DANA KLETTER

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.

Common ground

DANA KLETTER — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 16:17:59 GMT

Ann Patchett’s Boston allegory
Like the American naturalists of the last century, Ann Patchett examines race and class in her new novel, Run .

SNOW GLOBE: Patchett’s investigation of race and class in Boston doesn’t hold up.

Run | by Ann Patchett | Harper | 312 pages | $25.95

Like the American naturalists of the last century, Theodore Dreiser and Sinclair Lewis, whose novels interrogated the social order, Ann Patchett examines race and class in her new novel, Run. Her drama begins when she sends a white SUV through a white-out on Mass Ave that nearly kills the black son of a rich white man.

The Doyles embody the heroic potential of the American dream retold for a multicultural world. An Irish Catholic family that by rights should have been Kennedy-esque in size and political promise is reconstituted after a series of losses and scandals. Frank Doyle, widower and former mayor of Boston, has one biological son, Sullivan, and two adopted sons, Tip and Teddy, virtually bequeathed to the Doyles by an anonymous black woman.

A Chappaquidick-like incident destroys Frank’s dream of political success and sends Sullivan into exile. All expectation rests on Tip and Teddy — gifted, bright, promising, and utterly uninterested in their father’s ambitions.

In Harvard Square, where Frank has taken the boys to a Jesse Jackson lecture, a car nearly cuts down Tip; he’s pushed to safety by a stranger who bears the brunt of the impact. The Doyles quickly learn she’s Tennessee Moser, the mother of Tip and Teddy — with her youngest daughter, Kenya, she’s been shadowing her boys for years, an invisible guardian angel. For the next 24 hours, as Tennessee lies in her hospital bed, each member of this conjoined family reckons with the outcome of an unexpected collision.

Kenya is self-sufficient, motivated in a way that her brothers are not. She has grown up in the projects only a few blocks from the gallery of Greek Revival and Italianate row houses of her brothers’ Union Park in the South End. Tip vacillates between medical school and biology, ichthyology in particular. He spends dreamy hours in the underground lab of the zoology department keeping company with 1.3 million species of fish preserved in jars. Teddy is drawn to the contemplative and metaphysical; a student at Northeastern, he’s considering the priesthood.

Kenya is a runner, and when Tip takes her to the Harvard track to work off some steam, he’s amazed by her ability and spirit: “Anger and sadness and a sense of injustice that was bigger than any one thing that had happened stoked an enormous fire in her chest and that fire kept her heart vibrant and hot and alive, a beautiful, infallible machine.”

After the Gold Rush

DANA KLETTER — Tue, 29 May 2007 22:08:43 GMT

Michael Ondaatje’s memory plays
Michael Ondaatje builds his new novel, Divisadero , around a triad of characters.

UNEASY PIECES: In Ondaatje’s prose, lives are always fractured narratives.

Michael Ondaatje builds his new novel, Divisadero, around a triad of characters: “twins” Anna and Claire, who were born concurrently to different mothers who die in childbirth, and adoptee Coop, “the endangered heir of a murder,” the only survivor of a massacre. They’re brought together in childhood on a ranch in 1970s Northern California. When their father discovers an affair between the 16-year-old Anna and the few-years-older Coop, the trio are dispersed in a brutal rending of their makeshift family. The recurring pattern of the novel is established: provisional families, structures, and identities are found or created and then shatter or disappear.

Ondaatje develops the prototype for his composition in the old Gold Rush town of Petaluma. Here lived a “many-headed civilization” of prospectors and the attendant “whisky merchants, poets, heroic dogs, mail-order brides. . . . ” Miners generate boomtowns; these eventually burn, flood, or are abandoned. In this literary terrain, it’s “as if there were a novella by Balzac round every bend.” Ondaatje invokes the French naturalists by name and by allusion. In his great chain of being the angels are Dumas, Stendhal, Flaubert. He even makes room for Colette.

After the family dissolves, the narrative fractures, switches decades, locales, points of view. Coop falls in with a tribe of gamblers. He takes to this new religion of odds, set-ups, and larceny and its accompanying saints, like the “player called The Gentile who had won his future wife in a card game, with a pair of nines.” The role of fate seems manageable when you’ve learned how to stack the deck. But in a high-stakes game in Vegas, while a television silently shows the bombs dropping over Baghdad, Coop’s recklessness precipitates his expulsion from the desert oasis and his new clan.

Anna becomes a scholar and rents the French country house of a minor poet of the Great War, Lucien Segura; there she intends to translate his work. She takes a lover, the Gypsy guitarist Rafael. But, haunted by the past, she remains fragmented, unable to commit herself to even a minor romance. Her father’s violence, she says, was “in retrospect something very small, something that might occur within just a square inch or two of a Brueghel. But it set fire to the rest of my life.”

