by Jon Garber

Lois-Ann Yamanaka wants a cigarette. It’s a rainy St. Patrick’s Day in San Francisco and the novelist and poet is halfway through a mini-tour for the softcover release of her sixth book, Father of the Four Passages (Picador, 230 pp.).

Holed up in a non-smoking hotel room, Yamanaka is relieved to take a few drags off a cigarette outside before dodging raindrops with a gleeful scream to sit down and chat. California’s rigorous anti-smoking laws are just one of the downsides of being on the road, which takes the author away from the home she shares with her husband and 10-year-old son, John, in Hawaii. Dressed in black, she is a warm presence, her wildly expressive facial gestures quickly switching from mock terror to humorous eye-rolling to knowing smiles.

Yamanaka, who grew up in a Japanese-American family on Hilo and Molokai, has become an important literary voice for the 50th state, painting a picture of the islands rarely seen by tourists lured by the promise of hula dancers, Don Ho and cocktails in plastic coconut shells. Hawaii, so often misrepresented in our popular culture--in fluffy Elvis movies, Hawaii Five-0, James Michener novels and cheesy tiki-lounge souvenirs--is hardly the idyllic paradise of mainland dreams.

With her funny, frank stories of childhood and family dysfunction, written largely in pidgin (a dialect of Hawaiian, Japanese, Portuguese and English) Yamanaka has succeeded in bringing to light the racial, economic and social inequities of the region. Her newest novel, Father of the Four Passages, depicts a young woman’s struggle to reconcile a troubled past of family strife, drug and alcohol abuse and three abortions with her own impending pregnancy. Sonia Kurisu remains haunted by the ghosts of her children, each seeking the identity of the fathers they never knew and her own father is a shadowy and elusive figure in her life. With the birth of Sonny-Boy, who is autistic, Sonia must find a way to bridge the past with the present and find peace and redemption for her son, her family and herself. The rawly confessional, surreal novel, arguably the author’s most mature and spiritual work to date, was also the hardest to write, she says.

"I had to face some truths in my life that were very awful to face," she says solemnly. "I had to make a decision to take myself to the place where the truth existed, which wasn’t in any form of light. It was in a very dark place of myself, not only myself but it was a physically dark place. Also the hard part was coming back out of that darkness because it’s so tantalizing, it’s so comforting. You know darkness is almost as warm as light. It just feels so good!"

Yamanaka has always blended elements of autobiography in her fiction, so vividly in fact, that readers often believe she is her characters. "I don’t want to make like everything is related to my life in some way,” she says warily. "It’s all fiction, right?"

But Father of the Four Passages is a particularly personal work for Yamanaka, whose own son, John is autistic.

"I thought that I had to go completely crazy to heal him. When I realized that he came to heal me, that was just an incredible moment of relief and joy," she says. "It was just very cathartic. His life has brought so many lives into my life that I would have never been privileged to be in the company of, in the company of spirits. And that’s because of him, yeah? The door opened through him. So, it’s pretty amazing."

Yamanaka first came to prominence in 1992, with Saturday Night at the Pahala Theatre, an evocative collection of narrative poetry that took an unflinching, comic look at puberty, poverty, parents and other adolescent humiliations. It offered mainland readers their first good look at Yamanaka, who was included in a diverse roster of American poets for the PBS program, The United States of Poetry. She followed this up with three novels, Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers, Blu’s Hanging and Heads by Harry, demonstrating a flair for capturing the pains and confusions of growing up with a distinctive yet universal voice. The so-called ‘Hilo Trilogy’ earned her a loyal following of readers and a major publishing contract, though she attests that naming it a trilogy was more a product of publisher marketing than her own sensibilities: "The Hilo Trilogy? Hello! The second book no even!"

It’s that second book, Blu’s Hanging, that cast the author into a firestorm of controversy, regarding her depiction of a Filipino character as a child molester. Several academic groups objected to the characterization, claiming that it perpetuated a racist stereotype of Filipinos as sexual deviants. The critically acclaimed novel had earned the Association for Asian-American Studies fiction award in 1997, only to have it rescinded a day later due to protests. What transpired from there was a long and heated debate among academic and literary circles, bringing up issues of free speech, censorship and the perceived obligation of ethnic writers to positively portray racial groups. Though several prominent Asian-American authors, including Amy Tan, Maxine Hong Kingston and Frank Chin rallied to her defense, the whole experience was a difficult one for Yamanaka.

