Washington Post Book Reviews
For You
Friday March 11, 2011
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I THINK I LOVE YOU
Allison Pearson
Knopf
ISBN 978-1400042357
331 pages
$24.95
Reviewed by Elinor Lipman, whose latest novel, her ninth, is "The Family Man"
It is 1974, and 13-year-old Petra Williams of South Wales is worshipfully in love with far-off pop idol David Cassidy. Along with her kindest friend, Sharon, beneath posters of their androgynous heartthrob, they devour every adjective, every investigative nugget (favourite colour: brown; favourite qualities in future wife: no flannel pyjamas), as reported in the Essential David Cassidy Magazine.
Petra is not a silly teen. She plays the cello and dresses modestly under the constraints imposed by a dragon of a German mother from whom all crushes, puerile friends and popular music must be hidden. Even with a sweet, docile dad on site, it is not a happy life. Though smarter and more sympathetic than anyone else in her circle, Petra craves approval and popularity, requiring her to negotiate the narrow straits between mean girls and her mother's disdain for almost everything.
Petra explains, "To improve your image, you made yourself more stupid and less kind. ... Now among friends, you were often lonelier than you had been before. ... The only thing that made it bearable was reading the David mags I kept under the floorboard by my bed and listening to the Top 40 in a cave beneath the sheets."
Allison Pearson's second novel, after her best-selling "I Don't Know How She Does It," depends heavily on readers' identifying with celebrity infatuations. David Cassidy as a thematic touchstone is a brave narrative undertaking, and readers with a history of similar intensities will be at a distinct advantage. Pearson renders teenagedom with authenticity and poignancy. Thus, when the story stalls, it's not the fault of the writing, but of the selecting. There is much reported -- past, present and future -- but not all of it is helpful to the novel's momentum.
Chapters alternate between Petra's story and that of an unhappy journalist, Bill Finn, 11 months out of university, whose new job is -- to his mortification -- ghostwriting, i.e., fabricating, all that is in the mind and heart of David Cassidy for the fans. Petra and Bill cross paths at a mobbed Cassidy concert, which turns into a literal crush of humanity. (True story: On May 26, 1974, hundreds of Cassidy fans were treated for hysteria or injury, and a 14-year-old died.) To get there, Petra has sneaked away after telling her mother she was taking the train to London to hear Handel's "Messiah." In what later will be seen as fate and kismet, Bill helps the nearly crushed Petra, supplying overdue evidence that he has, contrary to previous dialogue and exposition, a heart.
A very important plot point in Part 1: Cassidy scholars Sharon and Petra devote themselves to researching and answering "The Ultimate David Cassidy Quiz" published in the Essential D.C. mag, in hopes of outscoring the competition. To the winners go a trip to L.A. to meet David Bruce Cassidy himself, sponsored by Bill's magazine. How did Petra and Sharon fare? Time goes by. The topic is dropped, appropriately and effectively, at least for now.
The second half of the novel brings a welcome jump to 1998. Petra is newly divorced and heartbroken, a professional cellist turned musical therapist, mother of a teenage girl. Bill now heads the print empire that acquired his old magazine. Happily, the discovery of a lost letter (its content not to be divulged here) answers the question: What is the arc of our story, and where are we headed?
Lovely writing and acute insights appear throughout "I Think I Love You," but they are outnumbered by scenes that not only don't drive the story forward but also digress from the star-crossedness of Petra's and Bill's fates. There are philosophizings that are on point and philosophizings that are asides. ("With love itself, the true love of legend, the opposite was true; as it grew, you could no longer imagine yourself without it. The love made you.")
What has Petra learned from her Cassidy-immersion phase? '"You made the aura, not him,' Bill explains. 'That was your job, back in 1974. I did the fake version on the magazine, but you did the real thing. You told a story to yourself, about a boy you all loved, and you did it so brilliantly, with all your heart, that it didn't matter whether it came true. It just felt true.'"
