Washington Post Book Reviews
For You
Thursday February 24, 2011
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The Matchmaker of Kenmare
Frank Delaney
$26
ISBN NA
$26
Reviewed by Yvonne Zipp
It's almost upon us: the most romantic day of the year -- or the biggest con job since P.T. Barnum, depending on your view of Feb. 14. (Still, some of us will accept any excuse to eat chocolate.) It's also the season for love stories, poems and cards dripping glitter and sentiment. While these five novels might sound like the equivalent of a heart-shaped box, they are more for those who like their candy spiked with cayenne pepper. There isn't a conventional romance in the bunch. In fact, I defy Hallmark to create a greeting card to cover some of these scenarios.
4. As readers of Frank Delaney's earlier books know, Ben MacCarthy is a member of the Irish Folklore Commission (a job that must come with extremely flexible hours and unbelievably high pay). As "The Matchmaker of Kenmare" (Random House, $26) opens, Ben's pregnant wife has been kidnapped and may be dead. Despite the missing spouse, he becomes fascinated by Kate Begley, a matchmaker with an endless supply of platitudes. When Kate spots a handsome American soldier and decides to make a match for herself, she drags Ben with her into an espionage caper in order to land her mate. Then Capt. Charles Miller goes missing in action, and Kate and the unwilling Ben set off behind enemy lines to find him. This shaggy dog story -- seriously, it's practically a puli -- jumps from Europe to America, involving fat men and giraffes before both characters' searches are over. Those who haven't read "Venetia Kelly's Traveling Show" are going to be befuddled by the missing-wife plot (frankly, even if you have, it's frustrating), which gets shoved aside until an unsatisfactory wrap-up near the end.
Yvonne Zipp regularly reviews books for the Christian Science Monitor.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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The Lover's Dictionary
David Levithan
Farrar Straus Giroux
ISBN NA
$18
Reviewed by Yvonne Zipp
It's almost upon us: the most romantic day of the year -- or the biggest con job since P.T. Barnum, depending on your view of Feb. 14. (Still, some of us will accept any excuse to eat chocolate.) It's also the season for love stories, poems and cards dripping glitter and sentiment. While these five novels might sound like the equivalent of a heart-shaped box, they are more for those who like their candy spiked with cayenne pepper. There isn't a conventional romance in the bunch. In fact, I defy Hallmark to create a greeting card to cover some of these scenarios.
5. David Levithan, co-author of "Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist," throws out plot entirely in "The Lover's Dictionary" (Farrar Straus Giroux, $18), which is written alphabetically rather than chronologically. A bookish young man explains his two-year relationship with a hard-partying girl by defining words that apply to it. Take "exacerbate, v.": "I believe your exact words were: 'You're getting too emotional,'" or "fledgling, adj.": "Part of the reason I preferred reading to sex was that I at least knew I could read well." Despite the occasional sappy entry, such as "ardent" and "ethereal," Levithan creates a genuine emotional arc for his unnamed characters that makes this book much more than a gimmick.
Yvonne Zipp regularly reviews books for the Christian Science Monitor.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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ENDGAME: Bobby Fischer's Remarkable Rise and Fall -- from America's Brightest Prodigy to the Edge of Madness 
Frank Brady
Crown
ISBN 978-0307463906
402 pages
$25.99
Reviewed by Michael Dirda, who reviews books for The Washington Post every Thursday. Visit his online book discussion at washingtonpost.com/readingroom.
Geniuses are thick on the ground -- just ask the MacArthur Foundation, which chooses a couple of dozen new ones each year. Any field, after all, has its divas, maestros, "chers maitres" and award-winners. Every so often, though, truly original, almost mutant talents appear, of such power and strangeness that they shake up all our assumptions and leave us dumbstruck. The actor Marlon Brando, the singer Maria Callas or the pianist Glenn Gould aren't just electrifying, they're deeply polarizing. Love them or hate them, they seem touched by the gods -- and sometimes by madness.
Of recent sacred monsters, none is so fascinating and disturbing as Bobby Fischer (1943-2008), arguably the greatest chess player of all time. Even people who can't tell a pawn from a rook have heard of Fischer's prodigious genius at the chessboard and perhaps a little of his strange, final years. Happily, Frank Brady's superlative "Endgame" is a biography more than worthy of its charismatic subject. The first half might be likened to an imperial triumph, as the young Fischer progresses toward the world championship of chess; the second half, equally enthralling, depicts what is the human equivalent of a slow-motion train wreck.
