Washington Post Book Reviews
For You
Thursday August 19, 2010
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THE RED UMBRELLA
THE RED UMBRELLAChristina Diaz Gonzalez
Knopf
ISBN 978-0375861901
$16.99
FAT VAMPIRE: A Never Coming of Age Story Adam Rex
Balzer & Bray
ISBN 978-0061920905
$16.99
Reviewed by Mary Quattlebaum
Summer proves a transformative time for the teens in two new books.
In May 1961, Lucia Alvarez, 14, looks forward to her first chaperoned dance and lazy days with friends. But tensions soon heat up between Fidel Castro's forces and the middle-class denizens of her small Cuban town. In less than a month, many of those friends become student revolutionaries, her banker father loses his job, and her parents send Lucia and 7-year-old Frankie to the United States in a desperate attempt to keep them safe. The siblings end up in Nebraska, the beneficiaries of a church-sponsored foster program. Christina Diaz Gonzalez captures the fervor, uncertainty and fear of the times through Lucia's first-person perspective and the newspaper headlines that begin each chapter. Sensory details provide a vivid sense of Lucia's two homes, the mango-scented Cuba and the corn-laden Midwest, where the young exile navigates high school, dances the twist and anxiously awaits news of her parents. This is a compelling first novel.
On a family vacation in the Poconos, Doug, 15, is changed forever -- not into a dreamy "Twilight" type but a confused, pimply "Fat Vampire." Author Adam Rex deftly spoofs the popular vampire genre while delivering a novel that's surprising, funny and poignant. Plot complications involve a raided bloodmobile, a trip to Comic-Con and the zealous vampire hunter from a TV show. And then there are Doug's feelings for Sejal, a new girl from India whose addiction to online activity has bred its own sad, dark secret. The ending hits the reader's heart like a stake and lingers long in the mind -- the best kind of undead.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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A FIERCE RADIANCE
Lauren Belfer
Harper
ISBN 978 0 06 125251 8
532 pages
$25.99
Reviewed by Maureen Corrigan, who is the book critic for the NPR program "Fresh Air" and teaches literature at Georgetown University
From lowly mold to measured savior of humankind: That's the story of penicillin. Discovered in 1928 by Scottish scientist Alexander Fleming, penicillin was a finicky substance to work with; it was left on the shelf, so to speak, until the advent of World War II, when the Allies became desperate for a medicine that could be mass-produced to fight battlefield infections (as well as sexually transmitted diseases like syphilis). Because the Brits were busy repelling the blitz, the challenge was taken up by American pharmaceutical companies, working shoulder to shoulder with government labs and private research institutions. They succeeded. As Lauren Belfer tells us in an afterword to her compelling new novel, "A Fierce Radiance," on "D-Day, in June 1944, every medic going ashore in France carried penicillin in his pack." On the home front, deaths from infections, including scarlet fever, pneumonia and blood poisoning caused by accidental cuts and scrapes were dramatically reduced.
As she demonstrated in her best-selling first novel, "City of Light" (1999), Belfer is adept at writing historical fiction that sizzles. Sex, spies, murder, big money, family betrayals, doomed romance and exotic travel are smoothly braided into her main narrative about the wartime race to make large quantities of penicillin. The focus of the story is Claire Shipley -- a single mother who works as a photojournalist for Life magazine. Think a hotter version of Margaret Bourke-White. The novel opens in December 1941 with Claire on assignment at New York's Rockefeller Institute (now Rockefeller University). Doctors are administering a small dose of penicillin to a middle-aged banker who has developed blood poisoning after scraping his knee on a racquetball court. Camera in hand, Claire documents the experimental procedure that, as luck would have it, is conducted by a hunky single doctor named Jamie Stanton. But after a miraculous rally, the patient declines and dies. The problem? Not enough penicillin is yet available for a full course of treatment.
As the romance between Claire and Jamie heats up, so does the pressure to find a way to generate huge quantities of the drug. "A Fierce Radiance" ushers in a host of colorful secondary characters, all scientists at Rockefeller, who are working with soil and even sewage samples to find a medium that will grow the antibiotic effectively. Drawing on historical research, Belfer also sketches out the uneasy alliance between the federal government and private drug companies, in which patriotism vied with profit-making. The pharmaceutical companies were prohibited from patenting penicillin, but they could -- and did -- go on to patent the antibiotics discovered as a consequence of their research. The government tried to keep them from diverting their energies away from penicillin to the development of these lucrative "cousins."
