Washington Post Book Reviews
For You
Thursday August 26, 2010
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PERCIVAL'S PLANET
Michael Byers
Henry Holt
ISBN 978 0 8050 9218 9
415 pages
$27
Reviewed by Ron Charles, The Washington Post fiction editor. You can follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/roncharles. His e-mail address is charlesr(at symbol)washpost.com.
It's nice to see Pluto getting some love. You might remember that after years of nasty rumors, the International Astronomical Union kicked Pluto out of the planet club in 2006. And then came those mocking novelty T-shirts: "It's OK, Pluto. I'm not a planet either." We still don't know much about that little chunk of ice and rock orbiting billions of miles away on the edge of our solar system, but an endearing new novel by Michael Byers takes us back to its discovery at a backwater observatory just as the Roaring Twenties were falling into a black hole.
Although Byers isn't a scientist -- he teaches English at the University of Michigan -- this is his second book about a laboratory quest. His first, "Long for This World" (2003), followed a geneticist hoping to cure a fatal childhood disease, and now "Percival's Planet" peers up at the stars. But there's nothing geeky about Byers' novels, or if there is, it never dominates the story. (Let his characters make "a normative calculation of least squares"; you don't have to.) Like Allegra Goodman's "Intuition" and Richard Powers' "Generosity," "Percival's Planet" calculates the moral dimensions of scientific investigation, the whole system of people drawn into orbit around a mystery, sometimes without even realizing it.
The breadth of Byers' field of vision is a saving grace because searching for planets is not like prospecting for gold in the Amazon jungle or tracking down a lost child in Sarajevo. It's a mission of mind-numbing tedium carried out in the dark. In the 1920s, if you wanted to boldly go where no man had gone before and discover what was referred to as Planet X, you needed two quiet rooms. In one room sat the computers -- that is, a bevy of mathematically gifted women toiling away on regression analysis with sharp pencils. In the other room sat a "blink comparator," something like the photo album from hell. This machine presents two tiny exposures of the sky taken a week apart. If the gods were smiling on the weather and the telescope and the film, and you weren't even the least bit distracted after staring at these pinholes of light for months on end, you might notice that one of those objects has moved ever so slightly between the two photos. And that's how a self-taught Kansas farm boy named Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto in 1930.
The most charming section of the novel comes early, when young Clyde is grinding his own lenses in a barn and dreaming of going to college. But that's just one of several story lines that Bryers picks up long before they all wind together at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Ariz. "Something in the desert air is drawing them by the carload," he writes. "Tubercular patients in their last visionary days, half-mad desert seekers, white gowned proponents of psychical truth, sunstruck mummy hunters prospecting in the Grand Canyon, dog-nipped Navaho dreamers, earnest ethnographers with their wax-cylinder recorders. ... Put these oddballs alongside the genuine cowboys and second-generation frontier sheriffs and you have a funny mix, all right."
From this rich collection of characters residing in different universes, Byers has chosen and created about a half-dozen, fleshing out their strange stories like a desert version of Doctorow's "Ragtime": An amateur heavyweight in Boston falls in love with a gorgeous, unstable woman who believes a horn is growing out of the back of her head; the scion of a chemical fortune dapples with metaphysics before deciding that he and his mother should hunt for dinosaurs in the American West; and, finally, there's Alan Barber, a Harvard-trained astronomer who names a newly discovered comet after a young woman just hours before she tells him she's engaged.
Byers patiently draws this whole constellation of eccentric people to Flagstaff, revolving through them chapter by chapter until their paths intersect with the vision of the late Percival Lowell, who left his fortune to the observatory, "a second-rate place, it is generally agreed, staffed by old men and with a notorious history of crackpottery." Lowell is represented by his grasping widow, but I'm sorry he died before the novel opens. His exotic combination of brilliance and nuttiness -- "his assertion that the canals on Mars were built by a race of benevolent superbeings" -- would have fit right in with the amateur dinosaur hunter and the horned madwoman.
Still, Byers is not in this for laughs or ridicule. He's a careful mathematician of the heart when calculating the trajectory of affection. Just as the planets influence one another, tugging and stretching their orbits as they sweep around the sun, so all these characters cause perturbations in each other's lives. And Byers writes with a sweet mixture of humor and sympathy about lunacy and manhood during a period of extraordinary disruption.
