'Little Bird of Heaven' By Joyce Carol Oates

 'Little Bird of Heaven' By Joyce Carol Oates
Reviewed By Malena Watrous
NY Times

Often called the “Dark Lady of American Letters,” Joyce Carol Oates is a controversial figure, simultaneously praised for her prolific versatility and taken to task for a fascination with violence that can seem prurient. In her fiction, violence is often at the root of passion, and passion almost inevitably leads to violence, a tautology and trap that we see again in “Little Bird of Heaven,” Oates’s 57th novel since 1964.

Set in Sparta, a fictional town in upstate New York, the novel explores the unsolved murder of Zoe Kruller, a bluegrass singer with a reputation for sleeping around. After she was strangled in bed, the police repeatedly detained and interrogated her estranged husband, Delray Kruller, and her married lover, Eddy Diehl. The two men were named “prime suspects” in the local paper, but neither was brought to trial. Still, the accusations marked them. The town remains split on which one must have done it. Her cuckolded husband has a clear motive (and he’s targeted for being part Seneca Indian). But their son, Aaron, insists that he was with his father during the murder. Her lover, Eddy, was not home that night, a fact that his scorned wife discloses to the cops after they search her home. She also issues a restraining order against him, forbidding contact with his children. The novel is split too, between Eddy’s daughter, Krista, and Delray and Zoe’s son, Aaron, as both try to make sense of what happened in the years surrounding the murder, and to establish their fathers’ innocence.

“That yearning in my heart!” Krista begins. Although she’s a grown woman, she still pines for her father with the rawness of an abandoned child. She was not even a teenager when Zoe died, and she lost her “Daddy,” as she continuously refers to him. Krista’s narrative, dominating the first half of the book, is riddled with exclamation points, italics and single-sentence paragraphs. The intensity grows wearisome at times, her passion verging on hysteria. But as she becomes an increasingly unreliable character witness, the story grows richer and more layered.

NY Times 

'Conquest of the Useless' By Werner Herzog

Reviewed by JANET MASLIN
New York Times

This is what “a beautiful, fresh, sunny morning” was like for Werner Herzog during the Sisyphean miseries that plagued the shooting of his Amazonian epic “Fitzcarraldo” (1982): one of two newly hatched chicks drowned in a saucer containing only a few millimeters of water. The other lost a leg and a piece of its stomach to a murderous rabbit. And Mr. Herzog realized, for the umpteenth time, that “a sense of desolation was tearing me up inside, like termites in a fallen tree trunk.”

These and other good times have been immortalized in “Conquest of the Useless,” Mr. Herzog’s journal about his best-known filmmaking nightmare. Already published in German as the evocatively titled “Eroberung des Nutzlosen” in 2004, this book, translated by Krishna Winston, seemingly recapitulates some of Les Blank’s film “Burden of Dreams,” the 1982 documentary that captured the “Fitzcarraldo” shoot in all of its magnificent, doomy glory. When he spoke to Mr. Blank, Mr. Herzog used the phrase “challenge of the impossible” to describe his heroic, arguably unhinged struggle to complete his film.

But “Burden of Dreams” never penetrated Mr. Herzog’s rogue thoughts, at least not in the way his own mesmerizingly bizarre account does. That’s understandable: Mr. Blank could concentrate on such external diversions as hauling a steamship over a hill in the Amazon rain forest, which was the pièce de résistance of Mr. Herzog’s “Fitzcarraldo” scenario.

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'Black Water Rising' By Attica Locke

Reviewed by JANET MASLIN
New York Times

On the day he is to meet with the Houston mayor, Jay Porter takes special care not to wear his best clothes. That’s because as he dresses, he is being watched by Bernadine, his very pregnant wife, and because the mayor, Cynthia Maddox, is an old flame.

The year is 1981. Eleven years earlier, as a student at the University of Houston, Jay wore a dashiki, a goatee and a militant air. Cynthia, Jay remembers, was a noisily outspoken member of Students for a Democratic Society, a white girl drawn to black radicals “as sure as if the Temptations had come to town.”

