JOHN FREEMAN

Denis Johnson’s war

JOHN FREEMAN — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 17:49:24 GMT

Vietnam in Tree of Smoke
Denis Johnson has given us so many maimed and suffering souls in the past 25 years, he could fill a trauma ward.

Tree of Smoke | by Denis Johnson | Farrar, Straus and Giroux | 624 pages | $27

Denis Johnson has given us so many maimed and suffering souls in the past 25 years, he could fill a trauma ward. We’ve met men and women hollowed out by domestic loss (The Name of the World), drug use (Jesus’ Son), and failed suicide attempts (Resuscitation of a Drowned Man) — not to mention the end of the world (Fiskadoro). Now, entering his 60s, Johnson gives us his “apocalypse now”: a big, slow-motion epic about America’s experience in Vietnam. Even if you think you’re done with Vietnam novels, Tree of Smoke could change your mind — it belongs on the shelf next to Tim O’Brien, Larry Heinemann, and Stephen Wright. Not only does it re-create the jungle’s ooze and the paranoid warble of a war being micro-managed by the CIA, it encapsulates the long horrible fallout in prose as good as any Johnson has written yet. (It’s been nominated for the National Book Award, whose winners will be announced Wednesday, November 14.)

The story has a large cast of characters, the most important of whom are Skip Sands and his storied uncle, the Colonel. Both wind up in Vietnam — one having already proved himself a hero, the other desperate to do so as a CIA operative. Skip’s view of war and the US military is forever changed when he witnesses the assassination of a priest in the Philippines by the CIA. His experience in Vietnam goes south from there.

We get this type of turning point again and again. One by one, Johnson bends his characters over the wooden bench of his prose and breaks their innocence. In one early scene, a soldier hikes into the jungle and shoots a monkey just because he can. Then he freaks out. “ ‘Jesus Christ,’ ” he shouts at the convulsed, dying animal, “as if it might do something about its embarrassing and hateful condition.”

In Johnson’s vision, that irrational episode becomes emblematic of US involvement in the war. The novel begins on the day of Kennedy’s assassination, with hardcore military types in tears, and sidewinds luxuriantly, in Johnson’s most robust four-barreled tone, into the 1980s, where some of its characters wash up brittle and embittered. There’s a Canadian nurse who loses her missionary husband; there’s a South Vietnamese envoy whose fate gets bounced around with that of his American minders. There are also two brothers, Bill and James Huston, whose experience in the country is terribly familiar in its random brutality.

American dreamer

JOHN FREEMAN — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 21:42:19 GMT

Ha Jin retraces his journey
It’s difficult to think of an American writer with a story more inspiring than Ha Jin’s.

SO, NU? Ha Jin’s Chinese-American tale recalls Jewish-American fiction of 50 years ago.

A Free Life | By Ha Jin | Pantheon | 672 Pages | $26

It’s difficult to think of an American writer with a story more inspiring than Ha Jin’s. Born in China, he came to the United States in 1986 on a student visa to finish a dissertation on Auden, Eliot, Pound, and Yeats at Brandeis University. Jin and his wife had planned to return, but after the Tiananmen Square massacre, they cut their ties to China.

During the next decade, Jin turned himself into one of America’s most important writers. Between 1990 and 1999, he published two books of poetry, two collections of short stories, and two novels, one of which, Waiting, won the National Book Award. In his acceptance speech, he gave his heartiest thanks to the English language, “which is embracive and vibrant, and has provided me a niche where I can do meaningful work.”

Until now, Jin has written about life in China, during and before the Cultural Revolution. In his mammoth new novel, A Free Life, however, he deploys the elements of his own powerful journey in an epic tale about a young couple at sea in America in the early 1990s.

Nan Wu is a poet who comes to the US for graduate work and gradually brings his family over: his wife, Pingping, a beautiful woman who cares more for him than he does for her, and their son, Taotao, who grows up quickly and soon becomes more capable in English than his parents are. Nan and Pingping take odd jobs — janitor, night watchman, caretaker, even restaurant owners — to make his life as stable and secure as possible. They are living the American dream, one 20-hour workday at a time.