"That whole mess probably was a gift, although you don’t look at it as a gift when you are in it," she says. "But it was a gift because it made people start thinking, it made people react to literature, which people should do, there should be a reaction. You know what I mean? It should incite you, inspire you, that’s what gets you through. I think that happened. I think I also learned I’m a big girl and I can take criticism. And the other thing is that people have their own agendas, yeah? I learned not to personalize people’s reactions to my work or to me because they have their own needs and wants, you know what I mean? It was an academic battle, though to me."

Yamanaka is no stranger to the barriers of academic structures, having been criticized over her use of pidgin in her books and in the classroom as a teacher. She is a very vocal proponent over preserving the language, which has been systematically discouraged in the Hawaiian school curriculum.

"In Hawaii, it’s a very unusual culture and so, we were not allowed to speak or write in pidgin, and it was very discouraged. It’s hard growing up like that, you know what I mean?," she says. "You think you’re inferior because you can never get the dialect out of the sound of your voice. So my students, I tell them: Language is a wheel, we don’t look at language on a continuum because if we look at language on a continuum, we do subtle gestures of left and right. That’s what we were taught. It was so subtle…so insidious, you know what I mean? As a child, you don’t figure those things out, but as an adult, you understand what was done and what happened and the kind of racist structure that was all built into our little world."

Growing up in the ‘70s, Yamanaka often felt the pain of being ‘other,’ not only from her language and working-class upbringing but also from the flood of white images that steadily poured in from movies, television and pop culture. Her books are packed with references to everything from Donny Osmond and Farrah Fawcett to Barbie dolls and Flower Drum Song, often presenting a reality far from that of her characters’ experiences.

"It’s the only window we had into mainstream culture, yeah, was through magazines and television shows. Because we always felt ‘other’ because of the language and because of being Japanese," Yamanaka says. "You always felt ‘other.’ You don’t understand the idea of being a non-entity or not represented in pop culture or mainstream culture. You want to be. You want to be white. You want all of that because that is what is beautiful or that is what is hip or popular or whatever. So, that’s the way we were as kids."

Today, with writers like herself, Nora Okja Keller and Eric Chock, Yamanaka is cautiously optimistic about the state of literature in Hawaii.

"There are writers from Hawaii who are writing from the inside out rather than being the subject of somebody else’s text," she says. "So, I think that that’s an important change in the way that we are going to view ourselves and the way that we are going to speak about ourselves and the stories that we tell. So, I think it’s very natural. Because, you know, some of the criticism is: Oh, they’re all talkin’ about their grandmas and it’s an ‘I’ point-of-view and blah blah blah. It’s all a natural kind of progression into a literature and our literature is in a very adolescent state. That’s why there’s all the fighting because like teenagers, we all fightin’ with each other. Who’s right, who’s wrong, who’s doing it the right way, who’s speaking the right truth. It’s all kind of inside squabbling, but all good -- to me."

Yamanaka’s next novel, Behold the Many, marks another bold new step for the author. The book, which will be published in 2003, is set during the plantations of turn-of-the-20th-century Hawaii and will be Yamanaka’s first foray into historical fiction. In life and in literature, she continues to accept challenges and to learn from them, something she advises for any aspiring writer.

"When the student is ready, the teacher appears. So you might want to be a writer but it might not be the time for you," she says. "When your teacher appears on the path, you know that you are on the path and that is what you are supposed to do. I would also say to believe in the integrity of small presses and small non-profit web sites. Because that’s where real literature exists to me, not dream to land on the steps of Viking/Penguin and expecting to be open arms. To be an artist first."

by Jon Garber

"This is very strange. These look like those compartments where bodies are kept in the morgue," Han Ong says. He’s looking at a wall of paneled mirrors, each with its own cubed section and translucent pegs on each of the four corners.

It’s but one of several distinctive design choices in the tony San Francisco hotel where Ong is staying. Dressed casually in jeans and a sleeveless T-shirt which accentuates his well-toned muscles and slender frame, he looks more like a particularly intellectual club kid than a guest at the fancy hotel.

"Talk about bad feng shui...that chair...It’s ugly!," Ong remarks about a large throne, brocaded in gold and royal blue, that has been placed high atop a pedestal in the lobby.

Though Han Ong is not a practitioner of feng shui, the ancient Chinese art of placement and harmonious design that has become a wildly popular fad among the upper class, he certainly knows a thing or two about it. Feng shui forms a pivotal plot point in Ong’s brilliant, insightful debut novel, Fixer Chao (Picador USA, 384 pp., $14).

