MYSTERIES: Edgar finalists for best novel

May 3, 2013

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Reviewed by Yvonne Zipp

Whowunit? We'll find out Thursday, when the Mystery Writers of America announce the 2013 Edgar Allan Poe Award winners at a gala banquet in New York. The awards, founded in 1946, honor the best mystery writing in fiction, nonfiction and television. One thing's for sure: The winning novel won't be a cozy. There are no sugar-laden recipes, needlework or twee doings in small villages among the seven best novel finalists, which range in hue from tar-sands black to abyss.

"All I Did Was Shoot My Man," by Walter Mosley (Riverhead). Leonid McGill, private investigator and former boxer, has tried hard to make up for his crooked ways. He just freed Zella Grisham, who served eight years for a $58 million heist she didn't commit. His efforts to help her would seem downright noble - if he hadn't set her up in the first place. But even though he's sure Zella is innocent, people connected to the robbery start turning up dead. Meanwhile, his wife is drinking too much, his oldest son just moved in with an ex-prostitute, his daughter is having an affair with a married man, and his youngest boy - who rivals McGill as a criminal genius, even though they aren't biologically related - is now working with his dad. Mosley, an O. Henry winner and PEN/America's Lifetime Achievement Award recipient, is in fine form in his fourth McGill mystery, a complicated tale of atonement and family.

"The Gods of Gotham," by Lyndsay Faye (Amy Einhorn). As the potato famine sends Irish immigrants fleeing to New York in 1845, former barman Timothy Wilde starts a second career as a "copper star," part of the city's first police force. (A fire wiped out his life's savings and left him disfigured, but his older brother, a politically connected morphine addict, got him the job.) One night, a girl covered in blood leads him to a mass grave of children. Faye employs flash (thieves' slang), crafty twists and superb period detail in her second historical thriller, which has won favorable comparisons to Caleb Carr's "The Alienist."

"Gone Girl," by Gillian Flynn (Crown). Wood might be traditional for a fifth-anniversary gift, but the Dunnes have gone with murder instead. This tale of a marriage gone very, very wrong was a runaway critical and commercial success in 2012. Selling more than 2 million copies and landing on multiple best-of-the-year lists, the tale of a hapless liar who may have killed his perfectionist wife was long-listed for the Women's Prize for Fiction and is slated to be turned into a movie produced by Reese Witherspoon. Fans of unreliable narrators, rejoice: You can't believe anything either spouse tells you in Flynn's acid-inked pages.

"Live by Night," by Dennis Lehane (Morrow). A Boston cop's son winds up a gangster in Lehane's Prohibition-era novel, a follow-up to "The Given Day" (2008). Twenty-year-old Joe Coughlin commits two sins, either one of which could prove fatal: First, he robs gangster Albert White, then he steals his girlfriend. After a bank robbery goes south, Coughlin winds up in a Charleston prison, where another crime boss takes him under his wing. Oscar winner Ben Affleck, who adapted Lehane's "Gone, Baby, Gone," is set to direct and star in the movie version. Lehane, a multiple-award-winning writer, already has an Edgar on his shelf, shared for HBO's "The Wire."

"The Lost Ones," by Ace Atkins (Putnam). Former Army Ranger Quinn Colson, now sheriff of Tibbehah County, Miss., finds himself mixed up in cases involving trafficked babies, stolen army rifles, Mexican drug gangs and a not-terribly-bright high school buddy. Atkins - whose first Colson novel, "The Ranger," also was nominated for an Edgar - interspersesthe investigations with haunting episodes from the sheriff's childhood. Despite one dead child, the feds seem more concerned with finding the guns than the kids, leaving Colson and his deputy to locate the children before their "caregivers" decide it's easier to just cut their losses.

"Potboiler," by Jesse Kellerman (Putnam). The lightest of this year's finalists takes thriller writing and stands it on its head while making goofy faces. After a best-selling thriller writer is lost at sea, Art Pfefferkorn, a one-book has-been, steals a manuscript from his oldest friend's office and passes it off as its own. That sets off a darkly hilarious chain of events that gets Pfefferkorn - the unlikeliest secret agent since "Chuck" - embroiled in international schemes, high-stakes rescues and multiple double crosses. There's also epic poetry writing and plenty of root vegetables.

