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Barker’s Good
Books Right Now
Summer
2004
By Eric Barker
“I
think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and
stab us...We need the books that affect us like a disaster,
that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved
more than ourselves...A book must be the axe for the frozen
sea inside us.”
-- Franz
Kafka
Below
you will find a smattering of good books currently to be found
at your local chain bookstore. Some are brand new, some are
a couple of years old, and at least two were written before
1980, but either remain in print because of their towering
greatness, or have been reprinted for the same reason. This
is one of the many wonderful things about books: they don’t
live and die by their opening weekend, their cultural life
does not depend on the whims of the moment.
I canvassed
my friends in the book trade for some of these suggestions,
but in all cases I have actually read the books in question
and the final choices reflect my personal taste. Luckily,
my taste ranges over the whole gamut of the store, from literature
to geology, and so forth. I’ve even included a bestseller
or two, those I deemed worthy, that is, because chain stores
discount the books that really sell, offsetting the publishers’
production and distribution costs, and thus they become affordable
hardcovers. Now there’s an oxymoronic phrase if I ever
wrote one: hardcover books, like CDs, DVDs, espresso drinks,
and everything else in the retail multimedia world, have become
outrageously expensive, mostly in order to keep corporate
CEOs in champagne and service personnel on their summer yachts.
But the beautiful thing is, the delivery technology of a good
book doesn’t change. You can still take it, and consume
it, anywhere.
Here then,
a selection of sharp axes for your unknown corners, because
even in the ostensible light of summer, there’s always
a psychic cave or two that missed the spring thaw.
Non-Fiction
(a.k.a.
politics, self-help, history, science, etc., alphabetical
by title)
Against
All Enemies,
by Richard A. Clarke 
(current
events; 304 pp., published by Free Press. hardcover list price
$27.00)
Remember
when this guy was news, coming out to confirm what we already
felt in our bones, that Iraq II: The Revenge has
been in the works ever since the Bush crew took over the White
House? A cabinet advisor on terrorism to every President since
Reagan, Clarke opens the book with the gripping behind-the-scenes
story of his own day on September 11, 2001, his dealings with
all the major players we’ve come to love and admire
-- Condi Rice, Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, that paragon of
arrogance Donald Rumsfeld -- then charts the sad tale of American
involvement in the Middle East, from our first blunderings
in Lebanon to now, before bringing it around to that moment
when George Bush ordered him to find a reason to attack Saddam,
whether or not one existed. A book that is remarkable for
what it says rather than how it says it, historians will be
quoting Against All Enemies long after we’ve
all traveled to the undiscovered country.
Alfred
Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light,
by Patrick McGilligan
(biography/film
history; illustrated. 850 pp., includes index. published by
Harper Collins. hardcover list price $39.95)
For the
past twenty years there has been only one, comprehensive biography
of Alfred Hitchcock, and that was Donald Spoto’s The
Dark Side of Genius, published in 1983. A redoubtable
mixture of research and psychological speculation, the Spoto
Version began in good faith, because the author was a perceptive
critic of Hitchcock’s work, but it wound up painting
a deeply negative portrait of the Master of Suspense, confirming
a lot of myths and canards, taking too many unkind rumors
at face value. Spoto certainly made a career for himself as
a cutting-edge biographer out of that first effort, but critical
and academic studies of Hitchcock, not to mention the family
that loved him, have suffered ever since.
Now Patrick
McGilligan, one of the world’s top film historians,
has taken on the task of writing a more balanced overview
of Hitchcock’s life and work. McGilligan is vastly more
experienced than Spoto as a biographer, and he has no particular
bias about Hitchcock in either direction, good or bad, except
that the historian in him insists on acknowledging Hitchcock’s
major contribution to the development of film as a visual
grammar, his conscious, peerless blend of Expressionism and
Russian montage theory.
But more
importantly. McGilligan gives the great man a break, and finds
that he was no more neurotic or manipulative than anyone else
working in the international film business of his era. Ask
enough people who knew him and the general consensus turns
out to be that “Hitch” was a delightful collaborator,
a knowledgeable and helpful director of actors, and one tough
businessman. But perhaps McGilligan’s most important
contribution to understanding one of the all time great filmmakers
may be in his portrait of Hitchcock’s final years, revealing
a man who loved making movies so completely that he willed
himself to die when it became apparent he could no longer
do the job. Now that’s dedication to one’s craft.
