Category: Books

No Heroes:

A Memoir of Coming Home

By Chris Offutt

Simon & Schuster, 268 pp., $24

The chronology’s a little fuzzy, but author Chris Offutt left his home in eastern

Kentucky a total of five times only to return five times over the course of

some 20 years. The first time he left was to attend the University of Iowa’s

famed Writers’ Workshop. The last time he left was to teach at the Writers’

Workshop. And somewhere in all this coming and going he got married, fathered

two sons, and produced a body of work that would be any author’s envy: a debut

collection of short stories, Kentucky Straight (1992), which gained him

tons of notice; a memoir, The Same River Twice (1993), which an eager New

Yorker called “the memoir of the decade”; and a novel, The Good Brother

(1997), and a short-story collection, Out Of the Woods (1999), both of

which The New York Times named Notable Books of the Year.

But just shy of his 40th birthday, before Iowa’s invitation to join its faculty,

Offutt returned to Kentucky to teach in a county where some 30 percent of the

population is still functionally illiterate. The school was his Appalachian

alma mater, Morehead State University, and its reputation clearly wasn’t

Iowa’s. Offutt, in his new, highly heartfelt memoir, No Heroes, calls it

“a high school with ashtrays.”

What was he doing home — again? Basically, giving. Giving model to students in

a region that “offers no models for success … no tangible life beyond the

county line.” Giving Rita, his New Yorker wife, a house in the hills the couple

couldn’t possibly have afforded elsewhere. Giving Sam and James, his sons, a

taste of the natural world which inspires and still nurtures their father. And

giving himself some chance with his own father. “My biggest source of pain,”

the author says to his father in the book’s quiet, climactic scene, “is the

tension between us. I hoped that coming home would help fix it.” It does not.

Offutt’s father turns his back. Offutt is silenced. But Rita’s father, Arthur

Gross, in No Heroes‘ parallel narrative, is not.

The subject of that narrative: the Holocaust; the story: Arthur and wife Irene

Gross’ separate survival as Polish Jews. Arthur is now in Queens, New York.

Offutt in Kentucky is respectful but coaxing, reassuring, recording Arthur on

tape. Arthur’s one stipulation to his writer son-in-law: no heroes, the same

unspoken code, strangely enough, stipulated in Offutt’s Kentucky hills. It’s

just that simple, and Arthur’s and Irene’s suffering is just that terrible: one

man and woman with no reason to believe they should outlive the millions who

did not.

Offutt himself writes that he has had some difficulty squaring the two lines of

inquiry: the author’s own homecoming and recalling of past joys, past sorrows,

past times with running buddies and run-ins with authorities, past teachers who

encouraged and discouraged him, past moments of a very private clarity he finds

only in the woods versus his father-in-law’s forced leave-taking of home in

Poland and incarceration in a succession of concentration camps across

Nazi-occupied Europe. You’ll sense the tension too, until maybe some pattern

presents itself (“emerges” is perhaps too strong a word): “I had never

abandoned Kentucky,” Offutt writes early on. “There was no pattern of departure

and return, only the seasonal cycle of death and life.”

The emphasis here: death and life, not life and death. And as for the heroic?

Don’t call life in eastern Kentucky or even inside the death camps anything of

the kind. “Heroes are not human,” Arthur Gross remarks. Offutt in No Heroes

writes as reminder.

Chris Offutt will be signing No Heroes in Memphis at Davis-Kidd

Booksellers on Wednesday, April 17th, at 7 p.m. and in Oxford at Square Books

on Thursday, April 18th, at 5:30 p.m. Those dates follow on the heels of the

ninth annual Oxford Conference for the Book, which runs April 11th through the

14th on the campus of the University of Mississippi. The four-day event is this

year dedicated to Tennessee Williams, with Williams scholar W. Kenneth Holditch

and New York Times theater critic Mel Gussow (co-editors of the recent

two-volume Library of America edition of Williams’ complete plays) discussing

the playwright on Sunday afternoon.

