So Many Books; So Little Time
The
Politics & Prose Book Review
Issue #1, June
2007
Our motto “So many books; so little time” is true for us as well as you. So we are starting this new review format to help you choose among the new books. Here we can write longer reviews of a few of our favorite books of the season. We will recommend only books that we have enjoyed reading. We especially want to discuss the books that might escape your notice, or about which there is controversy. There are five readers in this first review, representing five different sensibilities.
You may notice that all of the books reviewed here are new hardbacks. Our Summer Reading Newsletter will be published in June and will contain all or mostly paperbacks.
All of the prices below are the retail price. We will offer them at 20% off through June.
Fiction
FREE FOOD FOR MILLIONAIRES by Min Jin Lee (Grand Central, $24.99)
Min Jin Lee, in her first novel, paints a vast New York landscape that
brings to mind Bonfire of the Vanities, updated 20 years. The
young graduates of the “best” universities and business schools
are scrambling up the ladder.
But Lee’s story is very much one of the gap between the striving immigrant parents and their children. The children are straddling the immigrant world and the cool New York City scene. Casey Han’s parents manage a dry cleaning establishment and send their two daughters into the Ivy League. Casey, unlike her compliant younger sister Tina, is full of ambivalence.
She wants success but is unable to choose a profession. She wants to reserve the right to be critical but needs support and sympathy. She feels comfortable among Koreans but wants to belong to the wider American society.
There is fantastic energy in this book about Casey’s search for her place. Casey is at once exasperating and endearing. The jacket copy compares Lee with early Philip Roth, and I think it’s an interesting and apt comparison.
•Carla
Cohen
THE RAW SHARK TEXTS by Steven Hall (Canongate, $24)
In this fast-paced first novel, a man wakes alone, gasping and choking,
on the floor of a room he doesn’t recognize. Nothing is familiar,
but this is not amnesia; his memories have been stolen.
On a table by the front door he finds car keys, a wallet containing the driver’s license of an Eric Sanderson, and an envelope instructing, “This is addressed to you. Open now.” The letter inside directs him to immediately visit a Dr. Randle and is signed “The First Eric Sanderson.” According to Dr. Randle, an accident at sea some years ago in Greece led to a dissociative condition causing severe and recurring memory loss for the first Eric Sanderson, and to death for his girlfriend, Clio Aames. Eric doesn’t believe Dr. Randle’s diagnosis or heed her warnings against reading correspondence from his former self. As his mind becomes a feeding ground for a terrifying creature, the second Eric Sanderson searches for answers to save his sanity.
Steven Hall has created a world in which language is more than a set of arbitrary signifiers. In Hall’s reality, language actuates the signified; it connects people (like him, the author, and you, the reader), it feeds conceptual killer sharks, and it can also defend against them if used correctly. The Raw Shark Texts is the most exciting first novel I have read this year. I read it compulsively in huge, satisfying bites.
•Katherine Broadway
THE NATURE OF MONSTERS by Clare Clark (Harcourt, $25)
The Nature of Monsters is the perfect blend of gothic and historical
fiction. Caught in the clash between folk medicine and scientific discovery,
and between pastoral and city life, is a smart, headstrong, sixteen-year-old
girl named Eliza Tally. At the outset of the novel, Eliza gets pregnant
and her mother does her best to save Eliza's reputation by placing her
in the service of a London apothecary, Grayson Black. Eliza's mother is
a midwife in her village and Eliza expects to understand her new household
because of the similarity between the two professions.
Eliza believes she is just to be a servant—she does not know Mr. Black is using her for his own scientific hypothesis regarding pregnant women and their imagination. Eliza struggles to survive in this bizarre and frightening house, slowly coming to understand Grayson Black's ulterior motives. Her only ally is the slow-witted Mary, another servant girl, who also becomes a subject in Mr. Grayson's study.