It’s a familiar story, but broken up into short chapters and narrated in Jin’s deadpan register, it takes on the jagged, mournful resonances of Jewish fiction of 50 years ago, books like Philip Roth’s Letting Go and Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Shadows on the Hudson (which appeared serial-style in the Yiddish-language newspaper the Forward, between 1957 and 1958). Like Singer’s characters, Jin’s exiles are caught between here and there. For a while when the couple fight, Nan vows to go back to China. Then his passport is revoked and that threat no longer obtains. Pingping is so desperate and alone that she will pick up the phone and dial anyone after their quarrels; she stops after Nan discovers she’s dialing 911. They are not in love, but out of a fierce desire not to sink, and amazing will power, they accomplish much. They save up enough money to buy a restaurant in Atlanta, and then a house, and they get Taotao into a decent school.

Class acts

JOHN FREEMAN — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 14:48:53 GMT

Richard Russo’s family tidings
The cast of Bridge of Sighs — Russo’s first novel since his 2001 Pulitzer winner, Empire Falls — may have benefitted from a refresher course with Emerson.

EMERSONIAN? Russo’s characters find themselves standing on the opposite shore from former identities.

Bridge of Sighs | By Richard Russo | Knopf | 544 pages | $26.95

If Richard Russo’s lambent, mournful new novel were a university, there could only be one quote chiseled above its entrance gates, from Emerson: “Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.”

The cast of Bridge of Sighs — Russo’s first novel since his 2001 Pulitzer winner, Empire Falls — may have benefitted from a refresher course with Concord’s wise man. Throughout this book, they fret over the lives they did not live, the places they did not go. This lugubrious, reflective mood has always been a main key in Russo’s register, but here it deepens to an almost Hawthorne-like dreaminess.

Once again, things kick off in an upstate New York town. This time it’s called Thomaston, where the tannery has slowly poisoned the water. Louis Charles “Lucy” Lynch tells us that “you’re unlikely to have heard of Thomaston, unless you work in medical research, in which case you may remember the now-famous study done years ago to explain why our cancer statistics were off any actuarial chart.”

Although many people would leave a city where the river ran red, Lucy elected to spend his whole life there, amassing a mini empire of grocery stores. As we begin, he and his wife of 40 years, Sarah, are preparing for a first-time trip to Venice, a vacation that could thrust them into contact with Lucy’s former best friend, Bobby Marconi, who has remade himself as a world-renowned painter.

Bobby isn’t the only person in this book who has reinvented himself. In ways both large and small, all the characters in Bridge of Sighs find themselves standing on the opposite shore from former identities. Lucy, the son of a milkman, moved from one side of town to the other and left part of himself behind. Sarah makes a similar class journey, as did her father before her, an aspiring novelist who became a schoolteacher.

Of all Russo’s novels, Bridge of Sighs is the most curiously mediated. Lucy’s sections about his childhood come in the form of a memoir he is writing. With Bobby, we have his paintings: they’ve recently tipped into self-portraits in which he sees the haunted visage of his own father. Art is a form of therapy in Bridge of Sighs, but an unsuccessful one, more like a stagnant river into which the characters gaze in hopes of seeing their watery reflections.

War, peace, and Robert Pinsky

JOHN FREEMAN — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 15:23:39 GMT

The season's fiction, non-fiction, and poetry
Every few years, a fall publishing season emerges that should remind us that Boston could be the literary epicenter of America.

Tom Perrotta

Every few years, a fall publishing season emerges that should remind us that Boston — and New England at large — could be the literary epicenter of America.

This is one of those seasons. Heading the charge is National Book Award–winning Boston University professor HA JIN. In A Free Life (Pantheon, October 30), Jin, who emigrated here in the ’80s, tells the tale of a Chinese writer trying to make his way in the USA. Also from these parts, you’ll find Like You’d Understand, Anyway (Knopf, September 25): stories by hilarious Williams College professor JIM SHEPARD, as well as The River of Sighs (Knopf, September 25), RICHARD RUSSO’s first novel since winning the Pulitzer for 2001’s Empire Falls.