As with past conferences, though, a variety of writers’ panels, booksignings,

readings, and get-togethers make up the weekend. Included among the novelists,

poets, playwrights, journalists, and editors scheduled to be on hand: Richard

Flanagan, Tom Franklin, Barry Hannah, Rick Moody, Paula Vogel, Jack Nelson, and

Thomas Oliphant. A screening of the new film Big Bad Love, based on the

collection of stories by Larry Brown of the same name, will take place on

Thursday evening with Brown, actor-director Arliss Howard, and one of the

film’s stars, Debra Winger, discussing the film beforehand.

Most events are free and open to the public, but preregistration is advised. For

more information, contact the Center for the Study of Southern Culture by phone

(662-915-5993), by fax (662-915-5814), or by e-mail (cssc@olemiss.edu).

Depraved Indifference

By Gary Indiana

HarperCollins, 319 pp., $24.95

You remember that dynamic duo Sante and Kenneth Kimes. They were the mother/son tag team who killed that 82-year-old Manhattan heiress Irene Silverman in 1998 so they could get their hands on Silverman’s multimillion-dollar, Upper East Side townhouse. The couple didn’t get what they wanted, but it wasn’t for lack of trying and it certainly wasn’t for lack of know-how. By the time they were captured, these two (with, then without, the help of Sante’s bourbon-headed third husband) had already gotten away with all manner of grand larceny, extortion, insurance fraud, bank fraud, forgery, car theft, identity theft, arson, money laundering, racketeering, shoplifting, more murder, incest, and, to cap it all, a photo op with then-first lady Pat Nixon. (Sante did do time, once upon a time in California, for “slavery,” but that was a strictly in-house job. Plus, those illegal aliens abducted and literally locked into doing unpaid housework were clearly uncomprehending ingrates from across the border and never mind the threats with a red-hot iron, boiling water, etc.)

But to give the Kimeses their due, they did succeed in winning the tabloids’, Vanity Fair‘s, Mary Tyler Moore’s (in a made-for-TV movie), yours, and now Gary Indiana’s attention in his book Depraved Indifference, the third in this author’s American Crime Trilogy. (Volume one’s focus: mom-and-pop killers the Menendez boys in Resentment: A Comedy; volume two’s: publicity-mad Versace-killer Andrew Cunanan in Three Month Fever.) And could there be a better author than this Pop-inspired namesake to do the dirty work he does here? Indiana’s ongoing investigation: the American dream deformed, capitalism at its down and dirtiest. His model American family in American literature: Faulkner’s Snopeses. His loosely fictionalized family in Depraved Indifference: Kimes stand-ins the Slotes.

When this insane story opens, Warren Slote is already a booze-hound and millionaire builder of a string of cheap motels that disfigure the California coastline. But it was World War II that first turned him onto the art of the scam. By war’s end he was “energized” into “a state of nervous ambition and patriotic mendacity.” And once he was done with real estate, the process was complete: this member of “the greatest generation” had become, in Indiana’s phrase, “a familiar kind of emotionally retarded parasite” and future “alcoholic puppet of his sociopath wife,” aka, according to innocent bystanders, “that lowlife bitch from hell.”

Enter that wife, a twice-married mother to one son (Darren, “dropsical bedwetting brat” by age 7, thief, liar, and “budding pyromaniac” by age 10) and Liz Taylor look-alike when she and Warren first meet in some bar in Vegas. (The Mint? The 4 Queens? “something like that.”) And here she is in her prime: “Angela/Evelyn looked hallucinatory, like some precipice about to be fallen off,” according to Warren’s vision of such drop-dead bogus gorgeousness, “in a polyester crepe evening gown that had a lot of open space in front, white as a new refrigerator, the region just under her cleavage speared by a preposterous rhinestone-encrusted, fake garnet dragonfly brooch of a color Warren associated with bone marrow biopsies.” Evangeline works Warren good. “She wanted people to experience them as a couple. A couple of what changed from week to week … .”

They become that couple, a highly mobile couple. They live the high, crooked life. Their houses in Hawaii, Vegas have this bad habit of bursting into flame. They scam: any born loser in sight, any bright lawyer in spite of himself, any family member who halfway gets wise, threatens to gum up the works. Lawsuits: all over the place; the Slotes: countersuits to gum up the courtwork.

