life as Abe’s has resonance. “I can identify with it,” says the New York–based artist whose work has been described (in the New York Times) as “Max Beckmann with dialogue balloons.” “I collect old photographs, but for a long time I collected matchbox labels, mainly Indian matchbox labels.” It’s an interest in manmade objects that also pervades his books. “They’re our history,” he continues. “The more you read about history, the more you understand why everything is the way it is.”

So when in 2004 Philadelphia’s Rosenbach Museum, which houses the brothers’ collection, contacted Katchor (who had by then won an Obie Award for The Carbon Copy Building) to commission a project commemorating its 50th anniversary, he was intrigued. “I think they thought I’d do an illustrated book of some kind. I’d already started doing these music-theater shows, so I said as a public event and a celebration I thought a theater piece would be a better idea. There’s a library filled with books, so another book . . . ” Besides, he says, theater can be seen as an extension of his graphic novels. (His pictures will be projected as part of the set.) “Comic strips are this combination of text and image, a graphic representation of an earlier form of theater. It’s all one big tradition, except the means of delivery have changed.”

Goin’ Home: A Tribute to Fats Domino

CLEA SIMON — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 21:21:01 GMT

Vanguard
This packed two-disc set gathers all the usual suspects and more for a Tipitina’s Foundation project to rebuild Domino’s Ninth Ward neighborhood in New Orleans.

Thirsty nights

CLEA SIMON — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 18:11:45 GMT

Rebecca Barry’s bar stories
A man walks into a bar.

DETAIL-ORIENTED: Barry’s eye and ear save her stories from the generic.

Later, at the Bar: A Novel in Stories | By Rebecca Barry | Simon & Schuster | 224 pages | $22

A man walks into a bar. The story could have been anywhere, and the man — or woman — anyone. But in Rebecca Barry’s debut collection, a series of 10 linked short stories, even generic hard-luck tales are marked by with the specific. The hard-drinking denizens of Later, at the Bar may be nobodies, but they’re individual nobodies, and all with their own sorrowful histories. Even the communal watering hole of the title, Lucy’s Bar, has a tale, its mullioned windows and many shelves surviving from its days as an apothecary before it was converted to its current use by a former Alaska fisherwoman who had been lured to upstate New York by a short-lived love. It’s through such details that Later, at the Bar comes alive, depicting a community through sequential profiles, all as natural as the thirst for whiskey on a winter night.

If that sounds sad, so be it, but like whiskey, this book is also warming. The stories start and end with death, yet even with these mortal bookends they celebrate the melancholy joy of life. In the opener, “Lucy’s Last Hurrah,” Lucy is “eighty-two and her bones were tired” when she walks out into a winter storm. She’s no longer running the bar by then, having turned it over to her lesbian bartender, Rita, so “none of her regulars knew she was quietly freezing to death that night, as they drifted in for happy hour and stayed out until dawn.” But, as with many of these stories, that sense of sadness, longing, and even inappropriate drinking fits. “It’s all right,” Lucy is imagined to be thinking, “The heart is right to cry. Oh, darlings, enjoy the night.”

Richard Russo fans will notice that Barry mines similar territory: Lucy’s Bar and Russo’s Empire Grill are set in the same kind of close-knit, dysfunctional Rust Belt community, where old loves and rivals rub up against each other because there’s nowhere else to go. But Barry makes the Lucy’s Bar crowd her own with detail that works like a gesture drawing, creating memorable characterization in a few strokes. Not much is explained, and not much needs to be; this novel is composed of short stories because Barry wastes no words. There’s Linda, the advice columnist who rarely tells the truth — and whose own confidences to her long-distance boyfriend are filed under “Letters Not Sent.” Grace, who “had given up hard liquor and cigarettes a few years before, after she’d found a lump in her breast, but she missed her old bad habits.” And Bill, who had “sworn off women since his last girlfriend, Trish, left him for a piano tuner, but because Madeleine was new, and because she didn’t seem to care if he lived or died, Bill found himself keeping an eye on her.”

Laotian dreams

CLEA SIMON — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 19:49:35 GMT

Colin Cotterill’s Dr. Siri novels
Dr. Siri Paiboun has a sense of proportion.

GALLOWS HUMOR: Like the heroes of John Burdett and Alexander McCall Smith, Cotterill’s Dr. Siri Paiboun is both humane and hilarious.