So engrossing is Belfer's account of the penicillin quest that it's a letdown when she introduces a murder mystery subplot a third of the way through her novel. The victim is Jamie's sister, Tia, a mycologist (fungus researcher) also working at Rockefeller. Tia was rumored to have made an important discovery in one of her mud samples: Nazi sympathizers, greedy fellow researchers and jealous boyfriends are all suspected of knocking her off in order to grab her lab notes. This dopey digression feels at odds with the sense of authenticity that otherwise graces Belfer's story. That authenticity is especially evident in her beautifully detailed depictions of wartime New York.
How quickly the home-front anxieties during World War II have been forgotten. How quickly, also, that the everyday terrors posed by pneumonia, scarlet fever and scraped knees were diminished, thanks to penicillin and other antibiotics. "A Fierce Radiance" vividly brings back that time of both terror and eventual triumph.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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MENTOR: A Memoir
Tom Grimes
Tin House
ISBN 978 0 9825048 8 8
243 pages
$16.95
Reviewed by Michael Dirda. Visit Dirda's online book discussion at washingtonpost.com/readingroom.
From now on, anyone who dreams of becoming a novelist will need to read Tom Grimes' brutally honest and wonderful "Mentor." While there have been plenty of books on how to write, or how to get published, or how to promote your work, as well as a number of triumphalist accounts of "making it," this is a story of what it's like to just miss succeeding. It's also a superb reminiscence of the Iowa Writers' Workshop in the late 1980s and of its celebrated director, Frank Conroy, author of the classic memoir "Stop-Time" (1967).
At the age of 32, Tom Grimes was working as a waiter at Louie's Backyard in Key West. He'd already been writing fiction for years and seemingly getting nowhere fast. His childhood in Queens, N.Y., had been psychologically debilitating because of a cold, unloving father; a streak of depression ran in his blood; and he'd recently been divorced. Now, he was happily remarried and wondering what to do with himself. Time was passing. Should he go to law school? Instead, at the advice of his wife, Grimes applied to four creative writing programs. Three turned him down.
One day, though, just as he was about to ride his bicycle to work, the phone rang. "'This is Frank Conroy from the Iowa Writers' Workshop,' the voice said." Conroy had loved the excerpt from Grimes' novel and announced that he was giving him the program's top scholarship. "See you in August."
That fall in Iowa, Conroy continued to sing the praises of Grimes' unfinished novel about baseball and the American dream. "I'll tell you. Your manuscript. Jesus Christ. ... If you want, you can have the best agent in America tomorrow. I'll call her in the morning, if you want me to." (At the time, this was Candida Donadio.) Later, Grimes learned that another student was referring to him as "Golden Boy," and people were comparing his writing to that of Don DeLillo and the young Richard Ford.
Surprisingly, Grimes turned down the scholarship and asked to teach courses instead, calculating that he might need such experience on his resume. He knew himself to be a bundle of neuroses, prey to anxiety and depression, and deeply uncertain whether he could complete his book to his own satisfaction and that of his new mentor and friend. Indeed, Conroy quickly seems to have looked on Grimes as a foster son, even an heir. It's clear that their similar backgrounds -- hardscrabble New York childhood, crummy jobs, drink, divorce and much else -- might generate a spiritual kinship.
After class, Conroy would regularly adjourn to the Mill, the local watering hole. "Frank ignored warnings about high cholesterol, got drunk nightly, and couldn't write without a cigarette," Grimes recalls. Although in his mid-50s, Conroy had published only a slender collection of stories ("Midair") since "Stop-Time." Now he was working on his much-anticipated first novel, "Body and Soul." Surely it would be a great success, win some major prize or prizes.