The
Introvert Advantage,
by Marti Olsen Laney
(psychology;
330 pp., includes index. published by Workman Publishing.
quality paperback list price $14.95)
If you
hate being interrupted and would rather work on one thing
at a time until it’s finished; if you feel that socializing,
especially with strangers, is enervating rather than energizing;
if you have a rich and imaginative inner life, tend to wallow
in details, are sensitive to nuance, communicate better in
one-on-one discussions, or experience absolutely no difficulty
taking a little time to yourself every day -- rejoice! I mean,
relax. You’re probably just an introvert, and it’s
not a preference, it’s a temperament shaped by personal
brain chemistry.
Psychotherapist
Marti Laney Olsen has, like a good introvert should, done
years of research on the subject, aided by a growing awareness
in the mental health community that introversion has very
good reasons for being, that it doesn’t mean you’re
“anti-social,” or stubbornly slow, or just too
self-absorbed to make a real contribution. This complex of
stigmatizing misperceptions was first perpetrated by that
self-absorbed extrovert Freud, then embraced by the extroverted
culture at large as proof it was on the right track, b-bye
now. Meanwhile, millions continue to drop dead from stress
related disease. Since personality tests like the Meyers-Brigg
index have become all the rage, it’s estimated that
one-third of the human population is introverted, which is
not a small number. It has also become apparent that a disproportionate
number of gifted people are introverts (Abraham Lincoln, Albert
Einstein, Alfred Hitchcock and Michael Jordan, to name a few).
Could it be introversion has its uses after all?
Laney
has written an engaging and thoughtful treatise on the subject,
sure to lift any introvert’s spirits, with a test to
measure your own place on the introversion-extroversion continuum,
succinct explanations of the biological factors behind temperament,
and most important, sound advice for adapting to a world that
will always honor extroversion first.
Krakatoa,
by Simon Winchester
(history/earth
science; illustrated. 416 pp., includes index. published by
Perennial. quality paperback list price $13.95)
For aficionados
of natural disaster, they don’t come any bigger than
Krakatoa, a volcano in the strait between Java and Sumatra
that exploded at 10:02 a.m. on August 27, 1883. This was not
the first eruption in Krakatoa’s history, but it was
the first during what might be called modern times, when scientific
and political communities were linked by instantaneous communications,
in this case the telegraph. After rumbling and bellowing in
warning for an entire summer, as other volcanoes have been
known to do from time immemorial, Krakatoa turned out to be
history’s most awesome and terrifying reminder of Nature’s
power, the kind of cosmic shrug that thankfully happens only
once in several lifetimes.
The explosion
vaporized the island at the volcano’s base, ejecting
its tonnage into the atmosphere where it would affect the
world’s weather for years (and incidentally created
a decade of stunning sunsets). The initial concussion was
so cataclysmic, it was heard in Australia and China, the air-pressure
waves spreading out from Krakatoa traveled around the globe
six times, and the barometric pressure surrounding the island
took the most precipitous drop ever recorded (an astounding
2 ½ inches of mercury, snap, just like that). Monstrous
tidal waves roared out in every direction, killing thousands,
depositing bodies as far away as the coast of Zanzibar; and
in the aftermath came the first swells of violence against
Western influence in the region, and the rise of Islam on
Java.
Simon
Winchester, whose previous books include the marvelous The
Professor and the Madman, is a geologist by trade, though
he has found his true calling as a nonfiction storyteller.
Krakatoa has been an obsession for him since the sixties,
and he makes the history of the place and the people involved
come alive, as well as making palpable the unimaginable scale
of the main event. His Krakatoa is at once a great thriller,
a valuable primer on volcano science, and the biography of
a very scary mountain. Which, by the way, has risen from the
sea again, smoking, rumbling, and growing every year.
And don’t
forget...
Lies,
and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, by Al Franken
(humor/current
events; 377 pp., published by Dutton. hardcover list price
$24.95)
Hard to
believe there is a lighter side to the utterly dismal condition
of our failing democracy, but Al Franken locates it in the
pomposity of the right wing media machine. A hilarious and
sly deconstruction of, in particular, Ann Coulter (“What
is wrong with that woman!”) and the offensively ignorant
Bill O’Reilly, the book has been a bestseller for nearly
a year, ever since Fox News frantically tried to block its
publication without cause. Still sold at a discount by chain
bookstores.
What’s
that? Everybody knows the “media” is dominated
by, ewww, liberal myopia? Try...
