The Good Thief by Hannah Tinti

Ren, the young protagonist of Hannah Tinti's darkly wonderful novel, The Good Thief, begins his tale with only pieces of a life. He finds himself at a Catholic orphanage and does not know how he came to be there. He is missing a hand and does not know why. He holds on to the scraps of cloth where he mother sewed his name into a nightshirt that is now threadbare, hoping that they will give him some clue to his true identity.

Life is bleak but uneventful for Ren until a mysterious stranger named Benjamin Nab comes to claim Ren as his brother. Surprise! It's a lie; it's not his first and certainly won't be his last. Ren and Nab join Nab's friend Tom in North Umbrage -- a town as ghastly as its name -- to unearth dead bodies for loot, except some of the bodies aren't totally dead.

Tinti has been compared to both Dickens and Rowling, but she has something unique to offer readers. While the plot is reminiscent of Oliver Twist, Tinti's prose style has none of Dickens' humor. She is steady and authoritative, and makes the odd and extraordinary seem perfectly regular. By doing so, she allows us to see with the child's eyes of her protagonist. There is authority, there are absolutes, but when evil appears -- when, for instance, a dead body rises from a wagonload of corpses -- we realize how fragile that authority is.

Tinti, Hannah. The Good Thief. New York: Random House, 2008. 325 pp.

Gilead by Marilynne Robinson

Robinson's latest shows a confidence and graceful restraint that are now rare. In the days of blogs and Twitter, when the pressure is on authors to produce quickly rather than well, Robinson has set herself apart from the crowd by taking the time -- 20 years since the publication of her last celebrated novel, Housekeeping -- to produce not just a book, but a masterpiece.

She takes on the most challenging form of novel-writing available to her: the diary. The narrator of Gilead is a 76 year-old pastor named John Ames in the small town of Gilead, Iowa in 1956. Told that he has angina pectoris and believing that he faces imminent death, Ames writes a long letter to his seven year-old son from a recent marriage to much younger woman. Gilead is that letter, but it reads more like a diary, discursive and ruminant. Ames' stated purpose in writing is to tell his son everything he would have done had he lived longer, but one understands that it is really a way for him to reflect on his life and satisfy himself that he has lived it well before dying.

The danger of the diary form is that it is static. All the elements that can support a mediocre novel -- dramatic subplots, minor characters, dramatic irony -- are absent from the limited first person point of view of a diary. We have only Ames' voice to entertain us and to give substance to our reading experience. But Robinson has such a facility with prose that Gilead is not tiresome or monotonous, but rather spare and elegant. She is able to accomplish much with this limited form.

Another challenge Robinson meets with aplomb is that of writing a clergyman as her protagonist. There is always the danger that we will assume his convictions are hers, or that she is evangelizing through fiction. Robinson does not shy away from her religious beliefs. I have not read her book of essays, The Death of Adam (1998), but I imagine there must be a good deal of overlap with Gilead, in which Ames sees no clear distinction between his religious life and the rest of it. But he is not dogmatic, never preachy. Rather, Robinson shows us a man still searching, on his death bed, for the right answers, and never quite sure he has them. It is a beautiful reminder of the fragility of all things.

You may not agree with Robinson's religious viewpoint, and you may not like the format she has chosen for this novel, but you won't be able to deny its quiet grace and heart.

Robinson, Marilynne. Gilead. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004. 247 pp.

The Favorites by Mary Yukari Waters

Sarah Rexford, the protagonist of The Favorites, is, like the book's author, half Japanese and half American. In the first part of the novel, she travels with her mother back to Japan to visit her grandmother and aunts, learning much about identity, love, and families in the process.

Sarah's family has an open secret that causes much pain among its members and requires careful politicking to stay ahead of the ever-shifting allegiances. Yoko, Sarah's mother, drills her in the "forward-thinking game," the chess-like practice of considering all the rippling emotional consequences of one's actions before making any move.

It's only by succeeding at this game that Sarah can earn the love of her mother and grandmother, because love in The Favorites is entirely conditional. Sarah's coming of age moment is when she learns to ally with Yoko against her aunt, crossing an "invisible line of allegiance" and realizing that her happiness comes "at the cost of someone else."

The Favorites is a beautiful, heartbreaking novel. Not since Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club has a book explored the relationships between mothers and daughters so truthfully. I will keep my eye on Waters' forthcoming works.

Water, Mary Yukari. The Favorites. New York: Scribner, 2009. 279 pp.

How Fiction Works by James Wood

In How Fiction Works, James Wood, a staff writer for The New Yorker and a visiting professor in English and American literature at Harvard, returns to an old-school brand of literary criticism and puts the deconstructed novel back together. Like E.M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel, which Wood cites readily, How Fiction Works is an old-fashion primer on literature, a throw-back to a time before the narrative arc of fiction became a mad scientist's laboratory.

That's not to say that Wood's view of literature is limited to the 19th century. He seems to have the entire Western canon at his fingertips, writing about David Foster Wallace and Ian McKeown as fluently as he does the Iliad.

But Wood's major point does center on the 19th century idea of realism. He argues that the test of good fiction is its ability to faithfully represent the interaction of the human mind with the real world. As far as Wood seems to understand them, that mind and world are both fixed absolutes, as are Rules of Literature. His ideas are so quaint that you can almost believe the print date reads 1949 instead of 2009.

As I said, Wood includes an extraordinary breadth of material, from Saramago to Spark, Rulfo to Roth. I love any book that leaves me with a reading list three pages long, as this one did. And I enjoy Wood's unique critical style: he pauses to appreciate the books he is about to critique, as if saying grace before a meal, and blends his analyses with personal asides to remind us why literature matters at all. Politics of academia aside, this is a book you'll love to read, if you love to read.

Wood, James. How Fiction Works. New York: Picador, 2008. 248 pp.

The Orphan's Tales by Catherynne M. Valente

My friend, Dianne, brought Valente to my attention for her critical essay, "Follow the Yellow-Brick Road: Katabasis and the Female Hero in Alice in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz, and The Nutcracker," which she presented at a Feminism in Sci-Fi/Fantasy Convention in 2005. In the essay, she analyzed the way fairy tale heroines work to contain females. Their arc is small, from birth to marriage, or death.

To remedy the lack of fairy tales for women, Valente has written two volumes of them: In the Night Garden and In the Cities of Coin and Spice. Together, they are The Orphan's Tales, and have won awards as "The Arabian Nights for our time."

The stories Valente weaves are compelling and vibrant. The orphaned girl of the title is discovered by a prince, to whom she tells the stories tattoed on her eyelids that form her own secret history. Each story seems more fantastic and wonderful than the one that came before, and accompanying illustrations, by artist Michael Kaluta, are just as fascinating. And, no, you don't have to be female to appreciate them.

Perhaps we should have entrusted Valente with our fairy tale canon from the very beginning!

Valente, Catherynne M. In the Night Garden. New York: Bantam Dell, 2006. 483 pp.

Valente, Catherynne M. In the Cities of Coin and Spice. New York: Bantam Dell, 2007. 516 pp.

Vanessa and Virginia by Susan Sellers

If you love Virginia Woolf, like I do, you probably think that no one can ever write a book as masterfully crafted as To the Lighthouse. You're right, but you may enjoy this one.

Vanessa and Virginia is meant to be read as a letter from Vanessa Bell to Virginia Woolf after the latter's suicide. Sellers assumes that her readers know the full background of Bell and Woolf, and their relationship, so do your homework before you start this novel, especially since Sellers writes in second person point-of -view, which tends to read like listening to one side of a telephone conversation.

Sellers is very clearly paying homage to Woolf's work, and Bell's role in it. Scenes from Vanessa and Virginia seem lifted almost entirely, word for word, from To the Lighthouse or Mrs. Dalloway. It's humbling to see one artist another in this way, but it is not to Sellers' advantage. She is an excellent writer; her prose is beautifully formed and her taking up the challenge of writing in second person well-met. But let her give us something different, something original. This is her first novel. I am eager to read the second.

Sellers, Susan. Vanessa and Virginia. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009. 224 pp.

7 Wheelchairs: A Life Beyond Polio by Gary Presley

"The beauty of disability is the beauty of being human" (157). So writes Gary Presley, whose book, 7 Wheelchairs: A Life Beyond Polio, recounts his life as a paraplegic. But don't let a single quote mislead you; Presley does not try to glorify his situation in his memoir. He spends chapters going into extensive detail about his bowel movements (or lack thereof), the urinal he carries with him everywhere, and his pride in still being able to have an erection.