Anarchy and Old Dogs | by Colin Cotterill | Soho Press | 288 pages | $24

Dr. Siri Paiboun has a sense of proportion. When, in this fourth fictional outing, we meet up with the 73-year-old doctor, Siri (Laos’s national coroner) is in the morgue, rolling a deep-fried testicle between his thumb and forefinger and pondering “the Maker’s” lack of consideration. Although there’s no mystery in the dismembered body part before him (a jealous wife is responsible), he does have questions for the fates. And despite his own spiritual proclivities (the doctor’s wiry body houses the spirit of a 1000-year-old shaman), he is eager to disabuse his stout, able assistant, Nurse Dtui, of her new belief in a transvestite fortune teller. “It’s a load of rot,” he tells her. “The future’s a pimple on your nose. No matter how fast you run, you’ll never catch up with it.”

But Siri’s creator, Colin Cotterill, enjoys the ironies of fate, and so Siri’s fans will not be surprised when, within pages, the doctor is visiting the flamboyant fortune teller, a “luminous beacon” whose “white stomach hung over the elastic waist band of her leopard-skin leotards like a floe of ice oozing from the freezer of a cheap refrigerator.” Or when the fortune teller’s wildest prediction — that Siri will betray his country — comes true over the course of several adventures, much alcohol, and the intervention of various spirits.

In Cotterill’s latest, his hero is in fine form. A cross between John Burdett’s Sonchai Jitpleecheep (Bangkok 8, et al.) and Alexander McCall Smith’s Precious Ramotswe (The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency), Siri is both humane and hilarious. Rooted in a spiritually open culture, like Jitpleecheep, he also shares Ramotswe’s gentle decency; he’s a spirited survivor, cheerful even when dealing with an increasingly ineffective bureaucracy. It’s 1977 in Anarchy and Old Dogs, and life in Laos has not improved since the series started with 2004’s The Coroner’s Lunch, shortly after the 1975 Communist takeover. “The government was starting to look like a depressingly unloved relative who’d come to visit for the weekend and stayed for two years,” notes the whimsical third-person narrator (who sounds suspiciously like Siri). But over the past books, Siri has learned to accept his government-mandated job, to work around shortages of everything from books to lab supplies, and even to welcome his shaman spirit. Along the way, he has also figured out how to solve crimes, often using hints provided by the dead. When the morgue receives a blind man’s corpse with a coded letter in its pocket, Siri rallies his troops to investigate.

Bound and gagged

CLEA SIMON — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 14:52:46 GMT

Lisa See gets tied up in the Qing
Girl meets boy; girl loses boy; girl wins boy back. It’s an old story, and it usually works, even when it’s set halfway around the world and the girl and boy are 17th-century Qing Dynasty aristocrats.

GHOST STORY: Are See’s characters too much of their time?

Peony In Love | by Lisa See | Random House | 304 pages | $23.95

Girl meets boy; girl loses boy; girl wins boy back. It’s an old story, and it usually works, even when it’s set halfway around the world in China and the girl and boy are 17th-century Qing Dynasty aristocrats. That the girl is modeling her behavior on a Ming-era opera set nearly 100 years earlier shouldn’t complicate things. But when the girl is dead for most of the book, her behavior circumscribed by a rigid code that reaches beyond the grave — well, that’s when contemporary readers might begin to lose interest.

Such, sadly, is the case with Lisa See’s intriguing new novel, Peony in Love. Based in part on Tang Xianzu’s 1598 opera, The Peony Pavilion, the book follows the life and afterlife of a susceptible young woman named Peony. Like the heroine of the opera, she dies for love — her “lovesickness” manifests as anorexia — only to discover that her secret beloved was in fact her legitimate betrothed. She then spends the remainder of the book haunting him and learning more mature ways to express her devotion.

Historical fiction seeks to bring a past period, and often real people, back to life through contemporary narrative. It’s an honest genre, descending from the likes of Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities. But these days, a number of considerations — the amount of research involved, the thickness of sentiment applied to make characters congenial, the gender of the author — can cause such works to be derided as revisionist pop fluff. In order to connect with readers, the author must balance the mores of the day with a contemporary consciousness. Female characters in particular can be challenging: should a leading lady accept societal restrictions or rail against them?

Gumshoes and golems

CLEA SIMON — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 14:58:51 GMT

Michael Chabon’s Alaskan-Yiddish noir
Michael Chabon has boundary issues.

BOUNDARIES: What if Alaska, not Israel, had been the Jewish state?

