Washington Post Book Reviews
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Thursday November 18, 2010
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A NOVEL BOOKSTORE
Laurence Cosse. Translated from the French by Alison Anderson
Europa
ISBN 978 1 933372 82 2
416 pages
$15
Reviewed by Elizabeth Hand, whose most recent book is "Illyria"
"All the literati keep /An imaginary friend," wrote W.H. Auden. Now bibliophiles can also share the joys and perils of running an imaginary bookstore, at 9 bis, rue Dupuytren, Paris. That's where Francesca and Ivan, the star-crossed, middle-aged book lovers in Laurence Cosse's "A Novel Bookstore," decide to open their shop, the Good Novel. (That name reflects the novel's French title, "Au bon roman"; the address makes it a neighbor to Sylvia Beach's original Shakespeare & Co., at 8 rue Dupuytren.)
From the outset, Francesca and Ivan, known as Van, set the bar high for both their store and its clientele: "The Good Novel will not be an ordinary bookstore. ... Our customers won't be ordinary customers. The people we'll see at our store will be people who never buy a book because it just came out, unless they adore the author already, but for other reasons that have nothing to do with its pub date, because they couldn't care less about that. They'll be the people who go into a bookstore knowing what they want to buy, and they go straight to the bookseller and say, I'd like 'Titus Alones' by Mervyn Peake. People who won't be surprised if we tell them the book is not in stock ... and who'll order it without hesitating, because they don't mind if it comes three or eight days later."
Never mind that millions of people now buy books online or download them onto iPads and Kindles and Nooks. In an effort to appeal to readers, Cosse over-eggs le gateau: Her novel is at once a wish-fulfillment fantasy for bibliophiles, a love story, a satire of the contemporary literary scene, and a mystery, complete with a patient young police prefect of a literary bent.
Detective work is necessary because, as the novel opens, three noted writers associated with the Good Novel have been attacked and left for dead. The writers are anonymous members of the eight-person Committee, the secret group Francesca and Van convene to choose the books their store will sell. Cosse devotes pages and pages to this intricate selection process -- the identities of the Committee members are known only to Francesca and Van, and each is responsible for suggesting 600 titles.
"'Is Pierre Bettencourt's 'L'Intouchable' on the list?' asked Francesca worriedly.
"'Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate,' said Van, searching.
"'All of McCarthy, I hope ...'
"'How many by Nicolas Bouvier?'
"'Be-Bop," by Christian Gailly?'"
Charming as much of this is, at times "A Novel Bookstore" reads more like a business plan than a page-turner. Fortunately, the pace picks up once the back story involving the store's creation is dispensed with. From its opening day, the Good Novel inspires both rapturous customer loyalty and outrage from those who cite its refusal to stock Dan Brown as pure elitism, not to mention commercial folly. Francesca and Van point out that, if asked, they will certainly order whatever a customer wants, but a decided whiff of biblio-snobbery hangs above those beautifully designed bookshelves.
Francesca and Van soon learn that the enemies of literature are legion -- and well-organized. Newspaper editorials attack the Good Novel; Web sites condemn it; armies of the night cover Paris with posters decrying its exclusionary practices; rival bookstores open across the street. Who is behind these guerrilla attacks on the gatekeepers of great literature? Prime suspects include Francesca's media-tycoon husband, a Gallic Rupert Murdoch; Van's mercurial young lover; and every French novelist whose work failed to make the Committee's list.
Cosse, a noted journalist as well as a successful novelist in her native France, has a gift for clever if sometimes heavy-handed satire of the Paris literary scene, even if her characters behave like stock figures. Helas, the novel's ending falls flat, and the mystery's resolution evokes a resounding "Huh?"
Still, many readers will find a reason to linger in "A Novel Bookstore," which makes a good argument for literature as a sensual pleasure surpassing even sex and fine wine. A visit to www.thegoodnovel.com allows one to peruse some of the Committee's choices. These include "Madame Bovary," but not Posy Simmonds' brilliant graphic novel reconstruction, "Gemma Bovery." Which means that I, hypocrite lecteur, may bypass the Good Novel for the Waterstone's across the street.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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ROGUE ISLAND
Bruce DeSilva
Forge
ISBN 978 0 7653 2726 0
302 pages
$24.99
Reviewed by Patrick Anderson, who regularly reviews thrillers and mysteries for The Washington Post
Fifty years ago the editor of the Nashville Tennessean hired me, fresh out of college, as a $65-a-week reporter for what was, in those days, a fine newspaper. My new colleagues included legends-to-be David Halberstam, John Seigenthaler and Tom Wicker. In 1960 the paper supported the re-election of Sen. Estes Kefauver and the election of Sen. John Kennedy as president. When massive sit-in demonstrations began at downtown lunch counters, Halberstam's tireless reporting contributed to their success. Meanwhile, I pounded the police beat and wrote a weekly country-music column, thus becoming a backstage fixture at the Grand Ole Opry . One day I blackmailed Col. Tom Parker into granting me the only sit-down, one-on-one interview that Elvis Presley ever gave. Those three years in Nashville were arguably the happiest of my life.