"Sunset," by Al Lamanda (Five Star). Former police officer John Bekker finds salvation from a most unlikely source: the mob boss he thought had had his wife raped and murdered in front of their 5-year-old daughter. A decade later, the girl has never spoken again, and Bekker is a drunken shell living in a trailer. The mobster, now dying of cancer after his own wife is murdered, forcibly detoxes Bekker and hires him to discover the truth.

Zipp reviews books for The Washington Post and the Christian Science Monitor.

Copyright 2013 Washington Post Writers Group

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SAUL BELLOW'S HEART: A Son's Memoir

May 3, 2013

Greg Bellow
Bloomsbury
ISBN 978-1608199952
228 pages
$26

Reviewed by Jonathan Yardley

Eight years ago, when Saul Bellow died, I wrote an obituary tribute about him for this newspaper in which I ranked him with some of his most notable contemporaries - among them Ralph Ellison, Eudora Welty and Peter Taylor - and said that they were "big writers (even those who mainly wrote short stories) with big ambitions, men and women who weren't afraid to take chances, who looked out at the world instead of into the mirror." But this book by Bellow's son Gregory, the first of his four children (each by a different marriage), convinces me otherwise: not that Bellow's work wasn't "big," which it certainly was, but that it was always rooted in what can only be called extreme self-absorption, if not outright narcissism.

One of those to whom I compared him was Bernard Malamud. Greg Bellow tells us toward the end of this memoir of his father that he spoke with Janna Malamud Smith in the course of writing it, because he respects her own memoir of her father - "My Father Was a Book" (2006) - as well he should. Both are offspring of fathers who contributed a great deal to American literature but were, as writers tend to be, somewhat less successful as parents. "Saul Bellow's Heart" is the testimony of a son who loved his father but was in effect deserted by him over much of their shared lifetimes, who treasured his memories of their father-son relationship when both were young but in time came to resent - with ample reason, in my view - those "dozens of self-appointed sons and daughters" who attached themselves to the world-famous, post-Nobel Prize Bellow.

Gregory Bellow, now in his late 60s, took up the study of psychoanalysis and eventually made a good career for himself as a psychotherapist specializing in children's behavior and problems at the Sanville Institute for Clinical Social Work in California, from which he is now semi-retired. He readily acknowledges that his interest in the field grew out of his childhood, a complicated one indeed with his father's five marriages and total absorption in his writing. He has tried to be both honest about and fair to his father in "Saul Bellow's Heart" and has largely succeeded, but he also acknowledges that there are things in this book that his father would not like, chief among them perhaps that he subjects Saul Bellow to precisely the kind of close scrutiny to which Saul subjected the real men and women who became fictional characters in his work.

"Saul certainly wrote in the heat of anger after his second and third divorces," Gregory writes. "And, to the chagrin of many, his published work gave him the last word. ... But I remain convinced that his novels were not simply or primarily written to get even with those who hurt him because were that the case, Saul Bellow would never have become the great writer that he was." Still:

"That is not to say that Saul's firm line between life and art is not open to serious question. He crossed it freely in novel after novel while attacking anyone who asserted that he had done so. Such literary license can and often does bleed into blatant thievery. And stealing someone's personhood is not a victimless crime. To the contrary, it is a crime whose victims simply have no voice. It is not - as I recently heard Benjamin Taylor, editor of my father's recently published letters, assert - an honor to be immortalized in a great work of art."

Certainly it is no honor to be thus immortalized if the portrait drawn from one's role in the author's life is unfair or vindictive; poor Sasha and Susan, wives No. Two and Three, who took their lumps, and lucky Gregory, that he never found himself portrayed, or characterized, in any of his father's books. In fiction as in life, Bellow could be especially hard on women, whom he valued for sexual favors and the "deeply maternal forms of love" that his mother had given him but that he ultimately found lacking in all his wives except the last, Janis Freedman. He trusted and respected Harriet Wasserman, who was his agent for many years until he unceremoniously booted her for what he seemed to see as a better offer, and the lasting influence of his mother cannot be overestimated, but he "had little sympathy with feminist ideas, the increasing presence of women in academia, or prominent women writers." In part this reflected the bitterness that was engendered in him by the various social, cultural, sexual and political excesses of the 1960s and later, but it was also just plain good old-fashioned male chauvinist piggery.

