Washington Post Book Reviews
For You
Thursday July 1, 2010
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THE NOBODIES ALBUM
Carolyn Parkhurst
Doubleday
ISBN 978 0 385 52769 9
313 pages
$25.95
Reviewed by Art Taylor
A number of ambitious and winning novels have been written about novelists themselves, from Margaret Atwood's "The Blind Assassin" to Ian McEwan's "Atonement" and Carol Shields' "Unless." Add to the list now D.C. author Carolyn Parkhurst's "The Nobodies Album." Not just a book about a novelist in action, it's also a meditation on writing itself and on the curious intersections between the imagined world and the real one.
Octavia Frost, the narrator here, has published several successful novels with a wide range of plots, among them: an abusive marriage viewed from an infant's perspective; an animator glimpsing hidden, unintended images in his own cartoons; and a 16th-century healer accused of witchcraft for trying to save her son. For her next book, she has embarked on a radical project: rewriting the endings to each of her previous novels. "I could see the traces of the hundred different stories I'd rejected," Octavia says. "It was all butterfly wings and tornadoes: even a slight deviation in any one of those places would be enough to set the whole book on course for a different outcome."
"The Nobodies Album" presents each of these final chapters and revisions -- a brilliant assortment -- but they're not the main story. Octavia wants to revise and set aright not just her books but her own past, too. She lost her husband and daughter in an accident many years earlier, and bringing up the surviving child, Milo, proved a turbulent journey. Four years ago, Milo discovered their family's history embedded in one of his mother's novels, which angered him so much that he hasn't spoken to her since. But now, en route to delivering her new manuscript, Octavia learns that her son, a famous rock musician, has been charged with murdering his girlfriend, and so off she goes to San Francisco, determined to protect her child. She also hopes that this crisis will prompt a reconciliation and that her writerly attention to detail can help uncover his innocence. Solving the murder, after all, just means constructing the right narrative around that blood-stained bed.
"The Nobodies Album" is brisk and engaging, though ultimately it features very little in the way of conventional clues or suspense. But the book succeeds in probing nuanced issues of guilt and innocence through an intricate collage of memories and musings, with excerpts from Octavia's novels and passages from Milo's lyrics. Milo's band is Pareidolia, defined here as "the human tendency to find meaning where there is none," but Octavia is more optimistic about purpose and meaning and about answering some emotionally richer questions. How should you raise a child? How do you deal with grief? What if you make a mistake? Or many? Is redemption elusive?
Those are some real mysteries, well worth grappling with.
Taylor reviews mysteries and thrillers for The Washington Post and other publications. His own fiction appears regularly in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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YOUNG ADULT NOVELS. Best-selling authors try books for the younger set
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ISBN NA
NA pages
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Reviewed by Mary Quattlebaum
Candace Bushnell not only crosses over to young adult fiction but travels back to the early 1980s in "The Carrie Diaries" (Balzar (plus sign) Bray, $18.99; ages 14 and up. ISBN 978-0061728914) to chronicle the senior year of Connecticut small-town girl Carrie Bradshaw. Yes, that Carrie Bradshaw, of Bushnell's best-selling "Sex and the City." In this YA prequel, Carrie finds her life complicated by a heart-thrumming bad boy, a fickle friend and her own newspaper column, but these developments leave her ready to embrace the Manhattan of Bushnell's adult books. Teens and adults looking for a light summer read will enjoy Carrie's witty reflections on high school and "The Big Love."
Mega-seller John Grisham swelled the ranks of crossover writers last month with his first middle-grade novel, "Theodore Boone: Kid Lawyer" (Dutton, $16.99; ages 8-12. ISBN 978-0525423843). The only child of two attorneys, Theo, 13, loves courtrooms, "where lawyers battled like gladiators and judges ruled like kings." Unfortunately, a belabored story setup and melodramatic whodunit mar this effort. Even young readers curious about legal matters may be put off by Theo's priggish tendency to advise peers and teachers rather than converse in a friendlier style.
