Author: Leonard Gill

This February, this Valentine’s Day, in three works of fiction by three prominent American writers, the game is love, which translates as sex, which translates as trouble, and to start at the bottom line, start with a blow job. You can also end on a blow job (the very same blow job), because that’s just what a woman named Kay, age 34 in New York City, after 115 pages, is still up to — and a mid-30s guy named Benjamin is still up for — in Susan Minot’s new novel Rapture (Knopf).

Minot, though, is an intelligent writer, so it can’t be all sex, and it isn’t. What it is is a man v. woman thing or, in this case, one man v. one woman and what’s at work behind the good/bad sex and what’s at stake and what does and doesn’t work and why, and it isn’t so simple. But “it” is as old as the hills. Old as even the Grand Canyon, which is where, finally spent and in a “vision of emptiness,” Benjamin’s thoughts turn for once on himself and matters of the spirit — his “sorrow,” his “pain,” “how wretched he felt … how polluted he was … how bad.” Benjamin’s (but any reader’s foregone) conclusion: “It was fucking sad.” (“It” being Benjamin’s life.)

Little word from Vanessa, Benjamin’s rich fiancée, on the subject of this latest “it,” but we do read dozens of pages’ worth of paralyzing self-analysis from Kay, Benjamin’s one-time production designer on an indie film he directed and his on-again, off-again part-time love interest over the course of three (long) years. Words from Kay on the order of: sex with Benjamin as being “the lure of the abyss” (her emphasis, page 13) to sex with Benjamin as being nothing more than the job of a “whore” (her word, page 36). Until (page whatever) sex with Benjamin becomes a “voluptuous letting go,” the whore, by Rapture‘s end, turned bird in flight and so what with the “old hideousness.” (The “hideousness” being several years’ worth of crummy behavior on the part of you-know-who.) One question: Who, outside Kay, Benjamin, and the third party in all this, Susan Minot, cares?

Amy Dickerson, age 40, for one, probably couldn’t, because A) Amy Dickerson is the very able heroine at the heart of Robert Olen Butler’s Fair Warning (Atlantic Monthly Press) and B) Amy Dickerson already has her hands full with: 1) a rich mama’s boy who wants to rid his late Upper West Side mama of her prized possessions; 2) a rich Frenchman who wants to buy the venerable New York auction house where Amy acts as star auctioneer and major object of affection; 3) a sister on Long Island in the throes of a possible divorce from her rich husband; and 4) a rich mama of her own who wants to rid her late husband of his prized possessions down in Houston. Who’s the collector and who’s the collected in all this? You figure it out. It isn’t hard. But try figuring this: What’s a Pulitzer Prize-winning author doing writing a solid (but still …) romance novel? The sex quotient: one (zipless?) quickie inside an elevator and, when things really heat up, some serious groping inside a midtown Manhattan limousine, then inside a very well-appointed apartment in the shadow of Paris’ Notre Dame. The word for this stuff: limp. Fair warning.

Want Pulitzer-caliber material from a past Pulitzer winner? The real pits, maybe, when it comes to men and women caught in the act of coupling, uncoupling, and generally making a mess but no mess when it comes to solid writing? Go directly to “Abyss,” the final (long) short story in Richard Ford’s new, across-the-board fine collection of short stories, A Multitude of Sins (Knopf). Late-acting scene-stealer: again the Grand Canyon, again the site to climax a certain someone’s spiritual aspirations, but this time the site for that same certain someone’s mortal end. On the extended end: a couple of real estate agents, adulterers, both of them on the road and outside Phoenix, and together, separately, the both of them set to figuring this man v. woman thing for themselves, courtesy Ford’s absolutely dead-on powers of observation. The couple’s answer: no answer.

So leave it to a character named James Wales in “Quality Time” to give it a shot and give it at least a name: “the literature of the failed actuality,” where, if experience can’t teach us what’s what, “someone … tell us what’s important, because we no longer know” (Wales’ emphasis, page 25). Someone just like Wales, a journalist by trade spending a few days’ time with a certain unhappily married woman inside a room at the Drake hotel in Chicago. Facts Wales can record accurately. Responses? Tabulate them; in their absence, make them up. Invent importance but leave, according to Wales, the incommensurable to novelists. And say the same for a short-story writer like Richard Ford. Bottom line.