And why this detour down Memory Lane? Blame Bruce DeSilva's novel "Rogue Island" for conjuring up images of those halcyon days. DeSilva has 40 years of newspapering behind him, mostly with the Associated Press, and his first novel is as good and true a look at the news game as you'll find this side of "The Front Page." Old newspapermen -- we are legion -- will delight in the book, as should anyone who appreciates a well-written, funny, sad, suspenseful look at this bewildering world we live in.
Our hero is, of course, a reporter, one L.S.A. Mulligan. He's 39 years old and has spent 18 years with an unnamed daily in his hometown, Providence, R.I. Along the way he won a Pulitzer Prize, but he continues to live in a shabby apartment, to drive a battered Ford Bronco he calls Secretariat, to work for peanuts and to suffer the slings and arrows of his almost-ex-wife: "Dorcas had seemed to be a perfectly decent human being until she woke up married to me."
Undaunted, Mulligan is falling for a gorgeous reporter in her 20s, although she refuses to consummate the matter until he passes an AIDS test. Alas, it takes the local health department eight weeks to process a test. Even after Mulligan slips the clerk a $20 bribe, it'll still take four.
"Rogue Island" is often hilarious, though built around a deadly serious plot. That's clear on its first page, when Mulligan races to a house on fire in working-class Mount Hope, where he grew up, and finds that 5-year-old twins had crawled under a bed to escape the flames. The fireman who carried one of them down the ladder wept: "The body was black and smoking." A serial arsonist is at work in Mount Hope, many more people die, and Mulligan, having no faith in the city's incompetent police and crooked politicians, embarks on a personal crusade to find the killer.
Arson is no joke, but DeSilva injects comedy into the darkness. A couple who recently moved to Providence from Oregon insist that their dog is a latter-day Lassie who followed them across the country on foot; Mulligan proves otherwise.
When Mulligan knocks on a door and tells a woman, "I'm a reporter for the paper," she naturally replies, "We already take the paper." As an example of the local brand of justice, Mulligan tells us about the star forward for Providence College who "had been sentenced to twenty hours of community service for breaking his English tutor's arm with a lug wrench." Then there's the local corruption. The city's chief arson investigator "aced the sergeant's exam by paying the going rate of five hundred dollars for the answers, then rose through the ranks the Rhode Island way, slipping envelopes to the mayor's bagman." DeSilva lets Mulligan explain his novel's title: "Rhode Island is a bastardization of (BEG ITAL)Rogue Island(END ITAL), a name the sturdy farmers of colonial Massachusetts bestowed upon the swarm of heretics, smugglers, and cutthroats who first settled the shores of Narragansett Bay."
In this account, the rogues still rule.
We meet Mulligan's take-no-prisoners city editor; his favorite bookie; some mobsters who may be involved in the arson; and his publisher's son, fresh out of J-school, who survives Mulligan's scorn and proves to be not a bad fellow. Although set in the present, "Rogue Island" is in truth a loving tribute to a golden age of journalism that now has all but vanished.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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MUST YOU GO?: My Life With Harold Pinter
Antonia Fraser
Nan Talese/Doubleday
ISBN 978 0 385 53250 1
328 pages
$28.95
Reviewed by Carolyn See, who reviews books for The Washington Post every Friday
In describing how she and the playwright Harold Pinter met back in 1975 and eventually married, Antonia Fraser begins with an explanation of the rigid British social caste system. Yes, he was Jewish and had a working-class background, and she "could be argued to be an aristocrat." But, she goes on, "the truth was that by the mid 1970s, both in our different ways successful writers, Harold and I belonged to the same class: I will call it the Bohemian class."
