Washington Post Book Reviews
For You
Thursday December 16, 2010
|
THE NEIGHBORS ARE WATCHING
Debra Ginsberg
Crown
ISBN 978-0307463869
303 pages
$23.99
Reviewed by Kevin Allman, a writer and editor living in New Orleans
Wildfires are as much a season in Southern California as wildflowers, and the Santa Anas are its harbingers -- unnerving, dry winds that, in the words of Raymond Chandler, "curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. ... Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen."
In Debra Ginsberg's new novel, "The Neighbors Are Watching," the Santa Ana winds also drive out a number of secrets in a Southern California hillside neighborhood.
Certainly the setup is fine. In a prologue rendered as a blog post with comments, Ginsberg sets the stage: the San Diego area during summer 2007, the year of the Witch Fire, one of the worst wildfires in Southern California history.
The Witch Fire barreled through chaparral, tore through hilltop subdivisions and looked like it would burn all the way to the sea; more than half a million people were evacuated, and nine died. In the prologue, Ginsberg zeroes in on the central tale: the disappearance of a young woman, an unmarried teenage mother who seems to have vanished in the devil winds, leaving her newborn baby in its crib.
How the woman got to the neighborhood is the story; what happened to her is the mystery. Joe and Allison Montana are leading a comfortable, if unextraordinary, life on Fuller Court, in one of the many endless hillside suburbs that ring San Diego. Joe, in his mid-40s, has settled into a job managing an Olive Garden-ish restaurant; Allison, a decade younger, teaches school.
Into their lives -- actually, into their driveway -- drops Diana, a 17-year-old black girl with tattoos on her legs and a baby in her belly, a daughter that Joe has always known about but never got around to mentioning to Allison. Diana has been packed off by her mother, Yvonne, who is exasperated with her wild child, and Joe and Allison have no choice but to install her in the spare room.
Soon, Joe is finding more reasons to work late, Allison is emotionally frozen (and, increasingly, half-soused) after his betrayal, and Diana's resentment at being stuck in a house owned by strangers is growing faster than her child.
Diana's arrival also stirs up the neighbors, most notably Dick and Dorothy Werner, a traditional-values couple who have been having trouble with their son Kevin. Before long, Kevin has entered into a romance with Diana, the two bonding over teenage angst and pot, while Dorothy, the Neighborhood Watch captain on Fuller Court, uses her position to snoop while trying to hide a number of secrets of her own.
Then there are Sam and Gloria, a lesbian couple who, until Diana's arrival, had been the biggest talk of the block. Gloria is enduring some unspecified depression, while Sam struggles to understand and connect with her.
The cast also includes the high-school-aged, perpetually hoops-shooting son of a secretive Asian family, and a former reality-TV star fallen on hard times who seems to have packed her father off to a facility so she can have his house to herself -- along with her gentleman callers.
Mostly ordinary people, with mostly ordinary problems, and that's the problem with "The Neighbors Are Watching"; very little of the dramatic action in the book (the Witch Fire, the birth of the baby) takes place on the page. Ginsberg spends paragraphs exploring her characters' most minute reactions to one another, which isn't quite the same thing as building psychological suspense.
Besides Diana's disappearance, a few other minor mysteries are seeded throughout the book -- What is Dorothy terrified of that the world will discover about her? Why is Gloria becoming near-catatonic? Where does Allison go after the fire? -- but the tale of suspense hinted at in the book's prologue never builds inexorable momentum; these people may have interesting things happen to them, but they never emerge as interesting people.
By the end, when the not-so-mysterious mystery is revealed, it's less "A-ha" than "ho-hum." Ginsberg has assembled all the ingredients for a thriller here, which makes it doubly disappointing that her plot is so inert.
As a season arc for "Desperate Housewives," the story of Diana's appearance and disappearance might make for mild TV drama, but in this telling, it's hard to work up interest in any of the people on Fuller Court, no matter how intently they're all watching each other.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
|
| Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Share | Top |
DINOSAUR HUNTER
Homer Hickman
Thomas Dunne
ISBN 978-0312383787
311 pages
$25.99
Reviewed by Carolyn See, who reviews for The Washington Post every Friday
Back in the days of Louis L'Amour, when so many men still faithfully read Field and Stream magazine, there used to be a terrific boys' writer named Commander Edward Ellsberg, who wrote stories about grouchy but tender men who participated in the most dangerous adventures. (His deep-sea divers were sometimes afflicted with the bends -- their entire bodies pushed up by mistake into their helmets, becoming nothing but bloody goo). But no matter what dangers Ellsberg's Heroes confronted, they usually stayed away as much as possible from two particular snares: war and women.