Thus, as "Mentor" goes on, we follow the lives of two men, the fates of two novels. Why does writing mean so much to them? Can their books actually live up to expectations? At one point, a public relations guy named Jay asks about the purpose of novels, and Grimes wonders: "What are novels for? Entertainment? Metaphysical inquiry? Chronicling one's times? Could I tell Jay that the world is chaos and an artful novel satisfies our human desire for order, or that the novel excavates meaning from the rubble of incomprehension? That a novel is a thing to be read upon a beach in July for pleasure, or that I was an Iowa Writers' Workshop student and writing a novel was my homework? Or that I never want to die and when I'm writing a novel I believe I never will?"
In "Mentor" Grimes brilliantly evokes the intensity of the Iowa program -- of his close friendship with short-story writer Charles D'Ambrosio, of what it's like to sit around a seminar table while your classmates rake over your work, of the serenity felt when the sentences are flowing well. Though much happens to Grimes at Iowa, initially everything seems to go his way: An apprentice work is published by a small press and receives critical accolades; a play is produced in Los Angeles and wins an award. Conroy continues to speak of a six-figure advance for his favorite student's real novel.
Finally, Grimes finishes "Season's End," and an agent -- an associate of Candida Donadio -- sends out the manuscript. All his adult life, Grimes has yearned to be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux or by Seymour Lawrence (whose clients included Katherine Anne Porter, Kurt Vonnegut and Frank Conroy). Both are interested in the book, as are three other firms.
What happens during the actual negotiations is enthralling -- and what happens afterward is even more so, as Grimes fights to save his book from being "orphaned" because his editor leaves for another company, and then fights once more against being ignored after a negative review in Publishers Weekly. When Grimes travels to Dayton, Ohio, for the first stop on his pathetic book tour, any writer will recognize the scene that awaits: Fifty chairs are set up for the audience, copies of "Season's End" are stacked high on a table, there are plates of cookies and an urn of coffee -- and nobody comes. Not a single person.
In its final quarter, "Mentor" darkens even further, as the wheel of literary fortune turns against both Grimes and Conroy. "Body and Soul" makes money but doesn't become a best-seller, wins no awards. Grimes ends up taking a low-paying teaching job at Southwest Texas State, then ranked by Playboy as the best party school in the country. He suffers a severe breakdown, leading to the brink of suicide. Meanwhile, Conroy's health fails -- diabetes, then cancer -- and he dies at 69.
Yet neither man's faith in writing ever wavers. Near the end of "Mentor," Grimes starkly confesses: "I'm a failure as a writer because I've overreached; my ambition was larger than my talent. Yet I willingly accepted that risk." He feels that he's always somehow left himself out of his fiction, and so concludes that "Frank is the protagonist of my best novel, and my best novel is this memoir. In the end, my memoir about Frank is a memoir about me."
In his teaching, Frank Conroy always stressed "meaning, sense, clarity," and Tom Grimes' deeply moving account of what the writing life is actually like shows how well he learned those lessons. "For me," he says, "writing is a necessity. I exist in sentences. I forget my sense of failure. I forget time. I forget that I'm aging. I forget that one day I'll die. Revising sentences is an act of hope, and connecting with a reader is the only leap of faith I'll ever take." In "Mentor" he not only leaps, he soars.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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FATHER OF THE RAIN
Lily King
Atlantic Monthly
ISBN 978 0 8021 1949 0
354 pages
$24
Reviewed by Ron Charles, the fiction editor of The Washington Post Book World. You can follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/roncharles. He can be reached at charlesr(at symbol)washpost.com.
Meetings conducted by Al-anon, the support group for family members of alcoholics, begin with some variant of this greeting, woven from solidarity and sorrow: "We who live, or have lived, with the problem of alcoholism understand as perhaps few others can." What grim knowledge these spouses and children harbor, forced into the contradictory roles of nurse, defender and victim. The proliferation of survivor memoirs and their popular auxiliaries -- the Redbook feature, the Oprah episode, the "Afterschool Special" -- tempt us to imagine that we have some idea of what living with an addict must be like, but for an understanding beyond the confessional or therapeutic, the very best novelists offer insight no one else can into that Sisyphean challenge. Marilynne Robinson's "Home" and Roxana Robinson's "Cost" are the most exquisite recent examples, and now Lily King's "Father of the Rain" is a worthy companion on this theme. Surprising and wise, it's the third novel -- after "The Pleasing Hour" and "The English Teacher" -- by a writer who understands the horrible burden of trying to save someone who's ruining your life.