Still, "Saul Bellow's Heart" is written with love mixed with vexation and frustration rather than with anger or resentment. His father was "a man who took such pains to protect what Saul called his 'inner life,'" who "surrounded his heart with a thicket that I was able to penetrate from time to time, though it remained difficult for both of us to fathom." Some of Saul's most important characters "suffer from an inability to give and take love freely"; Gregory believes "that to have been Saul's greatest personal flaw," and he senses that Saul both knew this and agreed. Certainly as he grew older and more famous, the thicket or carapace around his head grew ever more dense. His son believes that there actually were two Sauls, "young Saul" and "old Saul," and he has written this book primarily to acquaint us with young Saul.

Both young and old Saul were "always easily angered, prone to argument, acutely sensitive, and palpably vulnerable to criticism," but young Saul was also "emotionally accessible, often soft, and possessed of the ability to laugh at the world's folly and at himself. ... Saul's accessibility and lightheartedness waned as he aged. His social views hardened, although he was, fundamentally, no less vulnerable." Thus we have this memoir, which seeks to give "equal weight" to the well-known old Saul and the little-known young Saul, little-known not merely to the public but within the Bellow family and especially to Gregory's two younger brothers, Adam and Dan, who scarcely knew young Saul at all. The change can be traced in the novels:

"During the twelve-year span that began with the 1964 publication of 'Herzog' and ended with the awarding of the Nobel Prize, the idealistic 'young Saul' became the pessimistic 'old Saul.' I cannot fully explain the changes that were brewing in my father. 'Mr. Sammler's Planet' hints at how the political tumult of the late sixties affected Saul, and 'Humboldt's Gift' addresses the downsides of the fame and fortune that reached a crescendo in Stockholm. From my viewpoint it was during these pivotal years that the optimism and hope I loved and admired in 'young Saul' were buried under pessimism, anger, bitterness, intolerance, and preoccupations with evil and with his death, which lasted for the rest of his life."

Doubtless the reader has deduced from this that while Saul retreated from, even repudiated, his youthful leftist opinions, Gregory remains faithful to them. Though he does not use the word "betrayed," this is plainly how he feels with regard to his father's later political views. Yet it is odd that a practitioner of the craft of psychotherapy should be so intolerant of his own father's midlife change of course. Gregory Bellow seems unable fully to separate the personal and the political, and thus lays a heavier burden of guilt on his father than is really deserved. He can fault him for many things - long periods of neglect, utter faithlessness to all his wives except perhaps the last, self-absorption so intense as to render even those closest to him irrelevant - but supporting the Vietnam War and falling for neoconservatism really shouldn't matter so much as they clearly do to Gregory Bellow. As a result there are too many times when "Saul Bellow's Heart" seems not so much the love song it was intended to be as a complaint of ideological faithlessness.

Jonathan Yardley can be reached at yardleyj@washpost.com.

Copyright 2013 Washington Post Writers Group

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THE FAMOUS AND THE DEAD

May 1, 2013

T. Jefferson Parker
Dutton
ISBN 978-0525953173
37184 pages
$26.95

Reviewed by Patrick Anderson, who regularly reviews mysteries and thrillers for The Washington Post Book World.

Have you ever suspected that devils walk among us, insidious creatures who pretend to be as benevolent as you or I, but who in truth exist to inject chaos into our world? I cannot doubt that such demons exist. At least one now sits on our Supreme Court, another was our president not so long ago, and countless others scurry about our fair city legislating and lobbying for their nefarious agendas. Of course, you and I may not agree on which ones are the devils; thus do they cloud our minds, or at least yours.

These reflections are inspired by T. Jefferson Parker's new novel, "The Famous and the Dead," which features numerous devils in its cast of characters, along with the thugs, drug lords and crooked cops who are native to the genre. Parker, the winner of three Edgar awards for crime fiction, again delivers a tale that is not only well-plotted and suspenseful but also subtle, surprising and endearingly perverse.

This is the sixth and last of his novels about the Los Angeles County lawman Charlie Hood. In the first book, "L.A. Outlaws," Charlie fell in love with a gorgeous schoolteacher who had a secret life as a latter-day Robin Hood. She died at the end of the story, whereupon Charlie befriended her troubled teenage son, Bradley, who in time became a lawman. In this novel, 22-year-old Bradley is a corrupt cop who has made a fortune helping Mexican drug lords smuggle their goods into the United States.

Honest Charlie, meanwhile, has been assigned to the Bureau of Alcohol, Firearms, Tobacco and Explosives. He's now in San Diego, pursuing some Kentucky lowlifes who came to California to deal in guns and soon advanced to selling Stinger missiles to the Mexican cartels. Charlie becomes the scapegoat of a "Fast and Furious"-style scandal in which a thousand automatic weapons reach Mexico, and one of them is used to assassinate a U.S. congressman.

