Washington Post Book Reviews
For You
Thursday September 16, 2010
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BURN
Nevada Barr
Minotaur
ISBN 978-0312614560
378 pages
$25.99
Reviewed by Maureen Corrigan. Corrigan, who is the book critic for the National Public Radio program "Fresh Air," teaches literature at Georgetown University.
With "Burn," her 16th Anna Pigeon mystery, Nevada Barr intensifies what's become her modus operandi: putting her heroine and her readers through as much brutality as we can stomach. The Pigeon novels were always intrepid when it came to charting the rough terrain of human cruelty, but "Winter Study" (two novels back) took the series into a darker universe. Because of the grotesque killings that took place in that outing, Anna was put on administrative leave from the National Park Service, a career that had defined her life. She tried to recover by taking a belated honeymoon with her new husband in the subsequent novel, "Borderline." Big Bend National Park, however, turned out to be a bad choice as a vacation destination. During that rafting excursion into terror, Anna was required to perform a rudimentary C-section on an almost-dead woman and then run, with the starving newborn clasped to her chest, from hunters seeking human targets.
In "Burn," Anna, still on leave, finds herself in New Orleans in the middle of the grisliest horror yet. As in too much of contemporary American literature -- high and low -- the story line concerns kidnapping, pederasty and the torture of children. "Burn" is a psychologically arduous read that I can only hesitantly recommend. It offers engrossing character studies and an ingenious plot; it will also make many readers want to throw up.
New Orleans is an odd spot for the great-outdoors-loving Ranger Pigeon to alight, but Anna has gone there to recuperate at the French Quarter home of her friend, Geneva, a blind singer working at the New Orleans Jazz National Heritage Park. Settling in for a performance, Anna reflects on the work carried out by Geneva and her fellow performers:
"They were park rangers; their job was to protect and preserve the musical heritage of the historic city of New Orleans. ... In the name of political pork, the Park Service preserved so many worthless bits of history that some said the NPS was where white elephants went to die. Then there were places like this, where the sacred torch of a time long past was carried, still burning, into the present."
The sanctuary of musical grace created by Geneva's voice, however, is violated by the intrusion of street punks and by the lurking presence of a creepy tenant renting an apartment in Geneva's house. Anna comes to suspect this tenant of being a sexual predator with an eye for young girls and, because "for the best part of twenty years she'd been in the business of rescuing things and people from other things and people," she decides to tail this monster through the strip joints and sour alleys of nocturnal New Orleans.
Even as Anna descends into that particular inferno, another more nightmarish story line gathers force. Clare Sullivan is a mother of two girls, living in Seattle and married to a Saudi Arabian man with a mysterious import-export business. As Clare is returning from a dead-of-night run to the local drugstore for cough syrup, her house explodes into flames. Since her marriage, to put it mildly, was troubled, Clare immediately becomes the police's No. 1 suspect in the deaths of her husband and children, whose charred remains are found at the ruins of the house.
Except, on the basis of an overheard conversation between two creepy voyeurs at the scene of the fire, Clare believes her daughters are still alive and that they've been transported to New Orleans. Summoning up her skills as a former actress, Clare transforms herself -- body and spirit -- into a completely different person in order to elude the cops and rescue her daughters. Her path crosses with Anna's in a shocking way, and the two women join forces to locate the most helpless victims of the sex trade in the Crescent City.
The most gripping parts of "Burn" depict Clare's shaky hold on her old identity as a mother -- which is tormenting to her -- and her terrifying slide into her assumed self, "cell by cell, thought by thought." So vividly does Barr dramatize Clare's anguish over her lost daughters and their probable fate that it's hard for readers to stay for long within Clare's mind and heart.
The harrowing, extended climax of "Burn" is also difficult to take in, even for those of us who love the harsh world of crime noir. Barr continues to stretch herself as a writer and to push her battered heroine, Anna, further into the wilderness -- both the geographical and psychological kind. But "Burn" raises the larger question of "When is enough enough in a mystery series?" Aside from being boiled alive, poor Anna has endured just about every kind of assault known to humans and other animals. And so have her loyal readers. In recent years, the Anna Pigeon books, however sharply observed and inventive, have felt less like an exercise in pleasure and more like an exercise in literary masochism.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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MY LIFE AS A RUSSIAN NOVEL: A Memoir
Emmanuel Carrere
Metropolitan
ISBN 978-0805087550
276 pages
$25
Reviewed by Marie Arana, who is a writer at large for The Washington Post. Her most recent novel, now in paperback, is "Lima Nights."
