The Whore’s Child and Other Stories
By Richard Russo
Knopf; 225 pp.; $24
“Slow and steady wins the race,”
believes one of the characters in Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Russo’s first
collection of short fiction, The Whore’s Child and Other
Stories. And it is most certainly a maxim Russo himself holds to in
this collection. After painting the staggering canvas of last year’s
Empire Falls, for which he won the Pulitzer, it’s fitting that
the artist present us with a series of equally assured smaller works now, the
consistently unperturbed pace of each betraying the timing of a seasoned novelist yet
slowly accelerating toward a subtle, full-circle reckoning in 40 pages or less.
Seven spot-on stories make up The Whore’s
Child, and all are emotionally honed pieces illuminating the minor
travails inherent to all human relationships, but the prevailing theme is one Russo
has made his name artfully exploring in his novels — that of the infidelity and
vulnerability of men and women in the midst of perpetual marriages/separations. Also
figuring wonderfully in several stories is childhood and its abiding, frustrating
helplessness, both physical and spiritual.
Academia makes a few appearances as well, but it
is stagnation in it and escape from it that fuel the narrative engines.
A refreshing first-person tale, the title story introduces us to the epitome of a
doormat kind of nice guy, a college professor who is teaching a fiction seminar disrupted by
the arrival of an old Belgian nun. Intent on workshopping her autobiographical
memoir, Sister Ursula settles in, the niceties of actual enrollment, prerequisites, and
department protocol be damned. Our professor confides that he doesn’t have the heart
to kick a nun out of class, but it is her
intriguing manuscript that cinches the deal: Just a
little girl of 5 or 6, she was brought to a
convent school by a man she knows was her father and whose ruin was his wife, Ursula’s
mother, a beautiful Rubenesque prostitute of whom she carried a picture. As her memoir
grows and the professor and his other students uselessly encourage her to add fictive
elements, Ursula relives a bitter, questioning life at the center of which is the dream of
a father who should have returned, as he said he would, to rescue her and restore her
life, minus his wife. A quiet, observant student sitting in the back picks up on much
more than the poor nun is aware of and, in effect, hands her the key to freedom from her
life’s torment. This work will burn its way into your memory. As far as shattering
denouement and brilliant resolution go — the last paragraph is to be savored — it is a tale
up there with the best of them.
Another real doozy is “Joy Ride,” a
man’s remembrance of a boyhood cross-country trip with his mother, in flight from his
goofy father. With sometimes hilarious dialogue of such deliberate and natural precision
and characters in which you can see yourself and your family, it ranks as a near-perfect
modern archetype: There is the journey with its almost Odyssean circuit, the mother
unconsciously seen as goddess through the eyes of a son whose cowardly sins he believes
she cannot fathom, and the long shadow cast by the boy’s father, who may or may not
bother to pursue them.
Russo makes it all seem so effortless in
The Whore’s Child. The patient spirit of
his work makes you feel so cozy, so pampered, you can get lost in it, forget it’s all
artifice, until it arrests you with its hard-won
insight. Challenging work, this is not, nor should
it be. Here is a mirror held up to a few lives,
and there is much to be learned in it.
— Jeremy Spencer
The Emperor Of
Ocean Park
By Stephen L. Carter
Knopf; 675 pp.; $26.95
Stephen L. Carter explores a section of African-American life that is foreign not only
to most Americans but many African Americans as well. In his debut novel,
The Emperor Of Ocean Park, Carter, professor of law
at Yale, looks at the lives of the privileged and the hidden responsibility that
accompanies the glamour.
Carter’s novel begins as more a childhood recounting of an upper-class
African-American family than it does the suspense
thriller that it is bound to become based on the last lines of the prologue: “My father
died at his desk. And at first, only my sister and a few stoned callers to late-night
radio shows believed he had been murdered.”
The emperor of the title is Judge Oliver Garland, who has suddenly died and
left behind three adult children. The story is told through the eyes of his son,
Talcott Garland, who is not the oldest but is the most trusted. Throughout the
novel, Talcott reveals the lifelong discord between him and his father. He even
continues to use the nickname “Misha”
(after a Russian chess champion), in rebellion against his father’s rule.