The novel’s protagonist, a downtrodden Filipino gay street hustler named William Narciso Paulinha, becomes involved in an ingenious scam of revenge against the beautiful and privileged denizens of Manhattan’s upper echelon. The ruse transforms William into the inscrutable Master Chao, who, for a tidy sum, will offer feng shui advice to the wealthiest trend-setters. What these gullible poseurs don’t know is that William is a complete fraud and he will wield his "knowledge" to inflict harm on their pampered lifestyles.

In town to promote the paperback release of Fixer Chao, Ong took some time to meet with me and discuss the book over lunch at the hotel’s fashionable pan-Asian/fusion restaurant. Talking with Ong is a similar experience to reading Fixer Chao. Both in print and in person, he’s witty, playful, yet quite serious about any number of topics. He chooses his words carefully and with great thoughtfulness, but he isn’t above issuing the occasional sardonic zinger.

"People asked me what I had against the practice and it wasn’t so much the practice as that I was making a comment on the popularity of it and what people were using it as a vehicle for," he says.

Growing up with his Chinese family in the Philippines, the MacArthur Award-winning playwright and author was familiar with the basic tenets of feng shui, which his grandmother had followed. Yet when feng shui achieved a sudden fashionable prominence in the Western world during the late ‘90s, Ong saw an opportunity to examine its appropriation with his pointed social satire.

"If there is a commentary-critique, it’s more about that," he says. "What it says about human appetite and the need for safeguards and what it was they were trying to protect and safeguard, which is part and parcel of their successfulness…The vigilance and not just the acquisitiveness but the vigilance and the fear that comes from it. I think I had read a profile of a master in The New York Times’ Metro section and there was something about the article about the fact that the man’s clients were all very prosperous…it clicked in…and the fact that it’s an Asian field, you know, like the book says : ‘It’s the province of an Oriental.’ So the fact of the fraud and the feng shui and the idea that I would always write about an Asian protagonist sort of all blended and that’s how it came about."

As topical as the feng shui angle is, Ong’s novel is powered by his love for the detective genre--Georges Simenon’s Maigret series being a particular favorite--and its delight in creating intricate schemes, swindles and double-crosses.

"I’ve always liked pulp stories, detective stories and I love scams, the idea of a scam," he says. "So that was the first thing, the first element which was that I love scams. Ultimately I decided on its being prose, because at that point I had written so many plays --four in succession-- that I was tired out and I had just finished a screenplay after those four plays. I had been writing prose off and on during all this time, so it wasn’t a new thing to try out and experiment."

Though Fixer Chao has received mostly glowing reviews from literary critics, one group has remained surprisingly silent with positive or negative feedback: feng shui masters and their clients.

"[It’s] just as well because I certainly wouldn’t know what to say to them," Ong admits. "I don’t see myself as a debunker of the practice. In religious terms, I would be an agnostic. I think there are certain sound principles in it, certain things that if they don’t necessarily make common sense, some of them make common sense, and certain ones which don’t make common sense at least make a great, poetic sense, like the stuff I use in the book where you shouldn’t have a mirror facing your bed and the logic is that every time you go to sleep, your soul really lifts from your body and plays and when it wakes up and sees itself in the mirror, it wouldn’t know what it is and might frighten itself to death. I thought that was rather poetic. And others that sound far-fetched or too arcane."

Visit Han Ong’s own digs in Manhattan, though, and you won’t find too many indications that a feng shui master has been consulted.

"I have a mirror facing my bed," he says with a laugh. "A small mirror, but it’s not placed so high that I wake up and see myself. I have shelves, open shelves all around my apartment and that’s not supposed to be good, if I remember correctly. Open shelves are like knives pointed at you, daggers."

He presumably avoided the daggers of our waiter, who had to take Ong’s meal back three times to the kitchen before it measured up to the author’s precise instructions. "I wonder if he spit in it?" Ong says, before biting into the sandwich. "I should have asked him," he adds mischievously. "He would have been stricken."

Whether it’s perusing a menu or writing, Han Ong knows what he wants and isn’t afraid to seek it out. After immigrating to Los Angeles with his parents when he was 16, Ong dropped out of high school, ran away from home and spent time in the subculture of gay street hustlers, a world which he evoked in his first play, The L.A. Plays. He has since gone on to craft a remarkably prolific series of plays--nearly three dozen at last count--that deal with among other things, Asian-American identity, gay sexuality and his own Catholic school upbringing.