Only Claire maintains contact with her father. Working with a lawyer in San Francisco, she visits the ranch briefly before taking off on her horse, Territorial. In the hills above her home she is transformed. “Here she was uninterrupted by family life, could be dangerous to herself. . . . ”

Death becomes him

DANA KLETTER — Mon, 23 Apr 2007 21:54:20 GMT

Nathan Englander returns . . . at last
The combination of a gift for narrative, a proclivity for pathos, and a lode of arcane knowledge is put to great use in Nathan Englander’s first novel.

MOURNER: Englander’s depiction of a mother’s suffering has the potency of a pietà.

The combination of a gift for narrative, a proclivity for pathos, and a lode of arcane knowledge is put to great use in Nathan Englander’s first novel, The Ministry of Special Cases, the long-awaited follow-up to his celebrated 1999 fiction debut, the story collection For the Relief of Unbearable Urges. Kaddish Poznan makes a living obliterating the criminal monikers from gravestones in the cemetery of the Society of the Benevolent Self, where pimps, gangsters, and their molls have found a resting place. In order for the children of Talmud Harry, Shlomo the Pin, and Hezzi Two-Blades to have a respectable existence, evidence of their ancestors’ corruption must be obliterated. Kaddish’s work also enables him to visit the grave of his mother, Favorita the whore.

Kaddish, wife Lillian, and son Pato are living in Buenos Aires when Argentina’s 1976 military coup and its subsequent “Dirty War” begins. On her way to work Lillian sees tanks in the street and notes, “War is not unleashed. It is slowly, it is carefully, installed,” before taking a detour to her job at an insurance company. Pato is too consumed with student rebellion and the Oedipal war against his father to remember to carry his national ID, despite the appearance of checkpoints at all major intersections. “You’re a fascist,” he tells his father when forced to accompany him on a midnight eradication job in the cemetery. “Good for me,” Kaddish answers.

Danger encircles the family. Citizens are grabbed off the street every day by the police, never to be seen again. They become the desaparecidos, the Disappeared, their fate unknown but the worst assumed. “A year before becomes a different life,” Pato and his friends think, watching from a café near the university as a mounted policeman drags a young woman away by her hair.

When Pato is taken, Kaddish and Lillian find themselves unable to navigate the bizarre bureaucracy of the new regime to find him. The policemen, soldiers, and functionaries who keep the killing machine running block their way at every turn. Kaddish, a blunt bruiser of a man, tries to punch, threaten, and shout his way to the truth about his son. Lillian swings between denial and grief, and Englander’s depiction of her suffering has the potency of a pietà. But her arms are empty: there is no sign of Pato. “She accepted then that to others Pato wasn’t, and it was up to her to make it so Pato was. It was as if she were pregnant with a full-grown son.”

Engine of dreams

DANA KLETTER — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 14:52:28 GMT

Tatyana Tolstaya lives up to her name
Reviews of Tatyana Tolstaya are stuffed with adjectives that strain to capture the vigorous joy of her prose or the terrible engine of her imagery.

FOLK FORMS: Tolstaya’s stories of childhood come with the full knowledge of the horrors that obsess and fascinate children.

Reviews of Tatyana Tolstaya (great-grandniece of Leo Tolstoy) are stuffed with adjectives that strain to capture the vigorous joy of her prose or the terrible engine of her imagery. Assembling all her stories in one volume might actually be dangerous. White Walls should probably be accompanied by a dosage warning: “Take Only Once a Day. Do Not Read Before Bedtime.” It includes works from On the Golden Porch (1990) and Sleepwalkers in the Fog (1992) as well as more recent stories from the New Yorker. Her post-apocalyptic fantasy novel The Slynx (2003) has also just been reprinted by New York Review Books, and she comes to the Harvard Book Store to talk about her work next Friday.

Tolstaya writes often of childhood, but with the full knowledge of the horrors that obsess and fascinate children: the death of animals, what lurks under the bed and behind the curtains, what is old, what is forbidden. In “On the Golden Porch” the Edenic garden of childhood hides a bird’s bones: “A naked fragile skull like a gooseberry. A martyred sparrow face.” The children sew its shroud and bury it in a chocolate box. “Life is eternal. Only birds die.”

In “Loves Me, Loves Me Not” a sad old hag who comes daily to take the children to the park and teach them French instead reads poems composed by a suicide. A recitation of the dangers in the dark follows: “the fragile and translucent Dry One”; Indrik and Hindrik, who live behind the peeling wallpaper; the “black abyss” in the corner whose name can only be whispered, “ventilation.” Into this grim nursery a fever dream explodes, the onset sudden, the way illness comes to children, with a skyrocketing temperature accompanied by a hallucinatory meditation on the provenance of the ragged lampshade on the bedside table.