So what makes "Percival's Planet" such a sedentary, well-behaved tale? It seems as though Byers' ruminative temperament eclipses the natural drama of his story. He shuts down almost every opportunity for excitement the way my grandfather used to yell, "Cut that out before somebody loses an eye!" every time my brother and I picked up a stick. And there are plenty of sticks lying around these pages: He's got a mother and son lost at sea in a dinghy! An insane woman tries to cut off the back of her head! Gangsters move in on the archaeological dig! But these are framed as mere minor incidents compared to the energy and space devoted to Alan Barber's endless ruminations on his dim love life or the novel's climactic scene: a formal dinner party at the observatory during which (gasp!) Percival's widow behaves rudely. I worry that these nicely phrased sentences about odd, sympathetic people won't be enough to pull readers through more than 400 pages -- particularly toward a foregone conclusion (sorry again, Pluto). But for a certain kind of reader, a contemplative, sensitive reader with a sense of wonder at the mysteries above and within us, "Percival's Planet" will prove a subtle, satisfying adventure.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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FAITHFUL PLACE
Tana French
Viking
ISBN 978 0 670 02187 1
400 pages
$25.95
Reviewed by Maureen Corrigan, who teaches literature at Georgetown University, is the book critic for the NPR program "Fresh Air"
The voice is what grabs you first. It belongs to our narrator, Frank Mackey, a police detective in Dublin. Here's Frank assessing the guy his ex-wife is currently dating: "(Dermot) can't help looking like he lives life on the edge of a massive belch." Or, succinctly describing the slum neighborhood he was raised in as a "hive of old brick and lace curtains and watching eyes." Or, recalling the basis of the bad blood between his parents and those of his long-ago girlfriend: "My parents didn't like people with Notions; the Dalys didn't like unemployed alcoholic wasters." Frank's voice is so wry, bitter and just plain alive that when I finished "Faithful Place" and began writing this review, I had to think for a long blank minute about the name of the author. To do that, I first had to remember that Frank was created, not real.
My naive lapse was a tribute to Tana French's extraordinary gifts, and her name should be writ large on every mystery lover's must-read list. Her first novel, "In the Woods," swept up the Edgar, Barry, Macavity and Anthony awards. "Faithful Place" is the third installment in her ongoing saga about the Dublin Murder Squad, and it's breathtaking -- an elaborately twisted ballad of class resentments, family burdens, regret and passion. The story alternates between the depressed Ireland of the 1980s and the depressed Ireland of the present day, which means that the country's all-too-brief era of prosperity has been skipped over altogether. Not that the Celtic Tiger ever prowled much in the inner city environs of Faithful Place, the street on which Frank grew up.
Though his beat is in Dublin, Frank has resolutely kept his distance from Faithful Place for all his adult life. Too many nasty memories, too many jeering choruses of the Irish version of the Bronx cheer: "Who do you think you are?" But his siblings -- two sisters and two brothers -- still visit his drunken father and grim mother. As Frank explains: "All four of the others still put themselves through the weekly nightmare: Sunday evening with Mammy and Daddy, roast beef and tricolored ice cream and it's all fun and games until somebody loses their mind." Frank knows about the ritual because he's in sporadic touch with his sister Jackie, who calls one evening with news that upends his world: Builders have been gutting a derelict tenement on Faithful Place in order to sell the old fireplaces and moldings. They've found a decayed suitcase, stuck inside an upstairs fireplace. Soon after, a corpse is unearthed in the tenement's basement and identified as Rosie Daly, Frank's teenaged love.
Twenty-two years before, Frank and Rosie were supposed to run away to London and get married. Except Rosie never showed up the night of their elopement and Frank always assumed she'd had second thoughts and escaped from Faithful Place without him. Now, he realizes, she never made the break at all.
Like every serious mystery that's read its Freud, "Faithful Place" is suffused with an awareness of the stranglehold the past has on the present. To solve Rosie's murder, Frank must re-enter the maze of Faithful Place and ingratiate himself with family and friends he thought he'd exorcised long ago. (Given that Frank is a cop, the lack of enthusiasm about the reunion is general.) Here's Frank's merciless description of one old mate that should give all you female high school and college reunion-goers pause: "Not one of those twenty-two years had been nice to Imelda. ...These days she was what the boys on the squad call a BOBFOC: body off Baywatch, face off Crimewatch. She had kept her figure, but there were pouches under her eyes and her face was covered in wrinkles like knife scars."