Presley contracts polio from a vaccine when he is 17, and spends most of the first two decades of his paralysis raging against his fate. He harbors resentment toward everyone -- himself included -- and everything for what is difficult in his life. Then, gradually, through several dynamic points, Presley learns to appreciate what he does have and stop dwelling in the negative.

This is what he wants us to do, as well. Presley includes the graphic details of having to sit in his own feces because there is no one around to move him to his bedpan because he wants us to read 7 Wheelchairs and think, "Wow, this guy has it really hard. Compared to him, I am so fortunate."

And we are, but -- as Presley reminds us several times throughout his memoir -- so is he.

Presley, Gary. 7 Wheelchairs: A Life Beyond Polio. Iowa City, Iowa: University of Iowa Press, 2008. Print.

Angry Women, Edited by Andrea Juno and V. Vale

Andrea Juno founded the small, independent press, Juno Books, that printed Angry Women, its sister book, Angry Women in Rock, and many other subculture texts. According to Juno, her goddess namesake encompassed a wide range of female experiences in "lunar/matriarchal times."

Juno Fortuna, Fate; Juno Lucina, Light; Juno Martialis, the Warrior -- to name only a few. Also, every woman had a "juno," which was the name for her soul, just as every man had a "genius." When the solar/patriarchal societies took over the lunar/matriarchal societies, the goddesses became denigrated. Juno became the jealous, hysterical wife...Suddenly Juno is the "property" of Jupiter, inferior to him. (152)

Juno -- Andrea Juno, that is -- and all the Angry Women she interviews in this book make it their primary focus to restore the female goddess to her rightful place. They want to show women -- through visual and performance art, literature, and music -- that we don't need to chase after male genius when we possess our own female junos. To be "angry" in the Junian sense of the word is to be empowered and able to relate to men without needing to take anything away from them.

In terms of style, Juno presents her female subjects in interviews, but the journalism conventions end there. There is nothing objective about Juno's approach, nor even the acknowledgment that maintaining some detachment from one's subject might be desirable. Juno is the first to express and provoke anger, often losing sight of reason along the way. Consider, for example, her statement to Diamanda Galas that "the only form of gun control I would support is that women could own guns and men couldn't" (22).

Angry Woman ignited my thoughts and sparked my passions. And, most importantly, it gave me a phenomenal reading list for delving more deeply into feminist art and literature. If you're a woman, and you're angry -- and if you're a woman, you should be -- get your hands on a copy.

Angry Women. Eds. Andrea Juno and V. Vale. New York: Juno Books, 1991. Print.

The Search for God at Harvard by Ari L. Goldman

Whether intentionally or not, Goldman's account of his year at Harvard's Divinity School provides an apt illustration of his world religion's teacher, Diana Eck's lesson: "If you know one religion....you don't know any." The religion Goldman knows is Orthodox Judaism, and though he peppers his narrative with anecdotes about his Muslim friend or his Christian Scientist friend, it is Orthodox Judaism that is his main focus. More specifically, it is his struggle to recognize his deep religiosity with a modern, secular world that is forms the meat of this book.

There are very few Orthodox Jewish journalists. The news does not stop, whereas the Torah teaches us that God rested on the seventh day....and so should we. Jews consider it one of the most sacred rituals to observe the Sabbath from sundown on Friday to sundown on Saturday. So how should Goldman, a cub reporter trying to work his way up as a copy boy at The New York Times, answer the question, "Do you work weekends?"

Chapter after chapter, Goldman tries to put religion -- both specific religions and in general -- in perspective. He is in over his head when he is talking about world religions like Buddhism, misunderstanding the nuance in that philosophy between desire and love, but is in his element when reminiscing about his personal history and spiritual journey. The Search for God at Harvard should not be read as a religious text or a final word on the subject by any means, but can be enjoyed as the personal narrative of a man struggling -- as we all do -- with faith.

Our Landlady by Frank L. Baum, edited by Nancy Tystad Koupal

You've heard of Frank L. Baum if you've heard of The Wizard of Oz -- and everyone's heard of The Wizard of Oz. But you probably don't know that from January 1890 to February 1891, Baum wrote a column entitled "Our Landlady" that ran regularly in The Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer and now stand as a record of South Dakota's troubled first year. Baum commented on drought, railroads, suffrage, populism, prohibition, and other matters through his fictional landlady, Sairy Ann Bilkins, a busybody who starves her boarders. The vibrant cast of characters, the knack for satire, and the historical details make this collection of "Our Landlady" columns a real treat to read.

Tinsel by Hank Stuever

I picked up Tinsel because it made The New Yorker magazine's 2009 reading list, and because I was in the mood for something seasonal, but Hank Stuever -- self-proclaimed professional "snarkist" -- doesn't just attack our yuletide binge-decorating disorder, he turns an acid pen against our entire consumerist culture, while gamely admitting that he is part of that culture himself, a "man unashamed to be seen closing the bar at Applebee's."

He's not far off the mark. Consider the incisive wit Stuever uses to describe mall culture, as if in a guidebook for alien invaders:

On Saturday night there are married couples, MILFs with their DILFs, who've hired babysitters so they can have dinner at the Cheesecake Factory or California Pizza Kitchen and now wander around Barnes & Noble, browsing together and then drifting apart, until it is time to ride the escalator up to the AMC 24 for a 9:20 showing of a comedy starring Will Ferrell or Will Smith or Will Anybody.

Stuever announces that he intends to write "a Fast Food Nation or The Omnivore's Dilemma, only about ornaments." That's high company to align oneself with, and Stuever does his job of informing us all about the many details surrounding the Christmas industrial complex, with enough human interest stories to keep us interested along the way. We follow Tammie, the Martha Stewart of Christmas, a family over its head in Christmas debt, and a woman trying to put the "Christ" back in Christmas.

Pollan taught us much about where our food comes from and how we might change our eating habits. What does Stuever have to teach us? If he's trying to help us understand our cultural over-consumption, he only glances at an explanation by hinting that what we really crave is a pre-9/11 innocence, when we believed in Santa and the sanctity of our borders. But that doesn't explain much, since, as Stuever himself points out, the indulgent traditions of Christmas go way back to Victorian times.

No, what Stuever leaves us with is not some powerful moral or intellectual lesson. It's rather a queasy feeling, like having too much egg nog.

Five Red Herrings, Murder Must Advertise, and Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers

I've been sick lately, and with a blizzard thrown into the mix, badly in need of some good reading material. I don't how it's taken me so long to discover Dorothy L. Sayers' mysteries, featuring the bon vivant sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey, but I found her wit and affection at just the right time.

Sayers constructs Five Red Herrings (1931) as a puzzle for the reader. There are six suspects and a victim who was so hated in life that there is no moral problem in figuring out "who done it." Full of time-tables and plot twists, it's a mind game you'll enjoy.

Murder Must Advertise (1933) is based in Sayers' own experience from 1922-1931 as a copywriter at S. H. Benson's advertising agency in London. Going undercover as a copywriter himself, Lord Peter investigates a mysterious death and discovers many shocking details about the private lives of ad agency employees, while learning what it's like to work for a living.

Gaudy Night (1935) takes place at a women's college, Shrewbury College, a nod to Sayers' own Somerville College. The dons have invited Harriet Vane back to her alma mater for the annual "Gaudy" celebrations, but a campus vandal soon spoils the mood. Terrified at what such a lunatic might do, Harriet asks her old friend Wimsey to investigate.

All three are perfect snowy-day reads with a cup of tea, some biscuits, and a mind for mysteries.

Living a Year of Kaddish by Ari L. Goldman

Following Goldman through his kaddish year, the period of daily prayer in honor of someone close who has recently died, we encounter the milestones that are part of the bereavement process. There is the question of how to distribute what the dead has left behind, the problem of helping the young to understand death, celebrations that go unshared, and the persistent hope that a message will arrive from Goldman's father, that it has all somehow been a cruel mistake.

Goldman describes the many ways that Judaism helps him cope with the mourning process, by providing him with a structure for his own grief and a community of support. He also writes of how the obligation to say kaddish three times a day for 11 months of the year-long mourning period helps him find his place as a Jew in an increasingly secular world. The ongoing challenge in Goldman's book, and in Jewish life, is finding a minyan, the minimum of ten men required to perform religious obligations, including kaddish. Goldman asks himself whether it would be better to fulfill his kaddish obligation by finding a new shul, where there is a better chance of finding a minyan, but decides that his real obligation is to try to say kaddish, and decides that staying faithful to his community is most important.