ANN PATCHETT mucks around Boston with Run (HarperCollins, October 1), the story of a former mayor whose life is turned inside out. PHILIP ROTH has emerged from the woods of northwest Connecticut with Exit Ghost (Houghton Mifflin, October 1), which brings the Zuckerman series to a close. Also from Connecticut is STEWART O’NAN, whose new novel, Last Night at the Lobster (Viking, November 1), might be his most devastating yet.

Speaking of which: ALICE SEBOLD is back with The Almost Moon (Little, Brown, October 16), her first novel since 2003’s The Lovely Bones sold a gazillion copies. In The Air We Breathe (Norton, October 1), National Book Award winner ANDREA BARRETT brings to life an upstate New York asylum in 1916. TOM PERROTTA (Election, Little Children) takes another swipe at suburbia with The Abstinence Teacher (St. Martin’s, October 16) in which a sex ed teacher is forced to comply with Christian evangelists. And NICK HORNBY, who has long pondered the fate of boyhood, delivers his first novel actually aimed at the YA audience, Slam (Putnam, October 16), about a high schooler who knocks up his girlfriend and looks for guidance in the autobiography of skateboard star Tony Hawk.

Heat waves

JOHN FREEMAN — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 16:06:07 GMT

Summer reads to cool off with
“Summer joys are spoilt by use,” wrote John Keats, meaning the less you do between June and August, the better.

BURNING: Randall Kenan pays homage to
James Baldwin in The Fire This Time.

“Summer joys are spoilt by use,” wrote John Keats, meaning the less you do between June and August, the better. And so it goes with reading. The beach read, the backpacker’s paperback, the road- tripper’s bible — the hullabaloo over our Summer Read exists because we don’t want to get it wrong. To that end, here’s a guide to the out-of-the-way pleasures coming to your book store soon. All of them will keep your travel bag light and your joys un-spoilt.

Fiction
The best new work out this summer — with a few exceptions — will appear in translation, starting with Mandarins (July 7, Archipelago), a collection of short stories by famed Japanese author Ryunosuke Akutagawa (best known for Roshomon). This new translation by Charles De Wolf features three gem-like pieces never before seen in English.

If ninjas and samurai warriors are your thing, grab a copy of Heaven’s Net Is Wide: The First Tale of the Otori, by Lian Hearn (August 16, Riverhead). This fifth volume in the series recreates a medieval Japanese world by way of Taoist fable, historical fiction, and high fantasy. Robert Walser’s The Assistant (July 27, New Directions) which tells the tale of a man “drowning in obedience” has finally made it into English. So too has Peter Handke’s Crossing the Sierra de Gredos, (July 10, Farrar, Straus & Giroux), the mystical tale of a female banker on a Don Quixote–like odyssey.

SUMMER BOOKS
Ice and fire: Ice Cream’s cold contemporary art, Burning Man’s hot stuff. By Greg Cook.
The man who knew too much: Philip K. Dick enters the Library of America. By Peter Keough.
Sifting the trash heap: Things I love about the gold and the garbage in comics. By Douglas Wolk.

This summer also features three intriguing coming-of-age stories: Rajaa Alsanea’s Girls of Riyadh (July 9, Penguin Press), the first chick-lit novel to come out of Saudi Arabia; Aoibheann Sweeney’s stylish Among Other Things, I’ve Taken Up Smoking (July 19, Penguin Press), the tale of a girl growing up in Maine in the shadow of her father’s re-translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses; and, straight out of Seoul, I Have the RightTo Destroy Myself (July 2, Harcourt), Young-ha Kim’s edgy story of two brothers in love with the same girl.

Some other notable debuts coming down the pike include Ron Currie Jr.’s God Is Dead (July 5, Viking), in which the good Lord comes down to earth and dies in a Darfur refugee camp. Nalini Jones’s What You Call Winter (August 17, Knopf) is a collection of stories set in a Catholic town in India. And in The Tenderness of Wolves (July 10, Simon & Schuster), British film director Stef Penney tells a gripping story about a mother tracking down her fugitive son.