In 1997, his body of work was recognized by the MacArthur Fellows Program, often known as "the genius grant." At 33, Ong joins such recipients as novelist Thomas Pynchon, playwright Suzan Lori-Parks, theater director Julie Taymor and filmmaker Errol Morris, and was the first person from the Philippines and the youngest playwright ever to receive the fellowship.

"It was great, it was liberating," Ong says of the honor. "It gave me some freedom in those five years when I was getting the checks from the foundation. It gave me some freedom to actually pay attention to the writing and not worry about anything else. Like I always say, the money was great, but it wasn’t that much, spread over five years and also since I live in New York, that figure would have afforded me a great lifestyle anywhere else. In New York, it just made sure that I lived okay. Prior to my getting it, I just wasn’t getting enough support or productions in the theater from the profession and even after, I don’t think that it’s catapulted me that far, except that it’s just nice on my resume. I think for Chao when it came out, a lot of the interest in me was because the MacArthur had shined a spotlight and people were curious not only to see a writer switch genres, but also that with the MacArthur, it was sort of this nice seal of approval."

The grant also allowed him to pursue his long-hailed ambition of becoming a novelist, one that preceded his desire to write plays.

"It’s not as collaborative a medium as theater and your vision is yours alone," he says. "So much more in theater, you deal with people and you deal with an audience nightly when the plays are up. I mean people read my book in the privacy of their home and I’m not there to monitor their responses, which is great."

Ong’s background as a playwright and actor serves him well throughout Fixer Chao, which has some pretty choice words for the state of the American stage. When William attends a wildly praised Broadway musical directed by one of his clients, he thinks "suddenly the word Technicolor seemed a suitable anagram for punishment."

"Broadway’s like Disneyland," Ong says. "It’s really sort of a big, brassy kind of attraction. I’ve never been of the temperament--not to say that brassy entertainment could not sometimes be really, really good--but I’ve never been any way of the temperament. I don’t have the temperament and never have and I still don’t have it, so I don’t know if I ever will, to actually produce that kind of work. So Broadway has never been, even when I was dreaming and aspiring, has never been the arena in which I believed my work would ever be in, so it’s far removed from my ambition. It’s for kids and for a lot of grown-ups who think and act like kids. It’s basically what it is and it’s fun. It’s for out-of-towners. It’s their chunk of New York."

Though set in 1999, Fixer Chao continues to have a startling topicality today, never more so than in the eerily prophetic passages such as this one, in which a cynical tour guide talks about terrorism in New York:

"He took history students, he said, and tourists and U.N. workers and city lore buffs to various spots linked to the recent plots by a handful of Palestinians to terrorize New York…It gave his audience pause for thought, which was what they were paying for. They wanted to be scared. Conspiracies all around. They wanted to find the Devil."

Ong had written this long before September 11 became a reality, but even this tragedy was marred by its own version of media spin control, he points out.

"I was very moved and shocked and sort of agitated by everything and then of course, the surfeit of crying and then crying some more," he says. "For several weeks after 9/11, the main goal, the highest goal of TV news, seemed to be an Oprah goal, which was to try and make the audience cry as often as possible. And it got really manipulative and blackmail-ish. You just figured--well, once again, human emotions have reached a base point of being milked. So I don’t think my opinion of human nature, though altered for a few days, was really altered that much in the long run."

Despite its many entertaining, of-the-moment digressions, Fixer Chao is ultimately, a tale of social and racial revenge for the immigrant, the outsider whose face is pressed against the glass, peering into the lives of those who seem to have everything. Ong’s own experiences as an adolescent immigrant and later as a gay, Asian man in America certainly informed many parts of the book.

"[It was] hard, at the height of my adolescence, which meant that I was at the height of my self-consciousness, to be different," he says. "It was high school at its most undiluted form of anxiety. It was just so anxiety-making. You didn’t need any other reason to stand apart if you are that age. Being an immigrant, the status of being an immigrant just sort of heightens the feeling of apartness that you have from the rest of the crowd, who you see as one unit and yourself as being outside that impermeable unit."

Added to that was the distinctive baggage of growing up Catholic, which Ong addressed in his play, Middle Finger.