As a teenager, Brady -- now the president of New York's Marshall Chess Club -- met the very young Bobby Fischer and, he tells us, "Over the years we played hundreds of games together, dined in Greenwich Village restaurants, traveled to tournaments, attended dinner parties, and walked the streets of Manhattan for hours on end." Brady thus understands the world of serious chess and brings it to vivid life for the reader. But he doesn't shirk his much harder task: tracking how this Mozart of the chessboard gradually grew into a heavily bearded anti-Semite and anti-American. When Fischer died at age 64, he had passed the previous three decades living on the edge of homelessness in California, Hungary, Japan and Iceland. During all those years, apart from one money match in Yugoslavia, he refused to play chess in public, let alone defend his title. Brady's biography reveals the human tragedy behind that repudiation.
As is well known, chess is a game that rewards Talmudic-like study of its stratagems and intricacies. Yet few have ever been quite so single-minded about it as this young Brooklynite, a child of uncertain paternity raised in poverty by a Jewish single mother. When Fischer had just turned 6, his older sister Joan bought him a cheap chess set, and together they studied the enclosed page of instructions on how to play the game. By the time he was 13, in a matchup against former U.S. Open champion Donald Byrne, Bobby Fischer was playing so brilliantly that he could deliberately sacrifice a queen -- the most powerful figure on the board -- to engineer a seemingly inconceivable but absolutely inexorable march toward checkmate. In the annals of chess, Fischer vs. Byrne has been studied and restudied as "the game of the century."
For 20 years, Bobby Fischer was the cynosure of the chess world -- and frequently his own worst enemy. At tournaments, he regularly complained about lights and cameras, the collusion of his Soviet opponents, the size of the chessboard and its pieces, and even the black, staring eyes of international grandmaster Mikhail Botvinnik. He could be petulant and rude, worse than any rock star or prima donna, and if he didn't get his way, he would take his chess set and go home. Or not show up at all. The negotiations required to persuade him to travel to Iceland to confront Boris Spassky for the 1972 world championship involved months of wrangling. Having been poor in his youth, Fischer instinctively wanted the largest possible purse. Eventually Henry Kissinger, no less, wrote and urged him to soften his demands, and Richard Nixon promised to invite him to the White House after the tournament. (He didn't.)
Following his triumph over Spassky, the new world chess champion and high school dropout began to devote himself to the obsessive study of religion, strongly supporting Herbert W. Armstrong's radio ministry and intently studying its prophetic newsletter, the Plain Truth. But after growing disillusioned with Armstrong's Worldwide Church of God, Fischer -- already convinced that the Russians had secretly schemed to thwart his chess victories -- gravitated to conspiracy tracts like the anti-Semitic "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" and pamphlets that "proved" that the Holocaust never took place. At the same time, he grew more introspective and isolated, stopped shaving and cast aside his expensive bespoke suits in favor of denim work clothes.
From time to time, Fischer would instinctively reach out for love, and he finally found a devoted companion in Miyoko Watai, whom he had met in Japan. But in almost every other case he would eventually turn on those who had helped him, cut off all relations and refer to them as traitors. In one shocking interview he went so far as to celebrate the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, gladdened that corrupt America had finally begun to receive what it deserved. In 2004, following imprisonment in Japan for having a non-valid passport, Fischer found sanctuary in Iceland, which still honored him for the world attention he had brought to the country. There he lived quietly, spending much of his time reading in a used bookshop. When he grew ill with a urinary tract blockage, he refused to undergo surgery or take any medicine. He died Jan. 17, 2008.
Frank Brady's triumph in "Endgame" is to make both halves of this unique life equally fascinating. Up to the 1972 world championship, Fischer lives and breathes chess but he is still recognizably normal: As a boy he loves baseball, as a young man he swims regularly and plays excellent tennis. Yet Fischer, like others less gifted before him and since, gradually began to take the world's adulation as his due. Still, why he descended into the paranoia and fanaticism of his later years remains something of a mystery. He was, clearly, never a person who could do anything by halves. That obsessive-compulsiveness obviously helped him to chess immortality. The second half of his life, however, is one of the saddest of stories, even as this is one of the best biographies of the year.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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THE EVOLUTION OF BRUNO LITTLEMORE
Benjamin Hale
Twelve
ISBN NA
578 pages
$25.99
Reviewed by Ron Charles, who is The Washington Post's fiction editor. He can be reached at charlesr(at symbol)washpost.com.
These are hairy times for fans of simian fiction. The autobiography of Tarzan's sidekick, "Me Cheeta," was mildly amusing, but Sara Gruen's silly "Ape House" left me dragging my knuckles on the floor, and Laurence Gonzales' "Lucy" read like something thrown out between the bars. Now, though, we've finally got a book to screech and howl about. Benjamin Hale's audacious first novel, "The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore," is a tragicomedy that makes you want to jump up on the furniture and beat your chest.