Tolstaya writes about romance in “Sonya,” a love story or a eulogy set during World War II for an “utter fool.” A woman whose stupidity “sparkled with other facets, exquisite in its unpredictability” is seduced by a cruel joke, love letters from an imaginary admirer concocted by a group of tricksters. Inspired at first by malice, the instigator, Ada Adolfovna, becomes locked in an absurd affair with Sonya through their correspondence. Ada sends her compositions, “hostilely baking monthly hot kisses by mail,” across Leningrad. And then during the siege of the city the object of her contempt becomes her savior; Sonya spoon-feeds Ada a last can of soup before disappearing in the heavily mortared streets.

Éminence grise

DANA KLETTER — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 21:00:27 GMT

Joe Boyd remembers; remembering Joe Boyd
When I first met Joe Boyd, I knew him only as a legend, the force behind the psychedelic and folk-rock movements of the 1960s.

NEWPORT 1965: Joe (in the hat) with Eric Von Schmidt, Tom Rush, Geoff Muldaur, and Maria (Muldaur) d’Amato the year Joe plugged in Dylan’s guitar.

When I first met Joe Boyd, I knew him only as a legend, the force behind the psychedelic and folk-rock movements of the 1960s. I knew he had waded into the new scene, producing records for Billy Bragg and REM, but that didn’t explain his interest in an unknown North Carolina all-girl punk-folk-pop trio called blackgirls, my band.

I still don’t know how Joe found us. He just walked into our little den of punk-rock obscurity in a white linen suit. He was inscrutable, sitting on the floor of my almost empty apartment while we played our songs live because we didn’t have a demo tape to give him. It was as if Otto Preminger had wandered onto the set of a student film shoot.

The blackgirls were considered unpredictable, weird, and confrontational. On stage it seemed as if we could implode at any minute. Our guitar player, who wore tiny mini-skirts without any underwear and flashed the audience at intervals, considered self-mutilation a viable alternative to stage patter. I sulked behind my hair and cried dark things into the microphone.

For all our mouthy, modern defiance, Joe’s presence had a retrogressive effect on us. He was The Producer, and we became a girl group. We hid drug and drink problems from him. When our guitar player overdosed during mixing, we revived her, then hid her under the pool table at the studio and told Joe she had “allergies.” After reading his memoir White Bicycles: Making Music in the 1960s (Serpent’s Tail), I think now he would have understood, but at the time he seemed so grown up, and at 25 I was both scared and starstruck.

White Bicycles delivers an eyewitness report of the psychedelic era as dapper and self-assured as Joe himself. (He’ll reminisce at Club Passim April 4, where I’ll be joining him on stage along with the Silverleaf Gospel Singers.) Whoever doubted such a coherent account was possible is unacquainted with the kind of man who can both prep at Pomfret and plug in Dylan’s guitar at Newport in 1965, delivering a convulsive dose of electroshock therapy to American folk music. Although he admits he indulged moderately in drugs, perhaps it was this combination of the patrician and the puritanical that kept Joe from going off the rails when everyone around him was tweaking madly. But in his autobiography Joe is a believer in the redemptive might of music at a crucial cultural and political juncture. He quotes Plato by way of Ginsberg to describe the revolutionary potential of music in 1967: “when the mode of the music changes, the walls of the city shake.”

Holy relics

DANA KLETTER — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 21:09:10 GMT

Aharon Appelfeld revisits familiar terrain
Aharon Appelfeld’s parabolical novel All Whom I Have Loved tells of a boy’s loss of home and family.

BORDER CROSSING: In Appelfeld’s Czernowitz, assimilated Jews speak German and eye the Hassidic mystics with suspicion.

Aharon Appelfeld’s parabolical novel All Whom I Have Loved tells of a boy’s loss of home and family. It is a small book with a small voice, like an abandoned child singing himself to sleep with a half-remembered lullaby. Only the reader’s knowledge of what awaits the boy and his parents, secular Jews on the border of Bukovina and Bessarabia in 1938, reveals what the author’s simple language conceals, that one boy’s minute loss portends a coming catastrophe.

Appelfeld’s unadorned prose (as translated here from the Hebrew by Aloma Halter) is well suited to depict the inner life of nine-year-old Paul Rosenfeld. He is a coddled only child in love with his childish parents, whose own love has failed. Henia is beautiful but insecure and needy. Arthur, once a painter of great promise, is now a drunk and bitterly obsessed with the critics.

The effects of his parents’ divorce are not apparent to Paul until his mother accepts a teaching job in a village not far from Czernowitz and the family home. Paul’s separation from his father and relocation from the town of his birth initiates the disintegration of his world and prefigures his eternal displacement. With uncomfortable candor, Appelfeld depicts the boy’s proprietary love for his mother, the sensual joy he takes in her attentions, and his jealousy when he discovers she has a lover. When he catches her creeping out at night to meet her new man, Paul exacts revenge the only way a child can, by transferring his love. Earthy, wise, and experienced, his Christian nursemaid, Halina, teaches him about nature, love, and sex — and Jewish holidays, since his parents have abandoned their heritage.

