Selected Reading: Fiction
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A Dangerous Friend
by Ward Just
Ward Just, a former war correspondent, uses his intimate knowledge of Vietnam to advantage in this exploration of America's tangled relations with that small Southeast Asian country. Set in 1965, the last year that civilians were in control of foreign intervention, A Dangerous Friend chronicles the lives of a small band of aid workers who purport to administer financial and technical assistance to the Vietnamese; unknown to most, however, the Llewellyn Group is actually covertly linked to the Pentagon. Though told by a nameless narrator, the protagonist of this story is Sydney Parade, an idealistic American who abandons wife and child in order to help bring democracy to the third world:Heavy Water: And Other Stories
by Martin Amis, Christopher Cazenove (Narrator), Judy Geeson (Narrator)
These nine stories span a period from 1975 to 1997 and are a good reflection of the range of Martin Amis's writing, which is always skillful and consistently seductive--sometimes irritatingly so. Amis lures his reader into an intense interest in his characters, and then, in some unsettling way, encourages us to patronize or disparage them. It's an odd strategy, but it holds our attention. By making us uncomfortable about our own less admirable attitudes, he focuses us intently on his story line.Gods Go Begging
by Alfredo Vea
One could argue that the war novel is an essentially timeless genre. Weapons are subject to long and increasingly lethal refinement--but from Homer's day to our own, the fear, fury, remorse, and anguish experienced on the battlefield have hardly changed a whit. Still, the stories told by Vietnam-generation novelists may differ in the telling. A writer like Alfredo Vea draws on a myriad of cultural and literary traditions to evoke the peculiar terrors of Vietnam--while invariably reflecting the outsider status of the soldiers who fought in the conflict. And for both of these reasons, his third novel, Gods Go Begging, is a remarkable work.Gifts
by Nuruddin Farah
Though he has lived in exile for the last 20 years, Nuruddin Farah's eye never strays far from his native Somalia. In Maps and Secrets, the first and third volumes in his Blood in the Sun trilogy, he explored the devastating effects of tribal hatred and civil war on his society; the middle volume, Gifts, however, is of a different stripe altogether. Though also set in Somalia, it is a sunnier, more optimistic novel, and a love story, to boot. The protagonist is Duniya, a nurse at a maternity hospital in Mogadishu. Once widowed and once divorced, she has experienced the injustices heaped upon women in her culture--as a young girl Duniya was given by her father to an elderly man to be his wife; after his death she remarried, only to have her child taken from her by her alcoholic husband's family when they divorced. Free at last, she has no intentions of getting entangled again--until she meets Bosaaso, an American-educated economist who has returned to Somalia to help his country during its economic crisis:The Road to Mars: A Post-Modem Novel
by Eric Idle
The Road to Mars is the second novel by Eric Idle--yes, that Eric Idle, the guy from Monty Python's Flying Circus. No, the book isn't like a Monty Python skit (and a good thing too, since silly sketches are no basis for a successful novel). Yes, Monty Python is mentioned in the book, but the self-referentiality is blessedly confined to two paragraphs. Yes, The Road to Mars is funny. It's also genuine science fiction. And it's satirical, sharply characterized, well-written, thoughtful, fun, and more complex than you'd expect from its picaresque structure, in which a stand-up-comedian odd couple and their robot knock around the outer planets in search of decent gigs. Well, Alex and Lewis are looking for work (and sex); their android, Carlton, unfazed by his own irony impairment, is trying to write a thesis about comedy. The trio quickly find themselves mixed up with a mysterious beauty, a famous diva, the captain of the solar cruise ship Princess Di, and a band of terrorists determined to blow up Mars.Hannibal
by Thomas Harris
Horror lit's head chef Harris serves up another course in his Hannibal "The Cannibal" Lecter trilogy, and it's a pièce de résistance for those with strong stomachs. In the first book, Red Dragon (filmed as Manhunter), Hannibal diabolically helps the FBI track a fascinating serial killer. (Takes one to know one.) In The Silence of the Lambs, he advises fledgling FBI manhunter Clarice Starling, then makes a bloody, brilliant escape.Life in the Air Ocean: Stories
by Sylvia Foley
A debut collection of nine interlocked stories chronicling an unhappy familys years abroad and at home. The Mowrys are restless types at heart, the kind of people who manage to settle down but never really feel at home and are probably happiest on the road. Daniel Mowry is a refrigeration engineer, an Army vet who wanted to be a pilot but was held back by poor eyesight. He and his wife Iris live for some years in South America while Daniel works with the overseas division of General Electric. Even tually, though, they return to the States and settle in Carville, Tennessee. Of their two daughters, Ruth is a sickly baby who grows up withdrawn and neurotic, while her sister Monica marries young and adjusts to normal life better than the rest of the Mo wrys. Most of the stories here are episodes in the family history, describing things as various as Ruths nervous breakdown (A History of Sex), Iriss realization of her husbands infidelity (The State of the Union), a Caribbean vacation (Off Grenada), and t he general malaise that Daniel (Cave Fish) and Iris (Life in the Air Ocean) seem to have labored under for the whole of their marriage. As family portraits go, this one is grim but not particularly vivid, and although Foleys descriptive powers (The habits that came to Ruth were those of quickness, and falling. She understood plain things, eggs and rectangles and rhymes) are keen, she has small use for them here, where the unremitting sadness of the characters keeps them withdrawn, passive, and largely ina rticulate. Decently done but unremarkable: tales of essentially decent people who never amount to much either in life or on the page. Foleys talents may need a more ambitious approach.