Fond though I am of happy endings, this one could've used a little more elegance and a lot fewer lyrics from Cassidy gold records. ("Dear Petra, How can I be sure, in a world that's constantly changing, where I stand with you.")
For better or for worse, Pearson provides an afterword, a real-life interview from 2004 with Cassidy, then 53. "Fan heaven," she reports. "I realized I could bear just about any kind of awkwardness, embarrassment or disappointment, but I never, ever wanted to feel sorry for the man who once bestrode my world like a colossus in a white catsuit trimmed with silver studs."
A transcript of their Q&A follows. Such moments of fan bliss include, "OK, as I once screamed at you, David Cassidy, it's only fair that you should scream at me." Et cetera, painfully.
Pearson's reportage leads a reader to understand that she proudly shares DNA with Petra, that life offers second chances and that old crushes die hard.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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THE COLLABORATOR
Gerald Seymour
Overlook
ISBN 978-0340918876
474 pages
$25.95
Reviewed by Patrick Anderson, who regularly reviews thrillers and mysteries for The Washington Post
Immacolata Borelli, the quasi-heroine of Gerald Seymour's powerful new novel, is 25, tough, gorgeous and exceedingly spoiled. She's spoiled because she's the beloved daughter of the leaders of one of Naples' most powerful and ruthless crime families.
When we meet her, however, she's in London, and the family has problems. She's there to baby-sit her brother, who's living under an assumed name because he faces murder charges in Italy, and also so she can study accounting, the better to help manage the family fortune. Her father, the head of the crime family that his parents started during World War II, is in prison. But, not to worry, Immacolata's mother, who makes Lady Macbeth took like Mary Poppins, is running the family business quite well, with the assistance of an assassin called Il Pistole, who modestly admits, "I have killed more than forty men. I do not know exactly how many men because it is not important to me."
One day, walking in a London park, Immacolata meets a nice young man named Eddie Deacon, a teacher of English, and soon is sharing his bed and fixing him excellent Italian meals. Then she receives word that her best friend back in Italy has died. Knowing no details, she catches the first plane and hurries to the cemetery, expecting to be greeted warmly by her friend's grieving family. Instead, they call her a whore, knock her to the ground, spit on her and furiously explain that their daughter died of leukemia caused by the toxic wastes that Immacolata's family had for years been dumping near their village, a sideline that earned them tens of millions of euros.
Traumatized by her friend's death and this hatred, Immacolata returns to London and reaches a fateful decision: Her family is evil, and she will bring them down by telling all she knows to Italian prosecutors. Her family will disown her, of course, and have her killed if they can penetrate the protection the authorities will give her, but she boldly returns to Italy to send her mother, brothers, grandparents and several of their hired guns to prison.
She leaves London without saying goodbye to Eddie, who has no idea that she's part of a crime family. The poor fool is in love, so naturally he hops a plane to Naples and hastens to the Forcella neighborhood that her family holds in its iron grip. It's a great come-into-my-parlor moment. The family takes him prisoner and sends word to the now-despised Immacolata that, unless she walks away from the prosecutors, they will begin sending her various parts of her lover's body.
By now, several questions have arisen: How much does Immacolata really care about hapless Eddie? Will the prospect of his torture and death, or anything else, dissuade her from her vengeance? If not, will the family find a way to kill her?
That's the plot of the novel, but no summary can suggest its depth and texture. Seymour is not one to cut corners. He does his research, thinks hard about his story and gives us richly imagined novels that bristle with authenticity. Very few thriller writers tell us as much about their characters. Beyond that, he gives us vividly detailed portraits of Naples' criminal underbelly, of the operations of a crime family, of how hostages can be rescued, of the corruption of the Italian police -- and of the honesty and courage of some police and prosecutors. We see crime families shooting down people in the street, confident that no one will testify against them. We're told of Immacolata's 88-year-old grandmother -- who began the family's rise to power by recruiting respectable but starving women to prostitute themselves to GIs in 1943 -- "She would have stood in line to slit the throat of Immacolata ... and would happily have used a blunt knife."