But Halina is shot and killed by her fiancé in the doorway of Paul’s house, and Paul goes to live with his father. They begin a period of wandering together, through taverns, inns, to Bucharest and back. When he’s drunk, Paul’s father flails away at the animosity directed at him because he is a Jew and because he does not act the way a Jew should.

The Ukrainian town of Czernowitz is where Appelfeld (as well as Paul Celan) was born. There the assimilated Jews speak German and eye the Hassidic mystics with suspicion. The peasants and working-class gentiles Paul and his father meet are nostalgic to the point of sentimentality about the pious Jews who once lived among them, and disapproving of the “new Jews” who “threw off the yoke of their religion” and escaped to more cosmopolitan climes.

Fascist dreams

DANA KLETTER — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 18:43:32 GMT

Leslie Epstein’s grand — and comic — opera
Leslie Epstein opens his panoramic new novel with a cast of thousands assembled to watch the conquered Ethiopians paraded through Rome.

Leslie Epstein opens his panoramic new novel with a cast of thousands assembled to watch the conquered Ethiopians paraded through Rome. The procession of captured men and animals — elephants, lions, and camels — marches under the arch of Titus, which was built to commemorate the conquest of Jerusalem by the very Jews vanquished in that ancient war. The crowd is “singing and chanting and roaring.” On the dais sits Pope Pius, fingering the “tortured body” on the crucifix around his neck, watching nervously. And Mussolini in his familiar posture, strutting and puffing, stands above the crowd while women weep and offer themselves and their children up to him.

Epstein repeatedly summons a cinematic vision to produce the brand of spectacle that Fascism inspired. The result is a sweeping, operatic work, its many narratives linked by Hollywood-scale production numbers choreographed by his verbal pyrotechnics. But the formidable task of knotting together a work that, like Pound’s Cantos or Pynchon’s novels, encompasses just about everything is such that even a writer with Epstein’s control cannot keep his book from at times dissolving into a histrionic pageant.

The story centers on Amos Prince — Epstein’s conflation of Ezra Pound and Howard Roark, Ayn Rand’s hero architect from The Fountainhead — and his assistant, Max Shabilian, a young Jewish architectural student who has traveled from America to serve his idol. Mussolini commissions Prince to construct a monument to the Italian victories over several small, poorly armed sovereign nations. Prince envisions a mile-high tower, La Vittoria, “a gigantic sundial, with the tower as the gnomon and all of Rome as the face. The shadow of the Duce’s memorial will move across his city for eternity, and all the other monuments will be nothing more than figures on the dial.”

Epstein makes comic opera out of the interactions between Mussolini and Prince — Mussolini’s booming oratorio and buffoonery countered by Prince’s own brand of monkey business, a compulsive punning, a burlesque built of words that announce the subtext of his speech. “Douche,” he addresses the dictator. “Mister-loony.”

As World War II encroaches, production on the tower halts. Prince, as ambitious for his tower as Hitler is for his Reich, is driven mad by his thwarted desire. In radio broadcasts he blames the Jews, “Frankie Finkelstein Roosenfelt,” and the “Jew-hated States.”

Max Shabilian conceives various plans to save both the tower and the Jews of Rome, but he fails. In the end he watches the loaded trains leave for Auschwitz, his own life reclaimed by Prince’s son.

Impossible love

DANA KLETTER — Tue, 10 Oct 2006 19:55:39 GMT

Edna O’Brien’s mother-daughter tale
The Light of Evening , Edna O’Brien’s most autobiographical novel yet, depicts the struggle between a mother and daughter to sever the unbearable bond that conjoins them and the love and guilt that makes total separation impossible.

The Light of Evening, Edna O’Brien’s most autobiographical novel yet, depicts the struggle between a mother and daughter to sever the unbearable bond — the “blood feud, blood knot, blood memory” — that conjoins them and the love and guilt that makes total separation impossible. O’Brien sets her story in her mother country, Ireland, saturating it with both the poetry and the malarkey of her mother tongue.

HER STORY: O’Brien’s compact stream-of-consciousness is a distillate of Faulkner and Joyce.

Dilly Macready, who’s dying in a Dublin hospital, waits for a visit from Eleanora, her estranged and exiled daughter. Sleeping pills send Dilly into a disinhibited dream state. She reels through a vivid recounting of the years she spent in New York working as “a Biddy, a kitchen canary,” and her first love. The chapters are interspersed with plaintive letters from home (one signed “Your broken mother, Bridget”) begging for Dilly’s return and reporting on the misadventures of her “mad Fenian” brother. Her beau’s betrayal finally sends her fleeing back to Ireland.