As a staunch conservative Republican, Judge Garland’s career had been on
the fast track, with an inevitable Supreme Court appointment by
then-President Ronald Reagan. But his political
views and influence mean nothing when his reputation is unraveled during
televised nomination hearings, which reveal his dealings with organized crime. The
judge never recovers, and neither does Misha. His father is relegated to speaking
engagements, radio talk shows, and a memory of what was, while Misha
becomes a law professor and attempts to escape his father’s disgrace.
After his father’s death, Misha is told by a relative that his father had
planned for him to lead the family. Unaware of any such plan, Misha dismisses this as
the mutterings of a madwoman until, at his father’s funeral, the person
responsible for his father’s humiliation
approaches him and inquires about “the
arrangements.”
While dealing with the possibility of foul play in his father’s death, Misha
also deals with his own affairs: ostracism from popular faculty at the university, his
wife’s possible infidelity, and an infant son. He must battle his own demons before
those of his father’s past overcome him.
The Emperor Of Ocean Park is definitely a page-turner: Readers are
taken on a journey to the truth but must navigate several turns on the way
there. Misha comes across as an average guy dealing with a parent’s death until
danger and deception are thrust upon him, forcing him to play the part of
seasoned sleuth. But his character does not miraculously develop crime-solving
skills. Through a car chase, an elaborate scam, and the final confrontation, Misha
remains true to character: a weary, cynical law professor.
Already touted by The New York
Times and seemingly everywhere else as a great summer read,
The Emperor Of Ocean Park lives up to all the hoopla.
— Janel Davis
The Real McCoy
By Darin Strauss
Dutton; 320 pp.; $24.95
Over the last decade or so, Andy Warhol’s famous comment that “in
the future everybody will be famous for 15 minutes” has gradually been
replaced by Truman Capote’s catchphrase, which hints at the malleability of
celebrity: Today, certain people are “famous
for being famous.” People like Courtney Love, Madonna, Carmen Electra,
Anna Kournikova, and Howard Stern, to name just a few, are all famous not
so much for any intrinsic talent or skill or intelligence they possess but simply
for their practiced ability to hold the limelight, to remain recognizable.
Oddly enough, this highly postmodern concept drives Darin Strauss’
historical novel The Real McCoy.
Set in New York City at the turn of the 20th century,
The Real McCoy follows the life of Virgil Selby, aka
Kid McCoy, aka St. Corkscrew LeFist, a “prairiebilly” pugilist from Indiana
who becomes a national sensation and a symbol for the American dream.
Described in newspapers as “a hatrack with
ribs,” Selby is an unlikely prizefighter:
He’s skinny, but he compensates with an ability to reinvent himself and a
true gift for grift. A “born liar” and a
practiced scam artist, he wins the welterweight championship
through flimflammery — he tricks his opponent into thinking it’s a charity match.
His victory in the ring earns him national notoriety, several lucrative
product-endorsement deals, and a beautiful wife — an actress named Susan Fields —
but he is damned to perpetuate the charade to keep his deceitful past at bay.
Strauss — author of Chang and Eng
— ably re-creates turn-of-the-century America: the bustle and grind of its
new cities and the slang and rhythm of its language. He tosses puns and one-liners
like quick jabs. Asked to fight without pay, McCoy retorts, “I don’t fight boredom
for free.” In addition, Strauss displays a keen
eye for date and detail, effortlessly conjuring a world in flux. “The 1900s,” he
explains, “were a moment of unprecedented
artificiality, of simulation and back-and-front
dishonesty. Thirty-five years earlier, say, day-to-day life had been more or less as it’d
been for generations. But now horses were being replaced by cars, candles by electric
light, mailboxes by telephones, ‘live’ theater by pictures that moved, serious journalism
by scurrilous ‘rumor rags.'”
Such observations provide a fascinating context for McCoy’s desire for
everlasting fame and serve as connection to the
21st century. In his quest to make a name for himself — even if it’s not his own name
— McCoy is a distinctly postmodern presence in a world only just becoming modern.
Unfortunately, Strauss seems to have figured this out from the very beginning. He
knows exactly where he wants the story to go, so there is no thematic development, no
surprise. McCoy means the same in the first sentence of the novel as he does in the last;
in fact, the first and last sentences are the
same: “Here was a champion before he closed
his hand into a fist.”
Consequently, The Real McCoy is as strangely guarded and controlled in
character and theme as it is exuberant in setting and language. By the time Strauss
rushes us through the blurry finale, we haven’t learned anything about McCoy we
didn’t know in the first few pages.
