Washington Post Book Reviews
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Thursday August 12, 2010
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LAYOVER IN DUBAI
Dan Fesperman
Knopf
ISBN 978 0 307 26838 9
288 pages
$25.95
Reviewed by Peter Earnest, the founding executive director of the International Spy Museum
Vienna, Berlin, Moscow: cities steeped in intrigue. But surely not Dubai, not that glittering jewel on the Persian Gulf where ATMs dispense gold, skyscrapers sprout overnight and snow blankets the ski slope in the Emirates Mall. Yes, now Dubai, too, joins the list.
The city's glossy travel-magazine image was shattered in January by news of the assassination of a major Hamas operative in Dubai's Al Bustan Rotana Hotel. Video cameras tracked the casually dressed 11-man hit squad as it stalked Mahmoud al-Mabhouh to his hotel room. Surely, some Hollywood director must be drawing up a compelling pitch for a movie based on the police flow chart of the team's credit cards and video clips of the killing.
With "Layover," Dan Fesperman conducts a fast-paced tour of the seamier side of this "eerie insta-city," bringing to mind the exotic locales in his previous novel, "The Prisoner of Guantanamo." We follow in the footsteps of Sam Keller, an auditor with the giant pharmaceutical firm of Pfluger Klaxon, based in Manhattan. On a two-day stopover in Dubai, Keller is accompanied by Charlie Hatcher, an older colleague with a taste for the sauce and the ladies. Although he's been asked by corporate security to keep an eye on Hatcher, within hours of their arrival in Dubai, Keller loses him and has to search through the city's sleazier night spots, the so-called brothel bars. He finally finds him in the York International Hotel just in time to witness Hatcher's murder at the hands of the Russian mafia.
Police investigators soon arrive, and while they're sympathetic at first, Keller is arrested the next morning, roughed up and taken to the police station to be booked. There, Lt. Anwar Sharaf takes him into his personal custody.
Keller accepts temporary detention in the Sharaf household, a traditional Arab home in which the aging patriarch must cope with the constant demands of his loving but strong-willed wife, his three overly dependent adult sons and his attractive, 24-year-old daughter, Laleh, who brazenly -- for the Arab world -- runs her own marketing firm in downtown Dubai. With the looks, smarts and ambition to cause Sharaf and his wife ceaseless worry over her Western ways, Laleh is as intrigued by Keller as he is by her, and now the frustrated parents must try to quell a scandalous romance in their midst. The Sharafs at home are a subject of great curiosity for Keller, and their cross-cultural misunderstandings make for a delightful touch in this exciting thriller.
Once Keller makes his way out of the house, though, he finds his situation increasingly dire. Options for fleeing the country are blocked at every turn. Terrified and now on the run, with no knowledge of the city or the language, he proves an unexpectedly resourceful fugitive. His hacking into his employer's computer system is a brilliant demonstration of corporate espionage.
Fesperman leads us on a lively chase as Keller plunges into a city of wildly differing, often clashing subcultures: traditional Arab society with its rigid social boundaries for women, the criminal underworld with its uneasy alliance between local gangs and the newly arrived Russian mafia, a police force steeped in politics and corruption, and even a rundown dormitory packed with overworked and underpaid foreign construction workers. With its fascinating insights about this Middle Eastern Miracle, "Layover in Dubai" whisks us from our workaday world into one far, far away.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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STAR ISLAND
Carl Hiaasen
Knopf
ISBN 978 0 307 27258 4
337 pages
$26.95
Reviewed by Louis Bayard, a novelist and reviewer in Washington, D.C.
There is precious little innocence in Carl Hiaasen's moral universe, only gradients of venality. Spend enough time with all those stoners and smugglers and ex-cons and sugar cane tycoons and telemarketers and televangelists, and you'll swear they must have crawled straight from the Florida swamps, hissing, wreathed in poisonwood. Which is another way of saying that Hiaasen needs his southern Florida the way Dickens needed his fog.
Should we be alarmed, then, that the chief troublemaker in "Star Island" hails not from Dade County but from the Hollywood Hills? Her name is Cherry Pye, nee Cheryl Bunterman, and she's a pop singer of the "barely legal slut" school, employed by Jailbait Records. She sells millions of singles with titles like "Runaway Tongue" and "Jealous Bone," and so what if she has a voice like "a sackful of starving kittens"? That's what backup singers and celebrity machinery are for, and, as a result, Cherry Pye is a bona fide star and very much an island: vacuous, egoistic and shrill, and given to pensees like "After I die, see, I really wanted to come back as a whale? But now I don't, 'cause who wants to get, like, stabbed with a harpoon?"