Dilly marries Con Macready, a racehorse trainer able to spot a mare with just enough talent to place third in any race. He takes her to live in his run-down manse, Rusheen, “the place where her sorrows had multiplied and yet so dear to her.”

The story moves to Eleanora, whose life mirrors O’Brien’s. She runs off with an older man, a famous writer, Hermann, whom her family despises. They marry and raise two sons. Eleanora writes a novel that causes scandal at home and abroad. (O’Brien’s Country Girl trilogy was banned in Ireland because of its explicit sexual content.) Hermann is furious that Eleanora has not allowed him to edit her work.

“You would only tinker with it,” she said fearless, though fearing.
“O pray enlighten me . . . ”
“I wrote ‘It was a country road tarred very blue’ and you deleted it, said there was no such thing as a blue road.”
“There isn’t,” he said savagely.
“There is,” she said savagely back.
That pretty much sums up the relationship.

Eleanora blames literature for her awful marriage. Schooled in love by the Brontës, she expected Hermann, dark and broody as Mr. Rochester, to be tamed into domestic bliss. Instead he interprets her success as a kind of insurgency, first claiming he wrote her books, then leaving her, taking the children with him.

Another family, another island

DANA KLETTER — Thu, 17 Aug 2006 16:57:10 GMT

Heidi Pitlor’s many birthdays
Heidi Pitlor’s debut novel, as the plural title suggests, is about more than just one person’s significant day.

WOOLF AT THE DOOR?: Pitlor’s Millers are a collective organism, a complex variety of parts, patterns, and processes.

Heidi Pitlor’s debut novel, as the plural title suggests, is about more than just one person’s significant day. It’s packed with various metaphors for beginnings, not only of life but also love, change and redemption, and the counterweights, death and loss — huge themes woven into a single weekend in the lives of the Miller family as they assemble on an island off the coast of Maine to celebrate Joe Miller’s 75th birthday. What further freights the title is that all three Miller children are expecting. This is a family who don’t know how to pack light.

Eldest son Daniel, the artistic one, brings wife Brenda, who achieved pregnant via sperm donation after he’d been left paraplegic by a bicycle accident. Middle son Jake, the successful one, and wife Liz finally conceived after years of fertility treatment, and they’ve just discovered that she’s carrying twins, what will be an embarrassment of riches before the story is over. Black sheep, rebel, and youngest daughter Hilary is pregnant, single, and not sure who the father is.

At points in the story birth and death parallel each other like inbound/outbound rails. Joe senses the coming of his mortality in his bones. His wife, Ellen, falls for the widower husband of her late best friend.

Pitlor goes after the big medical issues of the day. Daniel is haunted by the specter of the anonymous sperm donor, even giving him a name, Jonathan White, and a physical description. He also obsesses over the stem-cell research that he hopes will repair his injured spine. Ellen has girlish fantasies about her widower, about beginning life and love anew at 70. Yet there’s something forced about the abundance of ripped-from-the-headlines topics. And much of the novel is taken up with the interior monologues of the various Millers as they converge on Great Salt Island. Ellen’s thoughts wander from worries about the identity of the father of Hilary’s baby (“Perhaps he was in prison. . . . Maybe he was married”) to a remembrance of her daughter as a child (“Her lips had always chapped”) to a visit to the Gardner Museum with the widower (“She and MacNeil stood side by side, and for the first time she thought about what it might be like to kiss him”).

Grief work

DANA KLETTER — Mon, 24 Jul 2006 19:51:30 GMT

A brother’s memoir
The myth of Icarus is central to Ken Dornstein’s memoir.

SURVIVOR: From his brother’s words, Ken Dornstein assembles his own story.

The myth of Icarus is central to Ken Dornstein’s memoir. How many people have meditated on that image to describe falls both factual and metaphorical? The trope is ancient and instantly resonant. Dornstein evokes it first to describe his brother’s death in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, a six-mile plunge from cruising altitude to earth. Then he makes slow circles around his metaphor to include descents of every kind — the toppling of a hero off his pedestal, the fall from grace, the giving in to temptation, the plummet into madness.

He begins the story of his brother David as if it were a fable. “Once upon a time, I had a brother. He was older, bigger, wiser, more daring, more passionate, better spoken, and much better looking.” David’s great ambition was to be a writer. He filled reams of paper and many notebooks with words, and he bombarded friends and family, particularly Ken, with extravagant letters. His writings are grandiose, hyper, lyrical, ridiculous, and beautiful. But the words never cohered into the work of genius that David, and everyone else, was sure he had in him. Instead they became a kind of chronicle of David’s fantasized achievements.

