Month: July 2001

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Yonder Stands Your Orphan

By Barry Hannah

Atlantic Monthly Press; 336 pp.; $24

There’s a rumor about Barry Hannah bringing a gun to a class he was teaching at Ole Miss and firing it in front of his students. There’s another about him sharpening a knife during a reading at a bookstore, only to thrust it into the podium midsentence. There’s also one about him arriving drunk to a booksigning and attempting to scandalize every woman there. And there’s a particularly nice story about him playing trumpet with Mississippi roots-rock band Blue Mountain.

Legends like these abound about Hannah. Probably most of these stories — and the multitude of others that float around — aren’t true, and probably a few of them are. That’s not really the issue, though; what’s more important than the veracity of such gossip is the simple fact that such legends are being told. What other living Southern author has such a widespread and mythic legend surrounding him?

As famous as he is for his intimidation, drunkenness, and unpredictable behavior, Hannah is also renowned for his talent — his sentences sear the reader — and for his maddening inconsistency. A common perception of his work is that he is a far better short story writer than novelist. He excels in creating highly focused stories that seem to explode with action and meaning, while his longer pieces can often prove looser and more digressive.

Perhaps his latest book, Yonder Stands Your Orphan, will change this perception: It is an aggressively strange novel of stories and ideas sewn together like a Frankenstein’s monster and told by a writer whose own legends suggest he knows of which he speaks. Episodic and often elegant, it is composed of stories “of men gone mad with religion and vicious with regret, mass conflagrations, graves.”

Hannah focuses on a large group of crazies and eccentrics who live and work around Eagle Lake near Vicksburg, Mississippi, a remote locale frequented by hardcore fishermen and lunatics alike. His characters are creatures of the casinos and the backwoods, old men lamenting a South that never existed, unladylike ladies both very young and very old. They are the same kinds of people who populate Hannah’s previous fictions, hardscrabble hoodlums and middle-age losers this close to snapping; he has even revived one of them name and all — Sidney Farte, the entertainingly sinister old coot who first appeared in “Water Liars,” from his classic first story collection, Airships.

At the center of all the commotion are a few who might be considered main characters: Melanie Wooten, a 73-year-old widow who has “an elegance on loan from the cinema” and who is sleeping with a sheriff half her age; Max Raymond, a brooding saxophone player married to and jealous of a salsa-singing Cuban nicknamed the Coyote; and Man Mortimer, a small-time criminal who dabbles in teen pornography and prostitution, not to mention murder and mutilation, and who seems to embody evil in its purest form.

Mortimer is the most interesting in the community, if only because he’s the most unpredictable and the most ambiguous. At a drive-in restaurant, still nursing a humiliating wound to his testicles from the previous night, he slices the waiter’s arm with a concealed knife, then speeds away. In general, evil is more interesting than good, and Mortimer’s evil is so intense and shadowy that he lends the novel a perverse energy. Hannah infuses him with a great deal of symbolism and meaning: Mortimer acts as the culmination of more than a century of deconstruction rather than Reconstruction, and he is a creation more than strong enough to carry such monumental literary weight.

As Mortimer terrorizes the residents of Lake Eagle, the characters’ various interactions — romantic and adversarial, violent and lustful — create a labyrinthine story with a gloriously tossed-off feel to it, a ratty improvisation that perfectly captures the dying South that serves as both setting and theme. For Hannah, the South has become a cheap tourist wasteland, shackling its past and parading its dubious culture about for a quick buck.

Throughout a dozen books in nearly 30 years, Hannah’s prose has been legendarily graceful, inventive, voracious, and startlingly direct. In Yonder Stands Your Orphan, the sentences still retain their almost supernatural ability to bend, warp, and angle, while his characterization — running the gamut from young boys to aging beauties to old farts fishing from the docks — is sly yet sharp. The plot takes its own sweet time, meandering occasionally but always into intriguing territory. Hannah remains in constant control of the seemingly haphazard events, developing his ideas thoughtfully and infusing the novel with a sad-eyed melancholy. Yonder Stands Your Orphan erupts in a sharp finale of blood and fire and death, the account of which the author delivers secondhand so as not to reveal too much. The effect is creepy and concussive, if only because so much is left to the imagination.

Known to brandish a knife or gun as much as he is to wield a pen, Hannah has written an intricate novel that should completely overshadow his own extraliterary legend. Ultimately, Yonder Stands Your Orphan proves so original and so amazingly well wrought as to be absolutely unforgettable. — Stephen Deusner

Empire Falls

By Richard Russo

Knopf; 483 pp.; $25.95

If the title of Richard Russo’s latest novel, Empire Falls, strikes you as a possible allusion to Gibbon’s treatise on the fall of the Roman empire, you’ve got the right idea. The notions conjured up by the title — fallen empires, the inevitability of any human glory, no matter how magnificent and ostensibly controlled, succumbing at last to entropy — are within the first 20 pages revealed to be accurate implications of what the reader might expect from this hulking novel.

The fictional town of Empire Falls, Maine, is home to the skeletal remnant of the once-mighty Whiting clan’s textile empire and those left behind, willingly or not, after the unemployment-fueled diaspora that took place when that empire collapsed. Central to this imbroglio is Miles Roby, our crestfallen protagonist and manager of the Empire Grill, who seems to be losing a slow war of attrition. But in this war, the metaphorical shrapnel embedded in Miles’ body are shards of his own shattered dreams. Dreams of academia.

Miles’ place at the grill was both portended and pursued. While he was in high school, the girl of his dreams worked there (as she still does), so it was only natural that he be inexorably drawn to this unattainable beauty’s lair. Yet when he finally escaped high school (and the vortex that his teenage desire made of the Empire Grill), his happy, hopeful days far away at an excellent college were cut short by the dreadful pull of his mother’s cancer. Miles came home to comfort her, though all Grace Roby wanted was for her son to flee Empire Falls without looking back. During the slow months of his mother’s demise, Miles worked long and hard back at the Empire Grill, covering for its terminally ill manager. The manager would never return. Miles would never leave.

So this is where we find Miles as the novel begins. His teen daughter, Tick, is his life. He’s losing Janine, his wife, to the owner of her health club, Walt. An older man who fancies himself a “Silver Fox,” Walt loves visiting Miles at the Empire Grill to either rub it in or make sure there aren’t any hard feelings regarding Miles and Janine’s impending divorce and his part in it. Miles’ right-hand man at the grill is his younger brother, David, whose burden is a self-inflicted ruined hand. David’s injury is the result of a spectacular drunk-driving accident and its harrowing aftermath, the description of which itself is worth the price of the novel, but he’s since cleaned up, except for the occasional toke. David and Miles’ father, Max Roby, is the prototypical ne’er-do-well. During their childhood, the brothers’ father could be counted on to either be sitting at a nearby bar drinking on credit or sojourning the East Coast for work incompetently painting houses. Observing all this local color from across the Knox River’s Empire Falls is the probably malevolent Francine Whiting, widow of C.B. Whiting, the third generation to man the helm of the Whiting textile empire.

Mrs. Whiting also happens to be the owner of the Empire Grill. It was she who fetched Miles home 20 years ago when his mother’s illness took its fatal turn. Grace Roby had years before been offered a position as Mrs. Whiting’s personal assistant when her job at the Whiting shirt factory was eliminated under new ownership. She accepted the position with some misgivings yet remained on until her death. It was only after the devastating blow of burying his mother that Miles buried himself in the tedium of the grill. Mrs. Whiting soon informed him that since he had kept it financially afloat for her in a tough time it would pass on to him at the time of her death.

In the years since Miles took this fateful offer his dreams have been reduced to little more than making his retirement off the sale of the Empire Grill, if and when it passes on to him, and thenceforth leading a pleasurable, blasé, blue-collar existence on some spot of land on Martha’s Vineyard.

But capricious fate will have none of this and will make sure everything changes drastically. A little life-altering tragedy creeps in before Empire Falls ends. For a man who considers himself first and foremost a comic novelist — and there’s plenty of laughs in this book — Richard Russo has ingeniously crafted a terribly real and at times macabre tale of lives tangled up and rent apart that spans nearly a century. But that’s not to say it’s a downer. The resolution, though dark, is strangely uplifting.