Eliza evolves over the course of the novel—I became invested in Eliza and in her survival. Behind the suspense, Clark gives us the real obstacles facing women, especially servant women, in the early 18th century—how difficult it was to fend off unwanted advances, and to be considered disposable and incapable of intelligence. For me, this gave the novel a more gratifying conclusion because it seems that Eliza's triumph is really her own.
•Becca Kirk
FALLING MAN by Don DeLillo (Scribner, $26)
"It was not a street anymore but a world, a time and space of falling
ash and near night."
It's a daring move for an author to describe the indescribable. Even survivors of tragedies sometimes have trouble translating adrenaline into English. Keith, the main character in Falling Man, has already fallen, so to speak. We meet him as he is progressing up the street, away from the event, covered in ash and glass. With the immediacy of a choking fit, his world becomes the reader's. DeLillo leaves us inside the head of Keith, both ears ringing—the world turned topsy-turvy, covered in ash and glass. In a passage that becomes a recurring image, Keith is transfixed as reality gives over to spectacle, and he looks upward:
"There was something else then, outside all this, not belonging to this, aloft. He watched it coming down. A shirt came down out of the high smoke, a shirt lifted and drifting in the scant light and then falling again, down toward the river."
As he has shown throughout his long career, DeLillo is a poet of catastrophe and cataclysm. Although Keith can hear the bodies of jumpers falling and landing, he focuses on the ethereal image of the empty shirt sailing in the air, as though in a time of horror the mind seeks beauty or transcendence.
Rather than return to his own apartment, Keith catches a ride uptown with a truck driver to the apartment that Lianne, their son Justin, and he shared before they separated. Here everyone begins the work of creating and recreating the narrative of 9/11.
Lianne works as therapist, conducting a writing group where each student wants only to write about the planes. The children, Justin and his friends, concoct their own story and vigilantly play at watching the skies. Later in the novel, the title character is a performance artist who stages falls from buildings to shock people, to assault them with the repeated image.
DeLillo returns again and again to themes of social disintegration and the inadequacy of narrative. He is not commenting on the attacks of Sept. 11 as a historical event within a greater sweep of history. Instead, his is a world that is vanished, that by being transformed ceases to be anymore.
Falling Man is a mesmerizing work of fiction: powerful and memorable.
•Mark
LaFramboise
NonFiction
WHEN A CROCODILE EATS THE SUN by Peter Godwin (Little Brown, $24.99)
In this elegiac memoir, journalist Godwin observes his parents and Zimbabwe,
the country where he was born and grew up. Godwin, who now lives in the
United States, travels frequently to Africa. This journal of the years
1996-2004 records the decline of his parents intertwined with the decline
of Zimbabwe.
His parents moved from Britain to Zimbabwe in the early 1950s. George Godwin, a former officer with the British forces, met a former Wren when they attended Medway Polytechnic. George studied engineering and Helen, medicine. Their early years in Africa were very good. They had three children and were able to practice their professions.
Peter, their second child, came of age as the civil war against Ian Smith and for independence was beginning. By the early 1980s, Mugabe was consolidating his hold on Zimbabwe by arresting opposition parties. Mugabe managed to stay in power during these years by frightening the poor, ignorant, landless people and intimidating or sending into exile the rest. In a pattern that has persisted, there were few if any outcries from the international community.
Although pressured to leave, the Godwins and other whites loved their country, had deep ties, and refused to go even as their savings melted away from inflation and they risked intimidation and killing.
But political issues are only the background for Peter’s efforts to help his parents through illness and protect them from harm. In the last years, Peter found that his father had kept his true story secret out of fear. Sadly, there is a parallel between the terror of George’s early years and his final years.
•Carla
Cohen
THE INVISIBLE WALL by Harry Bernstein (Ballantine, $22.95)
When he was in his 90s, after the death of his beloved wife, Harry Bernstein
decided to write about his early years in a British factory town near
Manchester. In their grimy industrial neighborhood, the Jews lived on
one side of the street and the non-Jews on the other.
The relationship between the two groups was cool at best, and sometimes bitter. In Bernstein’s view, the parochialism and religiosity of the Jews was as much responsible for the absence of cordiality as the animosity of the gentiles. He remembers his sister Lily who was in love with a non-Jew and banished from the country when her parents found out.