Michael Chabon has boundary issues. A pop-culture junkie with a fantasy fan’s love of speculative fiction, he plugs comic books and pulp fiction into the spaces opened up by his historical “what if” questions and somehow molds it all into high art.

In The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, these parts coalesced, with — among other transformations — the Jewish golem, legendary defender of the ghetto, morphing into a comic-book superhero. In The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, Chabon’s first full-length adult novel since that 2001 Pulitzer winner, he again revisits the repercussions of the Holocaust, grafting noir crime fiction onto a brave new world in which Israel never took hold. It’s an interesting mix, but after Kavalier & Clay, it’s also a bit of a disappointment, a rechurning of ideas into a thicker, less digestible brew.

Aside from the boundaries of style and genre, the real-space definitions Chabon considers here are of consequence. The action, which kicks off with a murder in a fleabag hotel, takes place in the Federal District of Sitka. Following the fall of the three-month-old state of Israel, this strip of Alaskan shoreline has been ceded as a temporary homeland for displaced Jews. (Chabon here is drawing on an actual failed proposal.) Sixty years later, as the book opens, the land is due to revert. In a few months, the exiles will once again be homeless. There are also the boundaries defined by eruv, the practice of marking off outside areas with string to make them symbolically part of one’s house, and thus exempt from certain laws of the Sabbath. Given that in Chabon’s world the strictest group of Orthodox Jews have also become its organized crimelords, such boundaries, as well as the concept of home and homeland, have weight. As the book’s oft-repeated refrain goes, “these are strange times to be a Jew.”

Enter Meyer Landsman, a divorced alcoholic detective who lives in the fleabag where the murder takes place. At once a character from classic noir and an embodiment of diaspora Judaism, he’s plagued by memory. Or as Chabon’s typically complicated, Yiddish-inflected introduction explains: “Landsman has been told, by the same loose confederacy of physicians, psychologists, and his former spouse, that alcohol will kill his gift for recollection, but so far, to his regret, this claim has proved false.”

Going under Down Under

CLEA SIMON — Tue, 01 May 2007 21:02:21 GMT

Richard Flanagan’s fish in a barrel
Everybody loves an outlaw, and Richard Flanagan is no exception.

URBAN FABLE: Flanagan’s heroine fits his infernal vision of the modern city, overrun as it is with scabby beggars and casual cruelty.

Everybody loves an outlaw, and Richard Flanagan is no exception. In Gould’s Book of Fish, the Tasmanian author reimagined the real-life imprisonment of 19th-century forger William Buelow Gould in a hellish island penal colony during which he did indeed illustrate a guide to the area’s sea life. That historical novel, published in the US in 2002, set up an intriguing counterpoint: the lushness of Gould’s paintings, and of the half-mad convict’s inner life, against the inhumane deprivations of his imprisonment, and, by implication, of society itself. It was social satire at its finest, timeless and captivating with flashes of redemptive beauty.

There’s nothing of such beauty in Flanagan’s latest, shorter novel, The Unknown Terrorist, though its anti-heroine protagonist, Gina Davies, is quite attractive. An old-fashioned looker, her body and movements “rounded and full,” Gina, better known as the Doll, is a top stripper at Sydney’s Executive Lounge. At 26, claiming to be 22, she knows she’s aging out, but she’s so close to her goal that she keeps on dancing. Her ambition is simple: if she can earn enough to cover herself in $100 dollar bills, she’ll have enough to purchase an apartment. But even as she seeks to disappear into middle-class life, she can’t resist what she sees advertised around her, and she keeps dipping into her savings for Gucci bags, La Perla underwear, and Versace jeans. When she meets an attractive stranger, Tariq, her aching need is briefly forgotten. But then Tariq vanishes, and one of her clients, an aging television newsman, turns on her with deadly repercussions.

Vain and bitter, still smarting from a demotion and a sexual rejection, TV anchor Richard Cody gravitates to the Executive Lounge to reassert his place in the world order. “Isn’t it humiliating?” he asks the Doll during a private show, a question she throws back at him about his own work. When she then turns down his blunt proposition, the die is cast. Although the sagging celebrity is only dimly aware of his own motivations, he manipulates circumstance into a story that will resuscitate his career and put the pole dancer in her place. He casts the Doll as a terrorist, and fear- and sex-crazed Sydney is soon baying for her blood.

Homecoming

CLEA SIMON — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 21:36:17 GMT

Local group slams for NOLA
A home is more than a structure, more than a safe place to lay your head. It’s community, continuity, and belonging.