It feels like a realistic portrait of a side of Naples that tourists rarely see -- a city a priest calls "the centre of the western world's most successful criminal conspiracy" -- and it's not a pretty one. However, Seymour has seen six of his 25 previous novels filmed for television, and to lighten our spirits, he gives us the bittersweet love story of his fearsome Juliet and her naive (but increasingly brave) Romeo. Can the two of them survive in this stupendously violent world? Is there hope for a happily-ever-after ending? You'll have to read the book to find out, and if you enjoy old-fashioned stories that are long on characterizations and short on cuteness, you'll probably enjoy it.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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BEYOND THE CRASH: Overcoming the First Crisis of Globalization
Gordon Brown
Free Press
ISBN 978-1451624052
314 pages
$26
Reviewed by Anthony Faiola
For a brief, shining moment, the world stood together, and Gordon Brown was its voice. On an April afternoon in 2009, as global markets stared down the abyss and the specter of a second Great Depression loomed, the leaders of 20 major nations gathered in the backrooms of a London convention center to thrash out a salvation plan. Brown, then Britain's prime minister, strode to the podium before hundreds of international journalists to announce an ace in the hole, a $1-trillion pledge from world leaders to save the global economy.
Recounted with pride by Brown himself in "Beyond the Crash," this was the finest hour for a British politician whose moments of greatness are, rightly or wrongly, seen at home as few and far between. Mirroring Brown's political style, the book is impersonal and plodding. But it is a credit to his intellect that the book's significance withstands his dry, textbook-like account of the world's descent into financial crisis, the breaking of that fall and the prescriptions for avoiding a repeat.
Brown paints himself as an audacious protagonist in the bid to save Britain and the world from the jaws of financial ruin.
If he is stingy on behind-the-scenes color and gossipy revelation -- for prime ministers of Brown's ilk, what happens in G20 meetings stays in G20 meetings -- one cannot quibble about his central role in nudging a reluctant George W. Bush and rookie Barack Obama toward a global solution to the financial crisis.
This book excels most when Brown, used to being pilloried in the British press, grudgingly drops his defenses long enough to get personal. He tells, for instance, of pushing reluctant leaders toward that once unimaginable $1-trillion mark, inspiring them with the words of Britain's most cherished prime minister: "As we assembled for pre-dinner drinks, I repeated the words of Winston Churchill in the 1930s: we must ensure that we could never be criticized, as he criticized politicians then, for being 'resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity and all powerful for impotence.'" Brown's failure to deal credibly with his own gargantuan error in missing the credit bubble and the lending frenzy that precipitated the crisis -- he served as Britain's equivalent of treasury secretary from 1997 to 2007 -- is a critical flaw. He dismissively blames the bankers for having their heads in the sand, but the politicians and regulators charged with monitoring the economy were on that same beachhead. It is simply not enough to shrug and say, who knew?
In fairness, this is no memoir. Rather, the book blends a chronological account of the height of the crisis with an economic and political argument on where to go from here.
Much of the book is dedicated to calls for a "global New Deal" that could create jobs and usher in a more stable era of prosperity by rebalancing trade relationships, adjusting consumer-spending habits and forcing a new moral code on banks. This, he argues, must happen through sweeping global treaties.
Though students of the global economy will find no shocks in Brown's way forward, his arguments are forceful, occasionally persuasive, and laced with optimism. The United States must find a new path to competitiveness, investing in technology and education. Chinese consumers must spend more, and India must gradually open its hermetically sealed market.
Still, there is little here that other economists have not said first, and perhaps better. And it's frustrating that Brown only teases us, holding back the real goods. He dangles in front of us an illuminating dinner with Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, where the two men, along with Sonia Gandhi (daughter-in-law of former prime minister Indira Ghandhi) and others, discussed how to end poverty in India. But the inevitable insights from such an evening are never revealed. This reticence underscores the missed opportunities of a book that tells us a lot, but should tell us more.