Homer Hickam's new novel, "The Dinosaur Hunter," includes women among his characters, and sometimes a cowboy slips into a camping tent with one of them, but that stuff is mostly a sideline. In the great tradition of L'Amour and Ellsberg, this is a guy's book, and it's mainly about digging up dinosaurs. The author came upon his material honestly. "My introduction to dinosaur hunting came through (film director) Joe Johnston," he writes. "Joe told me he was heading to Montana to work in the field with Dr. John (Jack) Horner, the famous paleontologist who is the technical consultant for all of the Jurassic Park movies. This sounded like an adventure, so it took me less than a second to ask, 'Can I go, too?' Big mistake. I tend to get carried away by adventures and, sure enough, that's what happened."
Hickam and his colleagues dug in a place called Garfield County, full of "ranchers, farmers, cowgirls, and cowboys." They made some important discoveries, and, as Hickam tells it, he loved every minute of the time he spent in Montana's "glorious badlands," and particularly loved the hours he spent in the Hell Creek Bar, a "grand watering hole" located close to the dig. His tone is lively, gregarious, the words of an old-fashioned, mannerly gent. And it's this endearing tone that carries over into his fictional counterpart in this novel, an ex-cop named Mike Wire, whose earlier career was cut short by a rain of hostile bullets. Mike has regrouped and found himself a new life on a Montana ranch, where he works as top cowboy and sole hired hand for a dour, widowed ranch-lady, Jeanette, who treats him like dirt, which is too bad, because he loves her. (It's actually convenient for everyone, though, because as long as she scorns him, he can't go to bed with her.)
As the novel begins, Mike and Jeanette are living the Montana ranching life. Rain, sleet, thunder and lightning put on a big show, and the two of them occupy themselves performing a C-section on a sorely afflicted cow. Along with these difficulties, it seems that ordinary Montana life is made up of skirmishes with the Bureau of Land Management, neighbors telling each other to get off their property, and preparations for the labor-intensive Fourth of July festivities, which in this case feature several heartfelt fistfights and a couple of murders.
But after Mike and Jeanette meet up with a paleontologist named Pick, the book is pretty much given over to the mechanics of dinosaur hunting: how these enormous and awesome fossils are first discovered, then carefully unearthed, then either sent to a prestigious museum for further study or sold to a shady character in the black market. The process of unearthing involves digging for days, then wrapping the bones in plaster casts, aluminum foil or paper towels.
As the sun sets, they fix dinner at the campsite and drink prodigious amounts of g&ts (the tonic is good for keeping malaria under control). The paleontologists and their enthusiastic helpers pass their evenings telling stories and singing old songs. At this particular dig, which involves a suspicious scientist from a nonexistent university, an asinine jerk from the Bureau of Land Management and narrow-minded Jeanette (whom Mike refers to as "the queen of the prairie"), the motivations are either a lust for profit or a yearning to further the cause of science.
No one knows whether money or science will win in this unseemly scramble for a spectacular set of old bones. But the author provides us with a multiple-choice display of equally spectacular villains who come along to gum up the works.
But the real fun is reading about people engaging in physical activity in an old-timey man's world. Wouldn't it be fun to be crouching under THE sun, brushing dirt off of 65-million-year-old bones, waiting for tonight's round of gin? Yes, there's very little mushy love-stuff here. The bulk of the action consists of getting bones into trucks and bones out of trucks and intoning, with quiet menace, "Get off my property!" Since no one is sure about what property belongs to whom, these threats become another wholesome plot thickener. And Mike does finally spend a couple of nights in a tent with somebody.
"The Dinosaur Hunter" is not profound, by any means, but it's fun, and if you don't already live in Montana, it's a perfect escape.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
|
| Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Share | Top |
THE PASSAGES OF H.M.
Jay Parini
Doubleday
ISBN 978-0385522779
450 pages
$26.95
Reviewed by Ron Charles, fiction critic of The Washington Post Book World. He can be reached at charlesr(at symbol)washpost.com.
The Irish hold up "Ulysses," the Russians cherish "War and Peace," and we point to "Moby-Dick" -- those national monuments we revere but seldom visit. Face it: Herman Melville, the man who wrote the most famous opening line in American literature, is now largely unread. Call me crazy, but that's a damnable fate, the literary equivalent of being lost at sea.
Luckily, I had a high school English teacher who sailed us through the pages of "Moby-Dick" with the unwavering determination of Captain Ahab. But in college and graduate school -- focused on American literature! -- we only pursued a few of Melville's shorter works, dark marvels like "Bartleby, the Scrivener" and "Billy Budd."
Size matters, but length isn't the only challenge posed by "Moby-Dick." It's a vortex that sucks up chunks of classical history and literature, theology and geography, nautical science and 19th-century industry. Melville's style is thick and demanding, too, even by the standards of his friend Nathaniel Hawthorne. Yes, it's a rip-roaring seafaring adventure, but it sails through rough waters of philosophy, and there's no escaping the howling wind of Melville's anguished mind.