"The main feature about Catholicism is this huge intolerance for other ways of thinking and believing. And so for me, I have vestiges of that, I’m pretty intolerant of certain things…that might have something to do with being Catholic and being very absolutist...either heaven or hell. But now, I feel...I try as much as possible to be generous, that I have this upbringing to overcome."

Given this experience, he is hardly surprised by the recent sexual scandals that have rocked the Catholic Church.

"I cracked this joke before. I did U. Conn. (University of Connecticut), that was my first stop. I was speaking to students and I was on this mini-stage on a podium and I said ‘Well, I don’t know you well enough to crack this joke, but I’ll crack it.’ And someone had asked me this same question about the priests. And I said if I’d known about this scandal and that the Catholic Church would now be liable for millions and millions of dollars, I would have gotten myself molested as a kid. I think it’s just human nature and if you repress sexual desire or any kind of human nature that seems natural and you give it no outlet, an outlet will emerge…will be created."

He may be a master of cynical wit, but Ong says that he has learned to subtly contain a lot of the anger and resentment he harbored in his youth.

"I roll my eyes a lot," he says. "When I was younger, my mother used to say 'don’t make that face! Because once the wind blows, it will freeze and stay that way!' So I’m always worried that my eyes or my face is going to be frozen permanently with that rolling-my-eyes expression. On a purely pragmatic and careerist level, I continually roll my eyes at the things that get the attention that they do, the kind of books that get the attention that they do."

Dessert has arrived, a fudgy, chocolate concoction that could best be described as decadent. He surveys the mounds of chocolate hesitantly before plunging his fork into it. "It’s all just sugar," he says between bites. "It’s just cocaine for the timid. Which is me, I am the timid. Cocaine for me!"

It is only here that his penchant for candid truth seems to have abandoned him. Because if there is one thing that Han Ong is thankfully not, it’s timid.

Han Ong On:

Fixer Chao, which The New York Times’ Janet Maslin called "inventively malevolent," is packed with hilariously barbed comments about media and the entertainment world. Here are perspectives on some of our culture’s more sacred cows, from the man who referred to Madonna as "the undertaker of the music world."

On Abercrombie & Fitch, the clothing company that recently got into hot water for their kitschy T-shirt depictions of Asian stereotypes:

"...A stronghold of white, homoerotic, the Bruce Weber, hey-hey, ho-ho, we’re Nazis and we love our white boys... I certainly wouldn’t consider them the bastion of right thinking or any kind of thinking."

On Colson Whitehead, the prize-winning author of The Intuitionist and John Henry Days:

"Well, he certainly hasn’t been under-noticed. I was gonna say that he’s much older, but he’s not, he’s younger than I am. But that’s OK, I’m far, far, far more attractive than he is. I’m far cuter."

On newly-minted Oscar winner Halle Berry:

"I’m glad they gave it to a black girl, but they gave it to the wrong black girl. She ain’t talented. She’s so pretty but her acting is so effortful. I haven‘t seen it [Monster‘s Ball] yet, so I shouldn‘t be talking."

On apocalyptic disaster movies, which he playfully spoofs in Fixer Chao with his own creation, Super Pigeon:

"People say it’s a parody and in a way, it’s not so much a parody as it is a direct transcription of what was happening in the culture at that time: the end-of-the-world phenomenon. Do you remember those two asteroid movies?...Super Pigeon is supposed to be a slightly humorous transcription of that same kind of syndrome. I played it so straight and usually when people read stuff, they are used to having the author point things out for them italicized but then this is narrated by a person. I love movies like that. I love Super Pigeon. I wish somebody would pay me $2 million for the rights, not for Chao but for Super Pigeon! Super Pigeon! I would buy a ticket to go see Super Pigeon destroy New York City."

by Kevin Smokler and Jon Garber

A discussion of contemporary, postmodern authors can't go very far these days without mention of Rick Moody, the Connecticut-bred author whose insightful portraits of suburban unease in novels like The Ice Storm and Purple America have earned him a strong critical following. This year, Moody took a bold step both professionally and personally with his memoir/literary mood piece, The Black Veil, which explores his own struggles with depression and mental illness, while examining a possible family relationship to Nathaniel Hawthorne. CentralBooking recently caught up with Mr. Moody during his West Coast book tour to chat about veils, reading, and um, the author's liberal use of italics.

CentralBooking: Where were you in your writing life that you decided it was time to do a memoir or was this a case of that you didn't know it was a memoir until you started it? I've heard you say that before.