The ambition of this work is a bit boggling, and the circuitous manner in which all the narrative elements reconnect at unforeseeable junctures with startling clarity is nigh miraculous, not to mention hair-raising. And certainly beautiful is the author’s unquestionable command of voice. With characters this fully realized, you never hesitate to believe. I can recall only once or twice encountering a snippet of dialogue that came across as histrionic, but these were characters on the far periphery. Highly recommended.

Make sure you also check out Russo’s magnificent first novel, Mohawk, originally published in paperback by Vintage in 1986. It’s now available for the first time in hardback, courtesy of Knopf. Also highly recommended. — Jeremy Spencer

Visible Spirits

By Steve Yarbrough

Knopf; 273 pp.; $23

The dark, persistent spirits explored in Steve Yarbrough’s second novel, Visible Spirits, hold the characters captive to their violent and embarrassing pasts. The period and place is the Reconstruction South. The year is 1902. And the town is Loring, Mississippi.

Similarities to Howard Bahr’s The Year of Jubilo are obvious. In Bahr’s novel, Civil War soldiers return from battle and confront the reality of their new loss — the loss of almost every aspect of their previous existence. In Visible Spirits, Yarbrough’s central characters, the “entitled” Payne brothers, Leighton and Tandy, bungle through their distaste for each other as their home town faces turmoil: The African-American postmistress, Loda Jackson, is threatened into resigning, and President Theodore Roosevelt personally intervenes. There will be no mail delivery to Loring until the postmistress regains her position.

Yarbrough’s Payne brothers, and the unyielding memories of their deceased father, the powerful Sam Payne, are skillfully rendered. Even potentially positive characters, such as Leighton, Loring’s mayor and newspaper editor, whose struggles are real and worthy, never quite rises above the moral miasma of Loring’s citizenry. When Leighton recalls his participation in some of Sam Payne’s horrific acts against their servants — Sam at one time forces them into a vat of “dipping” solution to rid his plantation of ticks — the son seems to take on the sins of his father, justly or not. Tandy Payne’s return to Loring from New Orleans is anything but triumphant. Tandy is a survivor in the worst sense of the word. His gambling escapades have ruined him and almost gotten him killed. (He saves himself once by lighting a horse on fire.) Tandy’s acts of violence are coupled incongruously with his cowardice and bizarre good-ole-boy mentality. And the more the Payne brothers battle each other and the town, the more they evoke the terrifying specter of their father.

In contrast to Yarbrough’s confident handling of his male characters, Leighton’s wife, Sarah, is awkwardly portrayed. Her cold, dismissive manner is never adequately explained beyond her dissatisfaction with Leighton and their marriage.

Yarbrough scores, however, when he employs his knowledge of the Reconstruction South. The resistance to change in Loring resonates. When President Roosevelt focuses on the citizens’ misbehavior and applies his “federal” power, they once again feel conquered, but sympathetic readers will be few. Loring’s old guard is hardly worthy of concern. Interaction between blacks and whites is laced with bitterness. In fact, the only power the black community seems to possess is their control of spirits. When they threaten a haunting, even Sam Payne is unnerved.

That the Reconstruction South labored under a haunted past is highlighted by Yarbrough’s sometimes excessively elliptical style. Chapters flow back and forth, past to present, making Loring’s disconcerting history more so. The novel’s violent episodes and irredeemable characters hold little hope. Still, Visible Spirits concludes on a note of optimism. Leighton Payne visits an elderly Loda Jackson in the hospital and realizes the uncertainty of “his position and the space he’d taken up for so long.” — Lisa C. Hickman

Back When We Were Grownups

By Anne Tyler

Knopf; 274 pp.; $25

Pulitzer Prize-winner Anne Tyler, author of Breathing Lessons, The Accidental Tourist, and Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, has created in this her 15th novel a stunning depiction of an average life — a life so remarkably normal that when subtle changes occur it is with resonating force.

At 53, Rebecca Davitch wakes up one morning to realize what a difference one decision can make. Overnight this grandmother and widow realizes that she no longer recognizes herself and wonders what her life might have been had she chosen a different path.

In a dream Rebecca imagines that she has a teenage son, a fair-complected, light-haired boy completely unlike her daughter or step-daughters. The dream sets Rebecca to wondering what life might have been like had she married her high school sweetheart, as she had planned, and not Joe, an older, abandoned husband and father of three young daughters and the eventual father of Rebecca’s daughter.

Rebecca remembers the 20-year-old college student she was before she met Joe. She has long since left this serious, solemn, intellectual girl behind. Painfully shy earlier in life, Rebecca marvels at the person she has become. She cannot reconcile the somber, idealistic girl with the dowdy, silly woman she is, and she certainly cannot see how Rebecca the wallflower became Rebecca the planner of other people’s parties.

With this in mind, Rebecca retraces her life. She calls her old beau, and she picks up a research project she dropped more than 30 years earlier. She tries to reinvent the girl she was.

Beautifully written and at times quite witty, in Back When We Were Grownups Tyler has created an utterly believable woman grappling with that most problematic of notions: self-identity. The book’s other female characters — Rebecca’s grown daughter and step-daughters — are as thought-provoking as they are hilarious: By turns strong, defiant adults and bratty, little girls, Tyler’s women will instantly remind every female reader of herself and every woman she knows.

Back When We Were Grownups also reminds us, whether we be women or men, that there is no skin as comfortable as our own. In the end Rebecca realizes this, but her adventure has been in discovering which skin is, in fact, hers. Therein lies the beauty of this wry, intelligent character study and lesson in personal epiphanies. — Rebekah Gleaves

How To Be Good

By Nick Hornby

Riverhead Books; 304 pp.; $23.95

Nick Hornby has never had a problem writing realistic characters. His protagonists may be flawed, but they are honest about their flaws and their voices are self-aware enough to provide a truthful, compelling narrative. But Hornby’s latest is quite a departure from his usual style and substance. In How To Be Good, the main character is a North London doctor whose sense of morality dictates her self-esteem. She wants to, and has to, be Good.

When we first meet Katie Carr she has just told her husband — via her cell phone, no less — that she wants a divorce. In reaction, her husband David, a newspaper columnist who dubs himself the “Angriest Man in North London,” quickly does a 180: He quits his job, becomes sweet and sensitive, and takes up with a spiritual healer. All of which annoys our not-so-long-ago-saintly protagonist.

Suddenly she is not the Good partner in the marriage. While her husband is handing their lunches and computers to the poor and taking in the homeless, all Katie’s doing is administering to her patients and having an affair. Unfortunately, our narrator/martyr is not so honest with the reader. Katie doesn’t believe it herself, but she goes on and on about how truly Good a person she is. The paradox: She is a Good person. But this not only limits Katie’s fullness as a character (she cares only about this one distinction), it is annoying. For someone as short on moral fiber as myself, it grew quite tedious reading about Katie’s obsession with being Good. Chuck it, I found myself thinking. So you’re annoyed at your kids or your husband and his live-in guru. That’s understandable.

But while Katie could use a smack in the face, How To Be Good nevertheless shows that Hornby is becoming a more mature writer. He’s still dealing with the delicate ties that bind, but this is a novel that revolves around a marriage on its last legs. The question is, Does this couple want to put this marriage out of its misery or let it limp on indefinitely?

Perhaps portrayed more honestly than any of the characters in the novel, the relationship is an evolving beast nourished on years of gradual mistrust and subliminal warfare. It is this “character,” not Katie the Good, not hubby the Angriest Man in North London, that Hornby really understands and defines.

Hornby may be going deeper in this latest book, but he loses some of the humor and hipness that readers delighted in in his previous work. He still intersperses pop-culture references aplenty, but there’s a more serious edge. And I suspect no one will ever see this as a glimpse into women’s psyches the way High Fidelity was said by some to be a glimpse into men’s. Hornby’s Katie is believable as a woman but certainly not astonishing as one.

This opinion is based on the author’s previous work. On its own merits, How To Be Good is enjoyable enough, engaging and all that. Even if it isn’t Hornby at his realistic best. — Mary Cashiola

Nick Hornby will be signing copies of How To Be Good at Davis-Kidd Booksellers on Sunday, July 15th, at 6 p.m.