I have a friend who likes to say that life is like a French movie: bleak, with sharp punctuations of great beauty; baffling, yet illuminated by a few jarring truths; boring, until you get to the sexy parts; and then, in the end, you wonder what in the world you've just seen. His words came to mind as I finished "My Life as a Russian Novel," a memoir by the celebrated French author and screenwriter Emmanuel Carrere, not because those words describe his book, but because, in it, Carrere achieves the opposite. His chronicle of a trip to a remote, ruined village in Russia is quirky, verging on incomprehensible -- what's more, sex is its most boring part -- and yet, in the end, Carrere brings the whole pastiche to sharp focus with a few jarring truths and a moment of great beauty. You leave its last pages with a deep appreciation for life.
Carrere is best known for his book "The Adversary," an enthralling, true-crime chronicle of a man who murdered his extended family to prevent them from discovering the monumental lie his life had become. Compared by The Washington Post's Michael Dirda to Truman Capote's "In Cold Blood," the book was a harrowing tale of burgeoning insanity, a cinematically vivid journey to the dark corners of the human mind. Carrere's other works -- novellas, screenplays, a biography of science fiction author Philip K. Dick -- are all riffs on the same theme: How close is any of us, really, to madness?
The book begins with the memory of an erotic dream that Carrere experiences on a train in the wee hours of a Russian morning. He is somewhere between Moscow and Kotelnich, the village where he intends to film a documentary on the last prisoner of World War II, a Hungarian who spent more than 50 years of his life in a psychiatric hospital there. The dream is careening wildly -- as most of this memoir will -- between Kotelnich and Sophie, the lover Carrere has left behind in Paris. Yet, in a swift aberration meant to give us a hint of the unruly story on which we have just embarked, the erotic action suddenly admits a third person: the pert Japanese wife of a former Latin American president.
The sex in this book is largely like that: abrupt, nonsensical, beside the point. In time, we become numb to it -- an effect, in itself, oddly disconcerting. As we swing back and forth from Carrere's libidinous dream life to the harsh reality he comes to record in that Russian backwater, we begin to see, however dimly, the real story that has drawn him there.
It is the story of his mother. Or, rather, the narrative his mother would rather he didn't tell. She is Russian, grew up speaking Russian, although today she is a permanent secretary for the Academie Francaise. Her father, as it turns out, was a Georgian who loved literature, emigrated to Paris, drove a taxi, worked for the Nazis during the Occupation, and then disappeared in the maw of postwar reprisals -- dragged off, never to be seen again. Here, then, despite the numbing sexual asides, is a pulsing horror story. First, the shame of being an immigrant: "The most gifted, the most brilliant ... has gotten nowhere. In French society, he is no one. No one. ... He belongs to that mass you see in the Metro: poor, gray, dead-eyed, with shoulders bowed beneath a life they never chose, insignificant ... A father who cannot stand tall for his children." And, more acute, is the shame of being a collaborator: "a broken man who knew he was condemned and for whom the condemnation was the logical conclusion." There, there, all right now, as Carrere says. "Once said, it's not so terrible." It's the mantra of the memoirist, enough to make you cry. "It isn't your story, it's mine," he tells Mama, and off it goes, into the archives of human history.
When Carrere's grandfather vanished, in other words -- just as that last Hungarian prisoner of war vanished into the distant hinterland of Russia -- he set off dominoes that would clack through the generations to produce the work of Emmanuel Carrere: the secrets that the murderer in "The Adversary" didn't want told; the boy who went missing in "Class Trip"; the destructive mind game of "The Moustache"; the lurking madness of Philip K. Dick. And now, this true story of work, love and obsession -- all of it messy and forgivable.