Babbling books

JOHN FREEMAN — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 18:45:00 GMT

Chabon, Murakami, Bukowski, and more
April comes like an idiot, Edna St. Millay wrote, babbling and strewing flowers.

FREEWHEELING: Michael Chabon imagines Alaska as a Jewish state.

April comes like an idiot, Edna St. Millay wrote, babbling and strewing flowers. If she were alive today, Edna might add: books, too. The publishing lists are overflowing with titles. MOHSIN HAMID, however, seems to get the wisdom of the less-is-more ideology. The Harvard Law School grad’s streamlined second novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist (Harcourt, April 3), fights well above its weight of 192 pages. Set in Lahore, and fashioned after Camus’s La chute|The Fall, it recounts a young Pakistani man’s tale of falling in and out of love with the US after 9/11.

No one writes short quite as well as HARUKI MURAKAMI. The Japanese novelist is back with After Dark (Knopf, May 8), a novel about two sisters — one a fashion model, the other a student — and the encounters they have on a long Tokyo night. Eight years after his celebrated story collection For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, NATHAN ENGLANDER delivers his first novel, The Ministry of Special Cases (Knopf, April 24); about fathers and sons, it’s set during the heart of Argentina’s dirty war. MICHAEL CHABON is likewise back to form with The Yiddish Policeman’s Union (HarperCollins, May 1), a freewheeling comedy that imagines a post–World War II Alaska that has been declared the first Jewish state. Also worth checking out: HOWARD JACOBSON’s hilarious satire of two Jewish comic-book artists in post-war London, Kalooki Nights (Simon & Schuster, April 3).

There are some notable debuts. In God of Animals (Scribner, March 20), ARYN KYLE spins a heartbreaking story about a sixth-grader trying to grow up on her family’s languishing horse ranch. STEVEN HALL’s Raw Shark Texts (Canongate, March 28) imagines a world in which metaphysical sharks attack a man’s memory.

In nonfiction: MIKE DAVIS has put together his most topical micro-history yet, Buda’s Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb (Verso, April 1), which ranges from 1920 to modern-day Iraq. If Davis doesn’t disturb your Circadian rhythms, Atlantic Monthly columnist WILLIAM LANGEWIESCHE will with The Atomic Bazaar (FSG, May 15), an urgent look at the threat of nuclear proliferation.

Biography readers have plenty to dig into. Virginia Woolf biographer HERMIONE LEE has come back to America for Edith Wharton: A Life, (Knopf, April 10). ZACHARY LEADER takes a swing at Martin Amis’s pop in The Life of Kinglsey Amis (Pantheon, April 24). And Boston University professor ROBERT DALLEK gives us Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power (HarperCollins, April 24).

In the zone

JOHN FREEMAN — Thu, 04 Jan 2007 19:49:06 GMT

Buying Iraq’s broken dreams
Nearly four years into the Iraq War, the mistakes that tipped the US presence from occupation to quagmire stand out amid the rhetoric.

OCCUPIED: The Green Zone sounds more like the Mall of America than a fortress.

Nearly four years into the Iraq War, the mistakes that tipped the US presence from occupation to quagmire stand out amid the rhetoric. Even presidential loyalists admit it was a bad idea to disband the Iraqi army, as L. Paul Bremer III did, a move that sent heavily armed, unemployed men straight into the insurgency. It was also a bad idea to put formerly state-owned Iraqi businesses up for sale to foreign bidders. To a nation already looted by its dictator, this looked like larceny.

What kind of bubble could have spawned such wrong-headed decisions? Washington Post reporter Rajiv Chandrasekaran gives a detailed answer with his examination of the plush, walled-off palace grounds at the heart of Baghdad where the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) set about rewriting Iraq’s laws with very little grasp of the society they had imbedded themselves within.