There is much in Goldman's book to appeal to Jew and non-Jew alike. Jews, especially those who have lost a parent -- even those who are not Orthodox, like Goldman -- will connect to the shared experience that is organized religion. Non-Jews can learn more about the Jewish mourning process and about the universality of all grief. For example, Goldman's parents are divorced. Must one also mourn separately for parents who were apart in life?

There are as many questions as there are answers. "Kaddish," writes Goldman, "binds the mourner to the past and the present." It is a promise that the dead will be survived in Judaism by his sons, and that Jews will not allow themselves to disappear entirely.

Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen

Everyone loves the circus. Well, I don't. When I was I kid and my mom brought me to see the clowns in the big tent, I made her take me home screaming and crying. And when she coaxed me into giving it another shot, my fear was even more intense.

Whether for good or ill, the world of the circus is one almost solely of memory. In the light of adulthood, the animals stink and the clowns have smeared makeup, but childhood memories of the circus offer romance, fantasy, and spectacle. Gruen can't resist the liberation, as a writer, to envision a world where nothing seems impossible or far out of the ordinary, but she veers between a tendency toward melodramatic sentimentality and an unwillingness to touch any real emotion. Water for Elephants is all saccharine and no sugar.

We follow the story of Jacob Jankowski, a 93 year-old nursing home inmate recalling his youth as a young man experiencing the fragile glory of the Depression-era circus culture. While a veterinary student at Cornell, Jacob discovers that his parents have been killed in a car accident and, aimless and distraught, climbs aboard a train that happens to belong to the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth. His experience with veterinary medicine wins him a job with the crew as an animal doctor and he falls in with August Rosenbluth, the erratic menagerie director, and his beautiful wife, Marlena.

Gruen constructs many relationships in Water for Elephants, but none of them resolve in any particular way. The one we hope for most, the budding romance between Jacob and Marlena, culminates in a clumsy copulation that sorely disappoints. Despite some interesting plot twists and intriguing ideas, Water for Elephants never really delivers on any of its promises. Like the circus itself, it is mostly show, with very little substance.

Reading the OED by Ammon Shea

I usually avoid reading books about reading books. To let someone else translate a book for you is like letting him chew and swallow your food for you, too. It's just not as satisfying as doing it yourself. Of course, most books about books are meant to point us to the original sources eventually anyway; very few of them stand alone on their own merits. Shea's goal is also to get us to read the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), but his book, Reading the OED -- half personal essay collection, half mini-lexicon -- is itself a pleasure to peruse.

The charm of Reading the OED comes mostly from its author. Shea is the kind of character one writes books about. He began reading dictionaries at the age of ten and has supported that habit by working, in turns, as a street musician in Paris, a gondolier in San Diego, and a furniture mover in New York City. He connects to his readers as a reader, sharing personal anecdotes about all those things we who really love books experience: the tactile pleasures of books and coffee, headache and eye strain from reading too much, library culture, and the relationship dynamic of merging and eventually separating books with one's partner. Most importantly, Shea addresses the most important question in every reader's mind, "Am I the only one who enjoys this experience of reading in this way?" Shea assures us that no, we are not, and the solitary act of reading because much less lonely. After all, as Shea realizes, "You do not need to bring the book out into the world -- the world comes to you, through the book" (154).

Shea spent 12 months reading the 20 volumes of the OED (2nd ed. published in 1989). He's written Reading the OED to show the fruits of his labors, breaking the book into 26 alphabetical chapters, each with some of his favorite words and definitions. Here are some gems from the collection (with paraphrased meanings):

acnestis n. that spot on your back you can't reach to scratch

balter v. to dance clumsily

cachinnator n. someone who laughs too loud or too much

cimicine adj. smelling like bugs

dyspathy n. the antithesis of sympathy

erozable adj. readily influenced by flattery

elucubration n. studying or writing by candlelight

empleomania n. a compulsion to hold public office

fard v. to conceal facial blemishes with cosmetics

fornate v. to spend money that one has not yet earned

gaum v. to stare vapidly

gound n. that gunk the corners of your eyes a.k.a eye boogers

jehu n. a fast or reckless driver

jentacular adj. of or pertaining to breakfast

kandedort n. an awkward situation

lant v. to add urine to ale, in order to make it stronger

obdormition n. the falling asleep of a limb

opsigamy n. marrying late in life

pissupprest n. the holding in of urine

queaning n. association with women of immodest character

quisquilious adj. or the nature of garbage or trash

quomodocunquize v. to make money in any way possible

rapin n. an unruly art student

yepsen n. the amount that can be held in two hands cupped together, also the two cupped hands themselves

zoilus n. an envious critic

These words show that there is a term for everything, and they do make me itch to crack open the OED myself and find some more, which is exactly what Shea wants us to do with his book. He wants us to stop thinking about the OED as a dust-collector and realize it for what it is: the centerpiece of our living, changing language.



Shea, Ammon. Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages. New York: Penguin, 2008.

The Gravedigger's Daughter by Joyce Carol Oates

Oates' work has a sentimentality and melodrama that is more characteristic of an earlier style of fiction, of Dreiser or even Hardy. And if that indeed is your aim, The Gravedigger's Daughter will not disappoint. Oates hits all the stops here: coming of age, anti-Semitism, tortured love, grisly scenes of domestic violence, a murder mystery and, of course, the Oatesian twist ending.

But we'll get to that in a bit.

The Gravedigger's Daughter is the story of Rebecca Schwart, daughter of Jacob and Anna Schwart, German-Jewish refugees from Hitler who fled to America in 1936. Jacob can only find work as a gravedigger and the family takes up residence in a cottage in the Chatauqua Falls, New York cemetery. In bitter irony, they are persecuted by their neighbors, who think they are Nazis, and Jacob loses his mind to the demons of his past. He eventually shoots himself and his wife in front of Rebecca.

Rebecca later marries an abusive man and must flee him with their young son, starting a long string of "keeping-going." It's at this point, about half way through the novel, that Oates seems to lose control. Her writing appears rushed, she repeatedly uses "that" when she means "which," and she introduces too many new characters with the promise of developing them further, only to drop them almost immediately thereafter. This may be an effort to show, through style, that Rebecca's life has also become rushed and harried, but the real effect is that of sloppiness and self-indulgence, clashing with the book's motif: "In animal life the weak are quickly disposed of. So you must hide your weakness."

Oates also fails to develop her secondary characters to any satisfying degree. This was true of Black Girl/White Girl, too. It's like seeing the world with someone else's thumb over your camera lens.

And her exploration of a Jewish girl's search for identity seems trite and heavy-handed. As Siegel puts it, "Oates has discovered the Holocaust, and she labors mightily to incorporate it into her distinctive vision." It's easy, living in New York City in the 21st century, to almost forget that anti-Semitism exists. But it did and still does very much in some places, as my mom found out when she showed up to her first year of college at SUNY Buffalo in 1963 and a girl knocked on her door to "see what one looked like." And yet nowhere, except in Oates' world, could a woman be called a "dirty Jew" after every bad thing that happens to her. Oates couldn't have treated her subject with less subtlety than if she had painted a big gold star on her back.

That's overall: no subtlety. Oates is incredibly prolific, which is understandable because it doesn't seem like she works very hard at crafting her novels, or even gives them the once-over. She's hit or miss, so take your chances.

Black Girl/White Girl by Joyce Carol Oates

I'm new to Oates, which seems impossible given the rates at which both she writes and I read, but it's true. This is the first of her works that I've read, and as ornery as my reviews have been lately, I have to give this one a rave. Despite its title, Oates' novel avoids simple constructions of black and white to offer the reader a complex range of characters, plot, and drama.

Oates tells the story, based on actual events at a college campus in the 1970s, as "a text without a title," a "personal inquiry" by Generva (Genna) Hewett-Meade, who has been haunted for 15 years by the death of her college roommate. Genna is the white girl of the title, a descendant of the Quakers who founded the exclusive Schuyler College where the action of the story takes place. Her roommate, Minette Swift, is a merit scholar from Washington D.C., the daughter of a black preacher.

An author could get plenty of mileage out of this odd couple arrangement, but Oates doesn't let herself get lazy with her storytelling. This is not a case of white/establishment v. black/underprivileged. Genna's father, Max Meade, is a radical activist lawyer whose ties to Vietnam protestors, the Black Panthers, and various left-wing fugitives from justice have him under constant F.B.I. surveillance. Her parents' untraditional marriage, her mother's drug use, and the parade of Max's acolytes in and out of her life make Genna an outcast in the very college her family founded. Minette, on the other hand, comes from a conservative and eminent background. Whereas Genna's father is running from the law, the Reverend Swift is a powerful and well-regarded minister profiled in The Beacon magazine. Minette feels morally, spiritually, and intellectually superior to her classmates, which of course makes her as much as outcast as Genna.

