Washington Post Book Reviews
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Thursday December 9, 2010
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MOONLIGHT MILE
Dennis Lehane
Morrow
ISBN 978-0061836923
324 pages
$26.99
Reviewed by Art Taylor. Taylor reviews mysteries and thrillers frequently for The Washington Post.
Dennis Lehane's 1998 novel "Gone, Baby, Gone" (and the smart 2007 film adaptation) saw private investigators Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro tackling the disappearance of 4-year-old Amanda McCready. By the end of the case, the mystery had been solved, but few would call the resolution satisfying, least of all the investigators themselves. The case pitted legality against morality, and ultimately left Patrick and Angie at loggerheads. At the opening of Lehane's fifth Kenzie-Gennaro book, "Prayers for Rain" (1999), the two had parted ways, and though "Moonlight Mile" -- the first book in this series in more than a decade -- finds them happily together again and with a 4-year-old of their own, domestic harmony exists in part because no one mentions that old case anymore.
No one, that is, until the past rears its ugly head in a 3 a.m. phone call: "You owe me," a voice tells Patrick, and old debts prove pretty steep indeed. Amanda has gone missing again, it seems, and he is called on to find her once more -- and do it right this time.
His first instinct is to leave the case alone. Right or wrong, he'd done what he needed to do back then. He has a new job on the horizon and a family to consider. And he already sees new troubles brewing between him and Angie in the call's wake: "Since we'd reconciled, we hadn't said the names Amanda or Helene McCready in our home until three days ago. In those three days, every time one of us mentioned one of those names, it felt like someone had pulled the pin from a grenade."
But at the same time, Patrick's recent casework has left him making more distasteful compromises about right and wrong, and Amanda's disappearance offers a chance at closure, perhaps even redemption. That Patrick and Angie have a daughter of their own -- the same age Amanda was in that earlier case -- adds poignancy but also ups the stakes. As Angie asks Patrick, "When your daughter asks what you stand for, don't you want to be able to answer her?"
The search for Amanda leads to surprising places, and dark ones as well: fraud, identity theft, drugs, kidnapping, the black market, murder. As with "Gone, Baby, Gone," questions about parenting persist: What makes a person fit or unfit for parenting? How far would a good person go to protect a child? And what does "good" mean, anyway?
Throughout, Lehane's writing mixes the streetwise and the lyrical. One mobster "posted first-quarter NBA numbers on the Breathalyzer." Another's eyes were "a liquid sapphire and reminded me of a candle flame slipping under the surface of melting wax." Elsewhere, an extended metaphor aches with confusion and loss -- not just the core characters' but that of a larger community, perhaps America itself: "We no longer understood how we'd gotten here. We couldn't grasp what had happened to us. We woke up one day and all the streets signs had been stolen, all the navigation systems had shorted out. The car had no gas, the living room had no furniture, the imprint in the bed beside us had been smoothed over."
In the decade between the last Kenzie-Gennaro book and this one, Lehane has made quantum leaps as a craftsman: His breakthrough novel, "Mystic River," encompassed myriad perspectives and ultimately approached the level of Greek tragedy, and "The Given Day," an epic history of early 20th-century Boston, revealed a writer brimming with even greater ambitions. In returning to his old private eye series now, Lehane has narrowed his scope a little: The social commentary is less nuanced, more direct, and plot twists are more prominent than deep moral predicaments. Still, "Moonlight Mile" should hardly be considered a step back. Instead, Lehane is a writer bringing new confidence and an easy prowess to a new chapter in an epic story -- the Kenzie-Gennaro saga.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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GOLD BOY, EMERALD GIRL: Stories
Yiyun Li
Random House
ISBN 978-1400068135
221 pages
$25
Reviewed by Troy Jollimore. Jollimore is the author of "Tom Thomson in Purgatory," which won the National Book Critics Circle award for poetry for 2006.
Yiyun Li's characters, like the stories they inhabit, often seem at first glance quiet, modest and unassuming. These are people you might not notice if you passed them in the street; they are accustomed, in fact, to going unnoticed, and at times they barely seem to notice themselves. But the smallness of these lives is in part a matter of perspective, and there is considerable drama hidden beneath the placid surfaces they present to the world.