What
Liberal Media?: The Truth About Bias and the News,
by Eric Alterman
(journalism;
322 pp., published by Basic Books. quality paperback list
price $15.00)
If you
dare, that is. Just out in paperback, written in answer to
Bernard Goldberg’s bestselling Bias from 2002, a book
that purported to be shocking by revealing that -- gasp! --
there are liberals working in newsrooms all across America
(and possibly the world).
Alterman’s
book is a reasoned examination of just what kind of ideology
is revealed by the typical network broadcast, and I’ll
give you a hint: major news organizations haven’t been
very inquisitive when it comes to the most secretive administration
in American history. Even traditionally lefty news organizations,
which in America actually means center of right, have ducked
their heads in modern times, so that entire generations have
grown up not knowing what a real, so-called liberal sentiment
sounds like coming from a news anchor.
In an
effort to appear unbiased, major news organizations, in fact,
shy away from criticizing any conservative statement, no matter
how boneheaded, while hammering incessantly at every liberal
gaffe in the name of fairness. Since no one is better than
the Democrats, our ostensible liberal party, at eating their
own, there’s never a shortage of bitchy fodder, while
Republicans are astonishingly adept at making any statement
other than lockstep partisanship sound anti-American. Make
that, er, “liberal.”
Fiction
(alphabetical
by title)
The
Crimson Petal and the White, by Michel Faber
(fiction;
900 pp. published by Harcourt. quality paperback list price
$15.00)
A splendid
literary performance by one of the finest up-and-coming (read:
heavily promoted) novelists writing in English. The tale of
a Victorian-era prostitute named Sugar, and her slow climb
from the squalor of London’s slums to the edges of respectability,
Crimson Petal is heavily indebted to the milieu,
social consciousness, and sometimes the style of Dickens,
including the kind of satire that flows easily from any story
about arbitrarily erected social barriers. But there is where
the comparison to Dickens ends: the world Michel Faber creates
is anything but melodramatic, delving into emotions and places
that Dickens never could have visited so honestly.
Although
very little happens in the way of big dramatic incident for
such a hefty novel, Crimson Petal is compulsively
readable, rich with the inner lives of a half dozen vivid,
sometimes infuriating characters, and the prejudices that
informed their time and place. Faber teases us with some “postmodern”
distancing devices, like present tense narration and addressing
the reader directly (actually a favorite conceit of Victorian
literature), but the effect is less to build a comfortable
spot for us to sit in judgment of our great-great grandparents
than it is to question our own contemporary delusions -- that
we moderns have no social barriers, that we’re more
enlightened than our predecessors, that knee-jerk irony equals
safety from the messier aspects of human experience. As Faber
himself phrased it in an interview, “...everything has
always happened to everybody. Forever. So it's all there.”
The work
of a consummate storyteller with the full range of literary
technique at his disposal, Crimson Petal envelopes
the reader in a tapestry of piercing, beautifully written
interior monologues, a.k.a. stream-of-consciousness-with-the-punctuation.
Though he fills his book with a great many surprises which,
on one level, make us keenly aware that fiction is a ultimately
a game, a contract between the reader’s imagination
and the writer’s, Faber always has a precise and unimpeachable
reason for using any given effect. Fiction is so much more
than simply a game, a smart juggling act with cultural codes:
it’s a kaleidoscopic tool for examining life, art, and
the universe, and Michel Faber is a master at wielding all
of its edges.
In
a Dry Season,
by Peter Robinson
(mystery/thriller;
447 pp. published by Avon. mass market paperback list price
$7.50)
Right
now, sales in the mystery section are dominated by Dan Brown
and his overbearing bestseller The Da Vinci Code,
a sub-par thriller that barely holds together by constantly
promising a revelation just around the turn of every chapter.
Whatever works, I guess: the book has sold more than 7 million
copies since March 2003. Something has to pay the publisher’s
bills.
However,
I hope that one of these days people are going to discover
Peter Robinson, a superb novelist whose books starring Detective
Chief Inspector Alan Banks are some of the best fiction to
be found at the bookstore. Banks has suffered through fourteen
cases now, each one a riveting moral journey slicing deeply
into the heart of human darkness, while the author experiments
with new ways to make a police procedural yield unexpected
truths about the world. Meanwhile, there is a thread of constantly
changing characters throughout each volume -- wife, kids,
partners, bosses -- as Banks’ career dips, slides and
rises again, giving the added sense that one person’s
life is unfolding before us as he goes about the thankless
job of investigating the Original Crime.