— Stephen Deusner
The Sound Of the Trees
By Robert Gatewood
Henry Holt; 289 pp.; $25
Southern authors acknowledging the reach and depth of William Faulkner look for ways
to share the Southern landscape while offering original contributions. Cormac McCarthy
now occupies a similar position in the fiction of
the Southwest. The increase of McCarthy’s literary stature continues in a fashion suited to
the mythical nature of his prose. Robert
Gatewood’s first novel, The Sound Of the
Trees, reads like a McCarthy primer, and despite his heavy
borrowing, a talented young author emerges, one who writes with a quiet, simple eloquence.
The Sound Of the Trees is a poignant eulogy to
lost youth and a vanishing way of life. A learned disciple, Gatewood uses every
McCarthyism one would expect.
Set in the 1930s but without a single
reference to the Depression, Gatewood’s book begins with its protagonist, Trude Mason, a
time-warp cowboy, along with his mother, fleeing his abusive father. Born and reared on what
had been a successful ranch in New Mexico, Trude and his mother escape just days before
the diminished family ranch is repossessed, acre
by acre having been siphoned off due to Hatley Mason’s drinking — Mason, a man “who
could never settle on happy.”
Forgoing the family truck, which neither Trude nor his mother ever learned to drive,
and rejecting the offer of a car from a family
friend, they instead ride horseback through the
mountains, hoping to reach Colorado, a place glamorized in the young boy’s mind.
Gatewood’s deft handling of Trude’s mother — her
abundant love for her son and her sorrowful
inability to protect him — yields an inspired
portrait. The still-beautiful but long-abused wife
seems more adrift in the world than her
18-year-old son and soon succumbs. Their tender
relationship lingers throughout the novel.
As he makes his way after his mother’s death, Trude meets a host of extreme
characters. Two sage-like figures — an old hermit
and a reclusive rancher — take a liking to the boy
and do their best to keep him from harm — an utterly impossible task. The small town,
more like a fiefdom, where Trude finds work is
under the menacing rule of a power-hungry mayor. They clash over a beautiful but doomed
black girl who steals Trude’s heart before the
couple ever exchanges words. The girl, whose treatment by a cohort of the mayor includes
rape, infanticide, and a death sentence, tells
Trude “[t]hat only the best things and the worst
things that happen in the world are the ones you
can never explain.”
The hermit, who shares his cabin with Trude, spouts great gusts of mythology,
always trying to help Trude see the diminished role of humans against the forces of evil
and nature. Fringe characters along the way also offer wisdom. Happening upon
a “ceremony of love,” an Indian wedding, Trude is welcomed by a guest who
senses his burdensome grief:
“She told the boy that love appears
to people as the sky. That there is a landscape in the world of love that one
may travel through. Free to pick and choose, she said. To discover hidden places.
She said that with grief this was not so. She said grief was like a tree. … It could not
be moved or shaken loose. Nor could it be uprooted and carried away. It
planted itself like a dagger clot of stone. … But
she said that no matter how complicated [love and grief] became, that when the
heart found a place to hold them together as one, they could be lived with.”
By the close of The Sound Of the
Trees, redemptive grace and its accompanying peace find Trude at last. And here
the novel, ultimately life-affirming, makes its cleanest departure from McCarthy’s
fiction. — Lisa C. Hickman
The Life Of Pi
By Yann Martel
Harcourt; 319 pp.; $25
I loved this book. Can I make such a brazen declaration? If you’ll allow me,
I’d also like to bring in God or science or anything else that, when we reach
the limits of perception, requires us simply to believe. That is exactly what Yann
Martel succeeds in doing in his award-winning novel
The Life Of Pi.
The book is about a boy, Piscine, who lives in Pondicherry, India, where his
father runs a zoo. Much to the dismay of his
family and his religious teachers, the boy, in his fervor to know God, is a practicing
Hindu, Muslim, and Roman Catholic simultaneously. Piscine or Pi (yes, just like
the number) finds himself, after a series of logical, believable events, fighting for his life
in an incredible way.