"I am a forty-one-year-old woman living by myself," begins the narrator of "Kindness," the long story that opens "Gold Boy, Emerald Girl." She resides in a one-bedroom flat in an old building on the outskirts of Beijing. "I have not married, and naturally have no children. I have few friends. ... I teach mathematics in a third-tier middle school. I do not love my job or my students, but I have noticed that even the most meager attention I give to the students is returned by a few of them with respect and gratitude and sometimes inexplicable infatuation. I pity these children more than I appreciate them, as I can see where they are heading in their lives. It is a terrible thing, even for an indifferent person like me, to see the bleakness lurking in someone else's life."
It is typical of Li's characters to describe themselves as "indifferent," and if the circumstances of this woman's life strike us as somewhat sad, the tone of the passage makes clear that she expects no better. The stoicism she has adopted as a way of resisting despair has itself become a shroud, a barrier between her and her feelings about her life.
On the other hand, some of Li's characters seem genuinely uninterested in human company. The lovely title story introduces us to Professor Dai, a widow who seems to have no desire to remarry following the death of her husband.
"Professor Dai must miss her students these days," a young woman says. But the professor actually misses something else more: "the white skulls of mammals and birds on her office shelves, the drawers filled with scalpels and clamps and tweezers that she had cleaned and maintained with care, and the fact that she could mask her indifference to the human species with her devotion to animals." This story -- possibly the strongest in the collection -- builds slowly and gently to an ending that seems both unexpected and inevitable, concluding in a final sentence that is exquisite.
Li, the author of a novel called "The Vagrants" (2009) and a previous collection of stories, and the recent recipient of a MacArthur "genius" grant, likes to play with the tensions between still surfaces and deep waters. She sets up encounters between people who thoroughly misjudge and misunderstand each other, while giving the reader enough background information -- at times, decades of back story -- to perceive the depth of her characters' failure to empathize. Indeed, our inability to understand other people might be her central theme.
"Souvenir" describes an encounter between an elderly widower and a 22-year-old woman, both of whom go unnamed. He opens the conversation by saying, "You remind me of my wife when she was your age" - and we are immediately told that, while he has used this line with other young women, "he meant it more than any time before." He follows her into a drugstore but becomes disgusted when she tries to buy condoms, and his judgmental behavior is encouraged by the clerks. By this point, the reader knows more than any of these characters about the girl's background and the nature of her errand. Yet what we know does not make us automatically approve of her behavior; indeed, it does not lend itself to easy interpretation at all.
In Li's world, human beings remain mysterious even when their back stories are revealed, as in "Sweeping Past," in which an aging woman explains to her granddaughter the tragic reason she fell out with her two best friends from childhood. The world is an unpredictable and dangerous place, and the rare Li character who takes the risk of trusting someone could be punished or rewarded, as the protagonist of "Prison" discovers when she attempts to hire a surrogate mother in China.
No wonder, then, that so many of these characters find other people and life itself inscrutable and potentially dangerous; no wonder so many of them insist on turning away and congratulating themselves for doing so. "Indeed, he was a lucky man," one of them says of himself. "He had never married, so no one could accuse him of being an unfaithful husband or a bad father." To see the bleakness in other people's lives can be, as "Kindness" suggests, a terrible thing. But in the hands of a storyteller as gifted as Li, it can also be a moving and unforgettable experience.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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AN OBJECT OF BEAUTY
Steve Martin
Grand Central
ISBN 978-0446573641
295 pages
$26.99
Reviewed by Ron Charles, who is the fiction editor for The Washington Post. You can follow him on Twitter (at symbol)RonCharles. His e-mail address is charlesr(at symbol)washpost.com.
Those classic "Saturday Night Live" skits are more than three decades old, but it's hard not to keep thinking of Steve Martin as a Wild and Crazy Guy or the white-suited guy with bunny ears. Who could have predicted the trajectory of that arrow that passed through his head, sailed through his platinum albums, his dozens of movies, his New Yorker magazine sketches, and now hits its target in a smart novel about the contemporary art market?
The cerebral element has always been there, of course. You could hear it in those philosophical asides, even in his silliest routines; in his charming play "Picasso at the Lapin Agile" (1993); and in his thoughtful memoir, "Born Standing Up" (2007). And now Martin isn't just drawing on hearsay to write about tony galleries and multimillion-dollar auctions: When he displayed his private collection in Las Vegas in 2001, it included works by Picasso, Seurat, Edward Hopper and de Kooning. So much for getting small; he's also gotten very rich.