The Sopranos
by Alan Warner
If there's any justice, Alan Warner's third novel, The Sopranos, will lead to a sudden fad for artificially shortened kilt skirts, bright shoelaces, and flaming sambuca shots. As it is, we might have to settle for the sopranos themselves, six memorably vile-mouthed Catholic schoolgirls sent from their drab port town to "the big, big city" for the Scottish national choir finals. There Warner follows them as they shop, smoke, eat Big Macs, consume staggering amounts of alcohol, and pay no attention whatsoever to the competition. Winning, after all, would defeat their central goal: returning in time for the slow dances at the Mantrap and the promise of submariners on leave. In the end, it turns out that the nuclear submarine has stopped in their harbor only to unload a dead sailor, and the girls must console themselves with alcohol, sex, a veritable inferno of fireworks, and even one heartbreakingly courageous kiss.The Stones Cry Out
by Hikaru Okuizumi, James Westerhoven (Translator), Hiraku Okuizumi
Hikaru Okuizumi's The Stones Cry Out traces 20-odd years in the life of World War II veteran Tsuyoshi Manase, a timid bookseller and amateur geologist who struggles to suppress a troubled conscience. More novella than novel, this brief but keenly realized story--for which Okuizumi won the Akutagawa Prize, one of Japan's highest literary awards--is a stark, disturbing, but ultimately redemptive meditation on remembrance and mortality.Still Waters in Niger
by Kathleen Hill
"Zinder was a case, always, of unrequited love," according to the unnamed narrator of Kathleen Hill's Still Waters in Niger. Together with her husband and three small children, she once lived in this forbidding West African town, a "city of winds and wheeling vultures, of rocks shimmering in the heat." Yet in the end, its strangeness only made it more precious, and the place became her consuming passion. As the novel opens, the narrator has returned to Niger to visit her eldest daughter, Zara, who works in a medical clinic not far from Zinder. With Zara she retraces the scenes of her young motherhood, searching for the same transcendence she found there 17 years ago. Once again, she longs to become a woman freed from the confines of her own history:Duane's Depressed
by Larry McMurtry
At 62, ever-dependable oil man Duane Moore ditches his pickup and starts walking everywhere--deeply deviant behavior in one-stoplight Thalia, Texas. "It occurred to him one day--not in a flash, but through a process of seepage, a kind of gas leak into his consciousness--that most of his memories, from his first courtship to the lip of old age, involved the cabs of pickups," Larry McMurtry writes. Yet oddly enough, Duane's marriage, four children and nine grandchildren, his career highs and lows, all occurred when he was nowhere near his vehicle. Within days he has moved into his cabin on a hill, reacquired his dog, Shorty the Sixth ("an air of slight guilt was typical of all the Shortys"), and begun to think on these things. Of course, this brings on an additional problem: "He realized that for the first time in his life he had too much time to think; of course he had wanted more time to think, but that was probably because he hadn't realized how tricky thinking could be."Last Things
by Jenny Offill
"My mother knew a lot about spies and sometimes hinted that she had been one once. She knew a way, for example, to make an umbrella shoot a poison dart. Also that the CIA had tried to kill the president of Cuba with an exploding clam. She showed me how to send secret messages by underlining words in a newspaper and dropping it on a bench." To 8-year-old Grace Davitt, her mother is a puzzling yet wonderful mystery. This is a woman who has seen a sea serpent in the lake, who paints a timeline of the universe (in which "one billion years of real time = 24 days on the cosmic calendar") on the sewing-room wall, and who teaches her daughter a secret language which only they can speak. To the reader, however, it soon becomes clear that Anna Davitt is more than just eccentric. As her obsessions grow, her relationship with Grace's father, Robert, gradually deteriorates until at last the family breaks apart and Grace is left alone with her unstable mother.Fredy Neptune: A Novel in Verse
by Les A. Murray
Despite laudable efforts by Vikram Seth and Anne Carson, the novel in verse isn't exactly a fashionable genre. It seems to promise readers a ripping good yarn, only to bog them down in slant rhymes, enjambments, and other linguistic niceties. Yet even the staunchest fiction fans may find it hard to resist the charms of Les Murray's Fredy Neptune. For one thing, the hero--an Australian itinerant named Friedrich Boettcher--engages in the sort of adventures that are usually reserved for his opposite numbers in prose. Fredy fights aboard a German battleship during World War I, witnesses several of the worst slaughters of our century, and journeys from the Holy Land to Africa to America to the Far East before making a final landfall back in Australia. But Murray's eight-line stanzas are also eminently readable: slangy, swift, and jam-packed with narrative propulsion.The Things We Do to Make It Home
by Beverly Gologorsky