All this, though expertly told, is the conventional part of the novel. The more interesting part, underlying everything else, concerns devils and angels. The chief devil, who has figured in the earlier Hood novels, is Mike Finnegan, a short, stout, powerful man with red hair and freckled hands who purports to deal in bathroom products but in fact deals in souls, although he would say he simply enters into partnerships. He wants to make Bradley his partner, but even more he wants to seize control of Bradley's unborn son. Bradley, for all his sins, loves his wife and child and struggles to save them from Mike.

Mike has many irons in the fire. He corrupted the government of an entire California town, because that's what devils do and politicians are such easy prey. As Mike explains it, he and his fellow devils are much like those Milton presented, far more solemnly, in "Paradise Lost." That is, they claim to be in rebellion against a dictatorial God in order to bring freedom to humankind.

"We who work for the Prince know that our best tool is chaos," he explains, "but our goal for you is not chaos at all, but choice." Asked whether he's a devil, Mike replies: "We rarely use that word, but yes. I'm one of many. And there are angels, too, and they have us outnumbered roughly ten to one."

We meet an angel named Beatrice, whom Mike has kept prisoner for 96 years at the bottom of a mine shaft (she's been praying a lot), but whom Bradley rescues. Beatrice is a sweetheart once she's regained her strength - 96 years in a mine shaft is hard even on an angel - and she gladly adds her angelic powers to Charlie's campaign to put Mike out of business.

Parker has plenty of fun with this story, but he's serious, too. Where is the line between flesh-and-blood criminality and evil of supernatural origin? He complicates the debate by having Charlie's wife, a doctor who's an atheist, reject all talk of heaven and hell: "These are stories we've told ourselves to answer the fear and mysteries of death."

It's an old question: Can we sinners offer that beloved defense, "The devil made me do it"? Or are some of us simply born no damn good? The debate rages on, but Parker lets the angels triumph, at least for a while.

Copyright 2013 Washington Post Writers Group

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THE DISPENSABLE NATION: American Foreign Policy in Retreat

May 3, 2013

Vali Nasr
Doubleday
ISBN 978-0385536479
300 pages
$28.95

Reviewed by Warren I. Cohen

Vali Nasr - dean of the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins, a Middle East specialist and an acolyte of Richard Holbrooke -- has always believed that the Middle East is the center of the world. He recently discovered to his dismay that the White House rather than the State Department generally decides foreign policy, that domestic politics often influence foreign affairs. Too bad he never spoke to some former secretaries of state, such as Warren Christopher or Colin Powell, before he entered government service as a senior adviser to Holbrooke. Indeed, it's surprising that Holbrooke, who had been frustrated by White House interference when he served in the administration of Jimmy Carter, did not prepare him.

Nasr's new book, "The Dispensable Nation," argues that meddling by the Obama White House in foreign affairs has severely damaged American interests abroad. Nasr's focus on the Middle East is so sharp that he decries the American "pivot" to East Asia and contends that the outcome of the contest between the United States and China will be determined ultimately in West Asia (read Middle East). Usually supportive of the efforts of former secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton, Nasr finds intolerable her suggestion that the Asia-Pacific has replaced the Middle East as the world's most important region for the future of American interests.

On the other hand, he gives new credence to the China threat. He sees U.S. policies pushing Turkey, Egypt, Iran and Pakistan into China's orbit, creating opportunities for Beijing to promote illiberal institutions in those countries. And yet he endorses the be-nice approaches toward China trumpeted by Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski. His understanding of China, Chinese foreign policy and American policy toward China is clearly limited.

Nasr argues that President Obama's policies, especially toward Afghanistan and Iran, are not based on strategic considerations but rather are designed to satisfy public opinion. Although his case against White House intrusions into policymaking is persuasive, Nasr's inability to perceive any justification for such interventions is disturbing. He appears to have no grasp of the importance of domestic politics to foreign policy decision-making in a democracy.