“We see many of the characteristics of Dornstein’s later work emerging in these youthful journals. . . . We see a young artist goading himself to flower, aching away in flimsy whimsy,” David wrote in anticipation of his triumph, a conjured future where scholars would marvel over his work. Intermittently he would crash from his manic magniloquence into inconsolable self-loathing. “Your life is not the biography of your life that you imagine,” he berates himself in one notebook. “Maybe I’m not a natural Artist . . . I’m too pretentious . . . The trouble is that once I sort through all of the bullshit, I find I’ve got nothing left to say.”

David’s seeming prescience about his fate is downright eerie. Ken places instances of it strategically throughout the text. He describes David in the prestigious writing program at Brown University deciding on a form for his opus, a “fictional autobiography.” The story: “An unknown young writer dies in a plane crash leaving behind lots of notebooks and bits of stories.” David’s summary: “Born, lives, dies, entirely through words, I am the book, the book is me.” He calls his work The Fall Journal.

Tripping

DANA KLETTER — Wed, 21 Jun 2006 16:03:24 GMT

Travel guides that go beyond the practical
A handful of this year’s travel books seem an odd, almost ghoulish enactment of Rene Descartes’s statement that “Traveling is almost like talking with men of other centuries.”

Various travel guides serve various functions, which is only right since people travel for a multiplicity of reasons. Business travel has its practical publications with directions to the Chili’s closest to corporate headquarters. Travel guides of the Let’s Go Lichtenstein! variety cater to vacationers, informing them of the proper tip for taxi drivers in Novosibirsk or where to find decent lodging in Machu Picchu.

But a handful of this year’s travel books seem an odd, almost ghoulish enactment of Rene Descartes’s statement that “Traveling is almost like talking with men of other centuries.” These guidebooks have a distinct mission: to introduce readers to not only a place but also a time, and to direct their attention as much to the sights as to the things they cannot see. Some even offer good reasons to never travel at all.

In the category of guides written more for the pilgrim than the tourist is A Journey into Dorothy Parker’s New York (Roaring Forties Press, 160 pages, $19.95). Author Kevin C. Fitzpatrick provides the basis for a walking — and drinking — tour of Manhattan that follows in the footsteps of the famous Round Table wit. The well-researched book, which began as a Web site, maps out Parker’s life from her childhood on the Upper West Side to the New York landmarks where she and her famous friends launched their barbed bon mots, and the hospitals where she dried out and recovered from her excesses.

It also traces New York’s 20th-century literary legacy through its architecture. Destinations include the beaux-arts and Art Deco edifices that housed the small presses, magazines, and newspapers founded by Parker and her pals, and the speakeasies where they drank themselves into early graves. These would become institutions, like the New Yorker, Random House, and the 21 Club, or legends, like Smart Set and Tony Soma’s Bar.

Fitzpatrick has translated his Web site’s many features, liberally illustrating this elegant book with archival prints, current photos, maps, portraits, poems, and, of course, a recipe for the perfect pre–World War II martini. Roaring Forties Press offers a series of literary guidebooks from Steinbeck’s California to the Transcendentalists’ New England, with more to come.

Sweet slob

DANA KLETTER — Wed, 17 May 2006 21:54:01 GMT

Gary Shteyngart’s satirical mash-up
Absurdistan , an amplified Slavomerican mash-up of a novel, begs for a hyperbolic descriptive sentence to express its catch-all style.

MEAN LAUGHS: Shteyngart’s satire spares no one, not even himself.

Absurdistan, an amplified Slavomerican mash-up of a novel, begs for a hyperbolic descriptive sentence to express its catch-all style. “As if Woody Allen and Nikolai Gogol’s love child had written a Confederacy of Dunces for the new millennium!” Or some such thing. Certainly Shteyngart (an American born in Leningrad in 1972, he hit it big with his debut, The Russian Debutante’s Handbook) has variously called upon, pillaged, mocked, or paid homage to all his influences to construct the epic story of the epically obese Misha Vainberg. He is a Dostoyevskian holy fool, an ineffective Oblomov, a Tolstoyan do-gooder who caught a severe case of satyriasis from Philip Roth. All this and 325 pounds more.

Banished from his beloved adopted home in New York, blacklisted by the INS after his father kills an influential Oklahoma nutria farmer, the hugely fat, reluctantly Jewish Misha is stranded in St. Leninsburg in the former CCCP. He is living the high life of New Russian Capitalism, as the son of the 1238th-richest man in Russia, gorging on sturgeon, drinking himself into a stupor, and shouting into his Nokia mobilnik but yearning for the squalor of the South Bronx and his beloved Rouenna, “my big-boned precious, my giant multicultural swallow.”

Misha feels a deep connection to American urban culture. His Russian mobster father is, after all, an original gangsta, and the Vainbergs, like all Jews, are fundamentally ghetto. The oppression of African-Americans is familiar to Misha, their circumstances “blighted, equivocal, and downright Soviet.” Or as Rouenna explains it, “all of you Russians are just a bunch of niggaz. . . . your men don’t got no jobs, everyone’s always doing drive-bys . . . the childrens got asthma, and y’all live in public housing.” Misha expresses his love by rapping (badly) and sporting vintage Puma tracksuits.

