Washington Post Book Reviews
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Friday December 17, 2010
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THE MARRIAGE ARTIST
Andrew Winer
Henry Holt
ISBN 978-0805091786
367 pages
$26
Reviewed by Andrew Smith
A photographer plunges to her death from the studio window of an artist whose body is found next to hers on a downtown Manhattan sidewalk. Her husband is the critic who made the dead man's career.
In pre-World War II Europe, a 10-year-old boy discovers his vocation when he inks his first ketubah, an illustrated Jewish marriage contract that, according to his grandfather, "illuminates the mystery of the union of a man and a woman."
A double suicide. The nature of art. The meaning of marriage. Andrew Winer's intricately wrought new novel (the follow-up to his well-received debut, "The Color Midnight Made") stuffs a plethora of incident and ideas into two story lines haunted by love, guilt and grief.
The two suicides were Aleksandra and Benjamin. After their deaths, Aleksandra's husband, Daniel, reflects on their past. He and Aleksandra had been married to other people when they met; their relationship was fraught from the beginning with the sense of its having been founded on betrayal. Unable to conceive a child, she declared that God was punishing them. "There's only the universe," Daniel remembers replying. "And it's godless."
When the novel turns to Josef, the grown-up illustrator of marriage contracts, Winer examines the conflict between belief and skepticism by anatomizing his marriage to Hannah Englander. They met on their wedding day, two strangers taking advantage of an immigration permit that enabled a husband and wife to leave Nazi-occupied Vienna for Palestine. Hannah agreed to a sham wedding because she was too consumed by her relationship with God to care much about personal ties. Her doom-laden faith that "absolute affliction" is the true condition of human beings struggling to love an unknowable deity counterpoints Josef's conviction that marriage is an impossible institution, "capricious ... unstable and slightly grotesque."
Unfortunately, all these events, even the sex scenes, are somewhat abstract in the telling. Winer is so intent on making sure we get the point -- everyone is lonely, no one can ever truly know the beloved -- that he neglects to make his characters more than bundles of attitudes and opinions. Daniel is particularly problematic. His insights too often cross the line from poetic allusiveness into pretentious murkiness, as in these musings at a Vienna cemetery: "He saw that he had already been dead once, for a very long time (though not an eternity), right up until his conception." I doubt I'll be the only reader to roll her eyes at that epiphany, and I rolled them again when Carmen, the woman shoehorned into the plot to offer Daniel new love, says that upon her first sight of him she thought, "There goes the loneliest, most sensitive and beautiful man I have ever seen." Nothing we have seen of Daniel justifies such rhapsodies.
Carmen and Daniel meet at Benjamin's memorial service, where the two narrative strands come together in the hands of the artist's grandfather, Max Wiener, the Zionist who arranged Josef's marriage to Hannah. Max takes Daniel to Vienna, to the apartment where Josef and Hannah lived, to reveal the truth about Benjamin's origins, though this will not be much of a surprise to anyone who's been paying attention. The truth about the origins of Benjamin's final art exhibit is considerably more startling; indeed, it comes more or less out of nowhere, after Daniel returns to New York, to provide him with a closing epiphany that seems to belong in another book.
I'm being hard on Winer because he is a gifted writer with a lot on his mind who's fallen into some bad habits here. The characters face wrenching dilemmas, and the decisions they make in response frequently have disastrous consequences, which are traced with a commendable lack of sentimentality. But people talk about their problems in such a remote way that their emotional force is muffled. Underlying themes emerge over-explicitly and the author raises so many weighty issues that the story buckles underneath them.
Yet there are passages of great beauty in "The Marriage Artist," tenderly delineating the mysteries of love and creativity. Josef and Daniel may be overly schematic characters, Aleksandra and Benjamin barely characters at all (granted, they're dead when the novel begins), but Max's passions leap off the page, and the mistakes they lead him to are bitterly credible. Hannah's metaphysical concerns don't really engage us, but her painfully conflicted feelings for her husband do.
A thoroughly mixed bag, in other words. Readers with a taste for serious fiction will honor Winer's ambition, even as they regret that this time out it has not been entirely fulfilled.