Nasr's critique of Obama's management of Middle Eastern affairs is unquestionably valid. He contends that the hasty departure from Iraq unleashed chaos in the region and that the current plan to withdraw from Afghanistan is an abandonment that will leave American goals unmet. A more gradual departure from Iraq and a demand for political settlements in Syria and Bahrain, he suspects, might have stopped the sectarian violence in the region. He is appalled constantly by the White House's apparent indifference to diplomacy, especially when Holbrooke was involved. Obama, he insists, should have listened to Holbrooke but instead ignored him, and gave him minimal support and insufficient authority. Nasr argues that only Clinton's tenacity and the respect she commanded retained any influence for State. As he puts it, "When things seemed to be falling apart, the administration finally turned to Hillary because they knew she was the only person who could save the situation."

Nasr's discussion of relations with Pakistan, much of which he observed first-hand, is superb. Holbrooke, he notes, thought American interests in Afghanistan were important but deemed our interests in Pakistan vital. Nasr reminds us that the powerful Pakistani military was always focused on India and had supported the Taliban to check Indian influence in Afghanistan. Obama's advisers understood this and realized that the Pakistani strategic calculus would have to change before the war in Afghanistan could be ended on acceptable terms. But Nasr claims that the White House -- and especially national security adviser Tom Donilon -- undermined Holbrooke. Policy toward Pakistan was dominated by the Pentagon and the intelligence community -- and with Holbrooke's death, failed completely. Nasr contends that the United States now treats Pakistan as an adversary rather than as a friend, applying pressure in place of diplomatic engagement -- to the benefit of China.

In addition to Donilon, Nasr points to Dennis Ross as an obstacle to wise policy in the Middle East. Ross, a longtime presidential adviser on the region, was responsible for relations with Iran and efforts to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict. According to Nasr, the appointment of Ross as senior adviser on the Middle East for the National Security Council signaled to Iran that the United States mistrusted Tehran's overtures and would rely on pressure rather than diplomacy. Obama's policy toward Iran was "a strategic blunder." Nasr also holds Ross responsible for an inadequate American response to the Arab Spring. The United States should have been involved more diplomatically and economically.

Nasr suggests that America's Arab allies would rather see war between the United States and Iran than a rapprochement. He insists that sanctions that weaken Iran will open the Middle East to Sunni radicalism and greater penetration by China and Russia. And, shades of the Cold War, he argues that the real threat to American interests comes not from Iran but from China and Russia.

Mostly, Nasr faults Obama for what he perceives as the president's disengaged attitude toward the Middle East -- and for pandering to public opinion. He fears that America's influence in the world is diminishing because it exercises power poorly, and he blames the White House staff for interfering with the just operations of the State Department.

Nasr's description of the interplay between the politicians and the diplomats suffers from two problems. First, though a brilliant scholar of Middle Eastern affairs, he is unable to see beyond his area of expertise and his brief experience in government. Today we lose the Middle East, tomorrow the world. Second, he lacks historical perspective. He has little sense of how policy has been made in the past, specifically the part played by domestic politics. Holbrooke knew -- and countless historians and political scientists, including some of Nasr's colleagues at SAIS, have written about -- the need for public support to sustain policy. Nasr can teach us much about the Middle East, but there is still much for him to learn about the policy process.

Warren I. Cohen is a senior scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and the general editor of the New Cambridge History of American Foreign Relations.

Copyright 2013 Washington Post Writers Group

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THE VILLAGE: 400 Years of Beats and Bohemians, Radicals and Rogues, A History of Greenwich Village

May 1, 2013

John Strausbaugh
Ecco
ISBN 978-0062078193
624 pages
$29.99

Reviewed by Michael Dirda, who reviews books for The Washington Post every Thursday.

Where's the map? While there's much to praise and enjoy in John Strausbaugh's social and cultural history of Greenwich Village, there really should have been a map. People who have visited New York as tourists are likely to know that "the Village" comprises the streets and neighborhoods around Washington Square. You do know where Washington Square is, right? Near New York University? This book needs a map.

I emphasize this mainly because Strausbaugh deals with very specific places - bars, restaurants, theaters, clubs, apartment buildings - and he repeatedly identifies their exact locations. Can you visualize the corner of Bleecker and Cornelia streets? Can you pinpoint Patchin Place, once the home of writers E.E. Cummings and Djuna Barnes? (It's a little mews off 10th Avenue, near Sixth.) How far is it from the Cedar Tavern, where Jackson Pollock and Frank O'Hara hung out, to the White Horse Tavern, where Delmore Schwartz and William Gaddis did their drinking, to the Lion's Head, the longtime watering hole of Norman Mailer, Frank McCourt and Pete Hamill?