Nevertheless,
each novel is a self-contained work. In a Dry Season,
published in 1999, is one of Robinson’s finest hours,
with Banks trying to redeem his life and career in a rural
village, assigned to investigate the discovery of a skeleton
at the bottom of a drained reservoir. Robinson actually opens
the book with the one living person who knows what happened,
long before Banks discovers her identity, and then flashes
back and forth from the present to wartime England, unfolding
a novel-within-the-novel of jealousy, madness and murder while
Banks, in the present, moves inexorably closer to the truth.
An excellent
piece of storytelling for its own sake, In a Dry Season
is suspenseful and gripping on a half dozen levels, and there’s
no better introduction to one of the best kept secrets in
modern fiction. Followed by Cold is the Grave (2000),
Aftermath (2001), Close to Home (2003),
and currently in hardcover, Playing with Fire.
Los
Alamos, by Joseph Kanon
(mystery/thriller;
517 pp. published by Island Books. mass market paperback list
price $7.99)
Time was
when historical mysteries were a novelty, but everyone seems
to be doing them nowadays and no one does them better than
Joseph Kanon, who seems to be writing a secret history of
the mid-20th century. Los Alamos is his most widely
read book, perhaps because of this brilliant premise: in spring
1945 the security officer at the Manhattan Project turns up
dead, and a live-and-let-live government investigator, just
waiting for the war to end, is sent to find out why. Now,
you and I both know that they’re building the A-Bomb
at Los Alamos, but very few others in the story know it, or
know what it means, which makes for one hell of a dense character
study on the cusp of human destiny.
Kanon
is a former publishing executive who turns out to be a superb
writer at every level, especially interested in examining
the moral dimensions of a world that, in the great scheme
of things, was really only yesterday, just a tick of the second
hand on the cosmic clock. Real luminaries rub elbows with
the fictional; his portrait of Robert J. Oppenheimer, in particular,
is indelible and truthful in a way that objective historical
reporting can’t touch.
I actually
prefer Kanon’s third novel, The Good German,
a labyrinthine whodunit/love triangle set in the postwar ruins
of Berlin, but it is currently out of print (a testament,
perhaps, to its quality). Both books are well worth the effort
to find, the work of a novelist who just happens to be shelved
in the mystery section, smart enough to concoct a page-turning
story while he casually involves you in the lives of people
caught in the web of history.
Nova,
by Samuel R. Delany
(science
fiction; 241 pp. published by Vintage. quality paperback list
price $12.00)
Once upon
a time in the sixties, science fiction, the literature of
The Shock of the New, was ossifying and in desperate need
of an idea transfusion. So along came Harlan Ellison, J. G.
Ballard, Gene Wolfe, and many, many others, to form a palpable
“New Wave” that burst through the hard science
boundaries of the genre, smuggling in all kinds of contraband
like mythology, linguistics, modernism and magic realism,
parapsychology and metaphysics. Among the greatest New Wave
writers was Samuel R. Delany, a brilliant, bi-sexual, African-American
prodigy whose work rippled through the genre and forever changed
its fabric.
First
published when he was 26-years-old and already a Hugo and
Nebula award-winning legend, Nova (1968) is Delany
at his most compact, inventive and dazzling, creating a far
future society where the structure of interstellar commerce
hinges on an element that can only be extracted from the core
of an exploding star. Like the majority of Delany’s
novels and stories, this one is a quest, a multi-referential
odyssey in which a physically scarred starship captain and
a diverse crew of misfits set out to obtain Illyrion (Homer
anyone?) by diving into a sun just after it has erupted. Let’s
just say, there’s a lot of cash involved if they make
it.
The book’s
strongest appeal, however, is in the texture of its future,
more visceral and magical than anything you’ve ever
seen in a sci-fi movie, and in its obsessive protagonist,
Captain Lorq Von Ray (Ray is Delany’s middle name),
whose inner quest might give Ahab himself a bit of a pause.
Delany weaves it all together, razzle-dazzle speculation and
profound allusion, at an electrifying pace guaranteed to put
readers on the edge of their seats.
In and
out of print for almost twenty years, all of Delany’s
great early work has now been reissued by Vintage, which is
the classic reprint arm of the all-powerful Random House,
so perhaps he is back on bookstore shelves for good. We can
only hope. Other essential Delany: Babel-17, The
Einstein Intersection, the short story collection Aye,
and Gomorrah, and his magnum opus, the gigantic Dhalgren,
first published in 1975 and still controversial for its utter
command of the panoply of literary techniques and a whole
lot of sexual politics, which became Delany’s primary
subject in later years. Whatever you go for, do your mind
a favor and try some Sam Delany; the guy remains ahead of
his time, and science fiction doesn‘t get any better.