Looming over the story, in many ways a Jewish Angela’s Ashes, is a brutal and angry father, feared by his wife and children. Harry’s mother held the family together and found ways to feed them.
The book ends on a happy note when the family (without the father) is finally able to emigrate to Chicago, in the Golden Land.
•Carla Cohen
TROUBLESOME YOUNG MEN by Lynne Olson (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $27.50)
This book focuses on a hinge moment in history, when England, as John
F. Kennedy put it, was asleep. Chamberlain succeeded Stanley Baldwin as
Prime Minister in 1937. The Tories had a huge majority in Parliament.
Still recovering from the brutality of World War I, the British were averse
to confronting Hitler. Among the upper class in Britain, many were wary
of social reform, which they often conflated with Communism, and saw Hitler
as a bulwark against Stalin.
Chamberlain was not, as Americans tend to think, weak. In fact, he was arrogant and dictatorial; he punished anybody who opposed his policies. Although Churchill is given the credit for opposing Chamberlain, in actuality, he was in the government and did not speak out publicly. What Olson has done is give history’s due to the brave young men who risked their political careers to replace Chamberlain. Olson focuses on four of the young Tories: Ronald Cartland, Leo Amery, Robert Boothby, and Harold MacMillan.
There is not only politics in Olson’s book, but wonderful detail about the folkways of the eccentric British upper class, including their sexual peccadilloes. It’s a thoroughly enjoyable book.
•Carla Cohen
EDITH WHARTON by Hermione Lee (Knopf, $35)
When it seemed like nothing more could be said about Virginia Woolf,
Hermione Lee’s 1998 biography provided a fresh and fascinating assessment.
Now Lee has worked a similar magic with Edith Wharton. Approaching her
subject with the dual energies of an enthusiastic reader and a diligent
researcher, Lee pushes past the image of the cold, snobbish, and daunting
woman some thought Wharton to be, conveying instead the witty, passionate,
and energetic person known to her inner circle of friends, a circle that
included Henry James, Bernard Berenson, Theodore Roosevelt, and many others.
Henry James said of Wharton in a letter that, “you don’t know her till you have seen her as builder and restorer, designer, decorator, gardener.” Add to that poet, novelist, diarist, travel writer, Francophile, keen social observer, war correspondent, philanthropist, and dog lover, and you begin to know Edith Wharton. Lee presents each of these Whartons, starting with her early career as a nonfiction writer. Wharton’s first books were about home decorating, gardens, Italian villas, and Mediterranean cruises; they began as magazine pieces and most are still in print. As she grew in skill and confidence, Wharton didn’t discard these early interests, but built on them. Lee expertly shows how details of architecture and design in the novels reflect the “morality and personal values” of the characters.
While rightly considered a classic American novelist, Wharton lived in France for most of her life. She even started writing Ethan Frome, that quintessential New England novel, in French, to get practice in the language. Wharton was in Paris during World War I and some of Lee’s most exciting pages document Wharton’s prodigious wartime activities. She founded hostels for refugees, workshops for the unemployed, raised money for hospitals, and agitated for the United States to enter the war. In addition to writing fiction (some explicitly about the war), she edited an anthology of war writing to raise funds for private charities. She continued to travel and wrote up reports of battlegrounds, many of which had formerly been villages. Her energy was formidable.
In addition to vividly evoking the times and places Wharton lived in, Lee is a gifted literary critic. Her presentation of Wharton’s fiction is lively and energetic; she convincingly shows, for instance, why she thinks The Custom of the Country is Wharton’s greatest novel. While discussing how Wharton transformed her own experiences into fiction, however, Lee doesn’t simply use the stories and novels as biographical evidence, but lets them retain a certain mystery and vitality. They are, after all, what drew Lee to Wharton, and they’re exactly where readers of this outstanding biography will want to turn next—if, that is, they haven’t been rereading them right along.
•Laurie Greer