Because of her snobbery, Minette is viciously persecuted by her peers, both black and white. Her bedroom window is smashed in the middle of the night, her belongings go missing only to be found defiled, and Minette discovers the message "go home niggr [sic]" in her mailbox. The more she suffers, the more Genna reaches out to her, hoping that they can comfort each other in their aloneness. But the more she suffers, the more Minette pushes Genna away, hardening more and more in her defensive self-righteousness.

Minette meets a tragic end, as we've known from the novel's beginning, but Oates chooses to end not with Minette's death, but with Genna visiting her father in prison, bringing him the manuscript that is this novel. This ending adds a new layer to the book; suddenly it becomes not a book about black and white but about fathers and daughters. Both Genna and Minette worship and are ruled by their fathers, even (especially?) in their absence. Genna lives for the five minutes on the phone with her mercurial dad, and Minette calls home daily, steeping herself in the religiosity that is the mode of her life her father has laid out for her. There is an Electra aspect to these relationships, of course. Oates doesn't hesitate to describe, through Genna's childhood eyes, Max's bald head as "an upright blood-engorged penis." But the analysis of father-daughter relationships in what is ostensibly a book about relationships serves another purpose.

Looking back 15 years after Minette's death, Genna admits that she's only beginning to understand the many nuances of race relations (as are we, 55 years after Brown v. Board of Education). She wonders if the abuse "hadn't been purely personal, aimed against Minette Swift as an individual, and not 'racist,'" and simultaneously realizes "how swiftly and crudely the personal becomes the racial."

The story of Genna Meade and Minette Swift so quickly and easily becomes Black Girl/White Girl, a faceless, nameless construction. When we focus on people instead of stereotypes, we can make racism disappear, but as Genna/Oates says, the personal "swiftly and crudely" becomes the racial.

The Clerkenwell Tales, The Lambs of London, and The Fall of Troy by Peter Ackroyd

I had high hopes for Peter Ackroyd, hopes that were bitterly disappointed. Before I'd even read a page of his work, I knew him from London: The Biography, which won critical acclaim for its comprehensive and vibrant survey of 2,000 years of London's history. So when I brought home these three slim volumes from the library: The Clerkenwell Tales, The Lambs of London, and The Fall of Troy, I was ready for a long afternoon of bliss. But alas, no.

Ackroyd errs most with The Clerkenwell Tales, and his biggest error is aligning himself with Chaucer, setting his novel in the last year of the poet's life and assuring his readers that many of his characters "are also to be found in the Canterbury Tales." This does nothing to help Ackroyd's story and rather hinders it. Though the 23 chapters are broken into tales (The Prioress' Tale, The Reeve's Tale, etc.), the actual stories often bear no resemblance to those in Chaucer's poem, and they lack both the poetry of the original and the sense of being on a journey. Ackroyd sets himself against an epic poet and achieves an epic fail.

The Lambs of London is no better. Once again, rather than standing on his own two feet in the world of fiction, Ackroyd relies too heavily on his predecessors. In this novel about a Shakespeare hoax, Mary Lamb refers to London as a "great jakes" in just the fifth line. Gack! Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare, we don't need Peter Ackroyd to write Shakespeare (badly).

Fortunately, the last volume of Ackroyd's work I read allowed me to leave him on a high(er) note. The Fall of Troy tells the story of Heinrich Obermann, an archeologist who seeks to unearth Homer's world, through the voice of Sophia, his much younger, Greek-born wife. Again, Ackroyd is speaking to his ancestors; this time, to Melville as he fashions the Ahab-like, monomaniacal Obermann. It's a nice novel, nothing spectacular, but at least it saved me from having wasted an entire afternoon.

In the Garden of the North American Martyrs and The Night in Question by Tobias Wolff

To reaffirm my belief that Tobias Wolff is a great writer, I chose to read two of his short story collections: In the Garden of the North American Martyrs (1981) and The Night in Question (1996). After all, short stories are really what Wolff does best, and his best is exquisite. But while I certainly can't find anything to complain about in Wolff's craft, I still can't say that reading these collections was a pleasant experience. Wolff so expertly gets to the heart of his characters' lonely states and holds them up to the reader like so many unflattering mirrors; it's enough to leave anyone weeping in the dark out of self-pity (not that I did this or anything....ahem).

The twelve stories of In the Garden of the North American Martyrs follow characters who find their places in the world eroding. In the title story, a brown-nosing professor interviews for a job at a prestigious Eastern college, only to learn that she was never really a serious candidate for the position. Another professor, in “An Episode in the Life of Professor Brooke,” realizes that his belief that he could positively affect the lives of others through academia is a myth. “Face to Face” tortuously recounts a decidedly un- romantic weekend vacation for a couple who have grown too far apart.

The Night in Question (1996)'s fifteen stories are similar to those of In the Garden of the North American Martyrs for characters who seek meaning out of life, and find none. The opening tale, “Mortals” is of a man who reports his own death to the local newspaper, hoping to see an outpouring of friends and family. He is sorely disappointed, of course. Other stories follow a book critic who is shot and killed while standing in line at the bank, a young woman who visits her father after his nervous breakdown, and a devoted sister struggling with a brother who obsessively recites a biblical sermon. Wolff doesn't lose his humor, as in "The Other Miller'' a story about a soldier relieved of duty after an erroneous report of his mother's death, who decides to go along with the mistake so he can get out and have a good time. But the overwhelming tone reflects Wolff's lines from "Migraine:" "...Everyone was alone all the time...Even together, people were as solitary as cows in a field all facing off in different directions."

This thought is probably all too true, and Wolff should be commended for articulating it in such a graceful way, with such masterfully-constructed tales. But I read to escape the loneliness of reality, so to find it there so bleak, so heartbreaking, is just too cold and cruel.

Old School by Tobias Wolff

After my last few reviews, I've really wanted to read something that I could write about favorably. I figured Old School would be a sure bet, since I loved Wolff's memoir, This Boy's Life. But alas, I was disappointed yet again. It's not that Old School is a bad novel, it's not just not a particularly good one.

Wolff writes from his own experience about a Jewish boy trying to assimilate into a New England prep school. It's both a coming-of-age tale and the study of a writer's development. Which is lovely, except that there's nothing to set it apart from any other book about any other prep school misfit. There are moments of sparkling clarity, like when Wolff's narrator reflects on how being a writer allows him to "escape the problems of blood and class":

Writers formed a society of their own outside the common hierarchy. This gave them a power not conferred by privilege -- the power to create images of the system they stood apart form, and thereby to judge it.

But such instances of insight and masterfully crafted prose are too few and far between to carry and entire novel on their shoulders. Wolff is a good writer, he may even be a great one, but not because of the mediocre Old School.

Lancelot by Walker Percy

A novel doesn't require the reader to love the protagonist in order for it to be a successful work of fiction. Crime and Punishment, A Clockwork Orange, and An American Tragedy all have hateful main characters that are still so well-developed we can't help but identify with them in some way. Not so with Lancelot. Walker Percy's fourth novel ends up being nothing but a bitter, melodramatic rant that leaves the reader cold, without any connection to the characters or plot excepts for perhaps a vague sense of nausea.

Lancelot Andrewes Lamar, a relic of a Southern gentleman in the brash 1970s, carries the sole burden of narrating this tale. His is the only voice, which is unfortunate because, like a crusty old man at a dinner party, one tends to tune out his rants against the decadence of his era.

"I won't have it," he says. "The great whorehouse and fagdom of America....I do not propose to live in Sodom or to raise my son and daughters in Sodom."

The book is a string of similar invectives against blacks, women, and just about everything else. Though the viewpoints are provocative, they become tedious with repetition.

This wouldn't be the end of the world -- I don't have to agree with Lancelot to enjoy the book and the fact that I don't might actually make it more interesting -- but Percy offers his reader no way to connect to this man or his world. The voice is inconsistent and wandering and the character himself is entirely one-dimensional. There's no sense of warmth, no humanity. You can imagine a well-developed character walking off the page and living an independent life; these characters can barely survive the work they're already in.

Plot, you ask? Oh, yeah. There is one: some tiresome melodrama involving infidelity and revenge. No plot, though, no matter how thrilling, can save a novel from lack of character development.