More dizzying than the journey through the landscape of the past is Frank's psychological trip back into the intense feelings of his youth. Not only does the author write beautifully about Frank's adolescent yearnings for Rosie, but French also vividly summons up the ego-stomping suffocation that Frank feels even now in the presence of his family:
"My ma is your classic Dublin mammy: five foot nothing of curler-haired, barrel-shaped don't-mess-with-this, fueled by an endless supply of disapproval. The prodigal son's welcome went like this:
"'Francis,' Ma said. ... 'Could you not be bothered putting on a decent shirt, even?'"
By its devastating end, "Faithful Place" affirms the wisdom of Thomas Wolfe's much quoted adage, "You can't go home again." But, brilliantly, it also affirms the dark knowledge of every great noir mystery: "You can't escape home, either."
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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THE THIEVES OF MANHATTAN
Adam Langer
Spiegel & Grau
ISBN 978 1 4000 6891 3
259 pages
$15
Reviewed by Frances Stead Sellers, an editor at The Washington Post
Having written three novels, Adam Langer has demonstrated that he's pretty good at making things up. He's also tried his hand at telling what actually happened, in "My Father's Bonus March," a memoir of his father published last year. Now, with "The Thieves of Manhattan," Langer has reverted to fiction to say more about the tricky topic of writing truthfully. This fourth novel is not just about such postmodern questions as "Whose truth?" that bedevil every memoir writer. It's about actual fact and true lies and all the half-truths and shifts in perspective that hover in between and form part of the creative process.
Langer sets his story in a New York publishing world that's become so enamored of the first-person confessional that every aspiring writer needs a rags-to-riches story or, better still, a history of alcoholism or childhood abuse to achieve recognition, and maybe even celebrity status.
Langer's hero, Ian Minot, makes his way to this memoir Mecca from a nowhere town in the Midwest to seek his fortune. Minot brings with him a few thousand dollars of inheritance and the kind of high-minded "theories of honest writing and narrative authenticity" that he soon discovers will condemn him to literary irrelevance. He finds it particularly galling when a man he pegs as a total fraud gets a half-million-dollar advance -- and guaranteed stardom -- for a spare-no-details story about heroin addiction, the time he spent with the Crips and the month he went AWOL during the first Gulf War. "Everything about Blade Markham seemed like some kind of lie -- his words, his shabby outfit that he'd probably planned out a week in advance, even the cross he wore around his neck."
When Markham also succeeds in winning away Minot's stunningly beautiful Eastern European girlfriend, Anya, Minot determines to get revenge -- not just on Markham but on the whole corrupt publishing world. He agrees to team up with another man who says he's been burned and proposes an elaborate plan to expose the rampant literary fraud for what it is: Minot will take his new partner's rejected novel and rewrite it as his own memoir. Once it's been declared the success it is guaranteed to become with that patina of authenticity, Minot will reveal the whole story to have been a lie.
Except nothing is quite what it appears, and nobody quite who or what they claim to be in this rollicking romp through bookdom and beyond. Langer peoples his story with recognizable characters playing fictional roles: Author Francine Prose makes an appearance at an agent's high-end book party, for example, across the room from the stately figure of Henry Louis Gates Jr. "toting a walking stick and wearing a tuxedo." And there are echoes of real-life literary events: readings at New York's KGB Bar and the exposure of a duplicitous memoir writer in an incident that evokes Oprah's upbraiding of James Frey for embellishing his memoir, "A Million Little Pieces."
The perfect summer read? Almost. The phonetic representation of Anya's pouty Romanian drawl becomes a little tiresome. And Langer sprinkles his satire with a lit-crit vocab -- complete with glossary -- that is perhaps a touch too self-consciously clever: A "hemingway," for example, is "a particularly well-crafted and honest sentence"; and "daisies" are dollars, so named after "The Great Gatsby"'s Daisy Buchanan, about whom Jay Gatsby remarks, "Her voice is full of money."
But this is a very funny book with some very serious messages. Langer's most obvious target, of course, is "the fake memoirists, fictional poets, literary forgers, and hoaxers" whom he thanks for providing "such great inspiration." But he is clearly weary of the contemporary appetite for exhibitionism that made the tell-all tale into a dominant literary genre.