The Prayer of Jabez

By Bruce Wilkinson

Multnomah, 92 pp., $9.99

xplain to me the inexplicable. A minor inspirational tract of no literary value from a publishing house no one’s heard of about a one-sentence prayer issued by an Old Testament “hero” no one’s heard of gets nicely packaged as a gift book, hits bookstores, and, through word-of-mouth, through gung-ho marketing, through creepy missionary zeal, manages a year-long spot on the bestseller list at a measly 10 bucks a pop and to the very good fortune of God’s reverend, Bruce Wilkinson, who wrote The Prayer of Jabez.

But the bucks don’t stop here because now you can sink your cash into the business of sidelines: a devotional, a journal, a 2002 day-to-day calendar, a Bible cover, a Bible “study,” a “pocket reminder,” a key ring, a paperweight, a magnet, and something called a Scripture Keeper. This in addition to the standard, lucrative spinoffs: The Prayer of Jabez for Teens, The Prayer of Jabez for Kids, The Prayer of Jabez for Young Hearts, The Prayer of Jabez for Little Ones, and the latest stone upturned by this publishing company’s resourceful marketing department, the forthcoming The Prayer of Jabez for Women.

Now explain the astonishing popularity of this simple prayer, in which Jabez first asks for God’s blessing then asks that God “enlarge [his] territory,” that God be with him, that God keep him from evil, all so he doesn’t end up causing “pain” (a neat trick since the name “Jabez” already means “pain”). And guess what. “God granted him what he requested” (1 Chronicles 4:9-10). End of what we know of Jabez. Until, that is, Wilkinson brought him to the attention of a waiting nation. Make that nations, because Jabez has gone global based on the prayer’s capacity to work “miracles.”

Example: Wilkinson, “physically and spiritually spent” after a hard week’s work preaching at the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago (76 students counseled, “to be exact”), gets on a plane, finds his middle seat, and prays the Jabez prayer. He’s “completely worn out” doing God’s work, “can’t cope with temptation.” Immediately, the male passenger on his left pulls out “a pornographic magazine.” The man on his right pulls out his own “skin magazine.” Wilkinson silently seeks divine intervention: “Lord, please chase evil far away!” And good Lord, He does! The men out of nowhere let out a curse and promptly put up their magazines. Wilkinson calls this a miracle. You’ll call it rank impossibility: two guys in public on an airplane in the same aisle, each, without embarrassment, dipping into porno. Don’t believe.

Want more evidence of “what God’s grace and Jabez praying can do”? In 1998 Wilkinson began WorldTeach, “birthed from the womb of the Jabez prayer.” Target: Earth. “An exciting fifteen-year vision to establish the largest bible-teaching faculty in the world,” WorldTeach wants a Bible instructor for every 50,000 people on the planet. Your buying into Jabez buys into that mission. It comes with the territory. Hold on to your 10 bucks.

Rebel Heart

By Bebe Buell, with Victor Bockris

St. Martin’s Press, 372 pp., $24.95

Victor Bockris — professional hanger-on, biographer to downtown ’70s scenesters John Cale, Blondie, Patti Smith, Andy Wharhol, Lou Reed — must have known he had his hands full with Bebe Buell, so it was essentially hands off this ex-Catholic schoolgirl and ex-Elite model, ex-Playboy centerfold and ex-Max’s Kansas City regular, ex-bedmate to skinny-assed rock stars Todd Rundgren, Iggy Pop, David Bowie, Jimmy Page, Rod Stewart, Elvis Costello, Stiv Bators, et cetera, ad nauseum and ex-failed rocker herself, mother to actress Liv Tyler and still pretty as a picture thanks to Zoloft and Ritalin.

But one thing Buell thinks she isn’t is a groupie. One thing Bockris and St. Martin’s must have known she isn’t is a writer. Hence: Rebel Heart, her autobiography, courtesy of Bockris, which reads like Elizabeth Taylor barking inanities into thin air or in the direction of Joanna Shimkus in Boom! : close to 400 pages of incoherent self-absorption masquerading as self-revelation and all of it stomach-churning. Translation: perfectly page-turning, so long as you check your brain at the door and don’t mistake raw confession for the truth of the matter.

Example: Buell writes (or is it shouts?), triumphant at age 45, “I think that I have always been an instrument, I have always been a vehicle … . I am one of those people who generate art, inspire it. … I see myself as a powerful woman-man who can perform and who can channel all her favorite people, dead and alive.”