John Henry Days

By Colson Whitehead

Doubleday; 389 pp.; $24.95

Colson Whitehead’s breakthrough novel The Intuitionist garnered an impressive number of critical accolades, including words such as “brilliant,” “dazzling,” and “bold.” Comparisons to the great (and aware of it) Thomas Pynchon arrived in noisy clusters like detoxifying winos at an all-night soup kitchen. It was, in the opinion of hack and flack alike, abundantly clear that this young African-American writer was going places.

Conceptually, Whitehead’s second novel, John Henry Days, lives up to and perhaps even eclipses the potential shown in his first outing. But it is marred, almost irreparably so, by too many ornamental words, too many modifiers sans action, too many passages which dazzle only by painstaking design. It’s the kind of elegant-by-the-numbers prose where trees reach to heaven like “outstretched fingers.” But if you can tolerate this kind of literary mugging, Whitehead’s John Henry Days is bursting with enlightened, thoroughly devastating commentary on the most semiologically urgent sound byte in the history of American folklore.

As we move beyond automation into this digital age of virtual experience and as the battle between man and machine shifts toward endgame, tales of John Henry’s race against the steam drill become more and more appealing. Hope is the attraction. Whitehead, however, looks beyond the obvious and discovers in its shadows that which should have been equally obvious. He then asks the hard question: Who won the race? Who really won? According to song and story, Henry emerged victorious from his battle with automation and progress, and for the better part of two centuries his dubious victory, fictional or otherwise, has provided the children of post-industrial America with the hope that humanity has not been rendered obsolete by its own cleverness. We have somehow glossed over — even glorified — the fact that, in the end, the winner drops dead from exhaustion. Hooray.

The protagonist of John Henry Days, J. Sutter, is neither hero nor anti-hero. He’s just another journalist in his milieu. Set squarely in the present, a time when every bum on the street has a press agent, Sutter and his fellow scribes, self-aware and generally self-loathing hacks all, have become professional freeloaders, far more concerned with the complimentary liquor and cheese that is part and parcel of the events they are dispatched to cover than they are with the events themselves.

The not-so-newsworthy activity du jour is the release of a new U.S. postage stamp honoring John Henry in the tiny West Virginia town where the steel driver supposedly met with his demise. The backward burg depends on the trickle of tourists who come to have their pictures made next to the steel driver’s statue — a statue that owes its existence to a well-known liquor company — and to take home a souvenir or two. It is an artificial environment both on the rise and in bad decline. This diorama as literary device, pioneered and perfected by George Saunders, is no less effective in Whitehead’s more overtly political hands, and the statue of John Henry quickly becomes a tragic clown. Birds abuse it. Henry’s bare, bronze chest is pockmarked because drunken rednecks use him for target practice. Once, presumably for shits and giggles, someone tied a rope to the statue and drug it through the streets behind a car, then abandoned it. It’s a potent and pertinent image, which, if too precious, is never heavy-handed and always rendered with a sufficiently dark but riotous humor.

Though his tone, even when describing atrocious labor conditions, is too nostalgic, Whitehead’s best writing occurs when he takes on John Henry the myth and makes the folk hero all too human. As if channeling the dreaming minds of a terrified nation aghast at the destructive, all-consuming forces set in motion at their behest, Whitehead writes of John Henry, “He looked at his hands, the big dumb mules at the end of his arms. They did what they wanted. Palms like territories. It was stupid.” And so it was. — Chris Davis

Choke

By Chuck Palahniuk

Doubleday; 256 pp.; $24.95

Victor Mancini, sex addict, is the narrator of Chuck Palahniuk’s Choke. Victor is obsessed with the idea of an ideal world where no one grows old or dies. But in real-world terms, Victor works a job in a historical reenactment society where all things are as they were in 1734. He also helps care for his mother, a former feminist revolutionary, who is lying in a private hospital and starving because she has forgotten how to eat. Victor is struggling to keep his mother alive so he can continue to care for her. Sounds confusing and is.

Private wards cost money, so Victor makes some extra scratch by causing himself to choke at various expensive restaurants. He knows that someone will rush to his aid and hopes that this same savior will take pity on him and send him money. Victor is only too happy to be their victim, but Victor is running out of restaurants, so he needs to think up something fast.

Enter Dr. Paige Marshall on his mother’s private ward. Marshall has a solution to save Victor’s mom. All Victor the sex addict has to do is impregnate the good doctor so she can abort the child and use its brain tissue to restore his mother.

It gets worse. The book begins and ends twisted, and the question remains: Does the author of Fight Club know what he’s doing? In the same way that Victor cannot get past his ideal universe, Palahniuk cannot take these bizarre circumstances and create a coherent story. Victor and Choke don’t make it much further than pop psychology.

At least the book reads well. Palahniuk writes in an easy-going, straight-forward manner only occasionally marred by carelessness or all-out jumble. Clarity is the book’s chief strength, and the description of action — from small to grand gestures — can be heart-rendingly real. The first scene in which Victor “chokes,” I submit, is one of the most terrifying, most graphic you’ll ever read.

But there are limits. Palahniuk slaps down words that sound awfully arty and slaps down some spectacularly grotesque scenes that are awfully unnecessary. In the end, Victor Mancini is left pretty inconsequential. And as is the case for many first-person storylines, if the narrator goes, so does the narrative. — Chris Przybyszewski

Ignatius Rising: The Life of John Kennedy Toole

By René Pol Nevils and

Deborah George Hardy

LSU Press; 234 pp.; $24.95

Eleven years after John Kennedy Toole killed himself, his novel A Confederacy of Dunces was published. The next year, 1981, the work received the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. The story of how the novel came to be published is legendary: Toole’s mother, Thelma, forced the work on author Walker Percy when he was teaching at Loyola University in New Orleans. The book finally met the public, and the public has since made it something of a cult classic.

But who was Toole? What sort of mind was it that created the righteously anti-heroic Ignatius J. Reilly, unemployable and obese, a man who left chaos and a cloud of flatulence in his wake? What was it about Toole that led him to brilliantly define New Orleans through a handful of outrageous characters? And why did he commit suicide?

The biography Ignatius Rising, by René Pol Nevils and Deborah George Hardy, sets out to answer these questions. But because the principal parties in Toole’s story have died, Nevils and Hardy have had to comb through old documents and track down surviving friends and acquaintances. They have pieced together a boyhood overwhelmed by a theatrical mother (she taught piano and elocution), a woman who lived through her son yet gave him little praise. They follow him through school and doctoral work at Columbia University. They follow him to the all-women colleges where he taught and into the army and his assignment in Puerto Rico, where he taught English to the native recruits and wrote the bulk of A Confederacy of Dunces. They follow him back to New Orleans, where he finished his novel. And though he worked hard to clean up the book, it was finally declared unpublishable. Toole grew paranoid, disappeared, and reappeared slumped over in his car, dead from carbon-monoxide poisoning.

That’s the who and the what. Now what about the why? These answers don’t come so easily to the biographers. The book is filled with “must haves” and “might haves.” The letters from Toole, for example, which the biographers showed to psychologists on the possibility that Toole was gay (he didn’t have a girlfriend, though he didn’t have a boyfriend either), are given a lot of attention.

The focus on Toole’s sexuality leads to this incredible passage: “John was obese, unkempt, and very attractive,” says one source, who accompanied Toole to a cottage where he realized his host was running a rooming house for male prostitutes in exchange for sex, a rooming house that just happened to be in the backyard of Toole’s uncle’s house. That this was nearly 40 years ago and that the source was an admitted alcoholic and profoundly depressed at the time don’t seem to concern the authors one bit. Their proof of the accusation? According to this source, someone drove him by the property after A Confederacy of Dunces was published, and he identified the rooming house as such.

The writers, who met in a journal-writing class, first pitched the idea of writing about the efforts to transfer A Confederacy of Dunces to the screen (since delayed). Their editor at LSU Press (the same press that published A Confederacy of Dunces) suggested the women do a biography instead. Nevils and Hardy prove adept at doing the legwork but less grounded in doing the mindwork. Rumors are recorded and half-formed theories are given too much credit, making Ignatius Rising shaky with speculation. — Susan Ellis

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News The Fly-By

WILLIE FOR BOGGS?

A small handful of baseball-style trading cards featuring such Memphis luminaries as Mayor Willie Herenton, restaurateur Thomas Boggs, and Beale Street magnate John Elkington mysteriously appeared at Fly headquarters last week. We will happily trade our complete, mint-condition set for one 1979 Pete Rose (with ball cap); otherwise we ll be forced to unload our wares on eBay.