But I feel a little closer to the surprising warmth of that mind after reading Jay Parini's new biographical novel, "The Passages of H.M." There are certainly fuller treatments of the author's life, starting with Hershel Parker's definitive biography -- 2,000 pages in two volumes, completed in 2005 -- but that's another leviathan more praised than read. Although Parini's story tacks close to the outline of Melville's experience, much has been artfully omitted, and what remains benefits from the novelist's ability to shape the story of a lonely man, a volcanic husband and an obsessed writer.
Parini has written such faction before. A longtime English professor at Middlebury College and a prolific literary critic, he's produced traditional biographies of John Steinbeck, Robert Frost and William Faulkner, but 20 years ago he wrote a novel about Tolstoy, "The Last Station," which was the basis for the recent film starring Christopher Plummer and Helen Mirren. I'm tempted to feel there's something vaguely cowardly about the biographical novel as a form, as though it's merely a pre-emptive defense against writing a dull novel (Remember, it's a biography) or an inaccurate biography (Please, it's a novel). And yet these hybrid books, with their crafted themes and dramatic arcs that no messy real life could follow, have given me an intimate sense of such figures as Charles Dickens, Alfred Tennyson and Emily Dickinson.
That's certainly the case with "The Passages of H.M." In fact, Parini is more effective with the interior life of his hero than with the great author's famous adventures. He starts in 1839 when Melville is a restless 19-year-old, dreaming of serving on a whaler. We travel with him on his first voyage, a four-month round trip to Liverpool (total wage: $12), and then on to his next trip in 1841 to the South Seas in search of sperm whales. It was during that tumultuous voyage that Melville and a buddy deserted at Nuku Hiva. Melville went on to Tahiti and Hawaii and then returned home almost four years later with those tales of paradise, cannibals and sexual exploits that he published in "Typee" and "Omoo."
Parini is careful to highlight the biographical bases for Melville's stories, and the better you know his oeuvre, the more allusions you're likely to catch, as when a sick crewman refuses to work, "saying quite simply to his superiors, 'I prefer not to.'" And no one will miss young Melville's interest in the story of "Mocha Dick, a huge bull whale, white as a sail, who had smashed several ships in the course of an infamous life."
But despite the dramatic potential of this material, there's a disappointing amount of shorthand storytelling here. Perhaps it's prudery, or maybe Parini doesn't want to compete with the great novelist's own descriptions of his experiences among the Polynesians, but his recreations seem muted and pale at the very moments that they should be most libidinous and terrifying. When a flotilla of South Sea nymphs meets the ship of horny sailors in the bay, for instance, what happened next "defied easy description." Well sure, it's hard, but give it a try, Mr. Parini, because by the time we get to Polynesia, those nymphs will be long gone! Later, the author says that an old sailor named Toothless Tom "reveled in tales that made the blood curdle. ... You could not invent such things." But a little more invention would help here.
Besides, Parini is thoroughly capable of such creativity, as other sections of the novel show to great effect. He confesses in a short afterward, for example, that he practically made up Melville's long-suffering wife from scratch. Lizzie narrates every other chapter, sometimes in sync with Parini's retelling of Melville's life and sometimes jumping ahead. She's a marvelous creation, a smoldering prisoner of bitterness and devotion, resentment and affection. Her traditional faith makes an awkward marriage with her husband's febrile search for God, swinging between an Old Testament Yahweh and Ralph Waldo Emerson's misty pantheism. Enduring Melville's moods and punches, she gives a sobering portrait of life with the depressed genius who started his career with his most popular books and then watched his reputation sink.
Parini is especially sensitive in his portrayal of the desperate loneliness that afflicted the writer throughout his life. On sea and land, Melville was prone to intense emotional devotion to men who were too reserved, too frightened or simply too uninterested to return his craving for intimacy. The lengthy section about Melville's sometimes embarrassing affection for Nathaniel Hawthorne makes the latter part of the novel particularly rewarding. And what's so impressive is that Parini manages to create Melville's homoerotic yearning and despair in the context of 19th-century attitudes about sexuality, a pre-Freudian age that had not neatly divided the world into gay and straight, but also had no words for the feelings of love between men that Walt Whitman was so bravely yawping about. Wounded by Hawthorne's impenetrable restraint, Melville gropes for some way to express his feelings in a language that offers only romance or deviancy: "We lack the appropriate terms," he says. "But I say what I feel. Love is the only word that will suffice."