And then there's the utter failure of Percy's Arthurian gimmick. In addition to Lancelot, there's also Percival and Merlin. Is there a parallel with the Arthurian legend that will enhance and enlighten both tales? I'm afraid not. The farthest Percy gets with this tack is an excuse for Lancelot to call his obsession over his wife's cheating a "quest...for the Unholy Grail." But she is no Guinevere and he is certainly no Knight of the Round Table, so the metaphor is entirely lost.

I try not to be too harsh with my criticisms; it's too easy to fall into the trap of constantly writing bad reviews because they're more interesting to read and write than good ones. But I have to take off the kid gloves here. If I could take back the two hours I spent reading Lancelot to spend on another, quality piece of fiction, I certainly would.

A Month of Sundays by John Updike

Updike's title refers to his novel's structure. We're reading the daily diary of the Reverend Thomas Marshfield, whose sexual indiscretions with his organist (only one among Updike's many double entendres) have resulted in his exile from family and flock. He has been banished to a desert retreat run by the impregnable Mrs. Prynne, where he reflects on his errors and continues to write ad libidum (there Updike goes again) sermons that he will never deliver.

This is one of the novels where you can tell the author had a lot of fun writing it. What New York Times reviewer Anatole Broyard called "double-entendre schizophrenic word salads" are the manifestations on the page of Updike doing what every good writer does: enjoying the written word and testing its limits. Yes, A Month of Sundays is often a pain to read because of Marshfield's bombastic style, and the thinly-veiled metaphors of sin and pleasure and repentance are just too weak, but appreciate this novel for what it is: a step in the developing career of a great writer.

The Position by Meg Wolitzer

When Roz and Paul Mellow write a book about sex in the 1960s, they don't worry about their four children finding it. Rather, they leave it on the bookshelf as a gift to their offspring, a way to help them discover the joys of sex. Because in the Mellows' world, sex is only a source of joy, a uniting force between a man and a woman under the warm glow of love.

But as all the Mellows, both children and parents, mature, they learn that sex is so much more. It divides as much as it unites, causes as much pain as it does joy. Sex brings the dangers of AIDs. And it is not so neatly confined to heterosexual relationships.

Wolitzer's novel explores the lives of Roz and Paul Mellow's four children: Michael, Holly, Dashiell, and Claudia, through their sex lives as they learn these harsh truths. But the constant introduction of sex never feels prurient or gratuitous, as is the danger with such a topic. Rather, Wolitzer always seamlessly connects sex to larger ideas about human connection, family, and what it means to feel comfortable in one's own skin. It is a deeply enjoyable, masterfully crafted work.

Faith Fox by Jane Gardam

Does anyone in a Jane Gardam novel call before visiting someone? Apparently not, because then she would be at a loss for plot devices. This was a minor detail implausibility in Old Filth, but it's impossible to ignore in Faith Fox. Characters are constantly crossing and re-crossing each other in a frenzy of missed connections, giving the novel the feeling of a table-tennis game. You have telephones, people. Use them.

Gardam published Faith Fox in 1996, eight years before Old Filth. It's striking to see how much her writing matured in that later work, and how far it had to come. Where Old Filth is nuanced and subtle, Faith Fox is heavy-handed and trite. In short: a groaner. A group of wayward folks, loosely linked by familial ties and their lost FAITH are drawn together by the advent of a motherless child named FAITH and through her eventually find their FAITH. Perhaps if they had a little more faith in telephones at the start of the book we could forget this whole mess. Next!

Old Filth by Jane Gardam

I'm happy to have stumbled across Jane Gardam's work. Her writing is the kind that never fails to keep me engaged and is the hardest, I think, to accomplish. Gardam novels boast character development that is substantial but not heavy-handed, deep feeling that never turns saccharine, awareness of the extraordinary details of ordinary life, and just the right amount of sardonic British humor.

Old Filth (an acronymic nickname for "Failed in London, try Hong Kong") is a retired solicitor who has lived most of his life in Hong Kong with his wife, Betty, and has returned to England to spend his golden years. This is the story of a man's life, but Gardam only tells us the beginning and end. She alternates chapters between Filth's childhood in British-controlled Malaysia as a "Raj Orphan," modeled after Rudyard Kipling semi-autobiographical short story "Baa Baa Black Sheep, and his current state as an 80 year-old widower (Betty dies suddenly while gardening).

But Old Filth is really a story of a man's learning to love. Filth's mother died in childbirth and his father is mad. After being sent "Home" (an ironic term, since Filth has no real home anywhere) to avoid tropical disease, the boy is tossed among relatives and guardians who are at best distant, absorbed in their own troubles, and at worst abusive. "All my life...I have been left, or dumped, or separated by death from everyone I loved or who cared for me." Filth makes one emotional connection with a school friend, Patrick Ingoldsby. He falls in love with all the Ingoldsbys and is devastated when he realizes that he can never truly be part of the family, or any family for that matter. After Pat dies in World War II, Filth keeps everyone around him at a distance, even his wife. He and Betty sleep in separate bedrooms, since double beds are "for the bourgeoisie," he abhors the idea of having children, and he refuses to even recall his own maid's name, despite the years she has worked for him. Filth, as Gardam portrays him, is an extremely lonely man who cannot, or is loath to, connect with his fellow human beings.

Filth is a dynamic character, but Gardam keeps his transformation believable. Whether because his wife's death exacerbates his loneliness or reminds him of his own mortality and need to touch the world before he leaves it, Filth does begin to reach out slightly by the novel's end. But these gestures are subtle, never out of sync with the graceful balance of emotions Gardam has constructed here. Filth remembers his maid's name. He visits his neighbor for weekly chess games. He becomes less cantankerous, but 80 years of emotional lameness cannot be cured in an instant, and Gardam doesn't try to fool us that it can.

Which is why her twist ending is grossly out of place in this otherwise beautifully nuanced work. I won't divulge any secrets for those who wish to read the book themselves. I'll only comment that Gardam mars an excellent piece of fiction with the kind of lurid plot details that characterize ten-cent drugstore novels. It's an unnecessary addition and an unwelcome one, but I won't let it ruin my deep appreciation for what remains a captivating and touching read.

Freaks: We Who Are Not As Others by Daniel P. Mannix

I devoured this book in an hour, poring over the endlessly fascinating tidbits like the fact that the ancient Romans used to stuff babies into vases to create deformed freaks for Coliseum shows, or that the Algonquin Round Table was founded by Robert Benchley and Dorothy Parker to protect Robert Sherwood from midgets.

Mannix does not use the term "freak" in any derogatory sense. Rather, the book is compiled with memories and snapshots from his own days as a carny; he considers himself among them. And he celebrates their lives: their marriages, their children, their career successes. For Mannix, to be a sideshow freak is to exhibit the height of character and entrepreneurialism. Freaks take characteristics that society deems disabilities and turn them into extraordinarily valuable assets, earning millions for themselves and their peers.

What is it about freaks -- indeed, about this book -- that draws us in? Are we merely gawking at what some have deemed pornography? Not as Mannix presents his work. He and we, his readers, are merely satisfying our natural curiosity about other humans, trying to understand "normal" through its aberrations. You'll learn a lot about the various ways people can be born and you'll come out of this experience truly more informed and more understanding.

Honestly, I closed the back cover and immediately wanted to hug a midget, or a giant, or a hairy woman! They are just so cool and so courageous and set an example for the rest of us that what makes you different really does make you beautiful.

The Lazarus Project by Aleksandar Hemon

I was equally struck by this beautiful novel's simultaneously incredible humor and incredible sadness. A perfect example of their seamless coexistence in these pages is when our narrator, Vladimir Brik, walks into his Chicago kitchen to make coffee before his wife, Mary, awakes:

I spotted a can in the corner whose red label read SADNESS. Was there so much of it they could can it and sell it? A bolt of pain went through my intestines before I realized that it was not SADNESS but SARDINES.

Brik's marriage is in trouble because of his struggles to find his place, his identity, both as Bosnian immigrant in America and a writer. So the mundane, domestic details of his home kitchen are coated in sadness, but also by a sense of absurdity, of things being out of place.

The humor also comes from the exaggeration inherent in Brik's tradition of storytelling. Brik explains that this is how stories are told in his country: they are exaggerated, stripped of all proportion and divorced from truth until the world they create is absurd. Brik is shocked when, at a dinner party early in their marriage, Mary questions the validity of one of his stories in front of strangers. This is breaking a code; he never tells a story in front of her again.