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Cover Feature News

Endpapers – Part II

Unacknowledged Legislation

By Christopher Hitchens

Verso; 320 pp.; $25

Over the years, Christopher Hitchens has earned a reputation as a sharp-edged polemicist who cannot resist savaging the powerful — Reagan and half his administration; Bill Clinton, whom Hitchens attacks with almost as much gusto as he did Reagan; even Mother Teresa, for goodness’ sake. He has charged Henry Kissinger with war crimes and Sydney Blumenthal with perjury.

Like his intellectual comrades-in-arms Noam Chomsky, Lewis Lapham, and Gore Vidal, Hitchens enjoys exposing what he would call the hypocrisy of political discourse. He is always appalled by the imperfections of public men and women and plays the role of gadfly, as Bill Buckley did of yore, though from a different perspective, to be sure.

Unacknowledged Legislation, a collection of Hitchens’ essays on writers, reveals a more nuanced man than the angry radical offered up periodically on news talk shows. Hitchens trains his critical eye on, among others, Oscar Wilde, George Orwell, Salman Rushdie, Vidal, Saul Bellow, Anthony Powell, and Tom Wolfe. He defends T.S. Eliot against cheap charges of anti-Semitism and almost comes to terms with the idea that Whittaker Chambers was telling the truth. He rips Norman Podhoretz and disputes Raymond Williams, a Marxist historian who unfairly maligned Orwell and who was less than fully forthcoming about the failures of Stalinism.

Hitchens is a rare breed: a leftist who has been refreshingly candid about the failures of socialism as practiced in the Soviet sphere. We sense that he was led to this once rarely trod ground by Eastern Europeans such as Milan Kundera, Vaclav Havel, and Czeslaw Milosz, though none of these writers is discussed in much depth in this book.

Unfortunately, Hitchens does not provide a unifying theme to these disparate essays. One anticipates, given the title, a deeper exploration of the relationship between literature and power. If that relationship is explored, it is only by implication. For example, students of Orwell might recall that he once penned an essay called “Inside the Whale,” in which he argued that writers living amid the tumult of the 1930s and ’40s (communism unleashed, fascism on the rampage, a world at war) should withdraw from the chaos so as to avoid being co-opted by the particular “ism” of the day. In 1984, Rushdie responded to Orwell in “Outside the Whale” by arguing that in the nuclear age writers don’t have the luxury of retreating from the public square. As if to prove the point, a few years later, the Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwah condemning Rushdie to death for his alleged blasphemy in Satanic Verses. Given his knowledge of both writers, Hitchens surely is aware of this exchange, but inexplicably he does not join the debate even though it centers on one of the fundamental issues facing writers as “unacknowledged legislators.” (Hitchens, though, does stand by Rushdie in the face of Khomeini’s edict.)

These essays do have value, however, if only because of Hitchens’ wit and style. He applauds Phillip Larkin’s poetry, despite Larkin’s alleged bigotry, and he writes movingly of Kipling, who, for all his chest-beating over World War I, was so devastated by the loss of his son in that war that he began to chisel away at his once-carved-in-stone assumptions. (A more detailed account of Kipling’s impact on British-American foreign policy can be found in an earlier Hitchens book, Blood, Class and Nostalgia — precisely the kind of exploration of writers I expected here.)

A theme or two does however emerge in these pages. Specifically, sexual intolerance is the one thing Hitchens cannot abide (other than poor writing, perhaps). Homosexuality is discussed repeatedly — how it drove Oscar Wilde to destruction, how Alan Bloom never publicly acknowledged his own, how Phillip Larkin refrained from attacking the intolerance surrounding it, how Gore Vidal flaunted it, how W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood lived it. The issue is raised so often that it begs the complaint of politically correct overkill (and Hitchens is rarely politically correct). Hitchens even argues that antihomosexual hysteria is “the moral concrete” that holds conservatism together. I would have thought lower taxes and the call for small government, but Hitchens is not above caricaturing the views of the opposition.

The familiar journalistic pyrotechnics are also on display. Princess Diana is “a gold-digging air-head.” Tom Clancy’s writing “is to prose what military music is to music.” Norman Podhoretz possesses “the soul of a cultural commissar.” Conor Cruise O’Brien “made the mistake of confusing the condition of the cosmos with the state of his own liver.” Hitchens opens himself up to parody, too. In praising a particular piece of writing by H.L. Mencken, he observes: “This is finely written. It shows something of the feeling for the religious pulse that Marx evinced in his critique of Hegel, and it does so without making any concessions to illusion.”

I, for one, will take his word on it.

Hitchens clearly loves literature, and he keeps his political saber at least partially sheathed in order to celebrate some of this century’s finest writers, even a few whose politics he finds offensive. (Though certainly his sharpest arrows are aimed at conservatives.) He even praises The Great Gatsby and Arthur Conan Doyle — hardly standard fare in the good radical’s library. The generosity shown many of the writers analyzed in this collection would surely be coveted by politicians and government officials who have too often felt Hitchens’ point. But they wait in vain until they put down the sword and pick up the pen. — George Shadroui

The Copenhagen Papers: An Intrigue

By Michael Frayn and David Burke

Metropolitan Books; 144 pp.; $20

Michael Frayn is the British playwright (Noises Off ) who penned the witty Booker Prize finalist Headlong in 1999, a madcap story of a lunatic art appraiser who thinks he has found a missing Brueghel in a neighbor’s fireplace. It was the sort of balancing act of comedy and erudition that one might expect from Peter DeVries or early J.P. Donleavy. Frayn also authored a play called Copenhagen, which ran in London and then New York, where it received three Tony Awards, including Best Play of 2000. One of the actors in that play was David Burke.

Now, together they have written The Copenhagen Papers: An Intrigue, based supposedly on some papers sent to them during production of the play, papers which shed new light on the history of the German nuclear physicist Werner Heisenberg and the scientist Niels Bohr, about whom Frayn wrote Copenhagen. The book is a head-spinning mix of fact and fiction.

This much is known: Michael Frayn did write a play about the true-life mysterious meeting of these two scientists in Copenhagen at a time when Heisenberg was working for the Nazis. What was discussed and how close the Nazis were to having a nuclear bomb remains a puzzle to this day. According to Frayn, England, after the war, brought the Nazis’ entire team of scientists to a clandestine location, a place called Farm Hall, and held them, secretly taping their conversations to determine how much they knew. The British government was also intent on preventing the Russians from kidnapping the scientists to do much the same thing. You with me so far?

During the production of Copenhagen came a packet of papers supposedly from a family now living in Farm Hall, papers that, when translated, turned out to be instructions for the construction of a Ping-Pong table.

All this Frayn explains in the introduction to The Copenhagen Papers. What follows is the correspondence between Frayn and Burke concerning this disturbing turn of events. Are they on the verge of rewriting history? Are they privy to secrets the government would be interested in?

The first question becomes, Is this all a put-on? Is Frayn inventing or recording? And does he indeed have new news about the covert collaboration of the two scientists? Anyone who read Headlong knows that this is just the sort of mystery mixed with history Frayn loves to play with. It is also the clay with which he models this witty novella, if a novella it is. “One of the themes of my play, after all,” Frayn writes, “was the baffling irreconcilability of so much of the story to the end.”

Without giving away too much, what ensues is a battle of wits between Frayn and Burke along the lines of Anthony Shaffer’s play Sleuth. It’s one-upmanship, and the reader is involved, and just how the reader is involved is half the fun.

But the question soon shifts. Are the Frayn and Burke of The Copenhagen Papers just characters created by Michael Frayn? The real Frayn (or is it the character?) says, “I realized that I was in almost exactly the same situation as the central character in the novel I had just finished writing, Headlong. There is great pleasure in inventing frustrations and humiliations for one’s characters; this pleasure turns rather sour, however, when one finds one is being subjected to those same frustrations and humiliations oneself. The biter bit has more to endure than the pain of the teeth marks.”

Frayn doesn’t just pull the rug out from under your feet; he takes your feet. The game played, if indeed it is a game — everything is in doubt, the reader is purposely kept off-balance — is swift-moving and presents one precipitous transition after another. “Once the ground has shaken beneath your feet,” the author warns, “you feel it go on shaking for a long time afterwards.”