When the ship he and his family are on sinks in the Pacific Ocean, Pi’s family is
lost and replaced by a crippled zebra, a hyena, an orangutan, and a 450-pound Bengal
tiger. Quite naturally, his new “family” is
quickly reduced, according to Darwinian law, to an inconceivable pair: Pi and the tiger (who
is named Richard Parker). Together, the two survive starvation, storms, and every sort
of peril on a 26-foot lifeboat. Together. For 227 days.
The novel is Pi’s first-person account of these 227 days, and he is apparently
telling the story to another character, the author himself. The author creates the
necessary illusion (if indeed it is an illusion) that
the real-life Pi is actually telling the story of
his 227-day adventure in a series of interviews with the author — a narrative device vital
to a novel that ultimately addresses the act of storytelling and
faith.
Martel has managed to write a remarkable tale that leaves reality’s shores, so
to speak, with the reader in tow and abandons ordinary rules of narrative and
circumstance for an extraordinary set of rules and
circumstances. This is a story that reads as a
journey, and when readers return from that
journey, they may swear they are holding the human tooth Pi discovered or they may
believe something as far-fetched as fiction is the truth. —
Lesha Hurliman
Her
By Laura Zigman
Knopf; 210 pp.; $22
Neurotics have a special place in popular culture, especially in contemporary
fiction. We laugh at them because they remind us of our own inadequacies
and struggles and then top them off with an ice-cream-sundae ending.
That’s if the fiction is done well. If
done poorly, those same portrayals stop being funny and start eliciting less positive
responses, such as annoyance. Think of poor Woody Allen. His schtick used to be
funny; now, it’s just old and sad.
Her by Laura Zigman, author of
Animal Husbandry, walks on the decidedly
unfunny side of popular neurotics: It is Bridget
Jones’s Diary without the lovable and charming
— though clueless — heroine; it is the Ya-Ya Sisterhood without the divine secrets.
In fact, if Her were a woman, she’d be in
the throes of hysteria and trolling for a good
slap across the face.
When the novel opens, Elise and Donald are planning their wedding and longing
for days of wedded bliss. Elise is a bit of a
snoop, but it’s nothing that would be considered fatal to her upcoming nuptials. But
then Donald’s ex-fiancée, the gorgeous and
long-legged man-killer Adrienne, moves to town. Not only is Adrienne ravishing, she’s
Yale-educated and well-connected to boot: an engagement’s worst nightmare.
In all fairness, the book starts out as
cute, even clever. It’s a situation any woman
would feel a little threatened to find herself in,
and going a little crazy may be an appropriate response. Elise’s preoccupation with the
potential affair and her carefully devised plots to keep it from happening are amusing
as they fall to pieces and everything goes wrong.
But obsession is a different matter. Obsession is bad enough when you
have to listen to your friends go on and on about their latest love or their latest
love hiccup. You listen because they’re your friends and that is your job.
Two-hundred-and-ten pages of that conversation would almost inevitably border on
the tedious; it certainly does here.
One of the problems is that Elise is not a very sympathetic character. In fact,
rarely have I hated a character more. Not only does the entire premise of the book
rest upon the notion that you will think it’s funny that she’s insanely jealous
(she spends so much time stalking Adrienne that Donald accuses Elise of having
an affair), she is a main character with few redeeming qualities. She’s mean and
vindictive to her friends. She plots and schemes and then wonders why
Donald would ever consider straying. One imagines she would be the woman at a
wedding no one would want to talk to — even at her own wedding.
In the end, it’s Elise — not Adrienne — who is an engagement’s worst
nightmare. She — and Her — make it to the
top of my worst-nightmare list too.
— Mary Cashiola
High Maintenance
By Jennifer Belle
Riverhead Books; 351 pp.; $13 (paper)
Many possessions worth having are “high-maintenance” — dogs, swimming
pools, boats, and roses, to name a few. However, I normally hear the phrase used by men
to describe women. High maintenance is, of course, a bad thing.
Cosmopolitan once advised against carrying a large purse on
a date because it makes you seem high-maintenance. In
When Harry Met Sally, Meg Ryan’s character is
high-maintenance because she gives too many orders
when she orders food. Females, however, are taught that, to get and keep a man,
keep your expectations and demands low. Jennifer Belle’s novel
High Maintenance should be read by any woman who
has ever lamented having to carry a bag that could actually carry her make-up or
who has ever ordered her salad dressing on the side.