Anthony Faiola is The Washington Post's London bureau chief. He can be reached at faiolaa(at symbol)washpost.com.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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TOWNIE: A Memoir
Andre Dubus III
Norton
ISBN 978-0393064667
387 pages
$25.95
Reviewed by David Laskin
If you've ever been harassed or hurt by a bully, if you've ever dreamed of revenge, if you've ever crossed the line from dreaming to hitting back and felt a rush of relief and joy as you punished your enemy, then you're going to find a lot that resonates and a lot that disturbs the hell out of you in Andre Dubus III's new memoir.
Best known for his 1999 novel, "House of Sand and Fog," Dubus grew up weak and small and poor and cowering in the rough mill towns north of Boston. His father, the much-loved short story writer Andre Dubus II, walked out on a young wife and family to pursue his craft and girlfriends, and from then on the four kids were basically on their own with the thugs, drug dealers and budding sadists that infested Newburyport and Haverhill. One April afternoon Dubus III, on the cusp of adolescence, decides he's had enough. He has just stood by helplessly while a hulking 20-year-old army-trained monster bloodied his brother's face and called his mother a whore. Retreating to the bathroom, he faces himself in the mirror, hates what he sees and vows to change it: "this kid with narrow shoulders and soft arm and chest muscles and no balls. ... I looked into his eyes: I don't care if you get your face beat in, I don't care if you get kicked in the head or stabbed or even shot, I will never allow you not to fight back ever again. You hear me?"
With fanatical resolve, the kid embarks on a Rocky-like program of weight-training and boxing and bulking up -- "methodically teaching myself how to hurt people" -- until he feels ready to put his new muscles and nerve to the test. When a bully in a bar insults his kid brother, Dubus clocks the guy and then gets tackled and roughed up. "That was it?" he muses, stunned but proud. "My entire boyhood I'd been unable to talk or move or resist out of fear of that? My head and ears were sore, so what.
I wanted to run back up there and try again. I wanted to set my feet and throw one into the big one's face."
Over the next hundred pages he throws plenty. A self-appointed avenger of female honor, Dubus comes out swinging and generally hospitalizes his opponents. Though not without twinges of remorse and self-doubt. "So who was I to do what I did?" he wonders after pulverizing some horny drunk who had the temerity to glance at his buddy's girlfriend's backside. "Didn't I look at women like that all the damn time?"
At some point in his mid-20s Dubus starts to worry that he has "somehow gotten myself wired wrong, that now I was stuck with impulses I could not control, ones that could lead to nothing but deeper and deeper trouble." His salvation comes, of course, from trading his fists for the pen. In a scene that's just a shade too pat, too cinematic, too carefully bookended with the adolescent-mirror moment, Dubus realizes that the secret of writing honestly is to quit studying himself and start inhabiting his characters: "Negative self-scrutiny was just another form of insincerity; I had to disappear altogether." If only writing honestly, whatever that means, were so easy.
"Townie" comes most alive when Dubus writes about his father. Dubus II was clearly a piece of work -- charismatic, needy, utterly unreliable, married and divorced three times, revered by fellow writers but never commercially successful, obsessed with guns, driven by demons he did not understand but managed to let loose on the page. In a passage that can't have been easy to write, Dubus III confesses to the "dark joy" he felt at revealing his sister's rape to his father -- "the one who should've been here all along, the one who should never have left us in the first place." Forgiveness never comes, but Dubus finds something else that binds him to his old man -- a current of shared respect, rivalry, hurt, pride and love that is all the more powerful for never being named.
The dark joy of violence is potent, volatile fuel for movies and stories. When deployed by masters of restraint like Bogie, Hemingway, Cormac McCarthy or Clint Eastwood, it can bring you to your feet. But in a sprawling, humorless memoir like this where the fights have no fated trigger or progression and the characters blur into types and personal revelations come wrapped in pop psychology, the repeated crack of fist on jaw can make you walk away shaking your head.
David Laskin is the author of "The Children's Blizzard" and "The Long Way Home."
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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