The wild ride that is The Copenhagen Papers is that kind of gambol. Frayn has fashioned another compelling comedy, built of forgeries, fakes, false fronts, disguises, pranks, and mysteries — a quick sleight-of-hand which leaves you without your wallet.

In the end, is the whole book a ruse? Could be. Is there really an author named Michael Frayn? No doubt. — Corey Mesler

Was This Man a Genius?

Talks with Andy Kaufman

By Julie Hecht

Random House; 170 pp.; $23.95

The title is a hedge or, rather, a bet cast in full assurance that you already know the answer. Was Andy Kaufman a genius? Of course he was. Otherwise you wouldn’t be bothering with this thin volume by author Julie Hecht. Unfortunately, Hecht never answers the question because she never provides tangible proof that she can. She chooses instead to present the facts as she sees them and weighs in only on slightly less lofty concerns.

True, the late comedian’s brand of entertainment was never easy to figure out, whether during its apex in the late 1970s via skits on Saturday Night Live or now, as the posthumous accolades fall down on this odd, perplexing man whose humor still conjures bewilderment. Hollywood may have sent in the big guns via box-office sure-thing Jim Carrey, yet the poor faring of the 1999 biopic Man On the Moon says plenty about mainstream America’s continuing reluctance to embrace Kaufman’s performances in post-modern Dada, despite the celebrity achieved during his stint with the sitcom Taxi as immigrant mechanic Latka Gravas.

Was This Man a Genius? is the quintessential after-death book in that it simply wouldn’t exist had its subject not expired, which Kaufman did in 1984. It’s a chronicle of the year Hecht spent in search of an interview with Kaufman for a piece assigned by Harper’s magazine. She spent time with him when he came to New York for work or pleasure, and like a passenger duct-taped to a roller coaster, she rode the Wacky World of Andy Kaufman long enough to finally get the interview and write the story, only to have it rejected by Harper’s as being too long and “too strange to be published.”

For that, you can thank the subject himself. Love him or loathe him, Andy Kaufman was arguably the strangest, most unsettling presence to greet you from your television since … well, maybe since the big box settled into the living rooms of America. Whether going to the wrestling mat with women or performing myriad acts of madness on Saturday Night Live — the bongo skit, the Mighty Mouse skit, the unnervingly brilliant Tony Clifton lounge act, or the sincerely loving Elvis impersonation — Kaufman was a guerrilla comic on a warpath no one had even thought to blaze.

Hecht held on as best she could, tolerating his late-night culinary whims, subjecting herself to the often brutal chicanery of Kaufman and his agent cum co-conspirator Bob Zmuda, enduring her subject’s penchant for self-mythology and outright horseshit, doggedly pursuing what she knew was a good story. And finally, she got it, possibly the most confessional, if brief, interview Kaufman ever gave a reporter. It was all there: the domestic and adolescent complexities that prompted a young Andy to gaze vacantly from a window at an age when he should’ve been slobbering over Lincoln Logs; his decidedly skewed perception of romantic relationships; the roots of what seemed all the world like the most bizarre acts ever executed in the name of comedy; even the revelation that he really wasn’t even trying to be funny.

Everything of worth in Was This Man a Genius? arrives in one nice, tidy package at the end of an otherwise superfluous, mildly entertaining journey through the mind of a comedian who either was or wasn’t a genius. (“They could call me an absurdist and a surrealist,” Kaufman tells Hecht at some point early in their year together.) The problem with Hecht’s book is that she doesn’t take control, harness the story, put her own damn opinion into the thing. And if you care about Andy Kaufman, that makes for an infuriating read, because she got closer to him than just about anyone in her professional capacity.

So you’re left, ultimately, with a question unanswered, hanging like a half-broken branch. And somehow you can’t help but believe that Kaufman — if nothing else, a master of manipulation — would enjoy the hell out of Hecht’s disappointing, hardly revealing book. The baffling bastard. — John Floyd

The Money and the Power: The Making of Las Vegas and its Hold on America, 1947-2000

By Sally Denton and Roger Morris

Knopf; 479 pp.; $26.95

In The Money and the Power, the wife-and-husband team of Sally Denton and Roger Morris, veteran investigative reporters, use organized crime and Las Vegas as the prism through which to view a large chunk of America’s social and political history of the last half-century.

Real mobsters and politicians generally don’t sit down with authors for candid discussions of their mutual dependence and enrichment. To tell this story of the Kennedys, Lyndon Johnson, Ronald Reagan, and other politicians with mob connections, the authors relied on numerous books and published articles, testimony gathered by various crime commissions, as well as stacks of FBI files obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and interviews with confidential sources. This is a business, the text reminds us, where mobsters don’t just scare or snub snoops and snitches. They kill them. The book is complex, ambitious, not beach reading by any means, and heavy-going under any circumstances. I consider myself, professionally speaking, a casino junkie because of the Tunica story, but after reading this book, I felt overwhelmed as much as informed.

One problem: the subject itself. We’re used to fictional treatments of the Mafia that focus on a single mob figure or family such as, notably, the novel The Godfather and the movies made from it. If you had trouble keeping the Corleones and Tattalias and the rest of the families straight, you’ll have your hands full with The Money and the Power.

Another problem: the book’s prose. Denton and Morris don’t write many short sentences like this one. Instead, they pile name upon name, subordinate clause upon subordinate clause, insert parenthetical material within parenthetical material (not that the material isn’t sometimes helpful when introducing unfamiliar names, since some of them are not identified until the notes at the end of the book) until sentences become as turgid as this one. Where were the editors?

The book also falls short of its promise (and its title) in one key respect. There is little here about the present state of gambling and the publicly owned corporations that run it. Mississippi, which specifically modeled its casino licensing and taxes after Las Vegas, is almost totally ignored, including, curiously, the Gulf Coast and its connections to organized crime. There is a chapter on the late Benny Binion but nothing on his son Jack, who is arguably the main man or “the juice,” as the authors say, in Tunica. Nor is there much about the demand side of the casino equation, the millions of ordinary Americans who play the slots and low-dollar blackjack and enjoy it. Tying together gambling’s venal past and populist present would make a nice book. The Money and the Power is not it.

What you will learn, however, is a lot about Las Vegas and gambling’s sleaziest financiers, hit men, whores, and entrepreneurs, and more than you probably want to know about former Tennessee senator Estes Kefaufer and his crime hearings in the Fifties.

Having said all that, this is an important study, and the authors deserve high marks for guts, thorough reporting and research, and connecting an awful lot of dots. The notes alone fill 47 pages; the bibliography, 18 more. The Money and the Power is an antidote to simplified, fictionalized, historical treatments like the summer blockbuster Pearl Harbor. The truth, the authors note, is complicated. This book tries to tell it. — John Branston

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Endpapers – Part III

Chance in the House of Fate: A Natural History of Heredity

By Jennifer Ackerman

Houghton Mifflin; 249 pp.; $25

In Chance in the House of Fate, Jennifer Ackerman’s exploration of molecular biology is nearly as intricate as her subject. She probes the mysterious world of cells, sperm, and bacteria with textbook precision and with a whole-hearted admiration for the human connection to the natural world. It is this genuine admiration that makes Ackerman’s book a joy to read, an insightful and self-reflective study that is both scientific and lyrical.

The book is divided into 18 sections, each a close examination of the microscopic world that links all forms of life, from microbes to mice, cephalopods to human beings. Ackerman, a contributing writer and editor for National Geographic magazine and The New York Times, engages in a detailed explanation of genetics that, despite its specificity, is accessible and enjoyable. She approaches the subject of heredity from a personal desire to understand her sister’s genetic disorder and from her awe of the beauty of childbirth, of the symmetry and perfection of her own infant’s face. This curiosity about her own genetic makeup is manifested in a “pilgrimage to the heart of heredity.”