Given Chandrasekaran’s findings, it’s difficult to fault the CPA members entirely for their ignorance. As he describes it, the Green Zone sounds more like the Mall of America than a fortress. Staffers could buy T-shirts that read, “Who’s Your Baghdaddy?” A mural of the World Trade Center hinted at the muddling of Iraq and 9/11 that had brought us there. Halliburton took care of everything, from supplying the Fruit Loops to making sure employees’ Chevy Suburbans were washed every two weeks to rounding up and killing the stray cats who infiltrated the blast-proof walls.

More than half of the CPA’s staff had never been outside America, let alone traveled to the Middle East. George Packer detailed how bureaucratic infighting stripped much-needed talent from the mission in his 2005 book The Assassin’s Gate, but Chandrasekaran mines this vein deeper still. Two of CPA governor Bremer’s top aides were in their 20s and had no experience in Arab affairs. The man in charge of Iraq’s health care boasted of not having read one book about the country before arriving.

Bremer may have made decisions like a Fortune 500 CEO, but they were often the wrong ones. The first emissary to Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq’s most influential Shiite leader, was a millionaire urologist from Florida, not a knowledgeable diplomat. Iraq didn’t need a flat tax rate or a reduction of import taxes, as one of Bremer’s key aides concluded; it needed electricity. It didn’t need an anti-smoking campaign, Chandrasekaran points out; it needed emergency rooms that were sterile.

Not TV

JOHN FREEMAN — Thu, 28 Dec 2006 12:21:54 GMT

Mailer, Lethem, Amis, Ashbery deliver good reads
Big names, new names, and a handful of poets provide worthwhile reading this winter to distract you from the Sopranos reruns on A&E.

WILL WE LOVE HIM? Jonathan Lethem takes on the great American grunge novel.

Big names, new names, and a handful of poets provide worthwhile reading this winter to distract you from the Sopranos reruns on A&E.

FICTION
VIKRAM CHANDRA’s Sacred Games (HarperCollins, January 1) is 928 pages of literary Bollywood noir about a Sikh police instructor and a gangster who has hacked his way to the top in Mumbai (formerly Bombay) in the ’80s and ’90s, when the body count of crime syndicate shoot-outs emblazoned newspapers like some grim cricket score. The book is so good, it can even headline above the return of NORMAN MAILER, who unleashes The Castle in the Forest (Random House, January 23), a portrait of Hitler in youth through the eyes of the devil’s assistant. England’s own mini-Mailer — MARTIN AMIS — also looks back at Fascism and anti-Semitism in his short new novel, House of Meetings (Knopf, January 16).

From Turkey comes ELIF SHAFAK, who weighs in on the damage of the Armenian genocide in her raucous new novel, The Bastard of Istanbul (Viking, January 18). Booker finalist HISHAM MATAR’s debut novel, In the Country of Men (Dial Press, January 30), arrives on these shores too, with a heartbreaking tale of a father’s disappearance.

This winter is a busy one for Irish heavyweights. Prolific Booker Prize winner PATRICK MCCABE returns from a whopping two years off with Winterwood (HarperCollins, January 23), the story of a man who descends from madness into murder. IMPAC Dublin Literary Award winner COLM TÓIBÍN offers up stories in Mothers and Sons (Scribner, January 2), and Booker winner JOHN BANVILLE makes his genre debut as Benjamin Black, author of the crime novel Christine Falls (Henry Holt, March 6).

On the sunnier side of things, fans of The Office will find a literary equivalent of sorts in JOSHUA FERRIS’s debut, Then We Came to the End (Little, Brown, March 1). Literate entertainment is also to be discovered in JONATHAN LETHEM’s tango with the great American grunge novel, You Don’t Love Me Yet (Doubleday, March 13), and in Pulitzer winner JANE SMILEY’s Hollywood novel Ten Days in the Hills (Knopf, February 11). Meanwhile, DANIEL ALARCÓN brings to life the radio world, Latin American revolutionary style, in his debut novel, Lost City Radio (HarperCollins, February 1).