Well, for “favorite people” (who are alive, so why are they being channeled?), that means Marianne Faithfull, Patti Smith, Debbie Harry, and assorted drag queens. If (it’s true?) Buell did inspire Elvis Costello to write “I Want You,” hey, she did accomplish something. But she needs to be thanking her lucky star, Steven Tyler, who is Liv’s father, and Liv Tyler is going to be the one with the final handful: Bebe Buell when she hits old age and the self-delusion gets really ugly.

Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage

By Alice Munro

Knopf, 323 pp., $24

The title of Alice Munro’s latest collection is not only a mouthful, it’s a handful, and it comes to us from one character’s recollection of a girlhood game. It’s a game unlike walking down the street with eyes shut or walking backward home from school or talking in some shared nonsense language with a friend, all games designed to catch anybody’s notice and cause the adult world confusion if not concern. In this one schoolgirl game you’re asked to stake something. You’re asked to have someone in mind. It’s a game that’ll do for a lifetime.

You write out a boy’s name and your own. The letters in common you strike out because they don’t figure here. The remaining letters you count up and count off on your fingers according to the following five possible “verdicts”: hateship, friendship, courtship, loveship, marriage. And there you have it. What you and that boy share in name doesn’t enter the equation, an equation that makes a world of difference. Not unhappiness necessarily. Difference. What Munro’s protagonists make of that world is never less than quietly ground-breaking and never less than what makes most of us tick. And what makes us tick is going five-for-five with a loved one before death, disease, divorce, accident, or sheer exhaustion declare time out.

Is there today a clearer eye than Alice Munro’s on these matters, a better hand at writing these matters down in short-story form and wringing them for all they’re worth of meaning? William Trevor, an Irishman writing in England? Possibly, but he’s working within a larger political framework. Bernhard Schlink in Germany, writing after the fall of the Wall and writing across continents in his latest, excellent collection, Flights of Love (from Pantheon)? Hardly Munro’s equal (yet) but very much following in her footsteps. Canada, though, remains Munro’s province, from the farms and small towns of Ontario to the big-city streets of Toronto and Vancouver, from mid-20th-century families making a hard life livable on those farms and in those small towns to their educated, now-aging offspring trying to make sense of things and of themselves in a wider world. Add to this Munro’s outlook: a Northerner’s efficiency — dialogue in short bursts but sounding exactly the notes needed, exposition without a waste of word, and everywhere this: characters in the throes of … what? Definition, change — quiet but seismic change, redefinition, none of it earth-shattering, all of it honest-to-God. And if you don’t see yourself in all this, don’t bother with a book. What you need is a mirror and an open pair of eyes.

There are nine stories here in all, and it’s fruitless to single out one over the others. For their complexity and expert characterization, however, see the title story and its depiction of a woman dead-set on a new life and winning it despite false pretenses; “Queenie,” the one instance in this collection of marital discord escalating into physical violence in a scene to give you the real creeps; plus Munro’s closing story, “The Bear Came Over the Mountain.” Late in that story you will be introduced to Marian, wife of Aubrey. Aubrey is physically declining and temporarily inside a nursing home, where he develops a romantic attachment to Fiona (and vice versa), who is wife to Grant, who is coming to terms with Fiona’s Alzheimer’s and with his own unfaithful past. It is Marian we immediately don’t take a shine to, but it is Marian in the space of a single page of hard-nosed dialogue that turns this story inside-out and Grant’s self-regard upside-down. That makes Marian, in the vocabulary of Flannery O’Connor, the world’s least likely source of grace and gives Alice Munro a solid spot in the literary big league. She’s earned that spot without resorting to gunfire, bloodshed, brute sex, or gutter talk. People call it artistry.

I’m guessing but something says Munro would have agreed with jurors who recently awarded this year’s Memphis magazine fiction prize to Marjorie Rhem and her story, “A Detroit Connection.” And it’s not because bullets, blood, sex acts, or trash talk fail to make an appearance. It’s because Rhem, who teaches English at the Memphis College of Art, succeeds in telling a simple story with not-so-simple implications for its lead character, a woman traveling alone from Saratoga, New York, through Detroit’s airport, on her way home to Memphis. Technically, the writing is clear to the point of transparent, rich in coordinated detail, with every one of those details working toward one end, which is: to make this woman as vivid in readers’ minds as she’s unsure of herself. The end result: our full attention. And what’s more to fine writing, good reading?