And of course that's true, but they belonged to another one as well: the Iron Discipline class, whose members know what it means to get ahead and stay there, to make your mark and then make another one; to live a public life -- even a life of celebrity -- not for the sake of celebrity itself, but so that it will reflect upon the life's work. Thus, the endless lists of newspaper articles in which one is featured, the TV shows on which one appears, the cricket matches in which one participates, the lunch parties, the charity events. Add the keeping of a charming diary that can be quoted from frequently and will last, in theory, forever as a record. All this is part of the discipline of a carefully lived, extremely focused life. There are very few grilled-cheese sandwiches eaten thoughtlessly over the sink in this account. Instead, there are tickets bought, dresses worn, speeches made, poetry read and then more speeches. All of it duly and dutifully recorded to point to lives lived as a form of art.
It would have been understandable enough if Lady Antonia had done all these activities for herself (she's a historian with a very fine reputation), but as the subtitle here makes obvious, most of this diary seems to have been recorded in the service of Harold Pinter, who, by the time they met, had a good deal of his major work behind him. In later life he wrote several more full-length plays, including "Betrayal," but mostly confined himself to one-act plays, poems and increasingly left-wing political speeches.
He was indisputably a great writer. He went on to win the Nobel Prize, but he was subject to debilitating bouts of depression, and there's no telling how his life would have turned out if -- when they were both in midlife -- he and Fraser hadn't met and begun living a life of measured pleasure, focused leisure, melded together by steady and constant iron discipline.
She was 42 when they met; Pinter, 44. They had both been married to their first spouses for almost exactly 18 years. He had one child; she had six. His first wife took the breakup badly and complained bitterly to the tabloids. Her first husband took a philosophical view and remained, according to this account, on friendly terms with the new couple. Pinter's son moved further and further from a relationship with his father. But her family -- one of those Big English Things about as large as an American public high school -- seems to have taken him in enthusiastically, after some initial misgivings. By the end of his life, he had what amounted to a private army of relatives and supporters behind him; he was totally plugged in to the Larger British Society.
Remarkably, although this volume purports to be a memoir of their life as a couple, there's very little material here on Fraser's own work. She wrote major biographies of Mary, Queen of Scots, Charles II and Marie Antoinette, as well as numerous mysteries -- by my count she produced 19 books during the period they were together -- but we see very little of what occupied her intellectually during the time of her marriage to Pinter. She was ladylike, in the traditional way, deferring at every point to the important husband's career.
So this extremely interesting book might attract several kinds of readers. First, on a very practical level "Must You Go?" is a study on how to succeed, a user's manual on how to live an examined, focused, productive life. More crassly, it can be read as a variation of People magazine for very smart people, an enchanting catalog of celebrity names and sparkling events. Or, if you're a masochistic, aspiring artist or writer, you can read this as an instrument of torture, a way to make yourself miserable with envy. Basically, this is a list of all the wonderful parties you were never invited to, the fancy dress balls you never attended, the interesting people you never met, or even if you did meet them, you didn't have as much fun as Fraser had. For instance, Anthony Powell ("A Dance to the Music of Time") seems to have come over to their house all the time, but I don't remember getting invited. Novelist Alison Lurie ("The War Between the Tates") cast a horoscope for Fraser, but not for me. But wait a minute! Alison did cast a horoscope for me once, and it was fun, but not part of this continuously enchanted life Fraser is writing about. I mean, we had fun, but not (BEG ITAL)that(END ITAL) much fun. And I forgot to write it down in my diary. And that's part of the loving service Fraser performed for her husband; she not only provided him with an interesting, culturally layered, extremely enjoyable life, but she recorded it, so that this book exists as a homage, not just to their love but to their time and work together.
The sour grapes attitude to take would be that Fraser is name-dropping, and she certainly does: Averell and Pamela Harriman, Elizabeth Taylor, Carl Bernstein, Alexander Cockburn, Arthur Schlesinger, John Gielgud -- they all pass through these pages.
But this is an account of iron discipline, remember, and Fraser makes it clear that her life's work with Pinter was not just to entertain and record, but to comfort and cherish. After cancer struck for the first time, the couple was haunted by "The Great Fear" for the next seven years, during which Pinter was beset by a good percentage of all the ailments known to man. She was there, recording the falls and the breaks and the ulcers, along with the Nobel Prize. With the publication of this enchanting memoir, she has more than discharged her loving obligation to this distinguished man.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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HOW TO READ THE AIR
Dinaw Mengestu
Riverhead
ISBN 978 1 59448 770 5
305 pages
$25.95
Reviewed by Ron Charles, the fiction editor of The Washington Post. You can follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/RonCharles. He can be reached at charlesr(at symbol)washpost.com.