RHYME SCHEME: Slam poet Staceyann Chin headlines a benefit for the New Orleans Women Artist Collective.

A home is more than a structure, more than a safe place to lay your head. It’s community, continuity, and belonging.

“How do we get through to a people who have gone through so much?” asks New Orleans slam poet and musician Sunni Patterson. She lost her Ninth Ward home to Katrina, evacuating to Houston with only two dresses. Now back in New Orleans, living in the Tremé, she’s addressing the effect of the storm on her own life, and on her community. “We need basic things — food, clothes, and shelter — but what about the emotional aspect and the spiritual aspect?”

Answering those needs is the two-pronged mission of NOWAC, the New Orleans Women Artist Collective. A collaborative with strong Boston ties — co-founder M. Tye Waller lives in Roslindale — the organization will host its third local benefit, a women’s-poetry-slam contest March 29 at the Milky Way in Jamaica Plain. “Dangerous Divas” will feature slam star Staceyann Chin as well as New Orleans’s own Patterson and Asali DeVan; there’ll also be a slam segment open to all (sign up atwww.nowac.org).

Formed after Katrina to assist women artists in their “journey back home,” according to its mission statement, NOWAC performs the very practical outreach of home rebuilding; it also provides outlets for such artists to create. The original goal was to help Angelamia Bachemin, a former Berklee School of Music professor and friend of Waller’s, rebuild her New Orleans home last December; NOWAC has since gone on to repair the plumbing for Sister Andaiye, of the musical group Zion Trinity. Ongoing projects include restoring the homes of Charmaine Neville and Mother Tongue’s Dorise Blackmon and retiling singer Irma Thomas’s bathroom.

“How would you feel if you had to go on the road without a home?”, Waller asks. “I want to help them rebuild, get that home base, and from there they can jump off and do their music. They can jump off and do their art. Be the person they were prior to the flood — get back to some sense of identity.”

For Patterson, whose sleek slant rhymes capture the sounds of the city, the aim is to re-create community through words and music. “You have people who lived in the Ninth Ward for years who had never gone past Canal Street. So to be displaced, to be exiled to a city hundreds of miles away is traumatic. My aim is to focus on the spiritual.”

Pop elegy

CLEA SIMON — Sat, 10 Mar 2007 23:42:10 GMT

Critic Rob Sheffield comes to terms with the death of his musical soul mate in Love Is a Mix Tape
If every generation has its Love Story , its tragic tale of romance and loss, then Rob Sheffield’s Love Is a Mix Tape is that book for those who came of age with indie rock.

SMITTEN: There may have been some crappy music in the ’90s, but Rob’s love for Renée made it all sound sweet.

If every generation has its Love Story, its tragic tale of romance and loss, then Rob Sheffield’s Love Is a Mix Tape is that book for those who came of age with indie rock. Sheffield, a contributing editor for Rolling Stone, ostensibly wrote Mix Tape because his wife, Renée Crist, died unexpectedly and way too soon (age 31) on May 11, 1997, of a pulmonary embolism. But more than a meditation on grief, this is a love letter, both to the iconoclastic fellow critic Sheffield adored and to the rock that served as the soundtrack of their five years together.

Although the essential romance may be timeless, this is a book of its time, almost aggressively so, as Sheffield charts his life before Renée and their years together through popular culture. There are, first and foremost, the mixtapes of the title. One heads each chapter, and at least a partial discussion of the music, or the occasion for the tape’s creation, makes up some of the text. Sheffield is, after all, a critic, even if he was an English grad student with academic dreams when he and Renée first met, and bonded to Pavement, in Charlottesville.

But before he gets to their romance, as if to explain his double loves, he provides an amusing overview of his youth as a gawky Boston Irish Catholic kid who came alive through music and finally realized that music was more than a crutch, it was a major part of life. As he skims through these early days, not even his first romance is immune. Dumped and down, he comes to terms with his true values: missing his girlfriend, he is “sad.” But really, he acknowledges, “I loathed myself for secretly wishing I’d taped her records before she ditched me.”

By the time he and Renée meet up, it’s clear they share this passion. Like the music nerd he is, Sheffield introduces Renée through her music creds. “Her favorite song was the Rolling Stones’ ‘Let’s Spend the Night Together.’ Her favorite album was Pavement’s Slanted and Enchanted.” Big Star, George Jones, Yo La Tengo, and Marshall Crenshaw all vie for space on Renée’s tapes.

