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.