And then Warren and Evangeline produce Devin, a bad seed if ever there was one and who’s to blame him for that zonked-out expression of his, what with that wig-wearing, turban-headed mother of his pawing where no mother has any business planting a paw? Then Warren has a heart attack or something. He’s out of the picture, dust, literally. Mama and son: destination: New York, New York. A mansion on East 65th. And, thanks to a pizza-delivering, gun-toting nobody Mama and son once bamboozled, a couple of waiting FBI agents. Too late. That millionairess — named here Wanda “Baby” Claymore, owner of that five-floor household filled with fatuous New Yorkers — ends up a bag lady and in the dumps, literally, “an integral structural element of the newest and largest Home Depot outlet in the state of New Jersey.”

This is nasty business Indiana’s writing of, the facts heightened maybe, not falsified, by a writer clearly outraged at what passes for America the beautiful and business as usual until business means murder. Indiana’s trademark attack on the “media” isn’t so much at issue here; our complicity (note the legalese of that title Depraved Indifference) is. What are we doing putting a high gloss on such freak shows of ambition and worse? Kenneth Kimes, jailbird for life, in October 2001 held a reporter for Court TV hostage until that reporter was freed. Sante Kimes, jailbird for life, has requested and received permission to act as her own attorney in Los Angeles on another murder charge. The show must go on?

The Rotters’ Club, By Jonathan Coe, Knopf, 414 pp., $24.95

The year is 2003. The city is Berlin. And the scene is a revolving restaurant high above Alexanderplatz. Sophie, 18 or so, is talking to Patrick, 18 or so:

“Come with me, then, Patrick. Let’s go backwards. Backwards in time, all the way back to the beginning. Back to a country that neither of us would recognize … .”

“Was it really that different, do you think?”

“Completely different. Just think of it! A world without mobiles or videos or Playstations or even faxes. A world that had never heard of Princess Diana or Tony Blair, never thought for a moment of going to war over Kosovo or Iraq. There were only three television channels in those days, Patrick. Three! And the unions were so powerful that, if they wanted to, they could close one of them down for a whole night. Sometimes people even had to do without electricity. Imagine!”

Well, then, go back, imagine, just as Sophie and Patrick do and just as Jonathan Coe does in his ambitious and very fine new novel The Rotters’ Club. The year to start is 1973 and the year to end is 1977, which makes it, Sophie’s right, practically the Dark Ages. The country is England, Edward Heath’s, soon to be Harold Wilson’s, soon to be Margaret Thatcher’s England — an England of miners’ strikes, mass immigration, and Enoch Powell, hobbits, maxi skirts, and Rick Wakeman. The city is brown Birmingham.

Sophie’s future mother, you’ll learn, is Lois, a 16-year-old who’s dating a 22-year-old Fred Frith fanatic named Malcolm. The two of them are due for a date with an IRA bomb, but they don’t know it — yet. Paul is Lois’ obnoxious preteen brother, a neocon nightmare in the making. Benjamin, 13 or so, is her other brother, a nice kid nicknamed “Bent Rotter” by his buddies at King William’s school, “that toff’s academy” for the upper-middle-class but underaristocratic sons of Birmingham. Benjamin’s a bright kid but a little slow on the uptake zeitgeistwise: oversensitive, overserious, “into” composing lyrical pieces for piano and guitar, “into” Fielding and Conrad and Joyce, a writer in the making, in short, and Oxford-bound, but he doesn’t know it — yet. Their mother is Sheila; their father is Colin, manager at British Leyland Motor Corporation’s Birmingham plant. He’s got “labour” on his hands and his hands are full. These are the Trotters.

Patrick’s mother is Claire, and she’s also bright, bright enough to attend King William’s sister school for girls and sassy enough to sport some pretty smart lip. Her older sister is the “highly fanciable” Miriam, a typist at British Leyland. Their father is Donald, a clueless disciplinarian; mother, Pamela, is a cypher. These are the Newmans.

Miriam is having an affair with Bill Anderton, shop steward and trade unionist at British Leyland, until he dumps her and Miriam disappears into (or is it out of?) the arms of another man. The Andertons have a son, Doug, a classmate of Benjamin’s at King William’s. Doug’s got music on his mind too and a taste for Roxy Music over Yes. Doug is soon-to-be contributor to New Musical Express, soon to be an ex-virgin courtesy of a London party girl named Ffion ffoulkes [sic], and soon-to-be convert to “the neo-neanderthal dynamism of punk.” He is, in short, set to adopt everything Benjamin’s version of England is not, but Doug doesn’t know it — yet.