When Misha’s Beloved Papa is offed on the Palace Bridge, a revenge killing, it sends his son spiraling into mad despair. All the Ativan, Johnny Walker Black, and sturgeon kebabs in Russia cannot help him. He must get back to New York. Like all good Russian heroes in crisis, he heads for the Caucasus, to the republic of Absurdistan, where a corrupt diplomat has arranged a counterfeit passport, his ticket back to gangsta Paradise.

Med noir

DANA KLETTER — Thu, 27 Apr 2006 16:15:23 GMT

The bloody Continental take on an American genre
It all starts with murder.

It all starts with murder. Since Dashiell Hammett took the crime story out of the drawing room and into the street, mystery has ceased to be the meat of the story. Hammett used his crime fiction as a magnifying glass to examine capitalism’s toll on America. Sometimes he found his perp in that lens, but it was less about whodunit and more about who had the power and money to do what he or she wanted.

Crime fiction in Italy and France today has become as prevalent as it was in the US in Hammett’s heyday. The “Mediterranean noir” novel also acts as a lens, trained on European political and social structures. The best of it is making its way to the United States via publishing houses such as Europa Editions and the New York Review of Books Classics series.

American noir was peopled with hoods, hard blondes and the rich husbands who owned them, and all the yeggs in yeggdom. Mediterranean noir portrays a Europe where the detritus of postwar, post-Soviet, and post-colonial society drifts across the continent, battling, exploiting, ripping off, and killing one another. Spanish anarchists, Albanian lap dancers, Croatian war criminals, Romanian whores, Moroccan drug dealers — it’s not so much that they have a price, it’s that they have no place.

Massimo Carlotto’s hard-boiled thriller, The Goodbye Kiss (Europa; originally published in 2000), begins, of course, with murder, specifically a “double-crossing execution.” Pelligrini, a former Italian leftist revolutionary and self-proclaimed “prick filled with delusions of grandeur,” has been on the run ever since he killed a man. Sentenced to life in absentia, he makes a run for it — to Central America, where he plays at being a revolutionary. When Pelligrini has had enough of the brutal life of the jungle guerrilla, which makes his militant activities in Milano seem like a game, he decides to return home. He shoots his only friend in the back and heads for Italy. Thus begins Pelligrini’s mission to erase his past.

Texas highs and lows

DANA KLETTER — Mon, 27 Mar 2006 14:31:11 GMT

Gail Caldwell looks back
Anyone who’s listened to a homesick Texan sing the high lonesome song of longing for the Lone Star State will recognize the tune of Gail Caldwell’s memoir, A Strong West Wind .

Anyone who’s listened to a homesick Texan sing the high lonesome song of longing for the Lone Star State will recognize the tune of Gail Caldwell’s memoir, A Strong West Wind. It’s all there: the landscape engraved by ferocious elements, whittled by wind and water, the barrenness of the vista stretching to the horizon. And, of course, the relentless wind. Caldwell gives it a voice, reminding us that it once tore across the Panhandle, turning the high plains into a desert. She’s internalized the geography of Texas, and the memory of the land is her touchstone.

The book moves from the wide-open grasslands to small-town life in Amarillo, where she grew up, circa the late 1950s, not much more than a way station on Route 66. “A shy girl in glasses in a do-nothing town,” the bookish young Caldwell took refuge from provincial boredom in the library. It’s here she finds her “true north”: literature becomes the mechanism by which she will process her life. Caldwell has spent the last two decades as a book critic for the BostonGlobe, and in 2001 she won the Pulitzer Prize for Distinguished Criticism, so she obviously knew how to read her compass.

Books become the frame through which she revisits her life, and every event has a literary precedent. She worships her father, a kind of Scout to his Atticus Finch, until teenage rebellion disrupts the bond. She takes Thomas Wolfe and William Faulkner as her allies when conflicted feelings toward the South spur her guilty decision to escape it. She feels her heart “clenched in recognition” when she reads Absalom, Absalom. Her obsession with war novels, in a time of relative peace, foreshadows the event that will truly activate her, Vietnam.

Much of the memoir describes how it felt to be an American girl waking from a safe, suburban delusion to a revolution — what it meant to come of age in the ’60s. “Whether your trouble was a drug problem or tear gas in the face, you could attribute some of it to the times in which we lived.” She recalls the surreal incongruity of television in those days, when footage of body bags unloaded from military planes “like auto parts from the line in Detroit” ran cheek by jowl with Father Knows Best and Captain Kangaroo. She moves from war resister to dedicated feminist. But there remains something ambivalent about her activism.