It's OK, Cherry doesn't have to be smart. She has a retinue of handlers and bottom-feeders -- her parents notable among them -- who do all her thinking for her. The one thing they can't do is keep Cherry from partying and, in short order, overdosing. Their only recourse is to trundle her off to the next ER or rehab center and hope nobody notices. And to make sure nobody does, they hire an "undercover stunt double," a young actress named Ann DeLusia who impersonates Cherry at clubs and premieres and even the passing funeral -- wherever fans expect Cherry to be.
The subterfuge is ticking along just fine until a sweaty paparazzo named Bang Abbott kidnaps Ann under the impression she's Cherry. Bang's agenda is simple. He wants a day alone with his beloved star so he can create the photographs that will compose her memorial. (Quite reasonably, he assumes she'll be dead before the year is out. Remember all those advance obits being generated for Lindsay Lohan?) Unfortunately for him, Cherry's latest bodyguard is a giraffe-size killer named Chemo with a finely honed instinct for self-preservation and a weed whacker where his hand used to be. And Ann herself has a defender in glass-eyed Clinton Tyree, formerly governor and now a vigilante-style nemesis to the developers who are turning Florida's wilderness into cinder blocks and asphalt.
Alert fans will recognize Clinton and Chemo as holdovers from earlier Hiaasen larks, but will be comforted nonetheless by the new grotesques crowding into the grotto: Botoxed twin publicists; a strung-out drummer from a band called the Poon Pilots; a young actor playing "a corpse-diddling longboarder with the soul of a poet" in Tarantino's latest film; and, just in passing, Cherry's youngest brother, who has "a gallery in La Jolla dedicated to homoerotic sculpture and watercolors on butcher paper, painted with the tail of his deaf Persian cat."
How would such disparate people ever intersect in the real world? Why would someone as smart and resourceful as Ann allow herself to be kidnapped by a clod like Bang Abbott? Why is Clinton Tyree even there? (His effect on the main story is minimal.) Longtime readers know better than to dwell on such questions: Hiaasen is a master not of plot but of situation.
Consider three moments. Cherry's mom, upon hearing that a scallop tastes "like a broiled tumor," suggests trying it with ponzu sauce. Tyree's glass eye pops out of its socket and rolls down the aisle of a bus; Ann, without a word, retrieves it from under a wet bar. A hired assassin rats out his employer for failing to upgrade him from coach to first class. In each case, the effect is strangely serene because each character is simply following the dictates of his inner logic -- and is all the more surprised when some other system of logic gets in the way. A sentence like "The whole experience had soured him on contract killings" is, in the Hiaasen scheme of things, perfectly coherent and all the funnier for it.
What keeps "Star Island" from ascending to the author's upper echelon is the op-ed staleness that clings to its satire. Wandering outside his tropic comfort zone, Hiaasen hasn't come up with any insights more lancing than this: Show business is phony. Which, in addition to being old news, is seriously beside the point. Under the prevailing cultural ethos, phoniness is the new integrity. Kathy Griffin makes lunge after lunge at the A-list (long after she's arrived there). Heidi Montag pouts when doctors deny her more plastic surgeries. Lady Gaga sounds like Madonna, and Madonna sounds like the Duchess of Bedford. Writing a comedy about showbiz has become worse than easy, it's become redundant. Never mind what Edmund Kean said on his deathbed: It's tragedy now that's hard.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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JACK KEROUAC AND ALLEN GINSBERG: The Letters
Bill Morgan and David Stanford
Viking
ISBN 978-0-670-02194-9
500 pages
$35
Reviewed by Michael Dirda. Visit Dirda's online book discussion at washingtonpost.com/readingroom.
"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked" -- so opens Allen Ginsberg's 1956 anthem "Howl." Similar violence, excess and hysteria mark the poet's longtime correspondence with the novelist Jack Kerouac, whom he met in 1944 when the two young writers were both living in New York.
The first letter in this collection is addressed to Kerouac in the Bronx County Jail, where the future author of "On the Road" had been locked up for helping to dispose of evidence in a murder case. A few years later, Ginsberg was himself arrested for storing stolen merchandise in his apartment. Instead of being sent to prison, he was remanded to a psychiatric asylum, where he met Carl Solomon, to whom "Howl" is dedicated. Ginsberg's letters about his experiences while hospitalized are charged with a manic energy and humor reminiscent of the poem:
"Here the abysses are real; people explode daily and the doctors! the doctors! my god, the doctors! They are fiends, I tell you, absolute Ghouls of Mediocrity. Horrible! They have the truth! They are right! They are all thin, pale lipped, four eyed, gawky, ungainly psychology majors from the colleges! All the seersucker liberals, dressed in the same suits, always with a vapid, half embarrassed, polite smile on their faces. 'What? Mr. Solomon doesn't eat today? Send him down to shock!'"