Now Cynthia has a stiff blond head of helmet hair, an important office and a politician’s survival skills. Jay has a struggling law practice and a deep, gnawing sense of self-doubt. If he often feels as if others might betray him, he can thank Cynthia for some of that; she fell right out of love with him when he faced trumped-up charges of conspiring to incite violence. She vanished when he stood trial.

Attica Locke’s “Black Water Rising” uses Jay’s unease as a determinative character trait, one that will shape much of his behavior during Ms. Locke’s atmospheric, richly convoluted debut novel. Her story begins on a dark and watery night. Jay has taken Bernie (as she is known) on a bayou cruise when he hears cries for help, dives off the boat and rescues a damsel in distress. Knowing full well that only suckers rescue such damsels and that this may be “the oldest con in the book,” Jay nonetheless saves an expensively dressed white woman about whom he knows exactly nothing. The false assumptions that he makes about her will add a layer of interest to Ms. Locke’s deeply nuanced story.

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“Home Game” by Michael Lewis

“Home Game” by Michael Lewis
New York Times

Michael Lewis’s “Home Game” is meant for the man who has everything — including a grudging attitude toward raising his own children. Affecting a curmudgeonly stance that owes something to Professor Henry Higgins, Mr. Lewis writes of how he deigned not just to let a woman into his life, but also three children.

While his wife figures only tangentially in the book, is given scant credit for her efforts and is referred to as “incubator of the source material,” the children become the center of Mr. Lewis’s universe, much to his initial horror. “Maternal love may be instinctive,” he writes, with a touch of candor in a book that is otherwise gruffly facetious, “but paternal love is learned behavior.”

“Home Game” is about Mr. Lewis’s learning process. Based on a series of columns he wrote for Slate, the book frames a series of anecdotes about child rearing in terms well suited to Father’s Day. (Four years ago Mr. Lewis hailed that holiday with a conveniently timed book about his high school baseball coach.) No greeting-card saccharine here: Mr. Lewis manages to work business, baseball and golf references into stories about his children’s behavior. And no analogy is too manly to be out of place. When he takes his oldest child to school so that his wife and new baby can sleep, he writes, “I am the good soldier who has leapt on the hand grenade, so that others may live.”

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“Cheever: A Life” By Blake Bailey

“Cheever: A Life” By Blake Bailey

Reviewed By Bret Anthony Johnston
New York Times

Blake Bailey’s “Cheever: A Life” opens with a reference to the time John Cheever emerged, presumably drunk and definitely naked, from his Boston apartment. It was seven years before his death, a winter evening when he was to accompany John Updike to the symphony. His books were out of print, his marriage on the verge of collapse and his ambiguous sexual orientation a daily torment. He had taken to walking the streets and drinking with bums. Upon discovering Cheever in this compromised state, Updike, as he described it, “primly concentrated on wedging him into his clothes.” Afterward they went to Symphony Hall as if nothing unusual had occurred. Essentially, nothing had.

Bringing the lives of writers’ writers to the reading public is Mr. Bailey’s specialty. In “A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates” (2003) he delivered a sensitive and powerful portrait of the vastly underappreciated author of “The Easter Parade” and “Revolutionary Road.” Following Yates with Cheever makes sense. Both men waged desperate, lifelong battles with alcoholism, and Cheever, like Yates, spent his career attacking the hypocrisy of suburban life in keenly observed, downhearted narratives. Ultimately, though, their career trajectories diverged. After publishing three story collections and the novels “The Wapshot Chronicle” and “The Wapshot Scandal,” Cheever was hailed as “Ovid in Ossining” by Time magazine in a 1964 cover story — he also made the cover of Newsweek in 1977 with the release of his novel “Falconer” — while Yates remained a critical darling ignored by readers.

Yates never had a story in The New Yorker, whereas Cheever published a staggering 121 stories there. Most of those stories, Mr. Bailey writes, were born of autobiography or notes recorded in Cheever’s journal, a voluminous daily accounting maintained, Cheever said, as “a means of refreshing my memory.” (Only a fraction of the journal — 4,300 typed, single-space pages — has been published, but Mr. Bailey had total access.)