Rhem will be reading “A Detroit Connection” and signing copies of the December/January Memphis magazine in which it appears at Burke’s Book Store on Thursday, December 6th, from 5 to 6 p.m. The magazine, a sister publication of the Flyer, hits newsstands December 12th.

The National Enquirer

Thirty Years of Unforgettable Images

Talk Miramax Books, 253 pp., $45

Never mind for the moment who. The question is what has gotten into America’s premier rag, The National Enquirer. Respectability, to judge from the new coffee-table book The National Enquirer and to judge from an essay, contained in that book, on the tabloid’s recent stabs at mainstream journalism and its past mastery of paid journalism. But your 45 bucks aren’t going for a self-congratulatory essay. They’re going for the pictures of celebs and politicos, hangers-on and 15-minute media darlings, somebodies and nobodies caught in the act of being themselves, and the more humiliating, the freakier the photos, the better. The book’s layout is good and clean. The book’s “unforgettable images” are something else, and let’s begin by working our way down (or is it up?):

Bottom line: the piece of patchwork known as Michael Jackson, in brutal, full-color close-up, laying hold of a petrified 7-year-old leukemia patient. Jocelyne Wildenstein, wife of a billionaire art dealer, full-face and demonstrating “the catastrophic results of a 10-year addiction to cosmetic surgery.” Wayne Newton alive but from the looks of it embalmed. Bikini-clad ex-“Happy Hooker” Xaviera Hollander hitting the beach at Cellulite City and hitting the scale at 200 pounds. Bryant Gumbel and Matt Lauer in extremis and party to a “man-sized lapdance” courtesy of some transsexual waitresses. A 1987 Brad Pitt looking like Kristy McNichol. A preadolescent Mariah Carey looking like Kristy McNichol. A preadolescent Ben Stiller looking like a butch-version Liz Taylor, circa Butterfield 8. Mug shots of Linda Tripp (1969; the charge: loitering; the look: guilty) and Al Pacino (date unknown; the charge: concealing a weapon; the look: pre-Raphaelite gas-station attendant). In the swim: the “free-wheeling” Brooke Astor, a century old and atop a dolphin, in a full-spread one-on-one with Tom Arnold atop the lovely Roseanne. Charles Manson in 1976, the year of the “dry look,” mop clearly in need of professional help, mind clearly beyond professional help. (His jail jumpsuit reads “S WING,” or is it “SWING”?) Fun couple of the year, 1994: giantess Anna Nicole Smith cradling 89-year-old hubby and meal ticket Howard Marshall II. Fun couple of the year, 1997: Woody and Soon-Yi lip-locking in the Tuileries. Boxed and ready to ship: a very dead River Phoenix, an equally dead Elvis Presley (a photo that helped sell 6.5 million copies of the Enquirer the week it ran). Dead but unboxed: John Lennon, Steven McQueen, Ted Bundy, and, hiding somewhere under a blanket, what used to be Rock Hudson.

Back to the living and on to the life-altering: historic photos, such as O.J. in his “ugly-ass” Bruno Maglis, Gary Hart and Donna Rice on board (and in the middle of some) Monkey Business. Family shots: the Ramseys positively glowing (the oversized cross hanging from Patsy’s neck, literally aglow); a couple of stiff upper lips (emphasis on the stiff): the Prince and Princess of Wales.

But there’s one knockout photo here that, truth be told, might just register as art. What’s it doing inside the Enquirer ? Giving it some photojournalistic cachet. What’s it of? An outfit of Australian bikers called the Findon Skid Kids captured exiting the most beautiful fireball you ever saw. Say you saw it in The National Enquirer. Enquiring minds will want to know. The less curious will wonder over this season’s asking price for a tabloid suddenly making out like People, as we know it, Life, as we knew it.

Ascending Peculiarity

Edward Gorey on Edward Gorey

Edited by Karen Wilkin

Harcourt, 273 pp., $35

Call him illustrator, writer, playwright, set-designer, cat-fancier, balletomane, voracious reader, TV junkie, man-about-town when he was in New York City, homebody when he was home on Cape Cod. Depending on the one interviewing him, you can also call him an artful dodger or a real charmer: one part coy closet case, one part pure showoff, for every two parts genuine smarty. Stephen Schiff in a 1992 New Yorker called him a “half bongo-drum beatnik, half fin-de-siècle dandy.” You could call him a knowing eccentric of the mink-coat-and-tennis-shoes variety but one who wisely knew when and when not to go on about himself. He is Edward Gorey or was before he died last year after authoring and illustrating such contemporary classics of the sinister as The Curious Sofa, The Hapless Child, The Loathsome Couple, and The Gashlycrumb Tinies. (Still don’t recognize him? Check out the opening credits for the Mystery series on PBS.)