Later still, Kerouac made an epic drug-fueled odyssey through Mexico to visit novelist William Burroughs, who had accidentally killed his wife, Joan, while playing a kind of William Tell game:
"Bill is great. Greater than he ever was. Misses Joan terribly," Kerouac writes in 1952. "Joan made him great, lives on in him like mad, vibrating. We went to the Ballet Mexicano together, Bill danced out to catch bus we went on a weekend to Tenecingo in the mountains, did some shooting (it was an accident, you know, no doubt about it anywhere's)."
From 1944 to 1963 -- the years covered in this volume -- Ginsberg and Kerouac were constantly on the move from New York to California to Mexico to Europe, always meeting new people. Visiting Burroughs in Tangiers, Morocco, in 1957, Kerouac encountered Francis Bacon, the great painter of modern angst and ugliness, who, he wrote, "looks like overgrown seventeen year old English schoolboy, born in Dublin, started painting late at thirty and now he's forty-seven and wears sneakers and tight dungarees and black silk shirts and ... likes to be whipped and paints mad gorillas in grey hotel rooms drest in evening dress with deathly black umbrellas."
Along with Neal Cassady (the inspiration for Dean Moriarty in "On the Road"), Burroughs was never far from their thoughts. The author of "Naked Lunch" is certainly, in his quiet way, the most shocking of the three writers. At one point, he engaged in a "macabre" infatuation focused on a boy described by Ginsberg as a "sickly myopic pebblemouthed scarecrow" with "skin the texture of a badly shaved hemophiliac."
THE FIRST HIPPIES
The 21st-century reader of these letters may be somewhat surprised at the easygoing, polymorphous sexuality of the supposedly staid 1940s and '50s. Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs slept with both men and women. Ginsberg actually took up for a while with the former girlfriend of novelists John Dos Passos and Thomas Heggen (author of "Mister Roberts"), before losing his heart to Peter Orlovsky, the love of his life.
Of course, the Beats were hippies 20 years before the term was invented. In their correspondence, Ginsberg and Kerouac exchange accounts of drug trips, philosophize about Buddhism, discuss the genius of Wilhelm Reich (creator of the orgone box) and praise the visions of the spiritualist Edgar Cayce. At one point, Kerouac was asked by the editors of a dictionary to define the "beat generation" and described himself and his friends as a group whose members express "a relaxation of social and sexual tensions and espouse anti-regimentation, mystic disaffiliation and material-simplicity values, supposedly as a result of Cold War disillusionment."
Though commonly viewed as iconic free spirits, Ginsberg and Kerouac were well educated and intently focused on their careers. Ginsberg attended Columbia, where his mentor was the revered professor Mark Van Doren. Kerouac was a protege of two famous editors, Malcolm Cowley and Robert Giroux, and was represented by the eminent Sterling Lord literary agency. Both were voracious readers. At one point Kerouac writes that he "never was so happy in my life than in that splendid attic with 11th edition Encyclopedia Britannica." At another, he tells Ginsberg, "Glad you're reading Caesar Birroteau, great novel," adding "you know the greatest of all Balzac's novels is Cousin Bette."
Not surprisingly, these 200 or so letters seem to build toward the publications of "Howl" and "On the Road," those masterpieces of what Kerouac here calls "lingual spontaneity," a kind of trancelike automatic writing. Published by City Lights Books, Ginsberg's poem made its way steadily, but "On the Road" earned a rave review in the New York Times, and Kerouac, like Byron, awoke one day to find himself famous, the voice of a new generation.
DIVERGING PATHS
In the end, though, only Allen Ginsberg continued to espouse the Beat philosophy into the 1960s, becoming one of the gurus of that ahectic time. Kerouac retreated into himself and chose to move to Orlando, where his mother lived:
"I don't want no more frantic nights, association with hepcats and queers and Village types, far less mad trips to unholy Frisco, I just wanta stay home and write and figure things out by myself, in my own Child mind. ... I'm retired from the world now and going into my mountain shack later and eventually just disappear in woods as far as it can be done these days."