Rick Moody: Yeah, that's really the truth. I mean, I had this wild story that my grandfather used to tell me as a kid that we were related to this guy who wore a veil all the time. And I knew that that had become the basis of this Nathaniel Hawthorne story, "The Minister's Black Veil." So I wanted to really write about Hawthorne and I'd been wanting to do that for a long time. I actually proposed an essay on the subject to Grand Street in 1988.

CB: That's a while ago.

RM: Yeah. And the memoir-ish stuff in the book really appeared later on in thinking about. I still don't think it's a real memoir and I'm sort of disappointed that some people seem to feel like...confused, y'know. 'Oh, it's not a memoir!' It's not like uh...The Kiss. I didn't want it to be like that. The conventional memoir is a really stylized, kind of boring structure. But I started it finally after Purple America because I was just so burnt out by the novel and didn't think that I could write another novel immediately.

CB: Is that the kind of thing where you wake up in the morning and you say 'Oh, God! Not another novel' or was it wearing away at you gradually?

RM: Well, it was just a really hard book to finish. I mean, they're all hard to finish, but Purple America, I sort of put in everything I knew and I couldn't imagine that I had any more material. I just figured that if I tried to write another novel, it would just end up being the same one over again. I needed to do something else to sort of recharge the batteries.

CB: We were arguing about the word purple and the use of it in the title of Purple America. Is there a connection to Tom Wolfe's book, The Purple Decades, which I believe is what he called the '80s? And then we just sort of tossed around the word purple for awhile, that purple means overripe, overdone. Where did you come up with it and how does it...what pieces would fit in the puzzle of that book?

RM: What's your argument?

CB: Well, I kept thinking that in one sense it was a nod to purple pose in one sense. But also that it recurs throughout the novel and that purple is kind of like this ideal, at least in the '50s, with Billie's characters. But it suggests royalty and promise and everything is beautiful and yet with those lavender shades, purple can also mean a lot of other things as we know by the end of the book. I guess what's behind the surface of that beauty.

RM: That's closer (laughs). But I know the Wolfe book, actually. I have a visual artist friend and she's like the best stained glass window-maker on earth. She's discussed the Wolfe book with me. So, I know the argument and I know it well and it's also the case that purple in Purple America is like the veil in The Black Veil in that it's not meant to be a reducible...it's meant to be polysemous and sort of go wherever it wants to go. And I don't want to be prejudicial about interpretations exactly. In fact, it's precisely the opening outward of the word that I'm interested in. But in terms of what I was thinking about, it definitely was tryin' to flip the bird at people who'd said of The Ring of Brightest Angels Around Heaven that it was too cerebral and not emotional enough. So, my reaction was OK, I'm going to write a book that's so emotional, that no one will ever say I'm too cerebral again. So, purple book.

CB: So, you must have really taken heed on the people...you must have really listened hard to people who said this was too cerebral.

RM: No, I only listened to one person...Madison Smartt Bell. (laughs)...and it pisses me off.

CB: Do you generally read your reviews?

RM: Not anymore. I mean, after that one. It sort of started...I guess it started on Purple America, really. And it always ends up that I see a couple of them inadvertently and stuff. But the bad ones are so devastating...and it takes me a week to get over them and stuff, so it just seemed like I'd be a happier person.

CB: Do your friends tell you what they think?

RM: No, Amy, my fiancée, is the gatekeeper. She gets them and then I say 'is it up or down?' and then we move on.

CB: Near the end of The Black Veil, you talk a lot about...you do that whole passage that I really liked about how black, the use of the word black...and it's almost hypertextual in a way, like hitting the what's related button on the word black. Black can be this and this and this and this. You seem to be attracted to that sort of lateral style of thinking, of taking a word and pulling it out this way. Tell me a little about that.

RM: I really don't know why I like it, I just know that I do. I think it has to do with this idea that I have been kind of enunciating to myself of literature as deep archaeology, the idea that it's really important, that a lot of contemporary American fiction, prides itself on surface and on a kind of sort of stylized sheen. And I'm really interested in getting like way down under and seeing what things are in the sort of basement of symbols. What happens down there, where the other associations for something as simple as a veil or ice in The Ice Storm or whatever. Get down underneath from different points-of-view and allow obsession and condensation, displacement -- all part of what the thing means--to really investigate.

CB: And the color black

RM: But that passage also, I should say, since no one so far has noticed, is an homage to the chapter in Moby Dick called "The Whiteness of the Whale." So this is "the blackness of the veil."