Lions and lambs

JOHN FREEMAN — Wed, 13 Sep 2006 21:53:44 GMT

Pynchon isn’t all you’ll be reading this fall
The season is notable for the return to bookstores of canonical names like Atwood, Ginsberg, Kinnell, le Carré, Munro, Pynchon, and Vidal plus a fair share of younger lions like Eggers, Julavits, and Muldoon.

SAINT JOAN: Didion’s collected non-fiction comes out in one volume next month.

The season is notable for the return to bookstores of canonical names like Atwood, Ginsberg, Kinnell, le Carré, Munro, Pynchon, and Vidal plus a fair share of younger lions like Eggers, Julavits, and Muldoon. And if you just want to have fun, there’s always Carl Hiaasen. What’s not to like?

Fiction
THOMAS PYNCHON delivers Against the Day (Penguin Press, November 21), his first novel since 1997’s Mason & Dixon. In an unusual twist, the notoriously reclusive Pynchon himself wrote the editorial description for Amazon about this novel spanning the period from the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair to the years just after World War I: “With a worldwide disaster looming just a few years ahead it is a time of unrestrained corporate greed, false religiosity, moronic fecklessness, and evil intent in high places.” He adds: “No reference to the present day is intended or should be inferred.”

The rest of the fall’s fiction has a similarly dour cast. CORMAC MCCARTHY ’s The Road (Knopf, October 2) unfolds on a blasted, futuristic landscape where a man and a child try to walk to safety. CHRIS ADRIAN ’s The Floating Hospital (McSweeney’s, October 1) takes place after the earth has been subsumed by seven miles of water.

Things quiet down with CHARLES FRAZIER ’s long-awaited follow-up to Cold Mountain, Thirteen Moons (Random House, October 3), the tale of a man sent out into Indian country to run a trading post. EDNA O’BRIEN also takes a trip down memory lane with The Light of Evening (Houghton Mifflin, October 1), a lyrical fiction about a woman awaiting her famous novelist daughter’s return to Ireland.

DAVE EGGERS has gone a bit out of his way — to Sudan, in fact — for his new non-fiction novel, What Is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng (McSweeney’s, October 1), in which a Sudanese refugee escapes to Kenya and resettles in the United States. Fellow Believer editor HEIDI JULAVITS also returns to the fiction form with The Uses of Enchantment (Doubleday, October 17), in which a girl goes missing from a private school.

The drought of short stories turns into a flood this fall with ALICE MUNRO ’s The View from Castle Rock (Knopf, November 7). If you need a refresher course in Munro worship, pick up her Carried Away (Everyman, September 26), which is introduced by fellow Canadian MARGARET ATWOOD, who herself has a collection out this month, Moral Disorder (Nan A. Talese, September 19). Also keep an eye out for SUSANNA CLARKE ’s darkly magical collection, The Ladies of Grace Adieu (Bloomsbury, October 17), and the surprisingly hefty THE STORIES OF MARY GORDON (Pantheon, October 3).

Mass marketing

JOHN FREEMAN — Tue, 02 May 2006 21:07:37 GMT

George Saunders’s tragic-comic consumers
Everyone who reads him knows that George Saunders is one of the funniest writers at work today. What’s less remarked on is his capacity to wrench pathos from comedy.

Everyone who reads him knows that George Saunders is one of the funniest writers at work today. What’s less remarked on is his capacity to wrench pathos from comedy. While other writers seek out beauty, Saunders restricts himself to America’s chintzy landscape, our vocabulary of bureaucratese and self-empowerment. No one in his fiction is remotely glamorous, or likable. Saunders presents 10-steppers on the brink of meltdown, theme-park actors impersonating cave people. And as if these fates weren’t belittling enough, corporate interests hover like vultures, ready to wring every last ounce of productivity, or disposable income.

