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Thursday, December 23, 2010

"Lizards," "Ship Breaker," more


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Washington Post Book Reviews
For You
Thursday December 23, 2010

LIZARDS Nic Bishop

Scholastic
ISBN 978-0545206341
NA pages
$17.99

Reviewed by NA
Leaping lizards aren't the half of it. Nic Bishop's latest book also presents stunning photos of slithering lizards, sprinting lizards, sand-swimming lizards and some sunbathing lizards that look as blissed-out as any human sun-worshipper. Often magnified two to four times their actual sizes, these survivors of the Age of Dinosaurs are given the respectful scrutiny they deserve. As in his previous homages, "Marsupials" and "Frogs," Bishop delivers plenty of intriguing facts: The flying dragon lizard from Southeast Asia, for instance, can glide for 100 feet, steering all the way. The text helps explain the impressive variations in lizard size, appearance and skills on display in Bishop's extraordinary double-page images, which reveal textures ranging from smooth-as-silk to ancient-looking to positively thorny, with special features like spiny tails, horned heads and, of course, those soulful eyes and astonishing tongues. Bishop also manages to convey the motion of these scampering, scurrying creatures. Multiple-image views reveal a gliding gecko using its feet and skin flaps like a parachute. A foldout page shows a basilisk running nimbly across water. One photo captures the veiled chameleon's tongue extended almost 12 inches as it reaches for a cricket that's about to get the licking of a lifetime.
-- Abby McGanney Nolan

Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group

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SHIP BREAKER
Paolo Bacigalupi
Little, Brown
ISBN 978-0316056212
NA pages
$17.99

Reviewed by NA
In the post-apocalyptic future of Paolo Bacigalupi's "Ship Breaker," the world is sharply divided into "rust rats" and "swanks." Nailer, a scavenger of beached tankers, is one of the former. His bleak life takes a turn, though, when he discovers a storm-wrecked sailing vessel and rescues the lone survivor: a pretty, extremely wealthy girl. When he flees with Nita to a squalid, largely submerged New Orleans, Nailer enrages his brutal father, who had planned to keep the girl's promised reward for himself. A finalist for this year's National Book Award, this gritty, tautly paced novel will rivet readers eager to learn both the fate of the young ship breaker and the reason for the world's grim collapse. Memorable characters add pith and spirit, including gutsy Nita and a "half-man" named Tool, who bucks the servitude for which he was genetically engineered.
-- Mary Quattlebaum

Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group

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NIGHTS OF THE RED MOON
Milton T. Burton
Minotaur
ISBN 978-0312648008
294 pages
$24.99