And last
but never least, my all-time favorite summer read...
Shogun,
by James Clavell
(fiction;
1152 pp. published by Dell. mass market paperback list price
$7.99)
I used
to read James Clavell’s Shogun every summer, and it
would always ruin me. I would scan bookstore shelves for weeks
afterward, looking for a novel that could come half as close
to consuming my imagination and becoming my world, but always
to no avail, even among Clavell’s other books. There
is only one Shogun.
Clavell’s
masterpiece is founded on one of the basic plots of historical
fiction, the clash between two civilizations, and two vastly
different ways of seeing reality. In the year 1600, Englishman
John Blackthorne is shipwrecked in Japan, an isolated medieval
society so unlike his own, he might as well be on a different
planet. Through Blackthorne’s eyes, Clavell takes the
reader so deeply into the vanished world of the 17th century,
the book is almost impossible to put down, peopled with at
least two dozen unforgettable characters, consumed by the
urgent minutiae of simply being alive, while all around them
swirls the life-or-death intrigue of a country ravaged by
civil war.
Clavell
was inspired by the true story of an explorer who became part
of the Tokugawa Shogunate, which ruled Japan for more than
two centuries before the coming of Commodore Perry. But Clavell
changes names (for instance, turning Tokugawa into Toranaga)
and plays freely with actual events in order to achieve a
series of higher truths about ideology, history and perception.
Oh yes, and to tell a gripping epic story.
It begins
with the sentence: “The gale tore at him and he felt
its bite deep within and he knew that if they did not make
landfall in three days they would all be dead.” A whole
world follows, and all of life, on a scale and depth to rival
Tolstoy (if only Tolstoy had been rated “R”),
crammed with forbidden desire, unforgivable betrayal, unbearable
heartbreak, sex, violence, comedy, and a sense of melancholy
wonder at existence that is unique to James Clavell.
Shogun
is a modern classic, the kind of novel that is hardly attempted
any more outside of genre fiction, a compassionately drawn
mural that dares to be about the human condition from many
angles, yet isn’t afraid to be a magnificent entertainment,
too. It is doubtful any book written by a Westerner will give
you a clearer sense of Japan and the foundations of its culture;
it is certain you won’t find a more satisfying read
in this or any other summer.
Other
titles recommended by my book loving friends:
Fiction:
The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll by Alvaro
Mútis (New York Review of Books Classics, $17.95),
a modern Quixote-like quest, gets extremely high marks from
Lisa; Rebecca recommends David Sedaris’ droll essay
collection Me Talk Pretty One Day (Back Bay Books,
$14.95), guaranteed for a laugh; and Marilyn and Lisa both
are pushing the much lauded intellectual thriller, The
Secret History by Donna Tartt (Ballantine Books, $7.99),
which I may try myself before September.
Science
Fiction/Fantasy: Dhalgren-lover Stephen, whose taste
in this genre is sophisticated and eminently trustworthy,
recommends the latest masterpiece from Grand Master Gene Wolfe,
titled simply The Knight. The first part of a duology
about a boy who comes of age in a multi-dimensional realm,
it “turns tired fantasy conventions upside-down and
breathes new, unpredictable, heartbreaking life into the epic
quest...truly a perfect introduction for the novice to Wolfe.”
For up-to-the-moment,
innovative science, fiction he suggests the “hilarious”
and “mind-blowing” The Golden Age by
John C. Wright (Tor Books, $6.99); for incomparable poetic
weirdness, China Mieville’s The Scar (due in
mass market June 29 from Del Rey Books, $7.99).
Good
Web Sites for Incorrigible Readers:
The Modern
Word, a great site dedicated to contemporary literature of
all stripes -- http://www.themodernword.com/themodword.cfm
Eric Alterman’s
blog on MSNBC -- http://msnbc.msn.com/id/3449870/
The Samuel
Delany page at Vintage -- http://www.randomhouse.com/vintage/catalog/results_author.pperl?authorid=6807
Levenger,
a veritable toy store for book lovers, with protective covers,
book stands, weights, shelves, and a whole lot of other indispensable
luxuries -- http://www.levenger.com/
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