As Brik struggles to tell his own story -- to blend the Bosnian and American modes of narration -- he seeks to tell the true story of Lazarus Averbuch, a mysterious historical figure who was shot and killed after attacking the Chicago chief of police in 1908, an incident that caused a xenophobic reaction among Chicagoans that all Jews were violent anarchists. Averbuch's corpse is stolen, recalling his namesake, the Lazarus who was resurrected by Jesus. All the character's in this novel are exiles, including the biblical Lazarus, whom Brik considers exiled from death. Did he die eventually? Was he ever able to go home? Brik wonders.

Hemon's novel shows the author as a master craftsman, truly worthy of his 2004 MacArthur "genius grant." He's able to subtly interweave questions about religion, xenophobia, family, and partnership in such a way that none of it seems trite or heavy-handed, but so that it all fits together seamlessly. The humor and the pain are so carefully blended that they never clash but rather serve as each other's perfect complements. Though Brik may have trouble telling his own story, Hemon has obviously found his voice.

The Centaur by John Updike

I never know what to expect from an Updike novel. I've read some that I loved and some I just hated, which I suppose is to be expected with any author so prolific (Updike has written more than 50 books). Glancing over The Centaur before I began reading, I thought I was in for what New York Times book reviewer Orville Prescott called a "laborious construction of mythological puzzles...sabotaged by pomposity and tedium." I must say, though, I was pleasantly surprised.

Updike weaves the story of a disillusioned schoolteacher, George Caldwell, and his son, Peter, in 1940s rural Pennsylvania with the parallel myth of Chiron and Prometheus. Chiron, noblest of all the Centaurs, wandered the world in agony after being accidentally wounded by a poisoned arrow. So tormented with pain, Chiron begged the gods that he might die in place of Prometheus, the Titan who stole fire to give it to humans. After Chiron's death, Zeus made him a constellation.

George Caldwell, too is injured by an arrow: a dart from his tormenting students catches him in the ankle and he must limp to a mechanic to have it removed. But he is much more deeply wounded in spirit. His son, Peter, looks on at his father's suffering while still plagued by his own. Like Prometheus, Peter's skin is being consumed, though by psoriasis rather than a vulture. And like all the characters in The Centaur this physical pain is a sign of a deeper, emotional longing to connect with another human in some meaningful way. What does it mean to have a place in society? Like the volvox Caldwell teaches in his science class, to become a part of an organized society is to enter a compromised environment, with the result being certain death. The individual sacrifices himself for the whole, just as Chiron sacrifices himself for Prometheus and Caldwell for Peter (and Peter for Caldwell).

The Greek gods are not like our Judeo-Christian God. They are flawed, they are capable of heartbreak. Updike's scheme of drawing parallels between them and Peter Caldwell's story would totally fail if he weren't able to also draw the emotional parallel that supports it. All of Peter's gods are flawed. He lives in a world where there is no comforting Christ figure, no hope for salvation of any kind. Rather, his father and the other adults whom he might choose as role models are all deeply troubled in some way and it drives them to hurt others. It's a world of endlessly reaching out for some connection with another and constantly missing it, just as Greek mythology is full of pursuing an object -- a lover, a goal, glory -- and being disappointed. The only promise, as George Caldwell realizes, is to be remembered fondly in one's death. It's beautiful and tragic and Updike captures it perfectly, saving the novel from being overly academic and empty. This is not, as Prescott would have it, "a maze of pretentious experimentation" and showy virtuosity, but rather a graceful and heartfelt exploration of humans' needs for one another.

This Boy's Life by Tobias Wolff

I love memoirs. Maybe I shouldn't admit to that so readily, in the same way you don't easily confess to rushing home every day to watch Oprah. But I can't help it; I do. This confessional mode satisfies some essential part of the human psyche, the part that keeps us craning our necks at car accidents on the expressway. I want to know: What is your experience? What can it teach me about mine? The problem with most memoirs, however, is that they sour at some point, turning unbearable preachy and bombastic.

This Boy's Life has all the sensational elements of a page-turner: a poor upbringing, a drunken and abusive stepfather, delinquent adolescent behavior, and even some homoeroticism. Of course, it's not the story for which we should commend Wolff, as it is not fiction (though perhaps fictionalized), but the way he tells it. In line with Wolff's oeuvre, This Boy's Life is really a collection of short stories. These stories are like snapshots tucked in a family album, more in the order that someone remembered to paste them there than when they were taken. Wolff does not commit the cardinal error of memoir writing: pretending he recalls more than he did, or was aware of more than he was at the time. He resists retrospective analysis, steeping readers in the muddle of his adolescence just as he experienced it.

All memoirs should aspire to be like Wolff's. After all, these snapshots are all we ever have from which to view a life. And from them one can more easily achieve the purpose of memoir writing: the sense of shared experience. I may not have had an abusive stepfather or have grown up in a boarding house, but I do remember having a (toy) gun from which I wouldn't be separated and the (apparent) ingenuity to fudge school documents. Because of these congruities, I can connect with This Boy's Life and I'm sure others can, too, though their points of entry may differ. Wolff's humility in letting us see him as a child, and thereby see ourselves as children, rather than an older, wiser adult saves This Boy's Life from the fate that gives all memoirs a bad rap. Give it a good read before you turn your back on the genre forever.

The Last Witchfinder by James Morrow

The Last Witchfinder is really two books in one, woven together so seamlessly and inventively that alternating chapters begin and end with the same word. An example of Morrow's deft transitions:

An argumentum grande is growing inside me. I have achieved a mental / Pregnancy rarely saved the life of a convicted sorceress during the witch-hunting centuries, but a full womb was normally good for a temporary reprieve.

One tale is that of Jennet Stearne, daughter to a witch-hunter and niece and pupil of the female philosopher Isobel Mowbry, who is unsurprisingly burned at the stake, an act which commits Jennet to her aunt's legacy. Throughout a plot that rivals daytime soap operas for twists and turns, Jennet experiences a kidnapping by Native Americans, the loss of two children (one to smallpox, another to her husband's machinations), a shipwreck, and a fiery relationship with a 19 year-old Benjamin Franklin when she is 47 (the first cougar?). Her brother, Dunstan, marries the infamous Abigail Williams, the foremost accuser of the Salem witch trials, and becomes a witchfinder himself, while Jennet devotes herself to proving, with the help of Sir Isaac Newton, that witches do not exist.

Telling this story is another book; in this world Morrow has created for us, books write each other. The true author of Jennet's tale, it seems, is not Morrow himself, but rather Isaac Newton's "Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica." This is certainly a rather contrived way to frame what is essentially a historical novel, and I wonder how much Morrow intended to show off his own erudition with this authorial sleight of hand. I give him points for originality, a quality not always conducive to generating readable material. To my surprise and pleasure, however, Morrow's storytelling not only supports his showmanship, but is zested throughout with his gift for cleverly turned prose.

*Thanks again to Sarah Carbone and Dianne Schure for recommending this book to me, and especially to Sarah for lending me her copy.

Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman

Any decent review of Good Omens would be short; short enough to include only the words, "Go read it." To try to replicate or encapsulate Pratchett and Gaiman's witty prose, hilarious dialogue, and brilliant subplots would be sacrilege to the many who have run through many copies of the novel mainly because their paperbacks have disintegrated from overuse.

But, alas, such is the task I have set out for myself, and so I must try.

The premise: The Apocalypse is near. This is rather unfortunate, as the angel Aziraphale and the demon Crowley have grown to quite like humans in their respective capacities as the representatives of God and Satan on Earth. As they've become good friends, they hatch a plot to postpone the world's end by ensuring that the Antichrist, the son of a prominent American diplomat stationed in Britain, never develops the ability to discern between Good and Evil. Of course, the Antichrist child actually isn't (there was a switch-up at birth) and so high-jinks ensue as the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse assemble and the amusing prophecies of the 17th century prophet Agnes Nutter begin to come true.

The book is a quasi-parody of the 1976 film The Omen, and the character of Crowley is no doubt a reference to Aleister Crowley, the English occultist. It is steeped in that British brand of humor that blends two parts cynicism to one part absurdity, and stands as a hallmark of its genre (occult parody). Reading Good Omens isn't simply enjoying a comedic novel, however, it's initiation into a cult of ardent devotees. Do you dare to become one of them?

*Thank you to Dianne Schure and Sarah Carbone for bringing me over to the dark side.
*And for those of you die hard Pratchett/Gaiman fans, check out this Complete Listeners' Guide with AudioFile Magazine's must-listen's from both authors, interviews with four narrators, and a download of A Study in Emerald, written and read by Neil Gaiman.