Reviewed by Patrick Anderson
Milton T. Burton's third novel, "Nights of the Red Moon," is set in fictional Caddo County, in East Texas, a corner of the universe not entirely unknown to me. In my college years I used to drive from my hometown, Fort Worth, through the dusty towns and piney woods of East Texas on my way to New Orleans, Nashville and points beyond. In those days, even by Texas standards, that 150-or-so-mile stretch from Dallas east to the Louisiana line was considered an unenlightened region. As you entered some towns, you were met by "Impeach Earl Warren" billboards and other signs that warned certain citizens not to let the sun set on them there. Sundown Towns, they were called. That, it seemed to me then, was all I needed to know about East Texas: It was an excellent place to get the hell out of.
Now, however, I am indebted to Burton's novel for showing me that there is more to be said about the area. Real people live real lives there. It's still dangerous territory, but Burton's hero, Caddo County Sheriff Bo Handel, is doing his best to bring law and order, if not outright enlightenment, to East Texas -- the latter, one fears, may await the Second Coming.
Bo is 62 and has been sheriff for 30 years, long enough to see the end of the Sundown Towns and the acceptance of blacks and women as deputies. He's a decent, honest lawman, but no saint. When he learns that one of the county commissioners, a married man, has been carrying on with "that cute little Mexican waitress at Poncho's Cantina in Nacogdoches," he persuades (blackmails, some would say) the man to support the funding he needs to give his deputies a raise.
A widower, Bo is breaking the rules to carry on a secret romance with a younger woman on his staff. He tolerates low-level dope-dealing and bootlegging so long as the culprits keep him informed about the county's more serious criminals.
A carnival of crime unfolds in the weeks chronicled here. Explaining both the crime wave and the novel's title, Bo tells us that "back in frontier times when a summer drought lingered on toward the fall equinox, the Cherokees called it the Season of the Blood Moon, and feared it as a time of madness and death."
The red-moon carnage begins on the book's first page, when the wife of the local Methodist preacher is murdered. The sheriff learns that she was both addicted to prescription drugs and having an affair with the owner of a local liquor store. Further investigation shows that the liquor-store owner is involved in a major drug deal with a supplier in Houston. Several pounds of cocaine are missing. A hit man from New Orleans comes in search of it, and Bo uses his trusty slapjack to put him down for the count. More murders occur as the intrepid sheriff scrambles to restore peace to Caddo County.
It's a lively and well-crafted plot, but "Nights of the Red Moon" is most notable for its portrait of small-town Texas. We meet giant twins, 40-year-old pulpwood cutters, whose annual drinking binge, which they call their "frolic," always leads to the near-destruction of a local dance hall. One of the sheriff's informants is a well-off, middle-age fellow named Danny, a "gentle nihilist" who discovered marijuana in college and has been blissfully stoned ever since. The sheriff is amused by an aristocratic dominatrix who has a perverse yen for lawmen -- and also by a proper Southern Baptist lady who announces that she's learning to dance, a pleasure long denied members of her faith.
One night Bo visits a backwoods honky-tonk that features a sputtering old neon sign that casts a "ghostly green glow" on the dark, silent woods all around. Did Burton intend for that image to summon up the green light at the end of Daisy Buchanan's dock? Perhaps.
Inside, Bo tells us, "I loved to watch the regulars. They were a ghostly, interchangeable crew of tired, listless women with haystack hairdos and defeated faces, and weathered, khaki-clad men of indefinite age and vague occupation who drank their beer straight from the bottle and smoked their unfiltered Camels with the calm intensity of those who know they are doomed and can't quite summon the energy to care."
That's an East Texas honky-tonk, but it's also a million other dead-end bars and saloons and gin joints all over the world.
Burton has been a cattleman, a political consultant and a college history teacher in Texas. His "Nights of the Red Moon" isn't a great novel, but it's a good one: a solid, entirely believable portrait of a particular lawman at work in a specific time and place. It made me glad to return to East Texas -- at least in fiction.
Patrick Anderson reviews thriller and mysteries regularly for The Washington Post.

Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group

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IN A STRANGE ROOM: Three Journeys
Damon Galgut
Europa
ISBN 978-0771035968
207 pages
$15