Patrick’s father is Philip: Tolkien fanatic, prog-rock enthusiast, and another King William’s chum. Philip’s father is Sam; his mother is Barbara. These are the Chases, and Barbara is about to embark on an affair with a pretentious wordmonger and fool by the name of Miles Plumb (nickname: “Sugar Plum Fairy”), art instructor to Philip, Doug, Benjamin, the class clown Sean Harding, and Steve Richards (nickname: “Rastus”), King William’s one black student, a Jamaican and whipping boy to bad apple R.J. Culpepper, “junior rugger captain, junior cricket captain, would-be athletics champion and long-standing object of derision,” just so you know from the outset that Culpepper’s a creep.

And you are … probably lost.

So be lost, because there’s seemingly no end to the story, make that stories, and to the inventiveness inside The Rotters’ Club. Just as there seems to be no end to Coe’s widening circle of revolving, evolving featured players and minor walk-ons. No end to Coe’s index of pop-culture esoterica. (Quick: What rock band had an album that gives this book its title?) No end to Coe’s sly but telling references to British postwar politics. No end to Coe’s combination of high seriousness and high comedy. And especially no end to Coe’s bag of narrative tricks: third- to first-person switcheroos; interior monologues; diary entries; inane student-newspaper reviews, letters to the editor, and one Q and A; stories within stories (e.g., a family of Danish Jews’ narrow escape from Nazi henchmen during World War II); a letter dated 1981; a speech dated 1999; and in the book’s closing section, a single sentence running 22 pages, which already tells you it’s got to come from Benjamin, and it does, post-sex with bombshell Cicely Boyd and Ulysses-like, but what it tells of I’ll leave readers to discover or for Patrick to explain.

That may take Patrick some time, because his side of the story, as promised to Sophie in that Berlin restaurant, is set to come to you in a sequel to The Rotters’ Club called The Closed Circle. I’d say that gives American readers a good year to get unlost, the rotters straight, and the word out on a high talent, Jonathan Coe. Due date for the update: 2003?

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Bohemian Paris: Picasso, Modigliani, Matisse, and the Birth of Modern Art

By Dan Franck

Grove Press, 422 pp., $27.50

For those with zero tolerance for art or literary history but a tad interest in modernism and/or the lifestyles of the down-and-out and not yet famous, look: the place to be was Paris, the beginning of the 20th century, the neighborhood known as Montmartre, and a dump called the Bateau Lavoir. Pablo Picasso was living there and already making out like Picasso even if the world didn’t know it and even if he did have to keep his Demoiselles d’Avignon rolled up and underfoot. But Guillaume Apollinaire knew it. So too the circle of Henri Matisse, Henri Rousseau, Juan Gris, Max Jacob, Ambroise Vollard, Leo and Gertrude Stein, André Derain, Georges Braque, and assorted other pivotal figures, half-lights, and hangers-on whose names you may have once heard in college, then you, like Picasso, split.

And then, on the other side of the Seine, there was Montparnasse, because that’s where Alfred Jarry was, because that’s where the poets were, and, after World War I, that’s where the scene shifted and painters were. And then there was Dada and André Breton and Surrealism and Man Ray and Kiki, and already you’re thinking, Man Ray who and Kiki what. Man Ray the photographer’s Kiki. Kiki of Montparnasse. A woman who, after reading about her in Dan Franck’s Bohemian Paris, could surely have kicked Madonna’s ass in the gutter any day, and it’s a wonder Madonna hasn’t leeched off her look already. And as to antics? Despite Madonna’s global dominion, I still hand it to Kiki.

And, with little or no dominion whatsoever, hand it to Chaim Soutine and Amadeo Modigliani, who in these pages register as major sufferers, not to mention major painters. The poverty, the alcoholism, the drug abuse, and the hard knocks generally put these two in a class by themselves, and, believe me, it’s a heady class. Franck’s book makes it crystal-clear. Less clear: what made these guys, all these guys (they’re all guys), really tick artistically, made them get a century into gear. Analytical, however, Franck’s book is not. Readable it is. And useful, if only to remind you to thank God you’ve got heat and never had a lightweight like Jean Cocteau breathing down your neck.

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.