Each living entity, each individual cell, becomes a world of wonder for Ackerman, whose unique philosophy relishes nature and reminds us that “any dividing of life, however useful, is also artificial, reflecting the particular needs of the human mind rather than the realities of nature.” From Ackerman’s intriguing perspective the genome of a fruit fly is connected to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and the response of our immune system to Salmonella is a complicated play, like Shakespeare’s Othello. Her fascination with all living organisms, with heredity, and with motherhood is a reminder of both the mystery and the realities of our existence. — Virginia Benitez

A Pitcher’s Story: Innings with David Cone

By Roger Angell

Warner Books; 290 pp.; $24.95

A longtime editor with The New Yorker, Roger Angell has built a reputation as somewhat of a baseball scholar, with six books on the national pastime to his credit. His latest, A Pitcher’s Story, is a collaboration with veteran big-league hurler David Cone, best known recently for his work with the latest New York Yankees dynasty. Before he pitched in five World Series and before he won the Cy Young Award as his league’s best pitcher, Cone toiled on the mound as a Memphis Chick. He went 8-12 for the 1984 club and — Rick Ankiel fans, take note — led the Southern League with 27 wild pitches. Almost two decades later, Cone is approaching 200 major-league wins, now as a member of the Boston Red Sox.

Angell spent the entire 2000 season with Cone, a campaign that proved to be a bittersweet coda for the pitcher in Yankee pinstripes. Cone suffered through the worst year of his career, accumulating an ugly record of 4-14 (and separating his shoulder to boot) for a club that would win its third straight World Series. What was begun as a project to examine the craft of pitching at the hand of one who did it best became an attempt to convey what Angell describes as baseball’s principle of connection: writer to subject, fan to player, past to present. Less an examination of the art of pitching, Angell’s book became a study of the psyche of a professional athlete who finds his skills eroding … in front of millions.

Reading about Yankee success is like reading about Kennedy fame. It’s the bumps in the road that catch our attention. So it is with David Cone’s story. Angell mentions the highs — the 1999 perfect game at Yankee Stadium, Cone’s gutsy win over Atlanta in the ’96 Series — but he grips his reader with the lows. Cone suffered a career-, even life-threatening aneurysm in his arm during the 1996 season. He was a member of the raucous New York Mets of the late ’80s and early ’90s and became fodder for the Big Apple tabloids when his nightlife somehow managed to outshine his stellar pitching. All along, though, Cone remained as cerebral a ballplayer as one can expect. His enormous role as a representative for the players union during the 1994-95 strike makes for the most provocative reading in the book. These are the chisel marks that have come to shape Cone the ballplayer and Cone the man. “His defeats and his stubborn energy and courage had become the story,” writes Angell.

As with nearly every baseball writer, Angell’s chief weakness is a tone that too often screams, “FAN.” While he aims to provide insight into the atmosphere of baseball life, he does so from the perspective of someone who sees it from behind a notebook and maybe envies it a little. He goes so far as to write, “The more I saw Cone in confusion and pain, the better I liked him.” While a little skewed, the comment says a lot about a book that describes an aspect of major-league baseball we examine far too little: its humanity. — Frank Murtaugh

The Circus Fire: A True Story of an American Tragedy

By Stewart O’Nan

Doubleday; 384 pp.; $14 (paper)

To this day, survivors recall that the worst part of it was the shrieking of the animals trapped in the terrible fire.

But no animals died that day — what everyone heard was the agonized screams of more than 200 men, women, and children who perished when the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus tent caught fire in Hartford, Connecticut, on July 6, 1944.

No one ever discovered what caused the blaze, whether it was intentionally set by a disgruntled circus employee or whether it started from a cigarette, carelessly tossed into the straw below the stands. But in a matter of minutes, the canvas “big top” became a raging inferno, trapping more than 7,000 people inside during an afternoon performance.

I’ve read many history books over the years, and perhaps I have a morbid streak, since quite a few of them have involved disasters, but The Circus Fire, fully illustrated with photos taken during the blaze, is one of the best stories I’ve encountered in a long time. Stewart O’Nan makes us feel we are there in Hartford on that awful day and takes us minute-by-minute through the events of July 6th. We meet many of the families who decided to spend the day at the circus, we experience the horror of the fire almost first-hand, and we learn how those who survived coped with the memory of that day for the rest of their lives.

Among other things, we learn that the tent blazed so fiercely because it had been waterproofed with a mixture of paraffin and gasoline — good at repelling water, but strike a match to it and it becomes, in effect, a giant torch. We learn that most of the exits were blocked by tent poles, guy wires, and bleachers — forming an obstacle course as the tent filled with smoke.

We also learn the pathetic story of the dead girl who came to be known nationwide as “Little Miss 1565.” That was the number they tagged on her at the makeshift morgue after the fire, and that became the inscription on her tombstone. Though she wasn’t disfigured by the flames (many bodies were totally consumed by the intense heat), no one ever came forward to claim her, even when newspapers and Life magazine ran her photo. Today, she remains one of the mysteries of the tragedy that came to be called simply the Circus Fire and just one of the compelling stories of that day in Hartford that O’Nan tells so well. — Michael Finger

In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd

By Ana Menéndez

Grove Press; 229 pp.; $23

In the realm of literary fiction, first story collections by younger authors have a tendency to come out pretty uneven — such revered works as Barry Hannah’s Airships and Kurt Vonnegut’s Welcome To the Monkey House are examples — in that some of the stories are so faultless as to make you shake your head in envy, while others miss their mark by a wide margin. This is only natural, a common criticism. Rarely do you find an artist, even a master, who pulls off what appears to be perfection regularly.

This is what strikes me as so impressive in Ana Menéndez’s debut collection, In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd. It’s pretty damn even. Granted, some tales shine, other sparkle, and some are merely polished, but the book is a fine, coherent rumination on the hearts and minds of Cuban exiles growing old in Miami.

The stories are surreptitiously linked; you’ll follow a new protagonist around for five pages before you realize he or she appeared two stories back as a secondary character. This is telling. Menéndez’s Miami is populated by the fainter doppelgangers of those native Cubans who fled Castro’s revolution 40 years before. Some seem but ghosts of their former selves. And as we follow them or they skirt the perimeters of these stories, their pain almost imperceptible, an appropriate impression of otherworldliness descends upon the reader — every bit of dialogue becomes weighted with memory and remorse, characters breathe and dream. And you are convinced that, of course, they are in another world, unable to shake off the ache of being torn from their families’ homes (whose corridors they still walk).

This quasi-novelistic approach is a wonderful way to flesh out a community so colored by the past. The connections between these characters are tenuous, yet their comfortable familiarity recalls their common ailment: They are Adams and Eves who fled a crumbling Eden. Paradise is lost, and they can never return, but every day they hope to wake to the dissolution of Castro’s Cuba, the rebirth of theirs.

Menéndez has given us a sensitive, humorous, and sad look at ourselves, and rarely does she miss her mark. — Jeremy Spencer

Simone Weil

By Francine du Plessix Gray

Viking; 246 pp.; $19.95

Leslie Fiedler once called Simone Weil, in this, the age of alienation, “our kind of saint.” Flannery O’Connor, who pretty much knew sainthood when she saw it — foolishness, too — countered by once calling the life of Simone Weil “comical.” (No telling what O’Connor would have made of Fiedler’s insinuating “our.”)

Francine du Plessix Gray in her fine new book, Simone Weil, the latest in Viking’s very fine Penguin Lives series, stays out of the sainthood business and mounts the simpler, well-put argument that Weil the intellectual powerhouse, Weil the Marxist-turned-anti-Soviet socialist, Weil the non-Catholic Catholic mystic, and Weil the undereating champion of the economic underdog was in actuality a classic case of anorexia nervosa complicated by crippling bouts with massive migraine.

The diagnosis isn’t du Plessix Gray’s and it isn’t new, but it does help make sense of a life often shorn of sense. The same diagnosis had occurred to Weil’s friend Dr. Louis Bercher as early as 1950, seven years after a coroner’s report described Weil’s death in England, age 34, as “Cardiac failure due to … starvation and pulmonary tuberculosis.” But it did not appear in Bercher’s memoir till after the death of Weil’s devoted (and doctor) father, who categorically denied any such ailment in his daughter and had all references to it struck from the literature surrounding her.

So what is it with Simone Weil? Is she saint or clown? Intellectual or mystic? Martyr or neurotic? The correct answer is seven: all six.