Downtown Owl by Chuck Klosterman

I'm a huge fan of Klosterman's critical work. Fargo Rock City not only got a girl raised on Joan Baez and wheat germ to appreciate heavy metal, it got me to love it, too. Which is why I'm willing to forgive this very confused attempt at a novel, because I know there's some serious talent underneath the painful self-consciousness of Klosterman's adolescent attempt at fiction.

Klosterman's milieu is pop culture, and he finds this new medium very difficult. He uses several different devices to make himself more comfortable, all of which fail by getting in the way of the story. There's the constant name-dropping of 80s cultural references, and the cop-out of using "like an Altman film" as the sole description in some places. The barrage of witticisms is also distracting. In the first three pages alone, we're told that "the sun was burning and falling like the Hindenburg;" "His quadriceps stored enough lactic acid to turn a triceratops into limestone;" and "It would feel like being wrapped in cellophane while hauling bricks in a backpack." Clever, sure, but I want to read about the characters, not the author's wit.

Then, Klosterman does things with style that might work if they weren't so clichéd and if he could actually follow through with them to a reasonable point. But the ostentation of his writerly gimmicks lapses into absurdity by the novel's end. We are meant to understand that the book's action parallels that of George Orwell's 1984, which the Owl high school students are reading in their English classes (the year is 1983). And we follow three characters, each with their own separate chapters and points of view, who are meant to represent Winston, O'Brien, and Julia (Mitch, Horace, and --suprise!-- Julia). The town of Owl is a tiny fishbowl in North Dakota, and the characters can't even find privacy in this novel, since Klosterman reveals everyone's thoughts about everything to the point of disrupting the action. The book trots on nicely for a while, and then Klosterman totally loses it. He experiments with shorter chapters, combined chapters with all three protagonists' points of view (an epic fail), and an ending I'm still trying to work out.

Sorry, Chuck. Don't quit your day job.

Main Street and Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis

The protagonists of both Main Street and Babbitt take apparently disparate views toward small town life: Carol Kennicott née Milford would rather be anywhere else than Gopher Prairie, Minnesota, whereas George F. Babbitt cherishes the routine and (apparent) simplicity of the fictional Zenith, Winnemac. Lewis manipulates these two characters' views of what it means to live in middle America, and, of course, our own.

Carol Kennicott has big dreams. We meet her as a student in Blodgett College, full of poetry and sensibility. Her conflict arises from the fact that she doesn't lose these youthful aspirations after marrying a small town doctor and moving with him to the Midwest outpost of Gopher Prairie, known for its German farmers and gossip. Claustrophobic in her neat house with nothing but chores to fill her time, Carol becomes a Midwestern Madame Bovary, tormented by her conviction that anywhere other than Gopher Prairie and its restrictive social conventions would be an improvement. For fear of spoiling the novel's ending, I will only remark that Carol's ascent is not quite so linear.

Nor is it for George Babbitt. A realtor (don't dare call him a real estate agent) with a solid family, a car, and a nice house in the prestigious Floral Heights neighborhood, Babbitt thinks he's got it made. Sure his kids could be a little more obedient and sure he could smoke less, but Babbitt firmly believes that if everyone else strictly followed his dear principles of Morality, Republicanism, and Common Sense, the world would be a much better, happier place. That is, until Babbitt learns through hard experience that his convictions don't necessarily correspond to reality.

Carol's unhappiness stems from her inability to see what is good about her life, whereas Babbitt's downfall results from not seeing his own failings enough to forgive it in others. Lewis presents us with these two extreme and often ridiculous approaches to life, leaving us, his readers, to find some middle ground.

Freakonomics and Superfreakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner

While reading these two books, I started a mental list of how many people I should present with them as Christmas gifts. Talk about food for thought; these two collections of essays are both like seven-course meals of amuse-bouches. I don't even know where I would begin a review of these gems: the revelation that Roe v. Wade significantly reversed rising crime rates across the nation? the analytical breakdown of street economics, including drug dealers and prostitutes? the plan for global cooling?

Granted, the authors are intentionally provocative with their work and are conscious of writing for a lay audience. We lose the academic rigor that would call for the authors to substantiate these claims in any real depth. Several of Levitt's colleagues have taken exception to the unconventional nature of his research, but many others have praised him for bringing new life to a field that constantly threatens to dull the uninitiated at dinner parties. I, for one, am satisfied by the considerable end notes and the authors' rhetorical style of anticipating objections to their arguments. Maybe that reveals a degree of laziness on my part, but that will do for this brand of intellectual porn. In 15 minutes I can read one chapter and satisfy my urge for cool facts and well-spun rhetoric without the commitment of following a real academic study. Like the up-scale prostitute profiled in Superfreakonomics, these books offer a no muss, no fuss great time.

The Seal Wife By Kathryn Harrison

In Harrison's historical novel set in 1915, the protagonist, Bigelow Greene, a 26 year-old meteorologist from the Midwest, is hired by the Weather Bureau to set up an observation station in Anchorage, Alaska. As the town is only just developing as an outpost in the wilderness, Bigelow finds himself largely alone, trying to maintain his sanity in the harsh Arctic climate and struggling to supplement his meager government salary with odd jobs. He faces below-freezing temperatures and winter nights that begin at two in the afternoon. Most of all, though, he fights against the consuming loneliness reinforced by the bleakness around him in near Gothic fashion.

That is, of course, until Bigelow meets the Aleut woman. She never speaks to him, only allows him to follow her home one day to a frame house on the mud flats outside of Anchorage. They establish a routine in which he brings her a rabbit he has caught, she cooks it for him, they have sex and then she soaks in the bath while he talks to her about his life and his meteorological obsessions. She never says a word. One day, she disappears, and Bigelow is devastated. The Aleut woman becomes a new fixation for Bigelow, from which he seeks solace in drink and other, similarly silent women.

This is the most curious aspect of Bigelow's character: despite his loneliness, he is most attracted to women who are silent and repulsed by those who would dare open their mouths. One prostitute he visits recognizes this and gags herself with a towel to please him, saying, "I know you can't stand my talking. So, here." In the Aleut woman's absence, the only other female who appeals to Bigelow, at least for a time, is Miriam, the daughter of a local shop owner who has a stammer so severe that she can sing, but not talk, and communicates by writing on a notepad. "You like em' quiet, I guess," says Miriam's father, Getz. "Women that don't talk back. Can't say as I blame you." What is the reason for this preference? Is it, as Bigelow maintains, an attraction to the mystery of a silent woman, to the fact that "She is self-possessed. She possesses herself,"? Or is it because he is so consumed by his own obsession with charting the weather, an obsession that dominates every other chapter of Harrison's novel, that he cannot allow another's thoughts to enter his mind?

And of what significance is the weather? It's what brings Bigelow to Alaska despite the low pay: he craves the opportunity to prove his hypothesis that a great current of air sweeps in a circular fashion from the poles to the equator and back again, causing the air high over the poles to be warm, and the air over the equator cold. To test his theory, he designs and constructs an enormous kite to take temperature readings thousands of feet above the earth, thrilled with the idea that he is "recording a narrative that unfolds invisibly to most people." His work is a success: unbeknownst to him, word of the kite has given him a reputation as a scientific innovator in Anchorage.

Yet, he can find no happiness without the Aleut woman. He may be able to interpret the weather, to give it a narrative and a history, but he cannot do the same for her. He knows nothing about her -- her family, her feelings; not even her name -- and his solipsism prevents him from knowing how to ask.

Love Me By Garrison Keillor

I apologize for any lack of variety in my book choices. When I find a writer I like, I start a love affair with them so intense I can't touch, taste or smell anything else. The only thing to do is to let the infatuation run its natural course, until either I lose interest or run out of material. Right now, I'm totally enamored of Garrison Keillor. I read several of his Lake Wobegon novels before starting this blog and will continue until, broken-hearted, I find myself single again, trying to pick up someone new in the library.

It was a happy accident that I chose this particular Keillor work, Love Me, to read immediately after The Kiss. Both works grapple with the Horatio Alger myth that one should aim high, should be in constant pursuit of happiness. In The Kiss and Love Me, acting on one's aspirations only brings chaos and misery; the male protagonists only reach a measure of contentment at the end of the novels by deciding to make the best of what they have.