As I say, it doesn't clack into place until the final page. In the process, you'll endure an embarrassingly silly, priapic story that Carrere published, against all literary prudence, in Le Monde, in order to impress a woman he lusted after, yet never really loved. The Hungarian prisoner of war gets dropped unceremoniously. The focus of Carrere's documentary gets altered, all hope for the project abandoned, until tragedy and failure return to Kotelnich to save the day. Never mind. This maddening and uncomfortable book will be worth it.
Unlike my friend with the French movie, you'll know exactly what you've seen.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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JULIET
Anne Fortier
Ballantine
ISBN 978 0 345 51610 7
447 pages
$25
Reviewed by Diana Gabaldon. Gabaldon's latest novel, "The Exile: An Outlander Graphic Novel," will be published later this month.
Julie Jacobs, the heroine of Anne Fortier's romantic novel "Juliet," is a hot mess. Orphaned at 3, Julie has spent her entire life trying to escape the influence of her fraternal twin sister, Janice. Janice is popular; Janice is beautiful; Janice is reckless; Janice is selfish. Janice, Janice, Janice ... Consequently, Julie has arrived at the age of 25 with self-esteem so low that she can't think of any moment in her past that wasn't some horrible humiliation connected with her sister.
Fate intervenes when Aunt Rose, who has mothered the girls, dies suddenly and wills everything -- the house, the money, the art -- to Janice. All Julie gets is the name of a bank manager and a ticket to Siena, Italy, where the girls' parents met, married and died. As far as Julie is concerned, this second-class treatment is par for the course, and with a resigned sigh she toddles off to Siena, hangdog and unkempt.
Here we have the setup for one heck of a Cinderella story, if you can stand Julie long enough for the fairy godmother to show up -- and, fortunately Fortier doesn't waste any time. Julie meets Eva Maria Salimbeni on the plane to Siena, and is soon equipped with designer clothes and introduced to Alessandro, Eva Maria's darkly handsome godson, who works for the carabinieri.
Of course, the story would end here if the two fell in love, or even got along. But Julie still needs to track down that mysterious bank manager. It turns out he has a box for her containing a silver crucifix on a chain, a wad of papers and an old paperback copy of Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet." This is where the story becomes truly interesting.
The papers, collected by Julie's dead mother, Diane, are manuscripts with the stories of the original Romeo and Juliet, who -- surprise, surprise -- lived in Siena, not Verona. Luckily, the story told in these documents is a fascinating tale with notable parallels to Shakespeare's version, but with its own identity and a distinct Sienese flavor.
From this point, the novel shifts back and forth between the Romeo and Juliet story and Julie's attempts to solve her own family's mysteries. The contents of the box, Julie's legacy, hold the key to something -- but what? Julie meets her long-lost Italian family and pursues her dead mother's clues. Meanwhile, she suspects Alessandro of all sorts of things, and vice versa, while her life is further complicated by a black-visored motorcyclist who stalks her through the streets.
The strongest point of the book is the flavorful, evocative descriptions of Siena, with its ancient neighborhoods, rivalries and family feuds, and the annual running of the Palio horse race. The Shakespearean scholarship on display is both impressive and well-handled, too, with the original Romeo and Juliet story doled out in exciting installments between Julie's increasingly convoluted but much less interesting story. We're asked to believe that the original evil done to the young lovers of 1348 must be put right by the sexual coming together of a modern-day Giulietta (guess who?) and Romeo (no extra points for guessing him, either).
On the whole, the story is fun, if silly, and engaging in spots. Its modern-day characters are mostly cardboard, though -- with the interesting exception of Janice, who despite her late appearance, once again succeeds in stealing the limelight from her drip of a sister.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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SKIPPY DIES
Paul Murray
Faber & Faber
ISBN 978-0865479432
661 pages
$28
Reviewed by Jess Walter. Walter's latest novel, "The Financial Lives of the Poets," will be out in paperback in September.
Let's get right to it: On page 5 of Paul Murray's dazzling new novel, "Skippy Dies,"... Skippy dies.