Liv Kellerman, daughter of a famous fashion designer, is an extremely
low-maintenance version of her former, constantly manicured self. Twenty-six
and uneducated, she divorces her wealthy husband as well as her magnificent
Fifth Avenue duplex with a view of the Empire State Building. With only some
street clothes and her La Perla lingerie, she moves into a tenement with a
shower, marred with bullet holes, in the middle of the kitchen. She sleeps in the
former tenant’s grungy bed and stores her clothes in the refrigerator, which doesn’t
work. Her only post-separation love interest comes in the form of Andrew, a
cheap married man she finds “totally rude and unattractive with dutiful brown
glasses that made him look like a lesbian.”
He also bites her ear during sex and by way of apology gives her a football helmet
to wear during future encounters. Which she does. Her honest account of her
daily trials and horrible decisions makes you want to weep, but even she
acknowledges the absurdity of her actions and
knows that she “deserves a man who didn’t
talk about passing big loads … and lived alone in his own apartment with his
own condoms. And … a fridge with food in it instead of clothes.” And she’s right.
Thankfully, High Maintenance does not end with Liv homeless, friendless,
and wandering the streets of New York like some character in a Tama Janowitz
novel. But the book does not end with Liv finding the perfect man to live
happily ever after with either. She does become a successful real estate agent. And she
does get rid of her ugly, married, and perverse boyfriend. Plus, she gets to keep
her prized possession, a police-issued gun. She even escapes the tenement and
buys a wonderful loft. The maintenance on the loft is high even by New York
standards, but she knows that she and the new place are worth it.
— Leah Ourso
My Loose Thread
By Dennis Cooper
Canongate Books; 121 pp.; $18
You keep having to remind yourself that it’s just fiction, every word. Kids
aren’t really like this, are they? They aren’t all
a bunch of cold-blooded sexual predators with a total disregard for human life.
And yet there is something about Dennis Cooper’s latest novel,
My Loose Thread … at 121 pages, a simple read …
something that is undeniably true and unimaginably awful. That’s why, no matter how
hard you try, you can’t read it in just one sitting. And once you’ve finished it,
you’ll wish you’d never picked it up in the first place. The nauseating images, like
something out of painter Francis Bacon’s worst nightmares, linger. Cooper has long
proclaimed his obsession with torture, mutilation, and murder, and while he
has produced a body of significant work that is far more accomplished than
My Loose Thread, almost none of his
previous efforts has seemed either as enduring or as necessary. And as horrible as
the violence can be, you are left to wonder if it all doesn’t amount to so
many mercy killings.
Larry, a fairly typical Cooper protagonist, is a troubled teen given to
sudden and extreme acts of violence. His father, a cancer patient, is vacant and
ineffectual, and his mother is an alcoholic who,
unable to change her environment, avoids it at all costs. The complex sexual
relationship Larry maintains with his younger brother Jim, like something cut and
pasted from a lost Jim Thompson novel, is alternately sweet, casual, and
cataclysmic. While both brothers struggle with
their sexuality, they seem to have little trouble expressing themselves physically when
the need arises. Larry, who regularly claims to be confused and maintains that, in
spite of his sexual proclivities, he’s not gay,
has been hired by a schoolmate to kill another student, the self-mutilating son of a
whore, who worked as a hustler himself until his scars became too horrible. It’s not the
first time Larry has killed, though it is the
first time he has done so on purpose.
The reasons for all the killings seem abstract and only become concrete in
the book’s closing paragraphs. The victims represent the physical manifestations
of fears and deeply rooted prejudices. They also represent aspects of the killer
they would like to see surgically extracted. Infrequent references to Columbine
and the Matthew Shepherd murder do little to cheapen Cooper’s tale. Rather,
these references haunt the reader like a nagging I-told-you-so.
At one point, Larry, while contemplating a starry night, comments that
the universe seems more interesting when you think of all the twinkling lights as
a big city turned upside down. It’s as close as Cooper comes to a romantic
notion, and even this idea is somehow diseased.
Cooper’s prose has never been leaner than in this dialogue-driven story. But
it is a little disappointing that, within the space of 121 pages, the author
repeats himself so often. It’s a device to give us
a clearer picture of the characters, sure, but at a certain point, it reaches overkill.
Even Cooper’s hypnotic, sing-songy prose can’t mask this glaring deficit, which in no
way lessens the story’s ultimate impact.
— Chris Davis