Paula Spencer dries out

CLEA SIMON — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 23:50:13 GMT

Roddy Doyle’s heroine recovers
Purgatory offers less inherent drama than Hell.

“GRAND”: Purgatory just isn’t as interesting as Hell.

Purgatory offers less inherent drama than Hell. It’s a problem Dante must have been aware of, and it’s one that catches up with Dublin novelist Roddy Doyle as he continues the story of Paula Spencer, the abused, alcoholic protagonist of The Woman Who Walked into Doors.

That 1996 novel, a headlong first-person narrative, related Paula’s early life and marriage to the sadistic Charlo. In a stream-of-consciousness style, it revealed the pride and the lust of the healthy, young Paula, and how she was dragged down. As her shock turned to fear, and that fear pushed her into the bottle, she developed a sense of complicity with the violence, completing a masterful portrayal of abuse.

Now, 10 years later, Doyle addresses Paula’s redemption. Charlo is long gone. (He was killed by the police in the first book.) And Paula, 48, is four months sober, determined yet again not to fail her children, at least one of whom has followed her into substance abuse. Her life isn’t easy. She thinks about drinking constantly, measuring her sobriety by every yardstick she can muster. (“Four months, five days. A third of a year. Half a pregnancy, nearly.”) But, as she says in the book’s opening line, “She copes.”

Given the damage, Paula is coping well. She’s working as a house cleaner, and on most days she has food in the fridge for the two children still at home, Jack, 16, and Leanne, 22. But her past haunts her. Her oldest, Nicola, married and successful, has been embittered by years as everyone’s surrogate mother. The next, John Paul, appears to have beaten his heroin addiction, perhaps by cutting his mother out of his life. Jack is fine, doing well at school, and Paula is determined to mother him as she never did the others. Leanne, however, worries her; she suspects her youngest daughter is drinking too much. Uncertain as to how to proceed, Paula approaches Leanne gracelessly, pushing her away. She saves up to buy Jack a computer, and she keeps after Leanne, even as she recalls “giving” Nicola a bottle of vodka, “Wrapped it and all,” years before, a bottle she would, of course, seek to retrieve.

Elvis Costello & Allen Toussaint

CLEA SIMON — Thu, 28 Dec 2006 12:12:02 GMT

Hot as a Pistol, Keen as a Blade | Hip-O
When a big band take a big stage, the finer touches can get lost.

Fate’s pansy

CLEA SIMON — Tue, 17 Oct 2006 20:22:53 GMT

Another view of Marie Antoinette
Reimagining the past, as historical novelists must do, is difficult.

FIRST PERSON: Naslund’s Marie is a kind of human bonsai — pretty but stunted, she wins your sympathy.

Reimagining the past, as historical novelists must do, is difficult. Particularly if you’re dealing with a well-known figure, you’re stuck with the facts, the dates and deaths, and in the space between you must create something both appropriate and interesting. Reviving a historical personage in a first-person narrative is harder still: what you get in tension (the character doesn’t know how her life ends), you lose in perspective. If your chosen protagonist is naive and barely literate, the challenges rise further. Which all adds up to the question of why Sena Jeter Naslund decided to spend 500 pages fictionalizing the brief life of Marie Antoinette. And even more, how she succeeded.

As with her breakthrough novel, Ahab’s Wife, the answer lies in the distinctive and intimate first-person voice. The Marie Antoinette we meet, nude and shivering on an island in the Rhine, isn’t much of a person. Fourteen years old and physically undeveloped, she has shed her Austrian attire to take on French clothes, and her new role as Dauphine, betrothed to the heir to the throne of France. Her voice is still that of her mother, the Empress of Austria, whom we hear echoed as young Marie states, “I am always in her prayers.” The instructions she calls to mind further the impression of innocence: “We will copulate through the door at the bottom of my body; next, I become pregnant. Nine months after my marriage I give birth to a baby.”

To those who know her history, such prosaic recitations foretell tragedy. Naslund isn’t the first to suggest that the delayed consummation of the marriage (Louis suffered from a painfully tight foreskin) may have encouraged Marie Antoinette in her indulgences. But by letting the young Dauphine narrate her own story, she shows us how ignorance can become willful blindness. The girl who cries when her pet dog is removed intends well. “I know a truth: my greatest pleasures will always be to give my subjects pleasure.” But bored, pampered, and denied motherhood, the only role for which she has been trained, she lets herself be consoled by riches and the company of the beautiful.