Like "Shopgirl," Martin's best-selling novella from 2000, "An Object of Beauty" tells the story of a young woman, but this time his heroine is ferociously ambitious and has "a scalpel personality." With a killer body, a wardrobe to show it off uptown or downtown, and a sharp sense of humor, Lacey Yeager makes sure she's the center of every room. "Naked or well dressed, was her dictum." Even in snooty Manhattan, "tables waited for Lacey like kennel puppies hoping to be picked." From her entry-level position at Sotheby's, she beats, cheats and sleeps her way into the frothy art world, riding its peaks and crashes in the years before and after the 9/11 attacks. "She was rash with people, with her body, her remarks," Martin writes. "She was equally reckless with all." She's so sure she can perceive and control invisible forces of desire that it's hard to take your eyes off her, even when she's standing next to some of the most beautiful paintings in the world.
The person most thoroughly hypnotized by her performance is the almost-invisible narrator, Daniel Franks. In love with her since college, he's Norman Rockwell to her Niki de Saint Phalle. While Lacey leaps ever higher in the gallery world, Daniel wistfully toils away as a freelance art critic, watching her soar along with the prices of ironic, deconstructive works by young artists no one had heard of two years earlier. On the opening page, he tells us that he's writing down this story as a way of exorcising Lacey from his mind, but he only seems to be engraving her presence more deeply.
Despite its sexual frankness, "An Object of Beauty" reminds me of those novels of manners written by Edith Wharton and William Dean Howells back when John Singer Sargent was painting members of the enviable class. Lacey has the skill, the taste and the ambition to move in those circles, but she knows these qualities aren't enough to gain entree. As Bernadette Peters cries in "The Jerk," "It's not the money, it's the stuff." And the question becomes how much Lacey will contort her values and how much those around her must pay for her success. "She wanted fine things, beautiful things," Martin writes. "She wanted to grow up, to no longer live like a student. Lacey knew that what she needed was an amount of money that was appropriate to her rapidly evolving taste. This need repainted moral issues that were formerly black-and-white into a vague gray."
A tint of intrigue runs through the novel as Lacey considers how much integrity distinguishes a reputable dealer from a wheeler-dealer. Martin's portrayal of Lacey's conscience is sensitive and moving, and works well on a small scale, but he has trouble keeping the element of corruption in focus across the whole novel. A plot line involving the infamous Vermeer theft at the Stewart Gardner museum is a dead end, and in the final pages the whole story suddenly turns on another crime that we knew almost nothing about.
But those flaws are not likely to trouble you as you move through this graceful novel. If Martin isn't a talented art critic himself, he does a convincing imitation of one. Insightful but modest, sophisticated but deeply skeptical of po-mo gobbledygook, he offers engaging commentary on Milton Avery, Picasso, Warhol and many others. Along the way, he provides a thoroughly enjoyable analysis of the current art market, the distortions of new money flowing from the Middle East and the effect of wealthy baby boomers turning from modern to contemporary objects. "New galleries sprouted in Chelsea overnight," he notes, "lacking only fungi domes."
Given Martin's capacity for zaniness, the subtlety of his fiction is always something of a surprise, particularly in this case when the claptrap of so much contemporary art makes a ripe subject for comedy. There's certainly humor in "An Object of Beauty," but Martin doesn't waste much powder on the easy targets. He offers some light, smart satire of wealthy collectors, who are sometimes savvy, sometimes crass, scanning the market for works that other collections might, inexplicably, consider valuable someday. And he provides an alluring depiction of the way galleries, curators and collectors try to manipulate the fickle market of taste. "It was impossible to know if this new art was good, because, mostly, good art had been defined by its endurance over time," he observes. "The sheer amount of it -- to the dismay of cranky critics -- was redefining what art could be. Since the 1970s, art schools shied away from teaching skills and concentrated on teaching thought. ... Diversity bounced around like spilled marbles on concrete."
Surely, Martin's popular appeal will help "An Object of Beauty" sell better than "By Nightfall," Michael Cunningham's more sophisticated but more peculiar story about art and desire published last month. And it doesn't hurt that Martin's novel also sports a beautiful design (take that, e-books!). Bound on bright white paper, with splashy red endpapers, the text is enriched by more than 20 color reproductions of the artworks that catch Lacey's attention, from Maxfield Parrish's "Daybreak" to Richard Serra's "Betwixt the Torus and the Sphere." They make lovely, helpful enhancements to Martin's always engaging discussion of these pieces, and how wonderful it is to see a mainstream publisher that knows a book can still be an object of beauty itself.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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TAKE ONE CANDLE LIGHT A ROOM
Susan Straight
Pantheon
ISBN 978-0307379146
320 pages
$25.95
Reviewed by Wendy Smith. Wendy Smith, a contributing editor at the American Scholar, frequently reviews books for The Washington Post.