A more auspicious debut is "How I, Nicky Flynn, Finally Get a Life (and a Dog)" (Amulet, $16.95; ages 8-12. ISBN 978-0810982987), in which the title character's slightly sarcastic voice rings tween-true. Angry about his parents' divorce, Nicky, 11, turns for comfort to the shelter dog brought home by his overwhelmed mom. But why is the highly trained Reggie so fearful? Tracking down the dog's previous owner leads to offbeat characters, lies and danger. Art Corriveau follows up a first novel for adults with this fine, fresh mystery that is believable as a kid's experience.
Nuanced characterizations and lyrical writing distinguish Beth Kephart's oeuvre, including this third YA novel, "The Heart Is Not a Size" (HarperTeen, $16.99; ages 12 and up. ISBN 978-0061470486). Reliable Georgia and her artistic friend Riley volunteer through a GoodWorks building project to help a Mexican village. Being away from their privileged American homes, though, brings out secret issues: Georgia's panic attacks and Riley's eating disorder. How Georgia learns to help herself and Riley goes to the heart of this sensitive exploration of self-acceptance, friendship and teen-galvanized social change.
Rick Riordan catapulted from Edgar-winning detective fiction to international renown with his tween series "Percy Jackson and the Olympians." His new series, "The Kane Chronicles," swaps the bickering, boisterous Greek pantheon for the equally intriguing gods of ancient Egypt. "The Red Pyramid" (Disney Hyperion, $17.99; ages 9-12. ISBN 978-1423113386) begins with a literal bang in the British Museum. Kane siblings Carter, 14, and Sadie, 12, watch in horror as explosive forces imprison their Egyptologist father in a golden coffin. The two are soon on the run from London to Cairo to Washington, D.C., trying to piece together clues to aid Dad's rescue. The pace never flags as the narrative cuts between cautious Carter and intrepid Sadie. Riordan knows what kids like and delivers it well, including action-packed scenes involving a key obelisk, the Washington Monument.
Mary Quattlebaum is a children's author and writing teacher.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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THE LAST EMPTY PLACES: A Past and Present Journey Through the Blank Spots on the American Map
Peter Stark
Ballantine
ISBN 978-0-345-49537-2
352 pages
$26
Reviewed by Tahir Shah
As a travel writer, I have spent years crisscrossing the globe in search of the fabulous, the rare and the exotic. Mine has been a lifelong quest for the bizarre, and my rule of thumb has been "If it ain't crazy as hell, leave it out." But time and travel are great levelers. Hack through a few jungles, stagger across three or four deserts, climb some mountains, sleep in yurts and tents and at least one wretched west African brothel, and you begin to crave something else. Something new. It's a deep-down craving, the kind pregnant women get when they feel they have to chew on dirt. It's almost primeval ... the craving for the ordinary. It's a desire that is satisfied by Peter Stark's new book, "The Last Empty Places."
Stark is a writer and a journalist who grew up in an old log cabin in the Wisconsin woods. After 40 years of traveling the world and writing about what he has seen, it seems right and proper that he turn his attention to his homeland. From the start of his book, there's a sense that it's about coming home, Stark reacquainting himself with a blissful childhood, while somehow pitting himself against urban sprawl and the claustrophobic suffocation of the virtual world. He practices gentle observation the low-tech way.
Yet the book does begin with some high-tech thinking. Taking advice from a friend, Stark got himself a copy of the "Nighttime Map of the United States," a satellite shot showing population densities by electric lights across the country. Cross-referencing this with his Rand McNally road map, he plotted key target zones, areas of emptiness that somehow sang out to him. Uninterested in national parks (or in Alaska), Stark was more concerned with the realm of the pioneers, the American naturalists and thinkers who influenced his life: men like Thoreau, Emerson and that Scottish-born champion of the wilderness, John Muir. Over the next two-and-a-half years, Stark roamed and roamed, lured by the blank gaps in northern Maine and western Pennsylvania, in southeastern Oregon and the New Mexican desert.
To someone who grew up largely in Europe -- which is full to the point of bursting with people, towns and cities -- there's something deliciously refreshing about rambling through the United States in search of emptiness. I often find myself imagining that it, too, will be somehow overloaded. But it isn't. The United States is a vast, mesmerizing canvas of nature, a land that in many ways is as untamed now as it was in the times of the pioneers. It's just a matter of going in search of it.