In the decades since the end of the Vietnam War, American writers of all stripes have staked out that cataclysmic conflict as a subject for literature. Tim O'Brien, Michael Herr, Ron Kovic, David Rabe--the list of authors who have rendered men and war is long and impressive; the fact that there's nary a woman among them is perhaps not surprising, as combat is, for the most part, a male activity. But men weren't the only ones affected by Vietnam--for every soldier in a rice paddy, there was a mother, a sister, a lover back home; when their men came back changed by the experience of war, life changed for the women, as well. In her impressive debut novel, Beverly Gologorsky skillfully depicts the lives of three returned veterans and the women who love them. The story begins in 1973, shortly after Rooster, Frankie, Nick, Sean, Rod, and Jason return home from Vietnam, and it's obvious something's not quite right.Inner City Blues: A Charlotte Justice Mystery
by Carolyn See
The hero of Carolyn See's The Handyman has something of the sacred and more than a little of the profane about him. Back in his native Los Angeles after an abortive stay in Paris, Bob Hampton sets himself up as a jack-of-all-trades in order to pay for his art supplies. Soon, however, he's emotionally involved with several of his employers--each of whom is "sandblasted by life" and each of whom he does his best to rescue. In fact, this unlikely savior seems to work quick wonders on these dysfunctional households. What matter if he ends up bedding a few of the females in the process? But more to the point, Bob is roused by his role:The Handyman
by Paula L. Woods, Fran Washington (Narrator)
Empress of the Splendid Season
by Oscar Hijuelos, Cscar Hijuelos
The collision of Cuban dreams with sometimes harsh American realities has been Oscar Hijuelos's great theme, most notably in Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love. Certainly it's at the heart of his fifth novel, Empress of the Splendid Season, which chronicles the trials, tribulations, and infrequent triumphs of a Cuban American clan over the course of a half century. The protagonist, Lydia Espana, has grown up in pre-Castro Cuba, the pampered daughter of a prosperous businessman. But when she has the audacity to violate her father's small-town code of conduct--by sleeping with an itinerant musician--she pays a terrible penalty: "Her family, turning unfairly against her with a nearly Biblical wrath, had banished her, unprepared to contend with an indifferent world."Evensong
by Gail Godwin
In the tight-knit Smoky Mountain town of High Balsam, several weeks before the new millennium, Margaret Bonner finds herself pondering the notion of marriage. "I was mystified anew by this whole thing we humans do when we take it into our heads to love one particular person," she muses. At 33, she is the first woman pastor of All Saints Episcopal Church, and her husband, Adrian, is the headmaster of a progressive high school. The Bonners are in a marital slump--Adrian's self-loathing exasperates his younger, more passionate wife and she can't resist imagining what life would be like without him. Yet as the end of the century approaches, they are forced to turn their attention outward and respond to the escalating needs of their North Carolina community. The appearance of three colorful misfits brings matters to a head. Grace Munger, an aggressive fundamentalist Christian, is on a crusade to organize a "Millennium Birthday March for Jesus"; Brother Tony, a chatty 80-year-old itinerant who's taken up the life of a Benedictine monk, has a particular interest in Adrian; and Chase, a 16-year-old delinquent, harbors a thirst for liquor, with calamitous consequences. In her sequel to Father Melancholy's Daughter, Gail Godwin expertly traces the contours of faith, compassion, and loyalty in an isolated community on the brink of change. --Rebecca RobinsonThe Way People Run: Stories
by Christopher Tilghman
Christopher Tilghman is often mentioned in the same breath as John Cheever or William Maxwell--American masters who have mapped the difficult terrain of domestic life. Pretty exalted company, but Tilghman more than holds his own in the novel Mason's Retreat and the short-story collection In a Father's Place. The Way People Run is yet another example of both his skill as a stylist and his insight into the workings of everyday life. In "Something Important" Peter Randall is lured by his older brother Mitch to a family cottage in the Chesapeake country. The two men haven't seen each other in several years and their relationship has never been close. Yet when, in the course of the two days they spend together, Peter discovers that his brother knows something that he doesn't about his own marriage, it is Mitch who offers comfort:Ka: Stories of the Mind and Gods of India
by Roberto Calasso, Tim Parks (Translator)
The eagle Garuda is on a mission to steal soma--an intoxicating liquid that was to the gods of India what ambrosia was to the Olympic pantheon--in order to ransom his human mother, Vinata, from the snakes who have held her captive since she lost a bet and became her sister Kadru's slave. He reflects to himself, "So many things happening, so many stories one inside the other, with every link hiding yet more stories...."