Cheever wrote conventional and experimental stories alike, though in fiction, as in life, he was obsessed with the dark secrets of the middle class. In “The Enormous Radio,” one of his masterpieces, a married couple find that their new radio inexplicably allows them to eavesdrop on their neighbors. The Westcotts “overheard demonstrations of indigestion, carnal love, abysmal vanity, faith, and despair.”

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"The Cradle" By Patrick Somerville

"The Cradle" By Patrick Somerville

Reviewed By Janet Maslin

At the start of Patrick Somerville’s magical debut novel, a very pregnant woman named Marissa Bishop makes a request. In the short time before her first baby is due, Marissa would like her husband, Matt, to go find the cradle in which her mother, Caroline, once rocked her.

Caroline walked out on her husband and daughter when Marissa was a teenager. Ten days afterward and not coincidentally, a burglar emptied the house of everything Caroline wanted to take with her. Out came the good stuff, cradle and all.

“You can find anything,” Marissa tells her husband encouragingly. “You’re Matt. Where are my keys?” Yes, Matt has the persistence for this odd assignment. But it will send him roaming through unexpected regions of the Midwest, and of the heart.

Mr. Somerville has the chops to keep this story from softening into the generic mush suggested by his premise. As the jacket copy for “The Cradle” puts it, during the search “Matt makes a discovery that will forever change Marissa’s life, and faces a decision that will challenge everything he has ever known.” How often have you read this kind of synopsis? How wearyingly do track-down-a-secret novels conform to this pattern?

And how reflexively do authors crosscut, as Mr. Somerville does here, between two seemingly unrelated stories that turn out to be closely linked? Mr. Somerville uses even that creaky tactic to poignantly good effect. In a streamlined 200-page book that works as a fully conceived novel, he tells an endearing story full of genuinely surprising turns. And while Matt is quietly and whimsically buffeted by fortune, there’s no Gump or Garp in him. Though it takes a while for Mr. Somerville to reveal this, Matt is deeply serious about what first sounded like a purely capricious mission.

The primary focus of “The Cradle” is clear: this is a book about family ties, some ruptured, some restored. And Matt understands what his wife is really seeking. She does not want her new family to fall apart the way her old one did. The cradle will be her talisman. So what if that cradle is barely an heirloom? So what if it came into Marissa’s family when her grandmother bought it at a yard sale? “There’s another link,” Marissa insists to Matt. “Her hauling it home that day.” Matt loves his wife too much to do anything but agree.

So off he goes, away from Milwaukee and toward anyone who may cast light on Caroline’s whereabouts. His first stop, on the trail of Caroline’s half-sister: a house where “the yard gave off few signs of interested human control” and a cat sits staring out the window. “From time to time, Matt stared straight back at it and tried to send it mental signals: I am not your enemy, I am not your enemy” he thinks. Mr. Somerville adds, “Then, later: meow.”

There is a cradle in this house, he tells himself. There are spider webs on its porch, says the woman who lives there. So Matt winds up doing household chores before he can ask if she knows anything about Caroline. “I do,” says the woman. “But do you know anything about plumbing?”

This part of “The Cradle” takes place in 1997. Other, interspersed sections involve a woman named Renee and take place a decade later. Renee and her husband, Bill, have a 19-year-old son who is leaving for Iraq. “Their son was going to war,” Mr. Somerville writes. “This was the week he would disappear and become an idea.” When Renee turns on a television, she is spooked by the apocalyptic sight of a fire at a chemical plant in Milwaukee. By not-quite-coincidence, it’s the plant where Matt worked in 1997.

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“The Believers” By Zoe Heller

“The Believers” By Zoe Heller

Reviewed By Michiko Kakutani
New York Times

Nearly all the characters in Zoë Heller’s ambitious new novel, “The Believers,” are true believers. Though each chooses a different vehicle of worship — socialism, liberal humanism, orthodox Judaism or the New Age gospel of self-improvement — they are all in thrall to their own certainty, self-righteous about their own beliefs and contemptuous of anyone dimwitted enough to disagree. They are also believers in their own mythologies: the roles in which they have been cast by their parents or children or followers, the personas they have had thrust upon them and have, over the years, internalized as their own. Zeal is their default setting; sanctimony, their favorite defense.