Such questions of proximity matter because Strausbaugh emphasizes the intensity of Village life. While it's hardly a gated community, Greenwich Village does possess a kind of "under the dome" quality, with musicians, writers, artists and rebels of every kind living next door to each other and out of each other's pockets. You can walk from 14th Street to Houston Street - the rough northern and southern boundaries of the Village - in just over half an hour.

People have always gravitated to this tight warren of streets because of its implicit philosophy of total freedom. Strausbaugh calls it "a magnet for misfits." Here, if anywhere, you could realize your true self, you could be as wild, creative, promiscuous or weird as you wanted to be, and you would actually fit right in. If you were, say, a kid growing up in Ohio and you yearned for a literary life, you naturally daydreamed about having a drink with W.H. Auden at a bar near St. Mark's, dropping by Eli and Ted Wilentz's Eighth Street Bookshop, listening to Bob Dylan at the Cafe Wha?, having your novel published by Grove Press, and shedding a tear when the book ended up on the remainder tables at the Strand. In every way, "The Village" sounded like heaven.

Yet for every masterpiece created, for every career launched, there were scores of broken lives. "The history of Greenwich Village," writes Strausbaugh in his introduction, "is littered with the corpses of those who drank themselves to creative ruin or death, overdosed on various drugs, committed alcohol- or drug-fueled murder or suicide, or partied themselves into oblivion." In truth, until rents grew outrageous, the Village was largely the haven of penniless dreamers, for those just starting their careers or those who were convinced that - despite the failures, the drugs or the drink - they could somehow still make it. The lucky and talented ones nearly always ended up moving uptown to an apartment on Central Park West or out to a house in Connecticut's Fairfield County.

In its structure, Strausbaugh's history may be likened to a portrait gallery. Starting in colonial times and working up to the present, he organizes his chapters around brief biographies of seemingly hundreds of "beats and bohemians, radicals and rogues." If nothing else, the book represents an enormous amount of research and provides hours of entertaining reading.

Back in the 1850s, artsy Villagers frequented Pfaff's, a restaurant-saloon "in the cellar of the Coleman House" (which still stands on Broadway). There you might find all the vagabonds and loafers of the city, including Walt Whitman, the brilliant writer Fitz-James O'Brien (now best remembered for his fantasy stories, such as "What Was it?" and "The Diamond Lens") and the free-spirited poet Ada Clare, who defied convention by trumpeting the fact she was a single mother by having her calling card inscribed "Miss Ada Clare and Son."

Throughout his book Strausbaugh emphasizes the sexual freedom found in the Village and almost nowhere else. In the 1890s the Slide, "possibly the first drag bar in the city ... was at 157 Bleecker Street between Sullivan and Thompson streets, the site of the music club Kenny's Castaways." (See why you need a map?) Nearby on West Third was an equally scandalous basement called - wonderful name - "the Golden Rule Pleasure Club."

In the years just before World War I, the Village enjoyed its first great flowering. At the salon of Mabel Dodge one might encounter a cross-section of its inhabitants, including - in Dodge's own words - "Socialists, Trade Unionists, Anarchists, Suffragists, Poets, Relations, Lawyers, Murderers, 'Old Friends,' Psychoanalysts, IWWs [Industrial Workers of the World], Single Taxers, Birth Controlists, Newspapermen, Artists, Modern Artists, Clubwomen, Woman's-place-is-in-the-home Women, Clergymen, and just plain men."

Radical politics and cutting-edge art have always flourished in the Village, and Strausbaugh duly discusses revolutionaries Emma Goldman and John Reed (author of "Ten Days That Shook the World"), John Sloan and the Ashcan school of painters, the proletarian magazine the Masses, the innovative theatrical triumphs of Eugene O'Neill, the career of red-headed poet and heartbreaker Edna St. Vincent Millay, the satirical novelist Dawn Powell, the scandalously bisexual chanteuse Libby Holman, photographer of the grotesque Diane Arbus, such beat legends as Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg and, not least, guitar wizard Jimi Hendrix.

Besides chronicling cultural activities, Strausbaugh interweaves accounts of local politics, from the era of Tammany Hall through the administrations of mayors Jimmy Walker, Fiorello La Guardia and Ed Koch (all with Village connections). I didn't know that before he entered politics Walker wrote songs, including "Will You Love Me in December As You Do in May?" But, then, such serendipitous discovery is part of this book's charm and usefulness. Who would have thought that for many years one of the Mafia's most powerful bosses, Vincent Gigante, deliberately pretended to be a shambling half-wit to throw the Feds off his trail?

