SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 19, 2012 ■ THE WICHITA EAGLE 3C
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COMMENTARY
4 picks from Book Critics Circle award finalists BY MARY ANN GWINN The Seattle Times
Every year for the last six years, this has been my routine in January and February: I shut myself in a room with a jar of peanut butter and a box of crackers, say goodbye to my family, and read the finalists for the National Book Critics Circle awards. I’m on the board of the NBCC. One of our duties is to read five finalists in each of six award categories — fiction, nonfiction, biography, autobiography, criticism and poetry — in the two months between the time the finalists are announced in January and the winners are chosen in March (since I was on the committees for nonfiction and biography, I had a head start with those). Overwhelmed by this cascade of literary riches, I always have the same thought: there are so many great books out there, but everybody keeps reading the same book! (1. “The Help.” 2. “The Hunger Games.”) So, as Monty Python would say, and now for something completely different. Crack one of these books and you’ll learn a lot, maybe even think differently when you’re done: “George F. Kennan: An American Life” by John Lewis Gaddis (Penguin Press, 800 pages, $39.95) By coming up with the “containment” strategy that kept the U.S. and the Soviet Union from taking up weapons against each other after World War II, American diplomat Kennan kept the Cold War from turning into a hot one (think thermonuclear weapons). Lessons learned from the story of Kennan, a brilliant strategist temperamentally unsuited to politics: 1. Even great people have bad days, and 2. All human beings, even very smart ones, are to some degree at war with themselves. Biography finalist. “A World on Fire: Britain’s Crucial Role in the Civil War” by Amanda Foreman (Random House, 1,008 pages, $35) Confederate spies (some in hoop skirts) plotting in the streets of London. English lords, ladies and politicians battling in the parlor and Parliament over whether the Union or the Confederacy held the higher moral and tactical ground. And a whole cast of British eccentrics who blithely signed up to fight on both sides, and learned the true, horrible cost of war. Foreman is gorgeous, has five children and still writes informative, breathtakingly readable books. I should hate her, but oddly, I don’t. Nonfiction finalist. “Pulphead: Essays” by John Jeremiah Sullivan (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 384 pages, $16 paper) This brilliant young essayist made me actually enjoy pondering the deeper meaning of rock icon Axl Rose. Nonfiction finalist. “The Stranger’s Child” by Alan Hollinghurst (Knopf, 448 pages, $27.95) This novel by British author Hollinghurst, who won the Man Booker prize for “The Line of Beauty,” tells the story of a randy, largerthan-life World War I poet whose life story becomes glossed over and eventually ossified by succeeding generations determined to freeze his image in amber. This book, among others, has solidified my conviction that the Brits are really, truly, smarter than we are, at least when it comes to turning a phrase. Fiction finalist. You can find the complete list of finalists at http://bookcritics.org/blog/archive/pressrelease-draft Winners will be announced on March 8.
NEW & RECOMMENDED “Rub Out the Words: The Letters of William S. Burroughs 1959-1974” edited by Bill Morgan (Ecco, $35) Williams S. Burroughs was one of the Beat movement’s more radical writers, authoring such groundbreaking novels as “Junky” and “Naked Lunch.” Fifteen years after his death, he is the focal point in a collection of more than three hundred letters to recipients such as Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Jack Kerouac, and Timothy Leary. This volume is not just an intimate glimpse into the life of a misunderstood artist, but a chronicle of literary artistry. “The Orphan Master’s Son” by Adam Johnson (Random House, $26) North Korea is probably one of the most mysterious places in the world. Set against that backdrop, Johnson gives us a character whose world is defined by astonishing hardship, pain and endurance, yet brightened with camaraderie, moments of beauty, and love. Part literary thriller, part social history, part love story, “The Orphan Master’s Son” is a riveting portrait of a world hidden from view. Watermark best sellers 1. "A Good American" by Alex George 2. "Radiating Like a Stone" edited by Myrne Roe 3. "Pinches & Dashes" by the Junior League of Wichita 4. "Wander the Kansas Flint Hills in Words and Images" by Stephen Perry 5. "The Story of Beautiful Girl" by Rachel Simon 6. "Death Comes to Pemberley" by P.D. James 7. "Cynthia’s Cosmic Almanac" by Cynthia Killion 8. "Pity the Billionaire" by Thomas Frank 9. "An Object of Beauty" by Steve Martin 10. "I Want My Hat Back" by Jon Klassen — Source: Watermark Books & Cafe