I must admit that, when I read that Stark was dragging his wife and two kids along, at least part of the way, I raised one eyebrow and then the other. "Sounds like a travel writer trying to sell us a family vacation," I said to myself. But after pushing my way through the prologue (oh, how I dislike prologues), I found myself in the warm, wonderful underbelly of Peter Stark's world. It's a realm of considerable erudition, one that's observed with a reporter's eye for detail -- a reporter of the old school, who knows never to waste a syllable, let alone a word. There's plenty of history, the kind that's nailed firmly to places and the people he encounters. There's delicious description, too, such as that of a tiny Oregon village called Fields, "It had that oasis look to it -- a distant, yellow-green island of cottonwood trees and a huge brownish valley rimmed by dry mountains."
But the most touching thing about this book is the way Stark detours us away from the world we've all been sold -- the shopping malls and the theme parks, the gridlock, the cities and the desperate homogeneity of it all. With irresistible charm he reminds us that America is still a wild and vibrant miscellany of nature, a one-of-a-kind place.
With time I can imagine "The Last Empty Places" becoming required reading in schools. And I hope it does. It's a book that the early American naturalists and the pioneers before them would be proud of, one that carves through the smoke screen of mass culture, reminding us of the true essence of America.
Tahir Shah is the author of "The Caliph's House" and "In Arabian Nights." He lives in Casablanca.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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ROLE MODELS
John Waters
Farrar Straus Giroux
ISBN 978-0-374-25147-5
301 pages
$25
Reviewed by Jonathan Yardley
It's just about impossible to believe, but John Waters, the ineffable Bad Boy of Baltimore - "The King of Puke," "the Pope of Trash," the "Cult Filmmaker" - is now 64 years old. The man who gave the world such memorable if occasionally barf-inducing films as "Hag in a Black Leather Jacket," "Mondo Trasho," "Pink Flamingos," "Polyester" and "Hairspray" will be pulling Social Security checks any day now, leaning back in his Barcalounger and reminiscing about the good old days when porn was really porn and dog poop was on the menu.
As evidence that Waters is in a nostalgic mood, we now have "Role Models," in which he pays tribute to various men and women who in one way or another helped him become the man he is. If that inspires you to murmur, "Thanks a lot but no thanks," well, you're entitled, but Waters is a greater National Treasure than 90 percent of the people who are given "Kennedy Center Honors" each December. Unlike those gray eminences of the show-business establishment, Waters doesn't kowtow to the received wisdom, he flips it the bird.
So it stands to reason that those whom he salutes as his role models are not your standard-issue Boy Scouts. A few of them are well known -- Johnny Mathis, Tennessee Williams, Little Richard -- while others are known only within the tight little circles in which they work their magic: the Japanese fashion designer Rei Kawakubo; Lady Zorro, "the lesbian stripper from Baltimore's notorious red light district The Block"; the "outsider pornographers" Bobby Garcia and David Hurles.
Some of these people you might like to ask over for drinks, others you might ... not. Johnny Mathis, of course, would be the perfect guest, and probably would take fizzy water instead of a gin Gibson. "I wish I were Johnny Mathis" is how this book begins. "So mainstream. So popular. So unironic, yet perfect. Effortlessly boyish at over seventy years old, with a voice that still makes all of America want to make out. ... A man whose 'Greatest Hits' album was on the Billboard charts for 490 consecutive weeks. Versus me, a cult filmmaker whose core audience, no matter how much I've crossed over, consists of minorities who can't even fit in with their own minorities."
Still, "Johnny Mathis understands a lot about me. I can tell. He's a gentleman who lives alone and he's from another era." But is he gay? Waters naturally wants to know, but when Waters interviews Mathis at his house in Los Angeles, he politely keeps his own counsel on the subject, as he always has, but he leaves an opening for a classic Waters riff:
"I've always been pretty up-front about my sexuality (even though Mink Stole today says she didn't even know I was gay for a long time), but I understand Hollywood royalty's reticence about revealing anything personal, hetero (BEG ITAL)or(END ITAL) homo. Gus Van Sant and I always joke about the press saying we are 'openly' gay. What's that supposed to mean? It sounds like we're arriving at a premiere shrieking, 'Hey, Mary! Got any Judy Garland records?'"