A rather sanctimonious Minot ultimately regains control of his work -- and his life -- by deciding to write for his reader rather than for agents or editors with their crass commercial goals: "As I wrote, I vowed to myself that this would be why I always would write -- to tell another human being a story, one that felt meaningful to me, whether it actually happened or I had just made it up -- and I sensed that, now that I had lived a true adventure, I knew how to make one up pretty well." Without the publisher corrupting his relationship with his reader, Minot can successfully write the truth.
The most troubling message to take away from "The Thieves of Manhattan" is that we may be witnessing the death throes of an industry that is in the process of shedding its basic values for the sake of making a quick daisy.
Frances Stead Sellers can be reached at sellersf(at symbol)washpost.com
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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ROBERT A. HEINLEIN: In Dialogue With His Century: Volume 1 1907-1948: Learning Curve
William H. Patterson Jr
Tor
ISBN 978 0 7653 1960 9
622 pages
$29.99
Reviewed by Michael Dirda. Visit Dirda's online book discussion at washingtonpost.com/readingroom.
Picture a Saturday morning during one of those endless summers of the late 1950s and early '60s. A boy climbs on his red Schwinn bicycle and rides like the wind to the public library, then to several drugstores and thrift shops. He is on a mission. He is looking desperately for a book, any book, by Robert A. Heinlein (1907-1988), the greatest science-fiction writer in the world.
The greatest? Back then, few adolescent sf readers would have seriously questioned such a cosmic truth. Isaac Asimov's "Foundation Trilogy" was certainly cool (Hari Seldon! Psychohistory!), and Ray Bradbury's "The Martian Chronicles" could be poetic, scary and ghoulish almost at the same time, and, yes, Alfred Bester's "The Stars My Destination" just might be the single best sf novel of them all, but Heinlein was ... Heinlein.
Today, one can see that Heinlein's gift lay in blending relentless pulp-magazine action with a laid-back storytelling voice somewhat reminiscent of Mark Twain. Just read the ingratiating paragraph that opens "The Door Into Summer," published in 1957: "One winter shortly before the Six Weeks War, my tomcat, Petronius the Arbiter, and I lived in an old farmhouse in Connecticut. I doubt it is there any longer, as it was near the edge of the blast area of the Manhattan near-miss, and those old frame buildings burn like tissue paper. Even if it is still standing it would not be a desirable rental because of the fallout, but we liked it then, Pete and I." Who would not want to hear more from such a likable, easygoing narrator? Yet Heinlein, who first published in the magazines Astounding and Unknown, could also hook a reader with a quick eight words, as in the first sentence of his sf juvenile of that same year, "Citizen of the Galaxy": " 'Lot number ninety-seven,' the auctioneer announced, 'a boy.'"
It's important to stress Heinlein's undoubted importance as a genre writer because much of this first installment in William Patterson's two-part life focuses on a man who never intended to publish fiction. Indeed, Patterson -- editor and publisher of the Heinlein Journal -- views his subject as culturally far more than just a writer. As he says, in his sometimes flowery way: "The story of Robert A. Heinlein is the story of America in the twentieth century." Patterson even asserts -- and will presumably discuss more fully in Vol. 2 -- that Heinlein "galvanized not one, but four social movements of his century: science fiction and its stepchild, the policy think tank, the counterculture, the libertarian movement, and the commercial space movement."
-- A Military Influence
Growing up in Kansas City, Mo., the young Heinlein could have modeled for one of Horatio Alger's boy heroes -- or one of his own later, omni-competent protagonists: Bob sold magazine subscriptions at 12 and by 15 was self-supporting. He delivered newspapers, worked as a janitor, helped out at the library. He read his way through the Harvard Classics while maintaining his enthusiasm for the works of Arthur Conan Doyle, Edgar Rice Burroughs and H.G. Wells.
Like many go-getters of that era, Heinlein took several public speaking courses, corrected a stutter well enough so that he became a skilled debater, and eventually came to style himself a free-thinker and progressive-minded socialist. Yet Heinlein -- nothing if not ardently patriotic all his life -- also admired the military virtues. After graduation from high school, he organized a yearlong campaign, one that included gathering 50 letters of recommendation, to secure a much-coveted appointment to the Naval Academy.
While at Annapolis, Heinlein majored in aeronautical engineering, joined the fencing team and withstood some sadistic hazing and two tragedies: His high-school sweetheart died suddenly from appendicitis, and his beloved 7-year-old sister fell out of the family car and was run over and killed. The driver was Heinlein's father, who was psychologically destroyed by the accident.