AUTHOR TALK WHAT WRITERS ARE SAYING
“... when you write a book, once it's out there, it's not yours anymore. Everybody reads a different book. Everybody brings their own emotional baggage, their own history.” — Eleanor Brown, author of “The Weird Sisters”
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Tragedy, comedy, identity FICTION
■ The Holocaust is a dark cloud in the stories of Nathan Englander’s new collection. By Gordon Houser
“What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank” by Nathan Englander (Knopf, 207 pages, $24.95)
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nglander’s second story collection (he’s also published a novel) includes eight new stories that combine comedy and tragedy and consider larger questions about human nature. He presents those questions through the lenses of Jewish characters of all ages, from New York to Europe to Israel. The title story brings together two married couples in one couple’s home in Florida. The other couple, Mark and Lauren, are Hasidic and live in Israel. Deb and Lauren are longtime friends. The couples talk from different perspectives. Mark says that “the most annoying thing about being Hasidic in the outside world … is the constant policing by civilians.” He notes that Deb and her husband, the unnamed narrator, are obsessed with the Holocaust “as a necessary sign of identity.” For him, the current Holocaust that is destroying Judaism is intermarriage. Soon the tension eases as they partake of the Florida couple’s son’s stash of marijuana. Soon they’re laughing, then satisfying their hunger. Later they play a game Deb and Lauren played when they were young. Called “the Anne Frank game,” it asks players to imagine a second Holocaust, then talk about which of
their Christian friends would hide them. The game leads to a surprising — and alarming — revelation. In the back of every character’s mind in these stories is the Holocaust. The characters vary greatly in their observation of Jewish practices, yet that dark cloud affects them all. In “Camp Sundown,” a camp director tries to talk a group of elderly vigilantes from taking action against someone they believe is a Nazi from the concentration camps. Mixed with that tension is some funny dialogue that plays with language. One character says someone “wears now a wig and eats the snafu hot dogs.” The camp director corrects him: “Tofu.” In “How We Avenged the Blums,” young Jewish boys try to deal with a bully they call the Anti-Semite. They go to an 18-year-old Jewish boy for help. He tells them: “It’s a delicate thing being Jewish. … It’s a condition that aggravates the more mind you pay it.” In spite of wanting vengeance, the narrator at the end decides “I’d always feel that to be broken was better than
to break — my failing.” These stories deal with how to be Jewish in a world that is often anti-Semitic. Yet Englander does not romanticize Jews or portray them merely as victims. The enemies of many of these characters are themselves. Two of the stories are set in Israel. “Sister Hills” describes the beginning of an Israeli settlement from the beginning of the Yom Kippur War in 1973 through today. It’s told as a fable about the surviving founders of the settlement, two women who made a pact that has harrowing consequences later. It also shows the harshness of keeping Jewish laws. “Free Fruit for Young Widows,” perhaps the best story in the collection, unveils the evolution of evil in a man who survived the Holocaust at great cost to his soul. A father describes to his son “the hazy morality of combat” and the “gray space that was called real life.” He tells his son not to judge the man who survived the Holocaust too severely: “You, spoiled child, apply the rules of civilization to a boy who had seen only its opposite.”