Andrew Smith is a frequent contributor to The Washington Post Book World, the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune, and a contributing editor of the American Scholar.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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DAVE EGGERS
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Reviewed by Marie Arana
It would be hard to find a more big-hearted writer than Dave Eggers. At 28, he founded a journal that showcased writers rejected by mainstream publishers; McSweeney's went on to publish Joyce Carol Oates, David Foster Wallace and Michael Chabon. At 30, he produced his runaway best-seller, "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius," which described losing both his parents to cancer while he was still in college, then dropping out to raise his 8-year-old brother. At 32, he published "You Shall Know Our Velocity," a novel about two young men traveling the world, trying desperately to give away a windfall. By the time he turned 35, Time had named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world.
Now 40, and having fought, as he puts it, "all my demons" in that first memoir, he prefers to focus on others. ("What Is the What" concerns the Lost Boys of Sudan; "Zeitoun" is about a Syrian American caught up in Hurricane Katrina.) His publishing empire is a spirited showcase for talented writers and designers. But his real passion these days is spreading the love of writing to the young.
A staunch teachers' advocate, Eggers opened 826DC (www.826dc.org) in Washington, D.C., this past fall. The "store" calls itself the Museum of Unnatural History and sells cans of Primordial Soup and packets of Resplendent Plumage. But its real purpose is in the back, where it houses a busy hive of youngsters who come in after school for free tutoring and to sharpen their writing skills. One of eight centers of its kind in the country, 826DC is staffed entirely by volunteers (writers, editors, poets, artists) and is dedicated to the proposition that all children deserve one-on-one attention. Eggers got the idea from friends -- overworked inner-city schoolteachers -- who felt their students would shine "if only I could clone myself!"
The center works in neighborhood schools, helps children with homework, even organizes field trips. "If we do it right," says Eggers, "we'll start when they're 6, follow them through middle school, then take them all the way to college." With lots of good will and a nice dose of funding, the place may be solvent within two years.
"I'm very lucky to be writing for a living," Eggers says. Like the young men of his first novel, he's trying desperately to give away that windfall.
Marie Arana can be reached at aranam(at symbol)washpost.com.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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BEST AUDIOBOOKS
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Reviewed by Katherine A. Powers
"THE IMPERFECTIONISTS" By Tom Rachman. Recorded Books, 9 3/4 hours, 7 CDs, www.recordedbooks.com, buy: $44.95; rent, $17.50; audible.com download, $27.99. It would be hard to come up with a better narrator than Christopher Evan Welch for Tom Rachman's saga of the birth, life and death of a newspaper. By turns bitter, sweet, icily callous and very funny, the novel covers half a century and a large number of characters. Welch distinguishes between the characters mostly by mood and register, but so adeptly that he conveys personality and predicament as well as any thespian.
"THE KILLING OF CRAZY HORSE "By Thomas Powers. Tantor, 21 hours, 17 CDs, $54.99, 2 MP3 CDs, $39.99; audible.com download, $38.49. This latest account of the murder of Crazy Horse of the Lakota Sioux in 1877 is a complex, detailed and multilevel tale of greed, bad faith, racism and miscomprehension on both sides. John Pruden reads Thomas Powers' long book in a calm, unhurried voice. His pronunciation of the formidable Indian expressions and names is deft and unstrenuous. Though the voices of many are heard from letters, journals and interviews, Pruden does not embellish them; he maintains the narrating voice, avoiding complications in an already complicated but revelatory account.
"LORNA DOONE" By R. D. Blackmore. Unabridged, Naxos, 26 hours, 20 CDs, $115.98; Naxos download, www.naxosaudiobooks.com, $80. First published in 1869, this great tale of well-born brigandage, yeoman valor and maiden peril set in Restoration England's West Country, Devon and Somerset, gives full expression to mid-Victorian longing for a vanished agricultural past. Its audio form releases the language from the page thanks to Jonathan Keeble, an extraordinarily skilled voice actor who takes on the archaic Devon accent as though born to it -- which, as a native of the region, he was. The novel's quietly droll passages and paeans to nature are greatly enhanced by his country aplomb. Moreover, the dialect that snags the reader in print ("Whoy, dudn't ee knaw ... as Jan Vry wur gane avore braxvass") emerges here as fluid speech, its cadence a joy to hear.