With In Persuasion Nation, Saunders shows where this constant state of being marketed to is leading us — and debt is just the tip of the iceberg. In the opening story, “I CAN SPEAK!™,” a service representative writes to a customer dissatisfied with a Velcro mask that can be attached to a baby’s head, allowing it to speak. “Jon” describes a world where orphans are auctioned off to a market research firm that uses them as “Tastemakers & Trendsetters.” While the kids are being exploited, the adults are getting hooked on the products their research creates — from drugs to synthetic happiness. “And the Aurabon® would make things better, as Aurabon® always makes things better, although soon what I found was, when you are hooking in like eight or nine times a day, you are always so happy, and yet it is a kind of happy like chewing on tinfoil, and once you are living that sort of happy, you soon cannot be happy enough. . . . ”

CONSUMED: Fear of a lack of happiness, a lack of success — a lack of anything — pervades these stories.

Saunders argues that our experiment with psychopharmacology has created a population with a tenuous connection to reality. We expect good times, but the skills we possess deal with their opposite. So our emotions fly from disappointment straight to rage, then flat-line at paranoia; fear of a lack of happiness, a lack of success — a lack of anything — pervades everything. Where David Foster Wallace paints a world utterly dehumanized by these conditions, Saunders finds great humanity in all-encompassing anxiety, whether it’s parents obsessing over the possibility that their child is “slow” or homeowners possessed by the idea that their castle will be invaded.

Even the violent can be articulate. In “Adams,” a father describes his struggle with a creepy next-door neighbor who shoots him nasty looks. “And I thought, If that was me, if I had that hate level, what would I do? Well, one thing I would do is hold it in and hold it in and then one night it would overflow and I would sneak into the house of my enemy and stab him and his family in their sleep. Or shoot them. I would.”

To Hades and back

JOHN FREEMAN — Thu, 30 Mar 2006 14:23:51 GMT

Louise Glück welcomes spring
“Always nights I feel the ocean, biting at my life,” Louis Glück wrote in Firstborn (1968), her first volume of poetry.

“Always nights I feel the ocean, biting at my life,” Louis Glück wrote in Firstborn (1968), her first volume of poetry. Ever since then, mortality has haunted her work, sex and death bound together — often violently. In her much anthologized scorcher, “Mock Orange,” she wrote,

It is not the moon, I tell you.
It is these flowers
lighting the yard.
I hate them.
I hate them as I hate sex,
the man’s mouth
sealing my mouth, the man’s
paralyzing body —

In her latest, Averno, she confronts these pretty spring flowers, revisiting the myth of Persephone, in whose story sex and death became one. Rescued from Hades, the daughter of Zeus and harvest goddess Demeter must still spend half the year in the Underworld. This joint-custody arrangement takes on an almost spiritual cast in Averno, which unfolds in 18 lyrics. The poems have Glück’s typical short line, her elegant rhythms. Few American poets can do so much with so little, as in “The Night Migrations”:

This is the moment when you see again
the red berries of the mountain ash
and in the dark sky
the birds’ night migrations.

It grieves me to think
the dead won’t see them —
these things we depend on,
they disappear.

One glimpse of the tangible world — and then the second quatrain whisks it away. The poems in Averno repeat this metaphysical pick-pocketing over and over, as if reminding us that the story of Persephone is ours, too. No one gets to keep his or her body forever.

Glück writes with oracular bottom to her voice — she can borrow from mythology’s authority without appearing to inhabit it in drag. “Didn’t we plant the seeds,” she pleads, her voice overlapping with that of Persephone, “weren’t we necessary to the earth,/the vines, were they harvested?”

Good reads

JOHN FREEMAN — Thu, 09 Mar 2006 17:26:50 GMT

From Roth to Hall, and non-fiction, too
According to the Greeks, spring is the season of rebirth, when Persephone was released from Hades and mom Demeter celebrated with flowers.

According to the Greeks, spring is the season of rebirth, when Persephone was released from Hades and mom Demeter celebrated with flowers. What a bit of cheek for Philip Roth to publish his 27th novel, Everyman (Houghton Mifflin), in May, for if any upcoming novel puts a chill in your bones, it’ll be this one. Roth’s hero is a middle-aged ad man caught short by illness, then spun into a spiral of regret about lost loves and betrayal.