The eerie calm in Dinaw Mengestu's new novel, "How to Read the Air," is almost never broken. There are flashes of violence -- a black eye, a broken lamp -- but those strikes interrupt an atmosphere of smothered despair. Named one of the New Yorker's best 20 writers under 40, Mengestu earned high praise for his 2007 debut, "The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears," about a lonely Ethiopian working in Logan Circle, and his new novel concentrates that theme of alienation even further.
The story contradicts our most cherished cliches of immigrant progress: We expect the parents to work hard, trapped between countries and languages, saving their pennies and toiling at every opportunity, chagrined by their children's disregard for the old values, their easy integration with American culture. But Mengestu complicates that oft-told tale with a peculiar, psychologically perceptive story that makes one wonder how a country of immigrants could ever survive.
The narrator is 33-year-old Jonas, born and raised in the Midwest. His father escaped from Sudan in a box on a cargo ship; his mother came over three years later. Once reunited in America, they maintained a dreadfully unhappy, abusive relationship, haunted by the trauma of their pasts, and in the process created a new series of traumas for their son, who spent his youth "finding new ways of numbing myself so nothing my parents, or by extension the outside world, did could touch me." Jonas grew into adulthood feeling pessimistic, emotionally closed down and reflexively dishonest. And that dishonesty provides the fabric of the novel, as he slides from devious lies to excusable fabrications to deeply moving fictions.
The chapters alternate between the story of his three-year marriage to a young lawyer in New York and the story of the chilling honeymoon his parents took 30 years ago from Peoria, Ill., to Nashville. Uninformed, except for a few basic facts about their trip, and uninhibited about imagining his parents' thoughts and actions, Jonas lays out their drive as a series of punches, resentments and escape fantasies. "The fights grew out of their own organic, independent force," he writes, "obliged only to their own rules and standards."
Jonas has no interest in assigning blame or even judging his father, despicable as the man was, a paranoid brute whom Jonas and his mother hoped to escape in the way you'd want to escape a bad storm. Every detail of Jonas' behavior is relayed with the same dispassionate, factual voice, which provides a harrowing diagnosis of the symptoms of such a home: "At some early point in my life, while still living with my parents and their daily battles," he writes, "I had gone numb as a tactical strategy, perhaps at exactly the moment when we're supposed to be waking up to the world and stepping into our own."
Mengestu illustrates the crippling effects of that upbringing in the alternating chapters that take place in post-9/11 New York. Years of avoiding his father's wrath have trained Jonas in the art of invisibility, an ironic echo of Ralph Ellison's classic novel about a very different kind of black man in America. "I thought of my obscurity as being essential to my survival," Jonas writes. "Whoever can't see you can't hurt you."
Aimless and almost friendless 10 years after graduation, Jonas works a series of temp jobs before settling at an office that represents immigrants seeking legal status. His assignment is to help prepare the applicants' written testimonies about the abuse they suffered in their home countries. But he quickly begins exercising more editorial control: "I took half-page statements of a coarse and often brutal nature and supplied them with the details that made them real for the immigration officer who would someday be reading them. I took 'They came at night' and turned it into 'We had all gone to sleep for the evening, my wife, mother, and two children. All the fires in the village had already been put out, but there was a bright moon, and it was possible to see even in the darkness the shapes of all the houses. That's why they attacked that night.'"
He's good at this, and if he oversteps the truth now and then, well, it's for a worthy cause, right? What are more troubling, though, are the fabrications he begins telling about his own life. "History sometimes deserves a little revision," Jonas claims, with a nod to "The Great Gatsby." "I thought of this as a distinctly American trait -- this ability to unwind whatever ties supposedly bind you to the past and to invent new ones as you went along."
There's something slyly autobiographical going on here, of course: a young novelist making up a story about a young man who makes up stories. Mengestu is commenting on the life-giving properties of make-believe, as Jonas tries to save his parents, his job, his marriage with the drama and depth of his tales. He's a modern-day African-American Scheherazade, striving to postpone the silence for just one more day. "If my fictional narratives lacked any veracity, it didn't really matter," Jonas claims. "I was making something of myself while I was still young, and even if that something was little more than an ever-growing lie, it was still something to which I could claim sole credit and responsibility. I was, however wrong it may have been, making a go of things."
By the end, "How to Read the Air" grows into a tragic and affecting paradox, a demonstration of the limits of fiction, the inability of stories to heal or preserve. And yet there it is, this novel -- wholly contrived -- offering up its wisdom about the immigrant experience with the kind of power mere facts couldn't convey.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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