Dreamland
by Kevin Baker
Kevin Baker's Dreamland is the kind of novel that begins with a two-page list of characters and ends with a nine-page glossary. In between, this vast, sprawling carnival of a book takes in Coney Island and the Lower East Side, midgets and gangsters, Bowery bars and opium dens, even Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. It is, in short, a novel as big, lively, and ambitious as Gotham itself, and if you can stomach some of the more garish local color, it's every bit as much fun. Set at the turn of the century, in a New York as polyglot as any city on earth, Dreamland opens with an act of misplaced--and very stupid--compassion. Eastern European immigrant Kid Twist intervenes when villainous gangster Gyp the Blood is on the verge of murdering a young newsboy for sport. But surprise: that's no street urchin--that's Trick the Dwarf, self-proclaimed Mayor of Little City and a Coney Island tout, who dresses up as a boy, he says, as "a way I had of leaving myself behind." Trick hides Kid Twist in the hind parts of the Tin Elephant Hotel; Kid Twist meets Esther Abramowitz, impoverished seamstress and labor agitator, then falls in love; Trick woos Mad Carlotta, a three-foot beauty who thinks she's the Empress of Mexico; and Freud and Jung sail for America, where they squabble about psychoanalysis. There are also a few subplots involving police corruption, Tammany Hall, and the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire--but who's counting? Suffice to say that it all really does come together in the end, and you won't be bored for one step of the way. Baker served as chief historical researcher for Harold Evans's The American Century, and it's clear that he put his time there to good use; Dreamland is full of vivid historical detail, from Lower East Side slang to the lyrics of popular songs. If this is middlebrow entertainment, it's middlebrow in the same way as Dickens: extravagantly plotted, elegantly written, and compassionate to the core. --Mary ParkA Sight for Sore Eyes
by Ruth Rendell
Nobody does North London squalor better than Ruth Rendell. Describing in vivid detail the cultural sewer in which a monster named Teddy Brex grows up, she uses hideous furniture, slovenly housekeeping habits, even his mother's diet while pregnant to root us in the setting's hopeless ugliness. In contrast, Rendell introduces people and places of stunning beauty: Francine, a mentally fragile girl who became mute after witnessing her mother's murder; and Orcadia Cottage, scene of a famous painting that is at the center of much of the story's anguish. "It was far and away the most beautiful place he had ever seen," Rendell writes when Teddy--a gifted woodcrafter--first views the cottage. "The proportions of this hall, this room... the windows, the walls, the carpets, the flowers, the furniture, the paintings, all of it dazzled him."East Bay Grease
by Eric Miles Williamson
A remarkable debut novel describing a young mans coming of age amid the biker gangs of Oakland during the late 1960s. Single mothers are always going to have their hands full, but T-Bird Murphys mom knows where to turn for help: the Hells Angels. Ever since her husbands been in jail, shes dated a biker, so she can rely on the Angels to pitch in whenever theres a crisisand she gets more than her share. T-Bird himself seems to move from scrape to scrape, fighting off the blacks and Mexicans who mock his bookishness at school and ambush him almost nightly as he walks home. When T-Birds convict father gets paroled, however, Mom panics and persuades the Angels to help her leave the scene before he arrives. T-Bird stays on. He and his old man move to a trailer behind the gas station where they work, and for the first time ever, T-Bird savors the semblance of a normal family life. From his father he learns how to fight (Theres no such thing as a fair fight. . . . Someone always wins, and someone always loses. Its stupid to be the loser), and soon the Mexicans regard him with a newfound respect. But by and by his old man turns increasingly violent and irrational, and T-Bird sets out on his own, working construction crews by day and playing trumpet in Bay Area bars by night. Brawling remains a part of existence, and T-Bird becomes an old hand at gang alliances and fights. The real miracle of his adolescence, however, is not merely that he survives, but that he flourishesand emerges as an articulate, ambitious man. Refreshingly sincere and unaffected, Williamsons chronicle provides a fascinating glimpse, from the inside, of a world that is rarely visibleand a marvelous account of one boys escape from it.
Dogfight, and Other Stories
by Michael Knight
These are 10 stories, cut like gems from American family. And Michael Knight is purely American in his choice of ingredients and a touch Southern in his intonation. His stories have a gracious patina and a drawl of violence; his stories emphasize the pivotal moment, the moral moment, the decisive moment ... in these stories, an astonishing variety of forms.
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