Whereas Ms. Heller’s two previous novels — “Everything You Know” and “What Was She Thinking? Notes on a Scandal” — were slender tour de forces that used distasteful narrators to explore the related theme of self-delusion and the gap between private feelings and public perceptions, “The Believers” is a considerably larger and messier undertaking. It attempts to give us a group portrait of a wildly dysfunctional family, even as it tackles the big theme of certainty and its discontents.

Ms. Heller, who has worked as a journalist for publications like Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, is an extraordinarily entertaining writer, and this novel showcases her copious gifts, including a scathing, Waugh-like wit; an unerring ear for the absurdities of contemporary speech; and a native-born Brit’s radar for class and status distinctions. But “The Believers” is also a somewhat scattershot production: brilliant at times; at others, oddly unfocused.

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Christopher Nolan, Irish Author, Dies at 43

By William Grimes
New York Times

Christopher Nolan, an Irish writer who, mute and quadriplegic since birth, produced a highly praised volume of verse and short stories at 15 and went on to publish a prize-winning autobiography, “Under the Eye of the Clock,” died Friday in Dublin. He was 43 and lived in Sutton, near Dublin.

Christopher Nolan in 1988 with his autobiography. It won the prestigious Whitbread Prize and was followed by a novel.

His death was confirmed by a condolence message from the president of Ireland, Mary McAleese. His family told the Irish and British press that he died after food became trapped in his airway.

Oxygen deprivation during a difficult delivery left Mr. Nolan physically helpless, able to communicate with family members only through eye movements. At 11, supplied with a new drug to relax his neck muscles, he began writing with a “unicorn stick” strapped to his forehead, pecking a letter at a time on a typewriter as his mother held his chin with her hands.

The brain that one doctor had predicted would remain infantile turned out to contain a distinctive literary voice awaiting release.

“My mind is like a spin-dryer at full speed, my thoughts fly around my skull while millions of beautiful words cascade down in my lap,” he told The Observer of London in 1987. “Images gunfire across my consciousness and while trying to discipline them I jump in awe at the soul-filled bounty of my mind’s expanse.”

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'Death By Leisure: A Cautionary Tale' By Chris Ayres

'Death By Leisure: A Cautionary Tale' By Chris Ayres

Reviewed By Janet Maslin
New York Times

When Chris Ayres took his date to a Golden Globes party at the home of a former studio head, she had read about the place ahead of time. “If you push a button in the living room, a 20-foot movie screen drops from the ceiling, speakers rise from the floor and the bookshelf sinks down behind you to make way for a projectionist,” she said.

“If you push a button in my living room, the lights come on,” Mr. Ayres replied. “It’s incredible. I’ll show you sometime.”

Mr. Ayres was then Hollywood correspondent for The Times of London. And he found his life in California to be fiscally confusing. He had grown up in Wooler, a Northumberland village two hours south of Edinburgh, with a father whose proudest achievement was being middle class.

But he had relatives who sent him dollar bills as birthday gifts, and the idea of high-rolling American life fueled his imagination. One of the first words little Chris could say was “Lamborghini.”

He had done a brief but memorable nine-day journalistic stint in Iraq (the basis for his first book, “War Reporting for Cowards”) before California beckoned. Mr. Ayres moved there and took to his new beat.

“It is my job to ensure that the celebrity gossip is put into the correct sociopolitical context and recounted with the appropriate literary metaphors and allusions to Greek mythology,” he explains at the start of “Death by Leisure,” his book about time spent partly in the California trenches — and partly in the Hollywood Hills. This book is a comedic account of how California lured him into living large and introduced him to his inner Big Spender.

Fast and funny, “Death by Leisure” has the high spirits of a chick book, because its author is interested in chick-lit things: dates, celebrities, vanity and shopping. But it is also a tale of real woe. Even while abusing his American Express card and taking out a suicidal mortgage from a now-defunct company (his fictionalized “home loan specialist” works for “the You-Bet-You-Can Mortgage Corporation” — “Dealing in dreams since 2002!” ), Mr. Ayres kept on kidding himself and running up debts. He did that even though he anticipated what would happen to the California housing bubble, the dollar and the weather.