Simone Adolphine Weil was born in Paris in 1909 and grew up in a household it seems only the French can come up with. Her father — “kind, loving, and thoroughly enlightened, but taciturn and easily overwhelmed by his forceful spouse” — practiced medicine. Her mother — “as scrupulous about her children’s physical well-being as she was about their education” — practiced a dreaded fear of germs to go with her absolute faith in learning. Neither practiced the former family faith, Judaism. A son, André, was born in 1906, and in addition to being a mathematical prodigy, taught himself classical Greek and Sanskrit by the age of 12, when he was not on his way to becoming an accomplished violinist. Du Plessix Gray calls this household “a hermetic, rarified world,” but when you read that the youngsters André and Simone “often communicated with each other in spontaneously rhymed couplets, or in ancient Greek,” or that “[w]hen reciting scenes from Corneille or Racine they corrected each other with a slap in the face when one of them made a mistake or missed a beat,” you might want to call it closer to science-fictional. Whatever. This is the world Simone Weil was born into, a world she never felt herself entirely smart enough to be member of (what came naturally to André came, through sheer hard work, to Simone) and a world she never entirely outgrew. Not even after she developed a take-no-prisoners style of argument at the Ecole Normale Supérieure. Not even after various teaching appointments in the secondary schools of ’30s France took her from Paris but not from her attending parents.

As du Plessix Gray describes it, the career Weil followed and the leftist politics Weil professed were only broadly typical of her time and intelligence. Dressed head-to-toe in the most belligerently unbecoming get-ups possible, Weil smoked too much, ate little, then less than little (according, always, to the insufficient diet of those with whom she wished to identify), and so positively felt for the working class that, unlike her political soulmates, she felt it necessary to submit to physically punishing and mind-killing factory work so as not to think herself above and outside it. This, despite an in-built inability to perform safely the most routine manual tasks, and this, despite developing and highly idiosyncratic ideas on the nature of beauty, power, affliction, and the Cross.

The civil war in Spain got Weil wounded when she clumsily stepped into a line of friendly fire (a pot of boiling cooking oil), and the Second World War saw her proposing ideas to the Free French when the Free French had little time for either her or her brand of unrealism. Same with the priests from whom Weil sought counsel on doctrinal issues so as to permit her, conscience clean, to be baptized in the Catholic faith. True, Weil found comfort here. Also true, Weil found Logic, true faith of the French, opposed to the one, true Church, Rome.

The whole, final scenes described in this book make for sad reading, because we in hindsight know that this impossible figure, Simone Weil, was acting in and outside her time as witness or fool. But what of this hold Weil continues to have on the imagination, especially the imagination of those who grant her uncommon intelligence but who cannot grant her humility and charity as anything more than an eating disorder or super-headache? O’Connor may be right, but since when is “comical” necessarily not to be confused with saintliness? — Leonard Gill

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THE SUNSET SYMPHONY ONCE AGAIN

In my teenage years, the Memphis in May Sunset Symphony set my clock for the summer. Then, it was an annual meeting of friends, some family, the River, and “Old Man River.” We gathered on those sunny afternoons and as one watched the sun go down, the moon come up, and the sky light with fireworks.

It wasn’t just a wonderful outdoor concert. It wasn’t just an excuse to lay in the sun and partake in the guilty pleasure of smelling sun-tan oil. It was the last chance for my group — all my important people — to get together before the summer vacations and the jobs, the romances and the riffs, pulled us apart in ways unknown during the winter months when class schedules held us together.

It is not difficult to remember what was. The sun, beating down mercilessly during the afternoon, gave way to an evening coolness, like some atmospheric karma. The people lay on their blankets and watched children as entertaining as the music on stage. Cans of Coke, bottles of water, ham sandwiches, and potato chips abounded. Bottles of wine were passed freely among friends.

In my own group, the conversation shifted endlessly from the ending school year to inane television shows to summer college tests to coming admissions packets in the fall. There were sometimes multiple groups paired off or maybe two large groups and then sometimes also one large group of everyone talking at once. It was a grand cacophony of the relationships of our lives and its sound was good.

When college came, the Symphony was still there in the beginning. Everyone moved exam schedules around that date so they could be in town. As soon as the blankets were laid and the baskets opened, the walls came down around our various relationships and all was reunited in the boom of kettle drums, the power of the “1812 Overture,” and the appreciating crowd cheering yet another round of “Old Man River.”

Then, the ways things do, schedules became harder to mesh. Maybe an exam or two couldn’t be moved, or worse still, someone decided to stay at college for the summer. Perhaps there was an illness or a lack of cohesive planning. Whatever it was, the string of Sunset Symphony attendance was cut and the group drifted. To be sure, there are many reasons why we did not stay together. But I think one of them had to be the loss of that one anchor, that one thing we called our own.

And now here I am, back in Memphis after an extended out-of-town stay. I’ve gone to the Redbirds games, I’ve eaten my share (and the shares of certain small countries) of barbecue, I’ve embroiled myself in the middle of city debates. Am I really home? Have I fully returned? Not until I went to the Sunset Symphony once again, gathering around me those people that I could find, listening to the music and bonded in that strange and spectacular way that can only happen under a canopy of fireworks.

The symphony has, of course, changed quite a bit. There are more food vendors than I remember. Did someone say that picnic baskets weren’t allowed last year? Large and intrusive tents dot the limited open area in front of the stage, allowing corporate parties where only picnics once were. There is no more singing of “Old Man River” and there is a disappointment that things will not be as they were.

On a more personal level, the group is certainly much smaller. What once covered five or six joined blankets — our own little city of friends — now only covers two. It’s obscenely small and achingly lonely. It’s as if shadows and murmurs of Sunsets past flit on the edges of our vision, reminding us of a time there was more of a whole.

But the symphony still pounds away. The weather is beautiful as it always is and the afternoon spent lounging does its job to ease away the worry of the week. The river is still the river and there is some comfort in the sheer permanence of its never-ending current.

And that’s a problem. What bothers me the most, I think, is that I enjoyed this year’s symphony as much as I have enjoyed any of the others. I had thought, going into the evening, that I wouldn’t have the time I had before because all those special people weren’t around.

What I didn’t realize is there is some special quality to 18,000 people getting together and enjoying themselves for the evening, watching the sky glow in incendiaries. There’s an intrinsic value to an event bringing together the good feelings of a city celebrating another country, itself, its food and its music.

What stands out to me in this most recent event was not so much what I miss from before, but what I had missed from before. By focusing so far into my own experience, I hadn’t seen what was there in front of my face. There is nothing technically wrong with paying attention to those around you. I highly recommend it for a wide variety of cases. But it’s also very nice, sometimes, to look beyond your blanket-city of friends to see what’s there.

Hopefully, I can rebuild this tradition of the Sunset Symphony with old friends and new friends. Both. Maybe I will recapture some of the lost magic that explodes and fades away like the brightest of fireworks, leaving only a faint after-image behind. At the same time, I can only try to combine whatever I feel with my friends joining me with those things that come along with the event itself. Good times require good friends to join in on the experience. Better times need good friends with that one special event. My only hope is to find that perfect combination again.

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ACCIDENTAL DISPATCH

Ihave to admit something rather silly. I’m one of those people who likes to spot and meet celebrities. Not because I’m starstruck or in awe of them or anything like that (Elizabeth Taylor excluded, of course). There’s just something strange about seeing someone in person whom I’ve seen for years on the screen; it makes me want to know the person behind the persona. And I must say I haven’t had much luck. The last “star” encounter was at a party at the House of Blues in Los Angeles. The crowd was shoulder-to-shoulder and someone bumped into me and spilled my drink. When I realized that it was Geraldo Rivera, I decided to get out of the place as fast as possible and go take a shower.

So years ago, when editor of this prestigious magazine, I assigned someone to write a profile of Morgan Freeman, a native Memphian and one of my favorite actors, and I felt sure that I would meet him. I wanted to sit down and chat with him because I knew from other people that he was a very down-to-earth, lovable guy who would rather talk about his horses than pontificate about being a “movie star.” Well, it never happened.

More recently, when beginning this story, I was sure again that we would meet. Never happened. But I feel certain it will, because Freeman and Clarksdale, Mississippi, attorney Bill Luckett (who also practices in Memphis) have opened a restaurant in Clarksdale — Madidi, named after a Bolivian nature park — that fits perfectly into the world of colors and textures and characters that make up this gem of the Delta. And I feel sure I’ll be going back.