Once commissioned, Heinlein was assigned to an aircraft carrier, the USS Lexington, then captained by Ernest J. King, who quickly became Heinlein's ideal of what a man, not just a naval officer, should be. King paid attention to detail, commanded obedience and inspired loyalty, was just in his punishments and willing to buck orders when they uselessly endangered his men. In essence, he provided inspiration for the many gruff father-figures that dominate Heinlein's fiction. Though something of a maverick, King later rose to become commander of the fleet and chief of naval operations during World War II. Let it be noted that this reviewer proudly graduated from Admiral King High School.
In Heinlein's late 20s, ill health, including tuberculosis, resulted in his being medically discharged from the Navy, much to his regret. Soon, though, he and his wife, Leslyn MacDonald, settled in Los Angeles, where both actively campaigned for Upton Sinclair, who was running for governor on a kind of socialist ticket. In due course, Heinlein himself ran for the 1938 Democratic nomination for the State Assembly and lost by a narrow margin.
Throughout their unconventional life together, the Heinleins practiced an open marriage, regularly attended nudist colonies and were periodically drawn to suspect schemes for societal improvement, including new theories of taxation (Social Credit) and new ways of interacting with the world (General Semantics). (Significantly, almost ominously, one of their closest friends was a young science-fiction writer named L. Ron Hubbard, founder of Scientology.)
Many of Heinlein's notions about society, government and personal relations eventually made their way into a long, abortive, tractlike first novel entitled "For Us, the Living." He later mined the unpublished manuscript for story ideas and included some of its elements in his cult classic, "Stranger in a Strange Land" (1961).
-- His Sci-fi Breakthrough
By 1939, the social activist and politico -- now in his early 30s -- was casting about for a way to make more money when he noticed that Thrilling Wonder Stories was conducting a short-fiction contest. Just the thing! With Leslyn's help, Heinlein produced "Life-Line," which he decided to send instead to John W. Campbell at Astounding Science Fiction. It was immediately accepted, and on April 24, 1939, the new author received a check for $70. Having studied Jack Woodford's "Trial and Error" -- the classic manual on how to slant "yarns" and "gimmick stories" for the pulp market -- Heinlein quickly learned to adjust his writing to Campbell's editorial taste. By the time that the United States entered World War II, he had already produced such famous stories as "They," "The Roads Must Roll," "Blowups Happen," "Magic, Incorporated," "-- And He Built a Crooked House," "By His Bootstraps" and "Methuselah's Children." Some of these, along with much later work, were linked together in what he called his Future History.
During the war years, the Heinleins both worked at the Aeronautical Materials Lab in Philadelphia, where colleagues included two young sf writers, Isaac Asimov and L. Sprague de Camp (whose wife, Catherine, was once photographed nude by Heinlein). Alas, war work and other tensions strained the Heinlein marriage, Leslyn started to drink heavily, and Bob gradually found himself drawn to an engineer named Virginia Gerstenfeld.
This first volume of Patterson's biography ends with Heinlein's separation from Leslyn, his 1947 breakthrough publication in the Saturday Evening Post of "The Green Hills of Earth" and, that same year, his first sf juvenile, "Rocket Ship Galileo," originally called "The Young Atomic Engineers and the Conquest of the Moon." In 1948, following a lean time while trying to jump-start a career outside the genre magazines, Heinlein married Gerstenfeld, with whom he spent the rest of his life.
Sometimes fascinating, frequently overdetailed, Patterson's worshipful biography is no match in literary quality for Julie Philips' superb "James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon" (2006), a superb study of an equally unconventional sf writer. While Patterson admires his hero without serious reservation, some readers may find Heinlein the man just a little creepy at times, not surprising given the controversial militarism he later revealed in "Starship Troopers" (1959) or the polyamory and sexual obsessions of the sprawling books after "The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress" (1966).
Today, most readers regard the 1940s stories and the juveniles and short novels of the 1950s as Heinlein's best work. If you're a fan of these, you'll want to read Patterson's biography. If you're not, you should track down a copy of "Double Star" (1956) -- not quite a juvenile, but a brilliant piece of narrative construction -- or the huge 1967 collection of Future History stories, "The Past Through Tomorrow." There's still plenty of summer left.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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