Fraud and fortune

DANA KLETTER — Tue, 28 Feb 2006 22:06:47 GMT

Allegra Goodman’s Intuition
Allegra Goodman sets her latest novel, Intuition , in a long-ago, rent-controlled Cambridge.

Allegra Goodman sets her latest novel, Intuition, in a long-ago, rent-controlled Cambridge. The Philpott Institute is an independent research lab not yet absorbed by the crimson maw of Harvard or some giant pharma-conglomerate, a place where scientists still pure of heart pursue the molecules that will cure death and bring them fame, fortune, or grant money. It’s ruled by egoistic oncologist Sandy Glass and serious, brilliant Marion Mendelssohn and manned by a variety of hardworking and ambitious post-docs and grad students.

Cliff Bannaker is a golden boy from MIT who hasn’t lived up to his highly touted potential. When he experiences a sudden breakthrough, the delicate dynamics of the lab are disrupted. Intoxicated by the cancer-curing possibilities, Sandy initiates a publicity campaign that will bring the lab (and himself) glory and grants. The Philpott is swept up in the excitement. People magazine dispatches a reporter and photographer to the lab. Only Robin Decker, Cliff’s fellow researcher and girlfriend, has doubts about the miraculous discovery, which seems “too good to be true.” Fueled partly by resentment and partly by old-fashioned skepticism, Robin resists Sandy’s “brutal, jingoistic marshalling of resources,” and the novel turns into a mystery as she tries to discover whether Cliff’s findings are real or counterfeited.

Goodman presents a relentlessly harsh look at the lives of her researchers: “scientific sharecroppers, they slaved all day. They were too highly trained to stop.” The result of years of disappointment and lack of recognition are compressed into Marion, a girl who was once “quick to smile, joyous in her facility as carbon structures opened up to her, each in turn, lovely and elliptical.” After years of failure, “she’d grown thin and patient, critical of herself and others.” When opportunities at more prestigious labs do not present themselves, she ends up at the Philpott, where “she came as a pauper.”

Despite the secular location of this cancer-research lab, Goodman does not wander far from the spiritual themes of her previous novels. The scientific mission of her post-docs runs parallel to the religious quest of her protagonist in Paradise Park, as if there were little difference between the devoted researcher and the devoted anchorite. The ties of family and community she examined in Kaaterskill Falls, her novel of an Orthodox Jewish community, are re-created at the Philpott. And the chaste and ethical (Robin and Marion) are rewarded while the materialistic and corporeal (Sandy and Cliff) are cut off from what they love.

Hello to all that

DANA KLETTER — Wed, 25 Jan 2006 06:41:49 GMT

Julian Barnes’s Arthur & George
In a time of tenuous allegiances and deep culture clashes, Julian Barnes’s new novel asks, "What does it mean to be included, to be excluded?”

In a time of tenuous allegiances and deep culture clashes, Julian Barnes’s new novel asks, “What determines nationality? What does it mean to be included, to be excluded?” Set in Late Victorian England and based on a true story, Arthur & George alternates sections headed “Arthur” — Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of the iconic Sherlock Holmes — and “George,” a Staffordshire solicitor whose tidy, provincial existence is disrupted when he’s accused of hideous crimes.

Arthur’s life begins in Dickensian dysfunction, with a weak-willed, artistic, alcoholic father who keeps his family in poverty and a strong, wise mother whose tales of Round Table knights and the family’s glorious history inspire her son. When wealthy relatives offer to send Arthur to Jesuit boarding school, “the Mam,” an “expert in all matters, from underclothing to hellfire,” advises him, “Wear flannel next to your skin . . . and never believe in eternal punishment.”

George Edjali grows up in the claustrophobic Wryley vicarage, dominated by his father’s severe Anglican beliefs. His mother’s stories are mostly about burning in Hell, but just as troubling are the random parables, like puzzles with no logic to them. Equally random is George’s abuse at the hands of “stupid farm boys and odd-talking miners’ sons.” Half-Indian, dark-skinned, myopic, he can’t see that racism drives his torment.

Arthur becomes a devotee of the British cult of Manliness; hearty, cricket-ball whacking, honor-bound to a mythical chivalry. He trains as a doctor but makes a better living as a writer. With his Sherlock Homes money, he rescues many damsels — his mother and sisters from squalor, his wife from tragic family circumstances.

George trains for the law. Conscientious, teetotaling, repressed, he finds pleasure in the punctuality of suburban commuter trains. He dreams of the day he has all of a British solicitor’s accouterments — good watch fob, respectable umbrella, partners who hail him as “Good Old George” when he picks up the lunch tab.

When the Edjalis become the object of a vicious campaign of harassment, they respond with decent English outrage. When George is accused of animal mutilation and attempted murder, he expects the justice any Englishman deserves. Instead, on scant evidence, he’s found guilty. The separate narratives meet when Arthur sweeps in with great Holmesian flourishes to clear his character.