Today, many of these letters seem windy and dated and, were it not for the work Ginsberg and Kerouac actually produced, might be dismissed as simply the sophomoric gushings of bright young men. Of the two correspondents, Kerouac seems marginally the better writer and deserves the final, typically ecstatic word:
"I believe in shelter from the cold, and good food, and drinks, and many women all around, the interplay of the sexes, and much happy meaningless talk, and tales, and books, and Dickensy joy."
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF WALWORTH: A Tale of Madness and Murder in Gilded Age America
Geoffrey O'Brien
Henry Holt
ISBN 978-0-8050-8115-2
337 pages
$30
Reviewed by Carolyn See, who reviews regularly for The Washington Post
"The Fall of the House of Walworth" is predicated on a pretty iffy premise: that the Walworth family had some place to fall from and that the general public must be both well acquainted with the Walworths and suitably awed and distressed by their ignominious end.
But out here on the West Coast, from which I write, we haven't the faintest clue about who these people were -- and I say that to dispel any sense that you have to know about them in order to be beguiled by this story. This is the tale of a flock of self-important, anxiety-ridden, religion-obsessed, garden-variety Americans, social-climbing with all the energy they could muster, while the ladders they climbed on shifted underneath them. They could have been any striving family in America. And they were as cracked as a set of cheap china after an earthquake.
The patriarch of the family, Reuben Hyde Walworth, chancellor of New York (something like state attorney general, except that it's limited to civil matters) operated his own courtroom from his lovely home, Pine Grove, in Saratoga Springs in the 1830s and '40s. He was, in the words of author Geoffrey O'Brien, "a man of accomplishment but not an innovator or a leader; a workhorse, a detail man; a joiner, at home in committees and conventions, perfect for after-dinner toasts even after he gave up intoxicating drinks." After he left his job, the state government abolished the office, which certainly says something about his competence.
He married a deeply religious woman and had half-a-dozen children who were also susceptible to the religious impulse. His elder son, Clarence, grew up to be Catholic, scandalizing his Protestant parents; his younger son, Mansfield, wrote lurid, bad novels. When the chancellor's first wife died, he married a charming Southern widow, whose daughter, Ellen, soon married Mansfield -- and that's when the Walworth troubles began.
O'Brien, a cultural historian and the editor in chief of the Library of America, portrays the Walworths as a family that manifests -- in microcosm -- all kinds of American troubles. The religious impulse posed terrible domestic problems. The chancellor was Protestant; it didn't help his disposition any to see Clarence become a Catholic priest and then set about converting every possible relative he could get his hands on.
But Mansfield, a dedicated wastrel, was the real source of sorrow. He was so evil and brutish to his wife (who turns out to be very important in this story) that she moved with her children back to Kentucky. When the Civil War started, Mansfield managed to get himself arrested for treason, but he wasn't so much an aristocrat with Southern sympathies as a good-for-nothing, a crazy person who managed to go crazier every day.
Mansfield began to write three or four letters a day to his wife, demanding money, promising to do away with himself. Amid the torrent came this missive to his sister: "I have conceived the great secret of my existence. I was not born as men are, but let down from heaven in a basket. All who have preceded me are impostors. ... Keep this secret until I am announced by the sound of 10,000 trumpets, then fall down and worship me, for I am M.T. Walworth, the true and eternal son of God."
Given these letters and the fact that Mansfield was beating his estranged wife every chance he could get, it's little wonder that his son, Frank Hardin Walworth, packed up a gun, took a train from Saratoga Springs to New York City, invited his father up to his hotel room and shot him.
The book is billed as a true-crime story, but what drives the narrative is the events -- mundane and otherwise -- of Walworth family life. Ellen had many children, some of whom were stillborn, some of whom died in childhood. The men in the family who were supposed to earn money didn't always spring forth to do so. Appearances had to be kept up, and two enormous Victorian-era households had to be supported. While Mansfield was going crazy, he didn't contribute to his children's support, and young Frank wasn't in a position to help the family either. It fell to Ellen to convert one of their houses into an academy for young boys and girls. She seems to have run the whole show herself: teaching classes, grading papers, managing finances, all the while joining club after club, committee after committee, in an attempt to make something of herself, creating a public persona of repute and even modest splendor, someone to compare in eminence with the chancellor himself. Indeed, she did accomplish something quite amazing, which O'Brien keeps as a surprise -- something that really did assure that her family name would be remembered for a contribution far more important and interesting than just another squalid New York society murder.
The subject of this book is not so simple as good fighting evil; it's more like respectability duking it out with discord. "The Fall of the House of Walworth" is about the conflict between the part of us that wants to compose hymns and the part that wants to commit murder. That's typical American ground, and what makes this volume as instructive as it is entertaining.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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