Ascending Peculiarity is the appropriately titled collection of interviews with and profiles of Gorey written or broadcast over the past 30 years. There are within these pages serious overlaps, only so many ways for Gorey to trot out his boyhood, his first taking pencil to paper, his habit for years of attending every performance of the New York City Ballet, his admiration for the films of Louis Feuillade. Then there’s the matter of his instantly identifiable illustrations, which are only partially gone into here stylistically, psychologically. On a key to his character, though, think on this: a man who likes watching Golden Girls reruns as much as rereading (without ever understanding) Musil’s The Man Without Qualities. And in terms of memorable quotes, think on this, which makes Gorey no marginalist but a realist: “I think you should have no expectations and do everything for its own sake. That way you won’t be hit in the head quite so frequently.” Sound advice from a man of sound mind who had his audience believing he was anything but.

Half A Life, By V.S. Naipaul, Knopf, 211 pp., $24

The issues surrounding novelist and travel writer V.S. Naipaul — is he or is he not an anti-Third World, anti-Islam, antidemocracy, pro-empire, pro-conservative nonpracticing Hindu racist, a nihilist — grew into one big issue last month when the Nobel committee, operating according to democratic, internationalist ideals, awarded him — Indian by nationality but Trinidad-born, Oxford-educated — this year’s prize in literature.

Is it just one writer’s opinion, however, when fellow Caribbean (and a Nobel laureate himself) Derek Walcott claims that “Naipaul does not like negroes”? Or is it statement of fact when Salon.com’s Gaven McNett writes that Naipaul is “a weapons-grade grumpus” who just may be, as one Indian paper put it, “the greatest living writer of English prose”?

And what’s up with Naipaul himself when, in a Q&A with The New York Times in late October, he called “nonfundamentalist Islam” a “contradiction” and “[t]he idea of a moderate [Islamic] state … something cooked up by politicians looking to get a few loans”? When, in the same interview, he said he does not believe September 11th had a thing to do with American foreign policy? When he clarified that it was his wife, a Pakistani journalist, who once called the Taliban “vermin” and he saw no reason to disagree? Who said, when he tours India or Africa, he travels without the benefit of historians or scholars of the culture and goes instead “with a very blank mind” to let “the facts emerge”? That it is “facts,” not conclusions, that help make a “pattern” in the mind of his readers? But what readers? The relatively few if the benchmark is bestsellerdom and your two dozen works of fiction and nonfiction can’t cut it with false sentiment of any kind. And that’s a fact that does not escape the author now and did not escape him when, back in1979, he stated: “I am the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.”

Half A Life, Naipaul’s 13th novel but one with strong hints of the autobiographical, could be the book (abetted by the Nobel) that gets people not just talking but reading. And it might be the book by an author a general audience never looks to again. Why so? Start with the book’s superabundance of facts, because it’s facts (even in his fiction), not conclusions, this writer is about. A summary goes like this:

In the first-person narrative of Part One of Half A Life, it takes 10 years for the boy Willie Somerset Chandran to coax out of his father the source of Willie’s unusual middle name, a name that shames him before his classmates in ’40s India. And it’s shame on Willie’s father’s part that gets him face-to-face with the famous English writer and shame that serves him as inspiration for the author of The Razor’s Edge. Willie’s father, a brahmin and grandson of a Hindu priest, was going for his B.A. in English literature when “the mahatma” turned his mind off England and his eye toward “the lowest person” he could find, a “coarse-featured,” “noticeably black” girl from the “backward” caste, a girl herself fired by a “firebrand” uncle in a caste war conducted in the maharaja’s state. Willie’s father scandalously breaks off his engagement to the daughter of the principal of his college, forgets getting a degree, retreats into silence as a life-renouncing mendicant inside the precinct of a Hindu temple (where Maugham meets him), then slowly rises in rank as a cheating civil servant. Along the way, he fathers Willie and a daughter named Sarojini by the dark-skinned, never-named “girl.” Willie to his father’s face by the time this opening section of Half A Life ends: “I despise you.”