CB: So it even rhymes.

RM: Yeah.

CB: Do you still have the veil?

RM: Yeah, it's in the Wal-Mart bag in my office.

CB: Hanging on a hook or something?

RM: I think it's under a bunch of shit, in the pile of foreign editions of my books that I never know what to do with. It's all dusty, but it's still there. I haven't worn it in awhile.

CB: Did you ever wear it while you were writing the book?

RM: Oh, yeah. There's actually a whole other night that I don't talk about in the book because it ultimately seemed redundant. But I wore it to a dinner party and really freaked out everyone at the dinner party. It was tremendously uncomfortable. Everybody was really mad I was wearing it. (Laughs) They all tried to get me to take it off. And I realized, it's redundant to say so, but it's the most isolating thing you can put on your body. I suppose there are probably some other things that I don't know of that are as bad. But for a guy to wear a veil in public. It's a fucked up thing.

CB: Did you ever hear the story about the protesters who were objecting to the way Barnes & Noble treated readers and walked into Barnes & Nobles with paper bags on their heads, with eyes cut out. When the clerk stopped them and asked 'why are you here?' he goes, 'I think you view readers as an anonymous horde, so here we are.' And a whole bunch of people came in all wearing paper bags on their head. And they called the police.

RM: How excellent! What store was that? In New York?

CB: I believe it was in New York and I think it also happened in Vancouver. It was reported in Adbusters, which is where I read it.

RM: Great

CB: But there is something very disconcerting about being face-to-face with someone whose face you can't see.

RM: Yeah, yeah. It freaks people out. It's a very primal image, I think.

CB: You like Halloween, right? You've said that is your favorite holiday.

RM: I love Halloween.

CB: There are a lot of masks in your books, like the Nixon mask in The Ice Storm.

RM: Yeah, it's a big theme, actually. The chicken mask in "The Mansion on the Hill" [from Demonology].

CB: What were you for Halloween last year?

RM: I don't think I've been anything for a while now, unfortunately. I'm 40 now. But I really get into...what we did, Amy and I, last year, was we went to the 7th Avenue Halloween parade in Brooklyn, which is Park Slope, and it's mainly little kids...and so that was really fabulous. They really get out there. It's not as...sort of full of drunken mayhem that's at Greenwich Village's Halloween.

CB: You said you've been wanting to write about Hawthorne for awhile. I'm guessing you're the type of reader who has several favorite authors floating around in your head. What made Hawthorne stick out from the rest of them?

RM: You know, it's interesting, because some Hawthorne I really don't like, like anything else after The House of the Seven Gables, I think is pretty bad. It's so romantic and it's really boring and Marble Faun isn't that great, either. But when he was on, he was sort of really on, you know? And there are two things, one thing I like is the sort of irreducibility of the symbols, like the scarlet letter and the veil. And then the other thing I like is the prose. He actually had a really beautiful line and there's much more humor in there than people immediately suspect. "Rappacini's Daughter," "Celestial Railroad" and some of those little stories that aren't as well-known, are really great and fascinating. And the journals are really good. That's another thing I read a lot of for this book that nobody much reads but his notebooks are as good as Cheever's journals. They're just really beautiful, full of descriptive writing. So that's where I meet up with him, is at the level of the line, primarily. As a novelist, I don't think he was perfect and the short stories are better earlier on, the later they get, the more afflicted they are with allegory.

CB: I'm always fascinated by meeting people who picked up Hawthorne at 12 or 11 or whenever they did. I find it just fascinating, particularly people who didn't come from publishing backgrounds or didn't have parents for writers.

RM: Well, you know, I have this student. I teach at Bennington in the low-residency program and I have this student to whom I just gave Twice Told Tales. And he sent me this essay like 'why the hell did he send me this?' He couldn't make heads or tails out of it, and I think it's partly the kind of antique quality of the prose, you know? I didn't get it when I was a teenager. I read The Scarlet Letter in high school and I didn't totally get it. But by college, I really did and then I was starting to really dig it and the whole arc and the theme.

CB: Which would imply that you had to come back to it.

RM: I totally kept coming back to it, partly because of the familial coincidence. It seemed like I couldn't give up on it.

CB: Do you ever feel disgruntled about 'kids these days' not appreciating...?