Still, for all the craziness of Village life throughout its history, one is still awed by the amount of sheer talent that sometimes congregated in this one small neighborhood. When Harry Belafonte, before he decided to become a singer, signed up for an acting class with Erwin Piscator at the New School, his was "the only dark face" in the class. "He introduced himself to the other nobodies: Marlon Brando, Rod Steiger, Walter Matthau, Elaine Stritch, Wally Cox, Bea Arthur, and Bernie Schwartz, aka Tony Curtis."

The last chapters of Strausbaugh's book focus, to a large extent, on the post-1960s gay Village, including discussion of the notorious clubs the Toilet and the Anvil, the epoch-making riot outside the Stonewall bar (two doors down from the Lion's Head), and the AIDS epidemic. He ends, as he must, in the present when the old Village is fast disappearing, growing increasingly gentrified and upscale. And yet. To stroll along Sullivan or MacDougal streets or parts of Sixth Avenue is to feel strangely energized even in 2013, as if Greenwich Village were still and would always be the land of dreams.

Copyright 2013 Washington Post Writers Group

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THE ORDINARY ACROBAT: A Journey Into the Wondrous World of the Circus, Past and Present

May 3, 2013

Duncan Wall
Knopf
ISBN 978-0307271723
322 pages
$26.95

Reviewed by Elizabeth McCracken

It is called "the circus," singular noun, definite article, as though there were only one. But the history of the circus is multitudinous, badly documented, clouded by legend and stereotypes; it is the history of many circuses over many years, each circus composed of many acts - rings within rings within rings. It's hard to know where to start looking at it.

In his lovely new book, "The Ordinary Acrobat," Duncan Wall finds useful spots from which to peer at the history of the form: from the top of the trapeze platform, beneath a cascade of juggling balls and behind a red nose on his own face in the circus-mad Paris of 2003. He joins the circus to understand it.

Wall wasn't always a circus obsessive. His conversion occurred while he was in Paris during college, attending a circus in the Parc de la Villette. The performance was nothing like the circus of his youth: "The juggler had a Mohawk. The acrobats were unshaven and dressed in ratty black suits with the cuffs rolled up. ... It was visceral, real, and admirably raw." Thereafter, Wall was what the French call a circusphile and the Americans "a gawk": lovestruck, circus-struck. A year later, in 2003, he returned to Paris on a Fulbright fellowship to enroll in the Ecole Nationale des Arts du Cirque de Rosny-sous-Bois: In other words, he came to gawk from the inside.

"The Ordinary Acrobat" interlaces chapters about his triumphs and phobias in his studies, his interviews of Parisian circus figures and the wider history of the European circus. The history in the book is effortless and compact, if necessarily less than comprehensive. He covers an astonishing amount in a 300-page book, with sections on Philip Astley (the English businessman who essentially invented the circus), Barnum, Cirque du Soleil and the earliest origins of the feats that eventually became the compilation known as the circus.

Wall concentrates on a handful of acts, however - what might be described as a variety of human arguments with gravity: acrobats, jugglers and clowns. He explains how acts evolved; how jugglers changed their emphasis from seeing what extraordinary things they could keep in the air to simply seeing how many; how acrobats moved from displaying beauty to risking death; how clowns, once satirists, became beholden to the tastes of children.

Wall breaks the reader's heart with stories of the acts he was born too late to see. Perhaps you don't mind having missed the 800 bear trainers at Ivan the Terrible's wedding, but what about the retracting stage at the Nouveau Cirque in the late 19th century, which revealed a swimming pool for pantomimes nautiques, including one featuring 30 polar bears on slides? Or the clown who performed in a mobile designed by Alexander Calder? Or the rope walker Saqui: "Men flocked to ogle her bravery and catch a glimpse of her thigh. Women copied her style."

Wall trains with the acts himself. In the most oddly thrilling chapter, he juggles with the legendary Jerome Thomas. The first time they'd met, Wall had exaggerated his juggling skills and has had to cram: Now he shows Thomas what he can do. "You have some nice tricks there," Thomas tells him. "Now let's work on the quality of the gesture." Wall writes particularly well about jugglers, who might seem the least likely of artists - surely juggling is a party act! - but who, as he describes them, are sculptors of space. One of the students at the school where he studies theorizes that the jugglers ("the crazy ones," a tumbling coach calls them) break into the building at night to practice.