Although the 72-year-old titan shows no signs of slowing down — he’s published six novels in the past 10 years, and a collection of non-fiction — mortality seems to be on his mind. The same could be said of A.M. Homes, whose latest novel, This Book Will Save Your Life (Viking, April 24), features a man energized by a brush with the grim reaper.

British sensation David Mitchell takes a turn for the spooky in Black Swan Green (Random House, April 11), the tale of a stammering English kid entering the melodrama that is adolescence. Sinister doings also echo in Patrick Neate’s latest, City of Tiny Lights (Riverhead, April 4), which might be the only novel published this year to feature a Ugandan private eye.

National Book Award finalist Martha McPhee returns with L’America (Harcourt, April), the story of a woman who must decide how loyal she is to the red, white and blue. In Anne Tyler’s Digging to America (Knopf, May 9), a family from Baltimore cross paths with a clan whose roots go back to Iran. Joyce Carol Oates unloads her massive collected stories, High Lonesome (Ecco, April 4), as does that other poet of melancholy, Amy Hempel, in The Collected Stories (Scribner, May 9). At least George Saunders provides excellent laughs with his story collection In Persuasion Nation (Riverhead, June 1).

In the realm of non-fiction: Boston Globe columnist James Carroll’s House of War (Houghton Mifflin, May 4) is a full-length study of the Pentagon and how it has operated practically independent of government oversight. If you want to learn just what kinds of things the Pentagon does, check out Overthrow (Henry Holt, April 6), Stephen Kinzer’s history of America’s penchant for overturning regimes.

War and peace

JOHN FREEMAN — Tue, 03 Jan 2006 01:08:17 GMT

Books that travel from the Mecca to Memphis
Since September 11, publishers have been rushing to supply Americans with non-fiction books about the war on terror, the war in Iraq, and anything relating to the upheavals in the Middle East.

Since September 11, publishers have been rushing to supply Americans with non-fiction books about the war on terror, the war in Iraq, and anything relating to the upheavals in the Middle East. They’ve been much slower about supplying us with imaginative tales from these regions, but the trickle has begun. The winter of 2006 features several new imports that are safer than a trip to Ramallah and almost as intense.

Fiction
The most notable of these works is The Gate of the Sun (Archipelago, February 1), a novel by Elias Khoury that’s set during the events of 1948, when Palestinians were displaced during the creation of Israel. As the book begins, two Palestinian men remain behind, keeping vigil at the bedside of a leader of the resistance movement. One of them begins a story about what’s just happened, and it gradually expands into a Sheherazade-like yarn of astonishing beauty.

Another superb novel to arrive on these shores from the Arab world is Tahar Ben Jelloun’s The Last Friend (translated from the French; New Press, February 1), which describes the friendship between a Moroccan doctor and a professor. The brain drain that resulted from the Islamic revolution in Iran is the focus of Farnoosh Moshiri’s Against Gravity (Penguin, just out December 27), where the lives of a dying intellectual, a social worker, and an Iranian immigrant overlap in Houston.

Closer to these parts, Elizabeth Strout braves the topic of spirituality in Abide with Me (Random House, March 14), which conjures a Maine minister who’s beginning to doubt his faith. New England also figures heavily in Justin Tussing’s debut novel, The Best People in the World (HarperCollins, February 7), in which a young man falls in love with his high-school history teacher and runs off to the woods of Vermont.

The most eagerly awaited British import of the spring is Julian Barnes’s page-turning Booker finalist, Arthur & George, (Knopf, January 14), which is based on a true story involving Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Emily Barton also takes readers back in time with her second novel, Brookland (FSG, March 1), which lures readers to 18th-century Brooklyn, where a woman dreams of a bridge connecting her borough to Manhattan.

Family drama can be found in Ali Smith’s Booker finalist, The Accidental (Pantheon, January 10), which portrays a neurotic English family who shelter an odd guest. And the devout Catholic clan of the Santerres come back to life in Maile Meloy’s second novel, A Family’s Daughter (Scribner, February 14).