Reviewed by Ron Charles
I'm weary of dreary.
I know it's an act of book reviewing apostasy, but I've had it with the exquisitely crafted sighs of depressed men. And that's not just the eggnog talking. Honestly, how many times do we have to praise the stark story of a wandering, alienated man that Hemingway perfected in "The Sun Also Rises" way back in 1926?
Every year adds two or three "haunting masterpieces" to this respected subgenre. This year's top entries included Joshua Ferris' grave "The Unnamed," Dinaw Mengestu's somber "How to Read the Air" and now Damon Galgut's "In a Strange Room," which was a finalist for the Man Booker Prize. The lyrics differ -- a little -- but the melody of these dirges doesn't change: existential angst gliding along one spare, cool paragraph after another, like a Giacometti statue strutting out of the Iowa Writers' Workshop. I've put in my time with these narrators, and I've praised their harrowing stories and stylistic elegance, but Galgut, a South African novelist and playwright, has finally worn me out.
"In a Strange Room" is a collection of three autobiographical travel tales that have won praise since they were first published in the Paris Review and now come to us bound together as a novel. In each of these stories, "he goes on somewhere else. And somewhere else again ... He feels no connection with anything around him, he's constantly afraid of dying."
In the first story, "The Follower," our shell-shocked narrator is drifting through Greece when he bumps into Reiner, a strikingly handsome German dressed all in black. "He has a sullen sort of beauty," Galgut tells us, "with long silky hair that falls around his shoulders." They end up in the same hostel, where they engage in Brief Conversations Fraught With Tension:
"How long are you here for.
"I'm also going in the morning.
"Are you going to Athens.
"No. The other way. To Sparta.
"So you've seen Mycenae already.
"I've been here two days.
"Ah."
Damon can't shake the German or engage him in any real intimacy or use a question mark. "He is worn down by the constant presence, like some kind of dark attendant angel, ironic and brooding, his face almost petulant."
The hunky German walks around with his shirt off, sits on the edge of Damon's bed, daring him to make the first move. It's a scene of homoerotic passive aggression straight from a British prep school memoir of the 1930s. Except this is the 21st century, and there's no way to explain why these two modern, unattached adults imagine their relationship should be so burdened with the threat of transgression. They keep up this dance of denial for 70 pages, leading each other on a cruel walking challenge across Greece. "Was what happened between him and Reiner love or hate," the narrator asks, "or something else with another name." But we dare speak its name nowadays, Mr. Galgut, and it's not so shocking or titillating as you suggest.
Admittedly, it is highly atmospheric, and the sense of menace can be exciting, as in Poe's "The Man of the Crowd," but there's no escaping the artificiality of this performance. The story's creepiness and ambiguity are a substitute for the emotional profundity it makes a claim to. Vacillating erratically between first and third person, the tale is all poses grasping after Cormac McCarthy and J.M. Coetzee.
The second story, "The Lover," offers us more of the same: "the same state of nothingness, the drifting from place to place." Galgut explains that "he has lost the ability to love, people or places or things, most of all the person and place and thing that he is. ... In this state travel isn't celebration but a kind of mourning, a way of dissipating yourself." But I would argue that he's in exactly the opposite state: He luxuriates in his self, whipping his lust and ennui into shiny peaks of spun sugar like this: "His loneliness resounds in him with a high thin note, like the lingering sound of a bell. ... A thin column of grief rises in him like mercury."
This time he's in Africa on another of his "aimless and awful walks," when he meets three European tourists. "The younger man has from up close a beauty that is almost shocking, red lips and high cheek-bones and a long fringe of hair." Jerome -- with the lips -- barely speaks English, which cuts down on the awkward conversation, so for some 50 pages Damon and he stare at each other with enough unconsummated desire to melt everything but their own bashfulness. "As he settles himself for the night he rolls his eyes up and finds Jerome in exactly the same position, looking back, and for a long arrested moment they hold each other's gaze before they both look away and try to sleep." I just wanted to grab this sad-sack narrator by the shoulders and shout, "Get a job, man, or a boyfriend or a Chia pet or anything!"
And to a large extent, he takes that advice in the third and final story, which is genuinely compelling. In "The Guardian," our peripatetic narrator is wandering through India, but this time he's escorting a friend, an actual friend, "somebody he loves and who makes him laugh. Somebody he wants to protect": Anna is a manic-depressive woman who requires a complicated regimen of psychotropic medications to keep herself from slipping into obsessive behavior and suicidal madness. He's taking her along with him to give her "a couple of months away from home, a chance for Anna to find herself and stabilize." Almost immediately he realizes just how self-destructive she is and how wholly unprepared he is to control her.
What follows is a terrifying experience of torn affections and Third World medical care (Note: Don't get sick in India). After so many static pages of vague despair, it's doubly shocking to be hurled through this ordeal as Damon races to save a friend so set on destroying herself. Here, finally, we see what Galgut can do -- what he did in "The Good Doctor" -- when he wrenches himself out of his head, when his story is rooted in the details of specific people enduring actual challenges.
Plenty of sophisticated, sensitive readers have praised these stories, and I don't doubt their insight or their critical acumen. But how much you enjoy this novel will depend largely on how moved you are by oracular pronouncements such as: "A journey is a gesture inscribed in space, it vanishes even as it's made. You go from one place to another place, and on to somewhere else again, and already behind you there is no trace that you were ever there." At this stage of my life, this seems like a small room rather than a strange one, and I'm tired of sharing it with men who have nothing more to tell me than how dispirited they are.
Ron Charles is The Washington Post's fiction critic.

Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group

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