The finer elements of this novel are sometimes submerged beneath its more ordinary sections, but "The Passages of H.M." remains a sensitive introduction to Melville's stormy life and imagination. Anyone setting off into the great writer's novels, or returning to them after years away, might enjoy this thoughtful re-imagining of the man who remains America's Milton.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
|
| Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Share | Top |
THE WEEKEND
Bernhard Schlink. Translated from the German by Shaun Whiteside
Pantheon
ISBN 978-0307378156
215 pages
$24.95
Reviewed by Ruth Kluger
Not many American readers of this intelligent, stimulating novel will remember the German terrorist movement of the 1970s that called itself the Red Army Faction (Rote Armee Fraktion or RAF). They were a small group of would-be revolutionaries who fought against what they considered capitalism gone haywire and West German connivance with U.S. imperialism.
They committed violent crimes, including assassinations and bank robberies, which in turn inspired anti-terrorist legislation that infringed on civil rights, causing a good deal of controversy within German society. These days they are in the news again, because the few who survive have served their prison sentences and are about to be released or are already free.
Bernhard Schlink's new novel centers on one of these terrorists, who has been pardoned by the German president. On his release, his sister arranges a weekend in which he can become acclimatized and resocialized in idyllic surroundings and in the company of his former friends. "The Weekend" deals only indirectly with a turbulent past, and much more with how things have changed. Schlink is interested in how memories linger or don't, and how a wealthy nation can or cannot integrate its former fear, hostility and violence into today's well-being. In a sense, the book is a variation of Schlink's most famous novel, "The Reader," the story of a man's discovery that his childhood sweetheart was an illiterate guard in a concentration camp. Instead of the Nazi past, in "The Weekend" it is the turbulent postwar years that cast a shadow over the prosperous present.
A dozen people on a dilapidated old estate in former East Germany discuss their past, their convictions and their comfortable status quo. Jorg, the ex-prisoner, holds fast to his revolutionary ideals, which he didn't recant even in his application for clemency. He still opposes the democratic state in its present form, and he is egged on by Marko, a member of a new left-wing fringe movement, who tries to win him for the cause.
The others, like Ulrich, a rich owner of dental labs who embodies the industrial wealth and technical competence of his country, have made their peace with the system. The older generation is partly reflective and partly smug. There is a woman bishop, haunted by her childlessness and an early abortion. There is Henner, a successful journalist who remembers "the atmosphere on those nights when they had talked till dawn ... to find the correct analysis, the correct action. ... But there was nothing in his memories of what they had talked about and what they had actually been searching for."
Jorg falsely suspects Henner of having caused his initial arrest, but that was really the doing of his overly protective sister, one of many interesting plot twists. (After all, Schlink has written a number of detective stories.) They lighten the burden of the political and philosophical debates that are the backbone of the book.
Ulrich's daughter tries to seduce Jorg, not from affection but because of his fame, as a trophy conquest. She's a counterpart to the ideologue Marko, both trying to co-opt the celebrity. And to complete the round of insensitivity among the young, there is Jorg's son, who accuses his father of abandonment. Family conflict erupts where abstract conversation about good and evil was meant to prevail.
But the author's creative alter ego is Ilse, a mousy high school teacher whom the others never took seriously. She spends the weekend writing a story in longhand in a fat notebook, and she's the one who asks what is surely the author's half-ironic question: "What do we want our terrorists to be like?" She's haunted by pictures of the people who fell or jumped out of the twin towers on Sept. 11.
In her tale, rendered in italics, the unsavory past comes alive, with its kidnappings and murders. In her re-creation of a comrade who committed suicide -- or was abducted or just ran away -- fact and fiction merge.
The integration of ideas and narrative detail may not always be fully successful in this tight little novel, but it is never trivial. At its best, Schlink, one of Germany's few internationally known authors, allows us a glimpse into the national sense of unease beneath the smooth surface of his country's culture. The weekend ends as it began: Nothing is solved; life goes on.
Ruth Kluger is a retired professor of literature and the author of "Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered."
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
|
| Comment on this Story | Printer Friendly | Share | Top |
|
|
Advertisement Congratulations...You've Won: Free* $1,000 Sam's Gift Card
* Use at any Sam's Club location
* Works the same as cash - never expires
* Get the latest Toys and Gifts
* Groceries, Furniture, Tools...
* HDTV Or A New Computer... |
| Recent Stories |
 A VOICE FROM OLD NEW YORK: A Memoir of My Youth
SUNSET PARK
MY NINE LIVES: A Memoir of Many Careers in Music
SCORPIONS: The Battles and Triumphs of FDR's Great Supreme Court Justices
ZAPPED: Why Your Cell Phone Shouldn't Be Your Alarm Clock and 1,268 Ways to Outsmart the Hazards of Electronic Pollution |
|
|
|
|
|
| |