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'The Gamble' by Thomas E. Ricks

'The Gamble' by Thomas E. Ricks

Reviewed By Michiko Kakutani at the New York Times

Thomas E. Ricks’s devastating 2006 book, “Fiasco,” provided a lucid, tough-minded assessment of the Iraq war, brilliantly summing up the political and military mistakes that had brought the United States, after more than three years of occupation, to a terrible tipping point there. Drawing upon the author’s reporting on the ground in Iraq and his many sources within the uniformed military, “Fiasco” chronicled how the United States “went to war in Iraq with scant solid international support and on the basis of incorrect information,” and how flawed assumptions, drastic planning failures and plain old-fashioned hubris led to a “derelict occupation” that fueled a burgeoning insurgency.

In his equally powerful and illuminating new book, “The Gamble,” Mr. Ricks, who covered the military for The Washington Post from 2000 to 2008, takes up the story where he left off in “Fiasco.” This volume recounts how Iraq came close to unraveling in 2006, how the Bush administration finally conceded it was off course, and how a new set of commanders — headed by Gen. David H. Petraeus and Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno — began putting a radically different strategy in place.

That strategy, often referred to as the surge, not only involved the addition of some 30,000 troops but also, more important, featured new counterinsurgency tactics (which made the protection of Iraqi civilians a priority) and a new realpolitik approach to dealing with insurgents.

Mr. Ricks writes as both an analyst and a reporter with lots of real-time access to the chain of command, and his book’s narrative is animated by closely observed descriptions of how the surge worked on the ground, by a savvy knowledge of internal Pentagon politics, and by a keen understanding of the Iraq war’s long-term fallout on already strained American forces.

While Mr. Ricks praises General Petraeus’s success in helping the military regain the strategic initiative in Iraq as an “extraordinary achievement” — reducing violence and reviving “American prospects in the war” — he also reminds us that the surge was meant to “create a breathing space that would then enable Iraqi politicians to find a way forward,” and that that outcome is still unclear. “The best grade” the surge campaign can be given, he says, “is a solid incomplete.”

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'The Big Rich' By Bryan Burrough

'The Big Rich' By Bryan Burrough

Reviewed by Janet Maslin
New York Times

The title of “The Big Rich,” Bryan Burrough’s new book about Texas oil money, serves as shorthand. “Big” turns out to mean extravagantly vulgar; it means having the kind of taste that prompted Frank Lloyd Wright, referring to what was said to be Houston’s most fabulous hotel in 1949, to remark that he had always wondered what the inside of a jukebox looked like. “Rich” signals that vast fortunes don’t always last, and that a man who once owned millions of acres of oilfields and thousands of head of cattle could go so broke that even his water cooler and lawnmowers would wind up confiscated. Voyeurism and schadenfreude are the forces that drive this book.

Mr. Burrough, the business-savvy Vanity Fair correspondent, grew up in Texas, perhaps watching “Dallas.” But he didn’t have firsthand knowledge of the Texas that this book tries to summon. And the oil barons about whom he writes, ostentatious as they were, had little interest in leaving behind records of their financial dealings or domestic extravagances. So “The Big Rich” gets much of its information secondhand. It makes far too ready use of phrases like “What happened next has never been explained.”

Describing this account as “an engineered history,” Mr. Burrough proceeds to engineer it into a stock, familiar format. He chooses four tycoons out of the many who struck it rich during the boom years from 1930 to ’35. “If Texas had a Mount Rushmore, their faces would be on it,” he writes of Clint Murchison Sr., Roy Cullen, Sid Richardson and H. L. Hunt, caricaturing these figures as “a good ol’ boy,” “a scold,” “a genius” and “a bigamist.”