If killing your protagonist with more than 600 pages to go sounds audacious, it's nothing compared to the literary feats Murray pulls off in this hilarious, moving and wise book. Recently named to the Man Booker Prize long list, "Skippy Dies" is an epic crafted around, of all things, a pack of 14-year-old boys. It's the "Moby-Dick" of Irish prep schools.
The school in question is Dublin's venerable Seabrook College (the equivalent of a private American high school), a 140-year-old institution whose social dynamics make "Lord of the Flies" seem like "Gilligan's Island." Its halls are a maze of bullying, name-calling, alcohol and drug use, sexual obsession and predation. And that's just the faculty.
Our hero is one Daniel "Skippy" Juster, a slight, slightly disturbed second-year whose sudden collapse in the midst of a doughnut-eating contest forms the book's central mystery. Imagine Harry Potter dying at Hogwarts early on, and you've got a bead on the dark heart of this comic novel.
Backtracking a couple of months, we meet Skippy's mates, who include Ruprecht, his obese, brilliant, cosmology-obsessed roomie; Mario, the daft, horny Italian who has been carrying around a "lucky condom" in his wallet for three years; and Dennis, "an arch-cynic whose very dreams are sarcastic," keeper of a Nervous Breakdown Leaderboard on the frazzled faculty.
The exchanges between these boys are so profane and believable, they border on genius. Riffing on Mario's status as the David Beckham of masturbation, Dennis does a dead-on interview with a footballer: "Masturbating's changed a lot since I were a lad, Brian. In my day, we masturbated for the sheer love of it. ... Your young masturbators today, though, it's all about the money, it's all about agents and endorsements."
These boys are brilliant enough to debate whether string theory explains why they can't get girls, or whether one could shag a mermaid, but they go dumb when a frustrated teacher pleads for one of them to name a single major combatant from World War I.
"We've been talking about this for the last two days."
"Uruguay?" one student finally suggests. And another: "The Jews?"
Murray, author of the 2004 novel "A Long Evening of Goodbye," is an expansive writer, bouncing around in time, tense and point of view. He's unafraid to tempt sentimentality, to write directly at his deep themes, to employ shameless cliffhangers. And he's talented enough to get away with most of it.
Even the walk-on characters are sharply drawn, like the pasty-white hip-hop boys Patrick "Da Knowledge" Noonan and Eoin "MC Sexecutioner" Flynn, who pimp-roll to a Halloween dance after a heated debate over which one gets to dress up as Tupac Shakur and which one Biggie Smalls.
Murray gives us a real villain, too, in the junior sociopath Carl, who, with his pal Barry, shakes down little kids for their ADHD medicine to sell to girls as diet pills. When Carl becomes Skippy's rival for the affections of a vacant, Frisbee-tossing cutie named Lori, the danger is real, the result chilling. Murray's description of Barry and Carl's harsh underworld has its own terrifying, alien beauty -- a place where "the blokes are all scobes in tracksuits and the birds are mingers with ponytails and earrings as big as their heads."
The mixture of tones is the book's true triumph, oscillating the banal with the sublime, the silly with the terrifying, the sweet with the tragic. In short, it's like childhood. In shorter, like life. The book's refrain -- that we never really outgrow being lovesick, awkward, bullying children -- isn't exactly breaking news, but it's never been truer. As one teacher says in the staff room, "The twenty-first century is the age of the kidult."
The kidult version of Skippy is his well-meaning history teacher, Howard "The Coward" Fallon, himself a graduate of Seabrook. Howard pines for the dreamy substitute, Miss McIntyre, and has his own bully to deal with in "the Automator," the school's slick acting principal. When Howard insists that the troubled Skippy is a harmless dreamer, the Automator replies: "Dreaming's not something we encourage here."
Split into three sections, "Hopeland," "Heartland" and "Ghostland" (it's also available as three separate paperbacks in a boxed set), "Skippy Dies" rips along for such a big book, the tension building as we work back up to the boy's death. Once he dies, again -- with 200 pages to go -- the book loses a bit of its drive and playfulness (how could it not?) and becomes, at times, almost unbearably dark.
But in this, too, Murray makes the right choices, refusing to spare kid and kidult alike the gorgeous harshness of the world, filled as it is with "a sadness everyone can recognize, a sadness that is binding and homelike."
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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