The big difference is that Keillor's treatment of this idea is dosed with the author's trademark humor. This isn't a Lake Wobegon novel, though. Rather, it's a semi-autobiographical (and self-referential) tale of a middle-aged alcoholic with writers' block and an inability to keep his pecker in his pants. Despite his dark subject matter, Keillor never leaves us without the light of laughter. True to his Prairie Home Companion origins, Keillor dispenses witty aphorisms at every turn to blunt the severity of his protagonist's, Larry Wyler's, complete ineptness. Consider the scene in which Wyler first commits adultery. It's a despicable act: while his wife, Iris, is out of town, Wyler brings home a mutual friend of theirs, remembering to clear Iris' underwear out of the way first. Comically, his back gives out before he can perform and he leaves us with this pearl of wisdom: "It is so clear to me why adultery should always take place at a hotel; easier to make an exit if things don't work out. Never commit adultery in your own home. This is a rule never to be broken." That's the Eleventh Commandment, no?

Eventually, Keillor's humor descends from amusingly witty to just plain wacky. Wyler gets a job at the New Yorker, which he soon discovers is being run by the Italian mafia. And guess who John Updike asks to put out a hit on the publisher, Tony Crossandotti? Keillor loses me a little here, but as with all his novels, you just have to suspend disbelief, retain a sense of humor, sit back and enjoy the ride. And it is a fun ride, filled with all the sparkle and charm that characterize Keillor's work. If his protagonist is a narcissistic toad, that's okay. Keillor's writing shines all the more for making you like Wyler anyway.

Envy By Kathryn Harrison

Harrison herself paraphrases pretty well what goes on in her novel: sex.

"Getting it. Not getting it. Getting it, but not enough of it. Getting it from the wrong person. Getting it but not It. Coming, not coming, coming too soon, coming too late. Coming, but only under certain highly specific circumstances. Fetishism. Priapism. Frigidity. Bondage, humiliation, latex."

Envy certainly appeals to prurient tastes. So much so that I felt I should be carrying it around in brown paper wrapping, rather than just shoving it into my tote bag, as is my habit with books. Or maybe it would be better to have read it aloud on the Wendy Williams Show to a chorus of "Oh, snap!"s and "Oh no he didn't!"s, as Harrison uses every plot twist imaginable to engage her readers. Tragic deaths, adultery, accidental incest and rape are all in there, and I think I've even missed a few.

Maybe the salacious content of Harrison's work is an effort to deflect attention away from the author herself. Yes, this is the same Kathryn Harrison who wrote The Kiss, the memoir in which she revealed having an incestuous relationship with her father decades before Mackenzie Phillips went on Oprah. You'd think such a book would be a career-ender for sure, a point from which no one could move forward either personally or professionally. And yet Harrison has done a remarkable job defining herself by her work and not her past. She's written 11 well-crafted novels, and Envy is among her best.

It's about sex, sure, but the title is Envy, after all. Sex is a tool, a way to gain power and take it from others because you want what they have. The protagonist, William Moreland, is a psychoanalyst steeped in the belief that is Freud's legacy: that you can change your circumstances, your very being, and make your life happier just by understanding it better. Every character in Envy wants what others have. More specifically, they want to take from others what they feel they, themselves, lack. Will has a twin brother, Mitchell, who is absent from the action of the book and lives only in Will's obsessing over who got the better lot in life. From what we read of him, Mitchell feels much the same way and breaks taboo to get what he believes he deserves. Will is envious of others' children, having lost his own son to a tragic accident, and makes quite a mess of his life as a result. The whole book is a mess, in fact. It's a catalog of a chaotic existence, in which people scramble all over each other trying to get the biggest slice of the pie. Only when Will and his wife, Carole, make a silent pact to make the best of what they have can they find some peace and move forward with their lives.

Harrison's novel is a page-turner that will titillate you on all fronts. But it also goes deeper than that. Envy makes a cogent argument about the desperate search for something better that characterizes modern life. We've become so convinced that our lives are totally in our power, that we can have anything we want if we only reach out and take it, that we've lost sight of happiness altogether.

Liberty By Garrison Keillor

For me, opening a Garrison Keillor novel is like approaching the holiday season, when all the Christmases of your childhood are still alive and well in your heart, untainted by reality. I go to Lake Wobegon to escape, to imagine a place where "all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average." Those Midwestern Norwegians get up to their antics, sure, but the worst problem in this sleepy town is getting a seat at the Chatterbox at lunchtime so the waitress, Darlene, can pour you a cup of coffee and you can catch all the local gossip.

Liberty, though, is like the Christmas when your parents are screaming about the turkey, your drug-addicted brother doesn't come home and you're worried that if something doesn't start going right, somebody is bound to pull a gun. And that person just might be you.

Someone does pull a gun in Liberty, a rare occurrence in a Keillor novel, unless it's dosed with the proper amount of humor. There's less humor here, though, than plain old whining. The woman packing heat is Irene Bunsen, whose husband, Clint Bunsen, has been carrying on an affair with the town's Fourth of July parade's Miss Liberty. There's nothing especially attractive about Miss Liberty, although Keillor mentions her flat stomach at every turn, and she doesn't even seem to like Clint despite sleeping with him on occasion, even running off to California with another man. Yet, Clint spends most of the book pining after her. The rest of his musings are devoted to the life he might have led had he stayed in California after getting out of the Navy, lo, those many years ago. The men of Lake Wobegon are family men who don't ditch responsibilities out of boredom and have no regrets. Sure, they have their quirks and insecurities, or the novels would be without humor. But Keillor has veered far from his tried-and-true formula with Liberty, and I wonder why. I can go just about anywhere for existential whinings; I go to Lake Wobegon to get away from all that. You don't go to your vacation home to worry about the plumbing.

Finishing the novel was also like Christmas. Closing the back cover, I understand that in order to keep the myth -- of idyllic small town life, of happy family gatherings -- alive, I need to forget everything that just happened.

American Gods By Neil Gaiman

I have to confess, science fiction/fantasy/allegorical novels don't really trip my trigger. The few books of these genres that I love (ie: Harry Potter and the Southern Vampire Series), I love because of the author's captivating storytelling, which is also what hooked me on Neil Gaman's American Gods.

We enter the story with Shadow, who's about to leave prison after serving a three-year sentence for assaulting his cohorts in a bank robbery. His outlook is bleak ("He was no longer scared of what tomorrow might bring, because yesterday had brought it.") but he gets through the days by creating rituals to impose some order on his small existence. Shadow makes lists of what he'll do when he's free again, practices coin tricks and searches for meaning in weather changes. Throughout the novel, he'll continue this gravitation toward ritual, illustrating Gaiman's point that we lost too much when we left behind the gods and religion of our ancestors; man needs ritual to feel alive.

No one is this book is alive. Shadow's wife, Laura, dies the day of his release from prison in a car accident while fellating his best friend. She spends the duration of the book as a corpse or ghost (Gaiman is never quite clear on this point), popping in and out of Shadow's life to remind him of how much he misses her and supply the object of his quest: to either bring her back to life or give her a restful death. Laura points out that Shadow isn't alive either, despite the heart beating in his chest ("You're like this big, solid, man-shaped hole in the world").

I enjoy Gaiman's characterization of Shadow: a man seeking something sacred in a world full of profanity (Gaiman's America is gray, cold, and full of foul odors). He meticulously studies the board meeting minutes of the small town where he moves after his release, desperately seeking a heritage not his own, some sense of continuity to life. He tries (and often fails) to build relationships with the people around in the hopes of forming a human connection.

From there, though, Gaimain veers into a thinly veiled religious allegory. There are two camps of fantastical characters: the old gods and the new. Shadow is enlisted into the camp of the old gods: Odin, a leprechaun named Mad Sweeney, an Eastern European god called Czernobog and Egyptian deities like Bast and Horus. The power of these old gods is waning as they teeter on the brink of obsolescence because people don't believe in them anymore and gods can only exist in the hearts of the faithful. Instead, Americans are "clinging to growing knots of belief: gods of credit card and freeway, of Internet and telephone, of radio and hospital and television, gods of plastic and of beeper and of neon." Odin wants to confront the new gods before he and his fellows are obliterated; he and Shadow, harried by agents of the new gods, travel across America, seeking out the old gods and asking for their aid.

Odin is slain in battle and Shadow is committed to conducting his vigil. This means -- wait for it -- hanging from a crucifix. And get this: he develops a bleeding wound in his side! I get it; Shadow is the messiah come to return the ancient gods to their rightful place in the heart of these faithless Americans, whose lives are literally shit (Gaiman seems to really like describing feces, since there's plenty of it in this book) without a sense of religion and ritual. I think there's something to this point -- religion is a binding force in society and human beings crave some degree of ritual to center their lives and give them a sense of purpose, whether it be going to church or the gym -- I just wish Gaiman could get to it quicker and not shove it down my throat so much.