Although the meeting never took place, I am, however, on the telephone with Morgan Freeman and Bill Luckett, and even though it’s a little past noon, Freeman sounds a bit sleepy. It seems he had quite a late and exciting night the evening before. He was honored by the Mississippi legislature, which passed a resolution commending his wide body of work, not just in film but in his local philanthropic efforts since moving back to Mississippi in the early 1990s. In his typically modest way of talking about himself, Freeman says, “Oh, yes, it was exciting, a very exciting day.”

Luckett steps in and explains it a little further: “Morgan got the longest standing ovation ever offered anyone in the Mississippi House of Representatives, and it was 100 percent attendance. Everyone was in this very elegant place and Morgan was presented with a resolution honoring him and citing his many accomplishments and basically thanking him for making Mississippi his home. The whole house stood up at least three or four times in what was really about a 10-minute presentation, and they clapped for eight minutes after that. It was a tribute of the highest proportions.”

And while Morgan Freeman is indeed a man of many accomplishments, Madidi should be considered right up there with the rest of them. While Clarksdale has long been an international tourist destination for blues aficionados (it’s the closest thing to the “real” home of the blues, touting the Crossroads, where legend has it bluesman Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil to become a great musician), others around the world are talking about Madidi. The restaurant and other area attractions were featured in the March 26, 2001, issue of New York magazine as one of the best 52 weekend getaways in America. Food & Wine magazine gave it the thumbs-up in its February 2001 issue. Many daily newspapers have given it high praise. And there’s more national press on the way.

Housed in a turn-of-the-century red brick building downtown — a former bank Luckett remodeled — Madidi’s exterior is nice but understated, with a small sign and tiny gaslights at the doorway. Once inside, however, you’re in a world unto itself — a world where the food and atmosphere are just about perfect, but, as important, a world where love seems to flow even more so than the wine.

Luckett met Freeman back in the mid-1990s, while doing some legal work for him and his wife Myrna when they were building a house on Freeman’s nearby family farm. Freeman, Myrna, Bill, and Bill’s wife Francine became friends and began going out to dinner, both in the area and in Memphis, but the fine-dining choices were limited close to home. Luckett had been toying with the idea of opening a restaurant, and during one of Morgan’s short respites from his breathlessly busy acting career, the two began talking about a restaurant partnership. They began talking in the spring of 2000, and in November, Madidi became a reality. And an instant hit. And no wonder.

It’s obvious that the attention to detail at Madidi is one of its secrets. From the carefully chosen collection of regional and national artwork that hangs on the exposed brick walls in the main dining room, to the long mahogany and black granite bar, to the white linen tablecloths, fresh flowers, even the terra-cotta glazed “bowl” perched on a black granite counter that serves as the sink in the restroom, every nook and cranny of the place is executed with an eye for perfection — due in no small way to Myrna, a film set and costume designer who helped with the interior design.

But atmosphere is not the only thing going for Madidi. The service is impeccable. Call it Southern hospitality, good manners, or just good business sense, but the staff at Madidi is a special group of people.

Not the least of which is chef David Krog. I could have written this entire article, or, say, a book, about Krog, one of the nicest, funniest people I’ve ever had the pleasure to meet. Krog is goateed, tattooed, pierced, sometimes hyper, and generally looking a bit untraditional for a setting like this. But don’t let any of that fool you. He is such a fine chef that Freeman says, “One of my hopes is to get David out to California and introduce him as a chef to a couple of people I know out there so he can get some idea of how good he is. I don’t think he really knows it yet.”

Krog is a graduate of the Memphis Culinary Academy, and had worked his kitchen magic at a couple of Memphis’ finer dining establishments before being lured to Madidi by Luckett and Freeman. And he knows how to run a kitchen. It’s fairly amazing to see him serve the amount of food he does, and food of the highest quality, basically with the help of two people: his sous chef David McNeal and salad and pastry chef Anden Hamilton.

I promised my editor this wouldn’t be a food review, as that is already a monthly feature in these pages, but I must say that Krog’s French technique cuisine is remarkable, both in taste and presentation. Just to give you a quick idea, at one dinner, we started with pan-seared sea scallops with basil-habanero cream sauce (sweet, sweet scallops; subtly spicy sauce) and seared black pepper-encrusted yellow fin tuna with leek-smashed potatoes and a cognac cream sauce (all perfect, the tuna like luscious red velvet). The oven-roasted hybrid bass with caramelized shallot risotto, creamy black- bean puree, and chive oil was not available that night, and was substituted with a special of spice-encrusted grouper on a bed of saffron rice with black-bean salsa and tomato relish. I was leery of the grouper, because I’ve never had it not cooked to death. Silly me. Krog’s was white, sweet, flaky, and the best I’ve ever had. The peppered veal chop with grilled succotash and black-currant vermouth demi-glace wasn’t too shabby either. Let’s just say the food is worth the hour-and-ten-minute drive through the Delta.

And speaking of flavors and the Delta, as if owning a large, chic restaurant isn’t enough for a busy attorney and an even busier actor (on his way to Poland after our phone conversation to promote a movie from his new film company, Revelations Entertainment), the pair have added another hot spot to the town known as “ground zero” to blues enthusiasts. It’s a juke joint just down the street in the area known as “Blues Alley,” next door to the Delta Blues Museum. Luckett and Freeman, both music fans, have gone to great lengths to make the place as authentic as possible, down to having scraps of plywood scattered over original hardwood flooring underneath old tables and chairs in the center of the room. There are holes in the ceiling, beat-up tin light fixtures, and a long plywood whitewashed bar, which, as their preliminary advertising says, serves beer, whiskey, and wine. There are pool tables, shuffleboard, and live music on weekends complete with a colorful bandstand and a state-of-the-art sound system. The club’s name is, appropriately, Ground Zero.

Why, many people have asked me, would Morgan Freeman move to Mississippi? It’s pretty simple. He loves it. Having lived most recently on a boat in the Caribbean and prior to that in an apartment in New York City, he explains, “I was raised here in the 1940s and ‘50s, and I left with the intention of going away as far as I could get and never coming back. But as I was out traveling around and experiencing other places, I realized that this country is pretty much the same anywhere you go in terms of relationships, and they seem to be what you make them. So when my father died, someone had to come back and take care of the farm. We had been visiting a lot in the springtime when we lived in New York, and it was always so good to come home. To get away from the crush. It was so lush and lovely and green. I finally realized that I belong here. There is something truly magical about it.”

Or as Freeman told Food & Wine, “This is the place where I let my breath out and relax.” And it’s a good thing. He, along with Luckett, has certainly breathed some wonderful, fresh new air into Clarksdale, Mississippi.

For more information or to make reservations at Madidi, call 662-627-7770 or visit www.madidires.com.

[This story was first published in Memphis magazine.]

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sunday, july 8th

Reverend Greg P. Green & The Sinners are playing tonight s Buzz Night show at Earnestine & Hazel s. There s a Hotter Than July Jazz Cabaret at Precious Cargo on N. Main. The Phil and T Show is at Huey s Downtown this afternoon, followed tonight by Di Anne Price & Her Boyfriends. And if you haven t been to Abyssinia yet, go today for their Sunday buffet of delicious Ethiopian cuisine. You ll love it.

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saturday, july 7th

One more art opening this week: this afternoon at David Lusk Gallery, for A Vessel, A Path, an exhibition of paintings, and lovely ones they are, by Maysey Craddock. Today s big, big party is the 127th Annual St. Peter Home Picnic, a Memphis tradition that helps a lot of people and features carnival rides, a petting zoo, a chance to win a Saturn SL100, silent and live auctions sponsored by Target Stores of Memphis, and live music by the Bouffants. Down in Tunica, Kenny Rogers is at Grand Casino. Down on Beale Street, Every Mother s Nightmare (no, not the Bush daughters), Route 61, Bullet Theory, and Lupercus are at the New Daisy; Crash Into June with Scott Sudbury are at the Hard Rock CafÇ; and that wild woman of rock and blues, Barbara Blue, is at O Sullivan s on Beale (mmm, the way she talks). Elsewhere about town, Mose Vinson & Friends and The Fieldstones are at the Center for Southern Folklore; Palindrome, The Cloots, and Johnny Romania are at the Hi-Tone; Nate & the Rat Band are at Coconut Joe s out in Frayser (oh, come on, live a little); and last but certainly, certainly not least, before they all ship off to different institutes of higher learning later this summer, don t miss Accidental Mersh tonight at High Point Pinch. What are we gonna do without those guys?