As that passage suggests, outrageousness, far more than sexuality, is at the core of Waters' persona. "Tennessee Williams was my childhood friend," he tells us elsewhere. "I yearned for a bad influence and Tennessee was one in the best sense of the word: joyous, alarming, sexually confusing, and dangerously funny. ... Tennessee never seemed to fit the gay stereotype even then, and sexual ambiguity and turmoil were always made appealing and exciting in his work. 'My type doesn't know who I am,' he stated according to legend, and even if the sex lives of his characters weren't always healthy, they certainly seemed hearty. Tennessee Williams wasn't a gay cliche, so I had the confidence to try to not be one myself. Gay was not enough."
No doubt you are beginning to understand that "Role Models" isn't half as much about these men and women Waters claims to value, even venerate, as it is about Waters himself. His chapter on Rei Kawakubo opens with this declaration: "Fashion is very important to me. My 'look' for the last twenty years or so has been 'disaster at the dry cleaners.' I shop in reverse. When I can afford to buy a new outfit, something has to be wrong with it. Purposely wrong." Enter "the genius fashion dictator" Rei Kawakubo, who "specializes in clothes that are torn, crooked, permanently wrinkled, ill-fitting, and expensive." Waters admires (and actually wears!) her over-the-top clothing (if "clothing" is the word for it) and has a weakness for her fragrance, Odeur 53, which "to me smells exactly like Off! insect repellent." Among its ingredients, according to Rei, are "the freshness of oxygen, wash drying in the wind, nail polish, burnt rubber and the mineral intensity of carbon," to which Waters responds: "That's exactly what I want to smell like! How did she know?"
To me it sounds as if Rei Kawakubo is as much a put-on artist as Waters himself, but what do I know about fashion? Speaking of which, there's Waters' trademark, his famous pencil-thin moustache, which he grew "in a misguided attempt to steal Little Richard's identity." There was a problem:
"It's tough for a white man who isn't that hairy to grow one. Sure, I shaved with a razor on top and trimmed the bottom with cuticle scissors, just like I do every day now, but it still looked kind of pitiful. Then 'Sick,' the friend of mine from the Provincetown tree fort who had moved to Santa Barbara and changed her nickname to 'Sique,' gave me some fashion advice when I was staying with her. 'Just use a little eyebrow pencil and it will work better,' she advised, and then showed me how. Presto! An 'iconic' look: a ridiculous fashion joke that I still wear forty years later. Surprised? Don't be! It (BEG ITAL)is(END ITAL) called a 'pencil moustache,' isn't it? And there's only (BEG ITAL)one(END ITAL) pencil that does the trick -- Maybelline Expert Eyes in Velvet Black. My entire identity depends on this magic little wand of sleaze."
Well. I could quote John Waters all day long. The time in 1957, when he was 11 years old and "shoplifted" a Little Richard record. He put it on the player at his grandmother's: "The antiques rattled. My parents looked stunned. In one magical moment, every fear of my white family had been laid bare: an uninvited, screaming, flamboyant black man was in the living room. Even Dr. Spock hadn't warned them about this." Or the time he visited the porn director Bobby Garcia: "As I pull up in a ridiculous Mercedes-Benz that I didn't order but was upgraded to by the car rental place, I feel a sickening sense of entitlement. I hate fancy cars. In real life I drive a plain Buick that looks like a narcotics-agent car or the vehicle of the local monsignor. Who wants to be noticed in his car? Suppose I still might want to commit a crime? Who would ever want a car a witness could describe?"
And so forth. Yes, every once in a while Waters turns serious, mainly in his chapter about Leslie Van Houten, the "Manson girl" who has been in prison for four decades for her involvement in those dreadful crimes and who now deserves to be paroled, as Waters correctly believes, but heartfelt though these moments are, the outrageous ones are echt Waters. He has the ability to show humanity at its most ridiculous and make that funny rather than repellent. To quote his linear ancestor W.C. Fields: It's a gift.
Jonathan Yardley can be reached at yardleyj(at symbol)washpost.com.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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