Since their stories do not automatically interlock, Mr. Burrough relies on metronomic crosscutting to shape his narrative. This structure is arbitrary and feels that way. And the book’s most memorable oilman, Glenn McCarthy, is a whole other breed of showoff, a man who wound up as a character in “Giant” and really did leave a tabloid trail. Two McCarthys, Glenn and Senator Joseph, are compass points in the Texas of “The Big Rich,” but they don’t fit into Mr. Burrough’s central constellation. “The Big Rich” is also engineered into the standard arc of a success story. So it begins with 100 long, dusty pages about the discovery of oil in different parts of the region. (This book, illustrated with too few photographs to do its characters justice, desperately needed a map of oil fields.) At this early stage of the game Mr. Burrough’s main job is to find different ways to describe what it was like when a gusher came in.

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"The Associate" by John Grisham

"The Associate"
By John Grisham

Reviewed by Janet Maslin
New York Times


John Grisham kick-starts his latest morality fable just as he has kick-started so many others: by introducing the warring forces of good and evil. On the side of the angels: Kyle McAvoy, idealistic editor in chief of The Yale Law Journal. As “The Associate” begins, Kyle is coaching a basketball team for underprivileged kids in New Haven as he waits to graduate and pursue his career of choice. He has accepted a $32,000-a-year legal aid job so he can help migrant workers in Virginia.

But there is a sinister stranger with a “slick head” and “calm hairy hands” in Kyle’s future. He shows up to broach a different career plan. This vaguely foreign-sounding man, calling himself Bennie Wright and aided by a team of fake F.B.I. agents, announces that he would like Kyle to become a $200,000-a-year associate for a high-powered New York law firm. Translated from the Grisham-ese, what that means is that Bennie — acting on the same kinds of murky but all-powerful motives that used to fuel Hitchcock plots as he sets up a corporate espionage scheme with Kyle as its patsy — would like Kyle to sell his soul to the devil.

Kyle is a brash, attractive good guy. (Think back to “The Firm.” Mr. Grisham has.) Why would he agree to an about-face like that? Because he has to. Quicker than you can say, “Duke lacrosse team,” Bennie brings up an ugly college episode that involved Kyle, his Duquesne University fraternity brothers and a woman named Elaine who now claims to have been raped by four of them at a party. Bennie has a cell-phone video record of the incident that is remarkably clear, even though all participants were too drunk to remember whether the sex was consensual.

To read the rest of the review by Janet Maslin, please click here.

A New National Scripture

By ANTHONY LEWIS
Published: January 16, 2009
Found At New York Times

Barack Obama’s election as president had a thousand fathers in the long history of the struggle against American racism. But three events stand out as decisive in creating the possibility of an African-American president.

The first, in 1863, was Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, which promised freedom but was followed by a century of harsh discrimination. The second was the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education, signaling the end of legal tolerance for discrimination. The third was the speech the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave at the March on Washington in 1963, 100 years after Lincoln’s proclamation.

“I have a dream” is the refrain by which the speech is known — better known to Americans today than any other speech, even the Gettysburg Address. (In 2008, according to one study, 97 percent of American teenagers recognized the words as King’s.) But for all its familiarity and indisputable greatness, the origins and larger meaning of the speech are not generally understood.

The speech and all that surrounds it — background and consequences — are brought magnificently to life in Eric Sund­quist’s new book, “King’s Dream.” A professor of literature at the University of California, Los Angeles, Sundquist has written about race and ethnicity in American culture. In this book he gives us drama and emotion, a powerful sense of history combined with illuminating scholarship.

To read the entire review by Anthony Lewis, please click here.

Cataloging the Insults (and Joys) of Old Age

One of the drawbacks of old age, the protagonist of Saul Bellow’s final novel, “Ravelstein” (2000), declares, is that gaps begin to open in your life, “and these gaps tend to fill up with your dead.”
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Jillian Edelstein

One of the many excellent things about Diana Athill’s previous memoir, “Stet” (2000), about her long and storied career as a book editor in London — she worked with V. S. Naipaul, John Updike and Norman Mailer, among others — was that she allowed the gaps in her story to fill, like frosting layered onto a cake, with fulsome memories of her own cherished dead.

Some of the writers she celebrated in her witty, cantankerous style are all but forgotten now. Does anyone read the Irish novelist Molly Keane or the Brooklyn-born experimental writer Alfred Chester any longer?

To read more of Dwight Garner's Review from the New York Times click here.