Swinging through the absurd tale of a talking chimpanzee, Hale wraps his prehensile wit around humanity's deepest philosophical questions. From the magic of consciousness to the reifying function of language, the value of art and the morality of science, "The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore" is a brilliant, unruly brute of a book -- the kind of thing Richard Powers might write while pumped up on laughing gas. (Even Bruno's name will send you snorting to the dictionary; it stands for "Behavioral Rearing in Ultroneous Noumenal Ontogensis.") When the novel's antics aren't making you giggle, its pathos is making you cry, and its existential predicament is always making you think. No trip to the zoo, western Africa or even the mirror will ever be the same.
For all its concentration on the mechanics of scientific research, "The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore" doesn't raise as many questions about the possibility of animal consciousness as it does about the possibility of human consciousness. The loquacious narrator, Bruno, leapfrogs over anything Koko ever managed to pound out on his little keyboard. "I was an unusual case," he admits. "Being a scientific anomaly is such a burden." Taken from the Lincoln Park Zoo to a laboratory at the University of Chicago, young Bruno first impressed the scientists when he was offered a piece of fruit in a cognition test. "Did I dare to eat a peach?" he asks with a nod to T.S. Eliot and Genesis. "Indeed I did. In this way I fell from my state of innocence."
Driven by the "very human desire for philosophical immortality," Bruno recites his life story to a young researcher, his "amanuensis," in a lab where he's being held for murder. "I can't say I blame them," he says, "for wanting to study me. I am interesting. Mine is an unusual case." What follows for hundreds (and hundreds!) of pages is the funny, sad and shocking tale of a stranger in our strange world, a place brought to account by an animal ashamed and proud of his own humanity. "Following your own example some several million years too late," he explains with his endearing grandiosity, "I climbed down from that tree to spend the rest of my life running from the yawning darkness of animal terror toward the light of fire stolen from the gods, and like you, I remain in a state of constant pursuit, never quite escaping the darkness, nor ever reaching the light."
Bruno doesn't know why he learns so quickly -- "My father never quite lost his touch of aboriginal uncouthness" -- but under the tutelage of an autistic janitor and a very liberal-minded cognitive psychologist named Lydia Littlemore, he emerges from his "prelapsarian nudity" and enters the world of conscious thought, "the awesome thaumaturgy of mere language." The miraculous transformation of awakening into words is a process few of us remember, but it's fraught with euphoria and despair, all of which Bruno conveys.
Hale, who grew up in Colorado and graduated from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, demonstrates an extraordinary intellectual range, and only his wacky sense of humor can keep Bruno from coming off as a hirsute boor. "Ostentation is my style," the chimp says by way of apology. Scrambling through the whole canon of Western culture, he identifies with all the anxious outsiders -- from Milton's Satan to Shakespeare's Caliban to Disney's Pinocchio -- those inhuman characters who dared to thrust themselves into existence by speaking and making us question the nature of our own humanity.
Linguistics may be the most interesting and prevalent theme of this novel, but its salacious subplot will attract more attention: "I'm sorry. It's true," Bruno says. "I am a deviant and depraved pervert: I have no desire to have sex with other chimps." In the late 1980s, a conflict with her research supervisor inspires Lydia Littlemore to take Bruno home with her, and soon the two of them are sleeping together -- "like Anna and Vronsky." (Didn't former congressman J.D. Hayworth warn us about such abominations?) Their love, which dare not speak its name, eventually inspires violent protests and sends Bruno running underground for much of the novel.
A romance between a scientist and her chimp sounds a lot creepier than it ever seems in the context of this story. Though candor sometimes encourages Bruno to "stray beyond the parameters of good taste," his interaction with Lydia is always convincingly portrayed as a loving, tender relationship. This is, of course, a squeamish subject some readers will not want to explore.
"Obviously there was a sense of some deep-seated and dangerous taboo that our relationship violated," Bruno admits, but what the novel really wants to consider, in its own bizarre, cerebral and comic way, is the essential nature of love. "When it came to sex," Bruno says, "I had to make the Buberian moral shift from I/it to I/thou." Hale is a ghostly presence in this story, crouching behind irony and slapstick and intellectual satire, but surely he's most sincere in moments like this, when he tries to awaken in us the moral imagination we claim animals don't possess. Aping Oscar Wilde, Bruno quips, "I know that I am not fit to live in human society. But then again, who is?"
Yes, the book's too long, too in love with its own mock-serious voice. "I was an irrepressible chatterbox," Bruno confesses. "Do I digress? Very well, then, I digress. I am large, I contain multitudes." There's something peevish about asking an ape who can quote Whitman to wrap things up, but certain themes get pounded on, and Bruno's episodic adventures across the United States sometimes have the feel of a first-time author embarking on the trip of a lifetime and determined to cram everything into his van. Around page 500, Bruno pleads, "There's too much to say!" But just when you want to stuff this chimp back in his cage, he comes up with some unforgettable new adventure, like his off-off-Broadway production of "The Tempest" that's absolutely transporting. So let Bruno run free. He's got a lot to tell us, and we've got a lot to learn.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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