"THE SIEGE OF KRISHNAPUR" By J. G. Farrell. BBC Cover to Cover, 12 1/2 hours, audible.com download, $25.46. Sam Dastor's inspired delivery of the 1973 Booker Prize-winning novel, a brilliant black comedy set during the Sepoy Rebellion of 1857, is available as a download only. Dastor, who was born in India, delivers a brisk, uncomplicated Indian accent for the few actual natives in this book. His great triumph, however, lies in his general narration, which expresses the book's terrific irony at the contrast between British propriety and the chaotic mess these people find themselves in. When the voices of individual characters pipe up, they are uniquely their own. Among them are the Magistrate, whose clipped tones most certainly do "not invite debate," and the Padre, whose voice is perfectly balanced between donnishness and clerical sing-song.
"TRAVELS IN SIBERIA" By Ian Frazier. Macmillan Audio, 20 1/2 hours, 16 CDs, $59.99; audible.com download, $41.99 Ian Frazier caps his travels through Siberia's vastness by narrating his own account of them, another enormous undertaking.
The author doesn't have the polish or range of a professional voice actor, but soon we appreciate how this somewhat pedestrian tone suits both the crude reality of Siberia and the deadpan humor that pervades his book. How could anyone doubt that this is the voice of the actual man who, as he admits, had a "chronic fear of being run over while asleep in my tent" or who was annoyed that his tea tasted like the shaving cream someone had mixed in his cup?
Katherine A. Powers regularly reviews audio books for The Washington Post Book World.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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FATED
S. G. Browne
New American Library
ISBN 978-0451231284
352 pages
$15
Reviewed by Sarah Pekkanen
Note to all the single ladies: If a guy named Dennis saunters up to you at a bar, bragging about the black satin duvet cover on his bed, think carefully before you grab his Shirley Temple and toss it in his face. In S.G. Browne's terrific comic novel "Fated," Dennis is Death -- one of the dozens of Immortals who walk among us. And he isn't the only one you don't want to annoy.
God is nicknamed Jerry (he's a bit of a control freak and prone to sending hyperbolic e-mails), Lady Luck has ADD, and Gluttony competes in deep-fried Twinkie-eating competitions, then belches on snooty teenage girls and sentences them to bouts of bulimia. But the central story belongs to Fate, alias Fabio, an overworked, burned-out manager of 83 percent of the world's population. You think Beltway traffic is sucking the life out of you? Try overseeing 5.5 billion people, most of whom seem determined to muck up their own happiness (Destiny skims off the Nobel laureates and Super Bowl MVPs, while Fate gets left with us dregs).
Fate wants to change jobs, and there's precedent for it: Fidelity got canned "in the wake of the free-love debacle ... and Ego lost his job after the Beatles broke up." But everything changes when Fate catches a glimpse of a mortal named Sara Griffen -- or, more accurately, when she catches a glimpse of him, since he's sunbathing nude in a new top-of-the-line man-suit. Soon after their affair begins, Fate breaks Jerry's No. 1 rule -- "Don't get involved" -- by trying to keep hapless mortals from committing adultery or gambling away their savings. But tinkering with a few already-determined fates sets off a butterfly-wings-to-tsunami effect: "Without meaning to, I've affected several million humans," Fate realizes. "And I'm wondering if I'm going to get away with this."
With Jerry as his boss, does he really have to wonder?
True love's struggle against all odds isn't an original story line, but the fate of "Fated" hinges on the details, which Browne nails comically time and again: Infatuation gazes at his reflection in a lamp's base while he converses with Fate, and Fate avoids telling Sara about Jerry because "she'd want to meet him, which of course is impossible, and that would just lead to arguments about her feeling like I don't think she's good enough to meet God." This author's mind must be as active as a pinball machine surrounded by 10-year-old boys; the pace never falters. Even when Browne seems to stall toward the end, he pulls out something so unexpected and pitch-perfect that it's obvious Creativity knocked him out of his chair and started typing herself.
Sarah Pekkanen's comic novel, "The Opposite of Me," was published in March.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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