In Part Two, delivered in the third person, Willie is in the high school of the local missionary school and dreams of escaping his family and India by moving as a missionary himself to Canada. However, his composition book tells a different story: that of a budding writer ready to reveal his family’s sham life, the greater sham of an India ruled by superstition, backwardness, unreasonableness. In the opinion of his father, Willie’s imaginative stories show him to be “a monster,” a boy “to poison” what remains of what his father has managed to make of himself. He works to get rid of the boy, to send him to England, first by requesting help from Maugham, whose reply suggests he remembers nothing of the holy man he once revered, then from an English lord. The deal is made: Willie is to go on scholarship to a teachers’ college in London.

He goes to London. He’s stranded culturally, lost literally. He befriends a fellow student from Jamaica named Percy, who teaches Willie in the ways of good tailoring and good drink and the bad ways of a willing shopgirl (Percy’s girlfriend), in the ways of bohemian ’50s London, its big talkers and their wives, all eager to rub elbows with the influx of Third World immigrants. Cocktail talk is of crossing color lines, cross-talk of class barriers, sex, user and used. Willie is ashamed of much, but he is more driven by opportunity, and opportunity comes via the BBC, which hires him to write radio scripts. The language degree he was going for he drops in favor of his developing short stories — culled from his composition book, culled from Hollywood plot lines — his lawyer and writer friend Roger sure he can find a publisher for them. A sleazy, faux-Marxist friend of Roger’s becomes that publisher, but the book goes nowhere critically, financially (England wants Anglo-Indian fare on the order of John Masters or Rumer Godden; “India isn’t really a subject,” says Roger). The book does, though, find an appreciative reader in Ana, a dark-skinned, part-Portuguese, part-African woman studying English in London, a woman quickly to become Willie’s wife.

In the book’s third, final, and back to first-person narrative, the couple migrate to East Africa and the never-named but clearly Portuguese-held Mozambique, Ana to occupy her family estate, Willie to manage its cotton and sisal fields. It’s a country as utterly alien to Willie as London once was — a handful of top-ranking, land-holding, “blue-blood” Europeans, a greater number of mixed-blood “half-and-halfs,” a smattering of immigrants from Portuguese-held Goa in India, the fullest number, though, full-blooded Africans, with faint stirrings of guerrilla activity behind them and just across the border, activity that should be giving, if they’d listen, the non-Africans grave concern. No word from Willie as writer because Willie is living a kind of good, false life: lengthy Sunday luncheon parties among the fully white or half-and-halfs, sex among the non-landed African women in a makeshift nightclub/whorehouse in the nearest city, and finally a satisfying affair with “a mixed-race person of no fortune,” the daughter of a second-rank Portuguese. Willie’s sister Sarojini, whose made an “international” marriage with a German filmmaker on the track of Third World revolution, berates him for the nothing he’s making of himself, and Willie hasn’t the conscience to disagree. After 18 years with Ana, after slipping on the front steps of her estate and landing himself in a hospital, Willie, age 41, announces he’s divorcing her and retreating from the civil unrest engulfing the country. He goes to Sarojini in Germany, his future a blank, the same blank Willie’s father once said his son had inherited from his mother’s “backward” background to go with the “habit of non-seeing” Willie realizes he’s inherited from his father. Conclusion: no conclusion.

It was Willie’s friend Roger the lawyer who’d advised him in London to rewrite his stories, to “begin in the middle and end in the middle.” “It should all be there,” Roger advises, but the stories need work. “I’ve spent a fair amount of time listening to devious characters,” he adds, “and I feel about these stories that the writer has secrets. He is hiding.” Willie is mortified because he knows Roger is right. He goes to a bookstore and buys Hemingway’s short stories. A story called “The Killers” is all dialogue, “the people weren’t to be explained,” and Willie’s own stories, coming more quickly now, achieve something that they hadn’t achieved before. Roger reads the revised manuscript and announces, “One story on its own might not have an impact, but taken together they do. The whole sinister thing builds up. … It’s India and not India. You should carry on.”

Half A Life is V.S. Naipaul late in life carrying on, his language pinpoint and his mastery of narrative evident as ever. The book deserves an audience — will the Nobel introduce them? keep them? — unbothered by the prospect of sharing in Willie’s shaky ground. The big issues surrounding Naipaul? Big talk. It’s Naipaul the fictionist who’s telling some uncomfortable truths.