"Father of the Rain" describes the conflicted relationship between an alcoholic and his only daughter, Daley, who narrates the story in three parts, from the mid-1970s to the present day. It opens in a small Massachusetts town when she turns 11 on the week her mother plans to walk out. From the first page, we're caught in the tangled lines of affection and menace that will hold Daley in thrall to her father for the rest of her life.
King has created such an arresting character, an obnoxious, needy man whose magnetism can turn in an instant from attractive to repulsive. Charming, good-looking and athletic, Gardiner is a Harvard grad from a wealthy family, a man capable of dazzling acts of generosity and hilarious stunts. But he's also frighteningly erratic and easily enraged, a bully who hates everything that's happened since 1955 and does his best to remain in the class-bound world where men at the club wear slacks embroidered with little ducks and banter good-naturedly with the black waiters. In a voice even more damning for its refusal to judge him, King describes Gardiner streaking naked through a children's party, reading Penthouse Letters to the family and telling racist jokes in his Uncle Tom accent. Young Daley struggles to see him as silly and fun, while adults -- enablers every one -- stand around laughing nervously.
If he were a little more violent, if his sexual transgressions were just an iota more predatory, we could peg him as a monster and Daley could be free of him forever, but that's the treacherous skill of the functional alcoholic that King captures here so well: Gardiner swaggers between normal life and chaos, just good enough to maintain a semblance of sobriety, civility, humanity. Daley is torn between the fear of losing her father and remaining in his company, never knowing when she might be the victim of his sudden callousness but desperate "to receive the full glow of that face." Nothing compares with how good she feels when he hugs her tightly and says, "You're mine. You're mine. Aren't you?"
This would be so easy to get wrong, to let slip into a slow-moving thriller or a pathetic tale of abuse. But the raw sincerity of their love for each other makes his behavior and her devotion all the more tragic. "I miss him so much," Daley thinks, "it feels like my skin is coming off."
Another aspect of "Father of the Rain" that deepens the story and broadens it beyond the dimensions of one family's disintegration is how effectively King lets us see the national drama playing out in the news. While Gardiner is stomping around bullying his wife and children, President Nixon is snarling at his enemies and reassuring the nation, struggling to maintain the illusion of normality before his house collapses, too. This natural resonance between foreground and background makes for an affecting portrait of a little girl losing all the pillars of respect and stability in her life.
The novel's next part, 18 years later, is just as successful and even more absorbing, the narrator's voice having aged into a more analytical and self-conscious tone. An adult with a promising academic career, Daley no longer feels bound by Gardiner. "My father has no power over me," she tells a friend. "He wasn't even a father." But, of course, paternal influence is not so easily brushed off, and King explores their complicated relationship with startling psychological acuity. "He disgusts and compels me," Daley admits, trying to understand the paradox of loving a horrid man. As the adult child of an abusive alcoholic, a man who downs a quart of vodka and settles into a vicious argument every night, Daley has learned her role too well: "I do not bring up politics, history, literature, lawyers -- especially Jewish lawyers -- or any other subject that can be linked, however loosely, to my mother. I do not tease, and I receive teasing with a smile; I keep my thoughts and opinions to a bare minimum. I ask questions. I make myself useful. I do not discuss my interests, my relationships, or my goals."
She knows intellectually that "this is a sick man whose problems I cannot remedy," but the temptation to save him proves irresistible. As much as the first part of the novel is propelled by the tension of Daley's fear, this second section, wavering between breakthrough and collapse, is a brilliant exploration of the attraction of martyrdom, the intoxication of playing savior. "I'm fixing something with my father that got destroyed when I was eleven years old," she tells her fiance, who, like all her friends, is baffled by her devotion.
King poses the questions so powerfully that you can't answer them easily: What kind of abuse finally abrogates one's responsibility to a self-destructive parent? What is too much to ask of a child? Daley claims, "The way I cope is to never have expectations, so I'm not disappointed," but she's lying, ignoring the desperate hope that keeps her attached to this man, keeps her sacrificing her own life for his. It's an absorbing, insightful story written in cool, polished prose right to the last conflicted line.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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