Poems have traditional forms, modern subjects BROWSING
BY DONALD MACE WILLIAMS
“The Assumption,” by Bryan D. Dietrich (WordFarm, 84 Pages, $15) In spite of the title, these are not religious poems. ... Or are they? Though Dietrich doesn’t use the word “Assumption” to mean clearly the taking into heaven of the Virgin Mary, he does seem to have in mind the taking-it-for-granted that Something above us exists. Some of the lines in these 57 poems suggest that the Something may be God. But Dietrich, a professor at Newman University, comes closer to identifying some heedless power, as in the shivery fifth poem of the section called “The Astronomer,” which asks us to imagine an
“interstellar intelligence / of protoplasmic cloud ... a casteless, chlorophyllic civilization.” Having imagined that, the poet says, “Now try to imagine such species care, or give a techno-damn.” Well, Dietrich does care, at least in this collection. That — the intensity of his questioning, his imagining — is what gives the poems the power to keep a reader butting through the tangles of recondite allusions to monsters, myths, current events, wars and philosophies, not to mention the syntax that can be as jungly as this, referring to our inevitable lack of knowledge about unseen things: “that great gaping lack smacks us with its loss / of being loss, becomes a presence, lung / for those who cannot breathe, but wholly, space.” In spite of the modern-plus effects these poems make, their forms are traditional. All but the last two poems are sonnets of the standard 14 lines, though the lines are of irregular length and meter. The poems within each section are connected to each other tail-inmouth. They even rhyme, mostly. The modernness comes in good part from Dietrich’s snatching of sounds and images like grains from
whatever cosmic dust clouds come screaming past his head. He can read, as a result, like a parody of Gerard Manley Hopkins: “Each rock-pocked rockpile robots maneuver, / each rocket-picked planetary pocket emptied of ‘sin,’ / ceases to astound with silence.” The final poem in the collection, not a sonnet, has the narrator as a grade-school student discovering, and being horrified by, a book saying the universe must end. “Burn it, hide it,” he tells his teacher. And the 56th and last of the sonnets, in the section called “The Believer,” ends with something like relief after the groping, often brilliant turmoil of most of the book. “When / those great glowing prayer wheels ... / come suckling for me like all God’s children / drawn down from the deep,” it says, “I will go, cold, without question, / even trusting. It’s a fusty blade, religion.” Then, as if the poet had paused to reflect that this final sonnet should convey an extra bit of assurance, he adds a 15th line, “We all must greet it, fleshless, in the end.” Donald Mace Williams, an Eagle columnist through most of the 1990s, is the author of the single-poem chapbook “Wolfe” and the novel “Black Tuesday’s Child.” He lives in Canyon, Texas.
Englander is a fine writer who is willing to take risks. Two of the stories, “Peep Show” and “Everything I Know About My Family on My Mother’s Side” are more experimental. He is deft at using apt phrases. He describes “this Pat Tillman, quagmire-of-Iraq world” or someone who speaks “with his ‘master’s in social work’ tone.” Englander includes many Hebrew or Yiddish words and some Jewish arcana, and sometimes it’s obscure. For example, it would help to know what a “hametz” is. And one passage runs, “he went to heder, had the peyes and all that. But in America, a classic galusmonger.” He also provides many interesting insights, such as this about “Israel’s own internal plague … the one that took more children of Israel than all the bloodshed and hatred of all their long wars combined,” referring to highway accidents. Englander is part of a new generation of outstanding shortstory writers and definitely worth reading. Gordon Houser is a writer and editor in Newton.
BEST SELLERS From Publishers Weekly
FICTION 1. “Kill Shot” by Vince Flynn 2. “Defending Jacob” by William Landay 3. “Catch Me” by Lisa Gardner 4. “Death Comes to Pemberley” by P.D. James 5. “Private: #1 Suspect” by James Patterson & Maxine Paetro 6. “11⁄22/63” by Stephen King 7. “Home Front” by Kristin Hannah 8. “The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest” by Stieg Larsson 9. “Taken” by Robert Crais 10. “Left for Dead” by J.A. Jance
NONFICTION 1. “Ameritopia” by Mark R. Levin 2. “Hilarity Ensues” by Tucker Max 3. “The End of Illness” by David Agus, M.D. 4. “American Sniper” by Chris Kyle, with Scott McEwen & Jim DeFelice 5. “Take the Stairs” by Rory Vaden 6. “Steve Jobs” by Walter Isaacson 7. “Killing Lincoln” by Bill O’Reilly & Martin Dugard 8. “Quiet” by Susan Cain 9. “The World of Downton Abbey” by Jessica Fellowes 10. “Once Upon a Secret” by Mimi Alford