The Pickup

By Nadine Gordimer

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 270 pp., $24

The scene is a city in modern South Africa, but it could be any large city anywhere — a narrow street choked with traffic but traffic brought to a standstill when a car battery dies. The driver of the car, a young woman, throws up her hands before the faces cursing her, her palms open in a gesture of helplessness. She gets out of her car prepared to face faces that could kill. An unemployed man arrives, in this case a black man used to earning spare change directing drivers into freed parking spaces, and he directs the young woman back behind the wheel. With help he pushes her car out of traffic. A street vendor enthroned on a fruit-box and shawled in a towel observes the same scene then makes some remark to the man in a native language the young woman doesn’t understand. End of scene, as Nadine Gordimer herself once witnessed it and as Gordimer relates it as introduction to her new novel, The Pickup. But who the young woman is and what she means by that gesture of surrender Gordimer has had to invent. Here’s the back-story, the fictional follow-up to each and all of the above:

The woman is 29, white, and named Julie Summers. She lives in Johannesburg, works in PR. Her investment-banker father is loaded and lives in a gated suburb; her mother’s just as rich and lives with a “casino king” in California. Julie’s on uneven terms with both of them but knows she could be living the high life too. Instead she’s chosen to strike out on her own and make a home in what was once a servant’s cottage, the mess she makes of it nonetheless a sure sign of privilege. She’s happy, she thinks. She’s at home in her neighborhood of “aging Hippies and Leftist Jews,” a neighborhood that more resembles an Oriental bazaar. She likes her crowd (a self-professed poet, a self-styled philosopher, etc.) and their watering hole, the El-Ay (as in L.A.) Cafe. From there Julie & Co. talk politics, drink coffee, drink wine, smoke dope, find the next “underground” dance club, until the next day they re-form at the El-Ay, sure of themselves, less sure of their place in the world.

Julie “goes” for chance encounters, and she goes instantly for a “grease-monkey” named Abdu, who checks out her car, then finds her a new, used one. And Abdu — 28, more brown than black, from some country Julie has “barely heard of,” one “where you can’t tell religion apart from politics” — goes instantly for her and for this not entirely unhidden reason: Abdu has outstayed his visa and risks criminal charges if he doesn’t leave South Africa soon. Julie’s father won’t help; Julie’s kind uncle can’t either. Even a high-ranking (black) lawyer (and family friend) can’t see the sense in appealing Abdu’s case. The couple marry and still it does Abdu’s chances no good (for the time being), so they land in Abdu’s desert country — Julie (in love) in parts unknown; Abdu (less in love?) to resume his family place and reassume his family name, Ibrahim ibn Musa.

To Julie’s surprise, the desert suits her, despite the hard landscape. Ibrahim’s family suits her too, despite the limits put on women and a mother-in-law enthroned, enrobed on a sofa and speaking a native language Julie’s at pains to understand. Ibrahim, back being a mechanic in his uncle’s shop, can do nothing but work — toward what? Anything, anywhere that is not this village, which to him is nowhere. Word has it his crowd talk politics in the name of Islam. The truth is: Ibrahim talks of “making it” — in Chicago, in Detroit, in California maybe, and that’s where he intends to wind up, courtesy his faith in capitalism, courtesy his vehicle, Julie. No need to go into where this scene’s heading.

A few words, though, on Gordimer’s manner of telling it, which is, on the one hand, suggestive of all kinds of possibilities but possibilities tied to a few themes and variations — one root idea: “possession”; wordplay: on the order of palm trees and greasy palms; the color green and “green,” as in cash money — and on the other hand, a style that is idiosyncratic to the point of irritation: elliptical, shorthand storytelling that begs for words gone deliberately missing and that depends on subordinate clauses strung to the max. As in this and chosen at random: “He gets up to greet her and takes a chair nearer her she indicates with a half-tilt of a hand from her lap.” Sorry, 270 pages of like sentences and the rare, simple, declarative one comes as an absolute oasis.

Still, Nadine Gordimer has won a Nobel Prize, which must mean she knows what she’s driving at, and in The Pickup it’s prose-poetry. Her subject: of vital importance today. Why poetry that keeps us at such arm’s length it’ll take another committee to decide.