There are some hitches. The book wants to retrofit a memoir - the journey of a young man investigating the circus - into the history and research. But there's not much drama to those first-person events. The book also suffers from an occasional gee-whiz tone: By showing himself being disabused of his circus prejudices, Wall wants to disabuse the reader at the same time. Indeed, the opening pages discuss how dull the circus was to Wall as a child (which is irksome if you're already interested). But Wall the author and current professor at the National Circus School of Montreal surely knows more, has traveled further from those misconceptions. At any rate, the circus, as he points out, is not entirely a young person's game. His clowning mentor, Andre Riot-Sarcey, puts it this way: As most clowns "get older they get better. ... They get sadder, too, but that has to happen naturally, as the soul replaces the body."

One of Wall's missions is to convince nonbelievers that the circus - as a whole and its component parts - is art, and the book is lovely and light on that subject, and on art in general. Art, the juggler Thomas explains, requires the spectator to work, to ask questions: Who is this performer? What does his act mean? Who is he influenced by? The spectator, he says, thinks about all this without even realizing it.

Wall asks how it is possible to make someone think without realizing it. "You make ... him work ... his imagination," the juggler says, spacing the words out slowly. "You make him (BEGIN ITAL)dream." There is plenty in "The Ordinary Acrobat" to set circusphile and circus-skeptic alike to dreaming.

Elizabeth McCracken is the James Michener chair in fiction at the University of Texas at Austin and the author of five books, including the forthcoming story collection "Thunderstruck."

Copyright 2013 Washington Post Writers Group

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WHO OWNS THE FUTURE?

May 3, 2013

Jaron Lanier
Simon & Schuster
ISBN 978-1451654967
396 pages
$28

Reviewed by Evgeny Morozov

Should Google compensate us for our searches? Should Amazon pay us for the books we buy? They should, because they are using us to expand their databases and hone their algorithms -- and, eventually, steal our jobs. This is the startling argument advanced by Jaron Lanier in "Who Owns the Future?", his eccentric but unconvincing meditation on how the middle classes could survive the menace of digitization.

In Lanier's utopia, the data we divulge to what he dubs the "Siren Servers" -- the likes of Google and Amazon -- would earn us "royalties based on creative contributions from a whole lifetime." We must seize the initiative to make this happen or prepare for "an eventual socialist backlash."

Lanier's proposed scheme -- "the only way that democracy and capitalism can be in alignment" -- is anything but modest. The title of one of his sections, "It's All About I," perfectly captures the book's hyper-narcissistic tone: "My tale of a talking seagull strikes me as being kitschy and contrived," a typical sentence begins.

How would Lanier's grandiose plan work? Whenever Amazon uses our customer history to make a sale or whenever OkCupid matches a couple based on our dating history, we should get a cut -- a "nanopayment." As Google Translate gets smarter while we translate rap lyrics from Maltese to Latin, shouldn't we get something? Perhaps -- let's just wait for Google Translate to earn Google some money first.

Karl Marx has nothing on Jaron Lanier. In Lanier's ideal future, we would all be liking in the morning, texting in the afternoon and tweeting in the evening. Robots and 3-D printers would do all the hard work, allowing us to get rich simply by being ourselves. "In a humanistic digital economy," he writes, "designers will still make a living, even when a dress is sewn in a home by a robot." And the good news keeps coming: "Someone who wears the dress well might also make a little money inadvertently by popularizing it." Go ahead: Get yourself another dress and get even richer!

To account for this lucrative wardrobe, Lanier proposes a system of ubiquitous surveillance, with cameras, databases and all. Since we can't get any privacy, we might at least get paid. "Commercial rights," he notes, "are better suited for the multitude of quirky little situations that will come up in real life than new kinds of civil rights along the lines of digital privacy."

Following Lanier's logic, any correction in the market system -- say, price adjustments based on changing demand -- would require that extra profits be transferred to consumers. But should you expect a supermarket to send you a check simply because you chose to buy one brand of milk over another? Probably not. Why treat Amazon differently?

To some, the very idea that our every decision is a piece of data to be monetized might seem appalling -- and rightly so. What exactly is "humanistic" about Lanier's vision? Its chief hero seems to be, to borrow a phrase from philosopher Michel Foucault, an "entrepreneur of the self," always eager to cash in on some personal trivia.

...continuedPage: 1 2 View full story Copyright 2013 Washington Post Writers Group

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