Americans don't generally deal well with the fraught subjects of race and class, often reduced in our public discourse to slogans and platitudes. But in six novels, including the 2001 National Book Award finalist "Highwire Moon," Susan Straight has made it her literary mission to add nuance and empathy to the discussion. Exploring the lives of African-Americans and undocumented immigrants, she doesn't airbrush the crime and substance abuse endemic in impoverished communities, but she reminds us that these are communities, anchored in family ties and filled with hardworking, law-abiding people who understand all too well why some in their midst succumb to destructive despair. Straight's new book examines the nature of community itself, revealing its strength and limitations through the odyssey of a woman with her feet uneasily planted in two worlds.
Fantine Antoine comes from Sarrat, a tiny Southern California enclave built by her father as a refuge from racial violence.
In 1958, Fantine's mother and four other 16-year-old girls were sent west from their hometown because a white man had raped three of them and boasted he would get the other two. Things hadn't changed that much in rural Louisiana since Fantine's enslaved ancestor Marie-Therese was given by her owner as a sexual favor to a white man whose child she then bore (a tale related by Straight in "A Million Nightingales"). "It was my mother who told me the story," says Fantine, "so that I would stay home, safe, and never trust the outside world, or the white people in that world."
Instead, Fantine went to college and remade herself as FX Antoine, a successful travel writer who takes sardonic amusement in her professional contacts' attempts to guess the origins of her taupe skin and wavy hair. Pushing 40 when her narrative begins in late August 2005, FX is the classic, self-invented American. She lives in a trendy Los Angeles neighborhood, her apartment decorated with mementos from far-flung assignments. Her best friend is a gay white photographer, himself from a blue-collar background, who understands why FX seldom makes the 62-mile drive to Sarrat. Like her, he has rejected the guiding principle of a fiercely protective, self-enclosed clan that believes the only important things in life are "the fire -- the table -- the tribe. There was nothing else outside the circle that mattered."
Straight poignantly evokes the mixed emotions of someone who has seized the opportunity to move outside that home circle.
For her mother, Fantine admits, "my absence was almost as unforgivable as drug addiction or imprisonment." Within her family, good girls, such as her sister-in-law Clarette, become correctional officers; lost girls like her childhood friend Glorette become crackheads and get killed. No one in Sarrat reads the glossy magazines that publish FX; her accomplishments are unknown to them. But leaving behind her past means that her true self is unknown to those who know only FX. "I was floating. I was invisible," she thinks.
That isn't possible for her godson Victor, Glorette's son. He's a bright kid, eager for the intellectual pleasures and the wider world that lured FX away from her tribe; he's done well in community college, and FX is urging him to apply to four-year schools. But he doesn't have his godmother's racially indeterminate skin and hair. When members of the privileged world Victor wants to enter see him with his drug-dealing friends, they see only threatening black men. The restrictions imposed by race and class are intertwined but not the same; accents can be suppressed, clothes can be upscaled, but color is a marker for life.
When Victor's friends involve him in a murder, the three flee to Louisiana, and Fantine follows with her father. Their journey becomes a voyage into the past, all the way back to Plaquemines Parish at the mouth of the Mississippi, site of the plantation where Marie-Therese labored. As they frantically search for Victor, Hurricane Katrina guts Louisiana -- capping a plot rife with shootings and revelations of past violence that occasionally seem designed to make a political point.
Straight's lapses into didactic melodrama are redeemed, however, by her textured portrait of the African-American experience and her brilliantly specific language. The voices here ring absolutely true, from the stoic, French-inflected cadences of Fantine's father to the gangsta-wannabe lingo and Victor's recital of lyrics from "Baba O'Riley" that capture his conflicted soul. Meaning comes from the sound and weight of words as well as their content.
And words echo down the centuries, like the phrase reiterated throughout "A Million Nightingales" that gives this novel its title. "Take one candle light a room" was Marie-Therese's defiant affirmation that her daughter, conceived from rape, brightened her enslaved existence. Here it becomes a mandate for Fantine, who finally sees her way clear to honoring her family's history while shining a light toward a different future for herself and her godson. Layering the rich particulars of African-American life into a classic tale of individual desires straining against collective constraints, Straight adds another complex, compassionate achievement to her distinguished body of work.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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