RM: Sometimes. I mean the thing that worries me is that I'm so hopelessly out of date that I'm gonna wake up in 20 years and the stuff's that's valuable to me will just have been wiped off the map. I mean, I assume that there's some thing that is going to replace it, that eventually web stuff is going to have a literary wing and people will just read on there and that's how they'll do their thing. And books will be made, in some fashion, to cater to those kinds of tastes. That sort of ADD thing that you get reading on the web. But what about books? Books are so spectacular. What's going to become of them? I mean the good news is that the eBook thing just crashed.

CB: But the thing I'm so fascinated by is that Heny James' Daisy Miller, that was the Danielle Steel of its day. It was enormously popular. Housewives and tailors were reading that.

RM: I know, I know.

CB: You've mentioned in a couple of previous interviews that there is a theme of often what is not said and silences and what is left out, as opposed to what is available on the page. I'm guessing that that was a question that played around in your mind when you were doing The Black Veil. Can you talk a little about decisions you made about what to keep in and what to leave out and what might have motivated them?

RM: It was really central to the project, because the book was about concealment and revealing and that kind of dance between the two, which is of course, a debate that's of central importance to what the memoir is. We have this idea that it's possible for a memoir to be perfectly credible and completely open, but I would contend that that's a fiction, that it's a really stylized form and we've just been sort of duped by culture into believing that we're getting real access. Obviously, I come from this culture, this sort of Northeastern WASP culture, that's all about suppression of the really relevant material and the replacement with kind of metonymic equivalents. There's this great Cheever story, "Jewels of the Cabots", it's the last story in The Collected Stories, and in that story, every time someone's about to say something important, the narrator says: "Feel that refreshing breeze." That's sort of very emblematic of how the direct expression of emotion has always worked in my books, it's more often laterally arrived at. The Black Veil, as a structure, its weird, leaping, kind of circular, digressive structure, it's very much an example of the same problem being worked out. I didn't want to write about being in a psychiatric hospital and all that stuff, so the book cozies up to it, gets scared, cozies up to it, gets scared, on purpose, because that's how I think and that's how I think, that's how I imagine a certain kind of demographic of which I emerged, thinks in general. As to what's left out, it's left out, so I can't tell you. But maybe I'll put it in some other book.

CB: I guess I was asking....there's a part where you actually tell us what is left out.

RM: Yeah, but that's all included. So it's not actually left out.

CB: And you give no reason for why it's left out. You simply say, 'with regards to my first novel, I'm not going to talk about it.' And then you move on to the next thing.

RM: It's embarrassing to talk about your work. That's the honest truth. I mean, two things I just absolutely realized: I can talk about being in the psychiatric hospital, but I can't talk about my work and I can't talk about money.

CB: So if you're at a friend's book party and somebody says: 'Oh, Rick! I loved your new book! Tell me all about it.' Do you say 'no'?

RM: Yeah (laughs).

CB: I guess if it's a good friend, they would know better than to ask.

RM: What I would do is...I'm a really deft asker of questions in reply. So I get the other person talking about themselves and then I never come back to me. That's the ideal circumstance.

CB: You said because it's embarrassing?

RM: Yeah. Because it sounds like you're boasting if you talk about your work, which is the worst thing of all.

CB: Which is odd that you just wrote a memoir, which is about you.

RM: Yeah. That's why it's such an odd book. That's why this idea that it's narcissistic in some way is so vexatious to me, because I'm like...I'm so uncomfortable talking about myself at all, it's hard for me to think of the book as being self-centered.

CB: Is it difficult to read it?

RM: Oh, yeah. Yeah, it's really bad. I have found a couple of spots that I can read from that are really simple little funny things that don't get too close to the red hot center of it, because I don't know if I could really do that.

CB: I read in one of the interviews that you've done, that one of the reasons you wanted to write this was to learn more about yourself. What do you feel you learned about yourself that maybe you didn't know after finishing this book?

RM: I don't know if I learned a specific thing that was hidden, but what happened was that I made peace with some wretched stuff that happened, that I hadn't much talked about for a long time. I mean, there are close friends of mine who don't really know a lot of the stuff that's in this book. So it was a process of saying...you know, people who've read my work closely, know that I was in a psychiatric hospital and it was starting to become a thing where people talked about it. And I just decided I'm just gonna tell the story now, so that it will be fully told and I will be done with it. And in doing so, I got my records, so I got to read all the hospital records and all that kind of stuff. So it just brought me close to why I was there, what it was about, and that enabled me to feel like...no anxiety about going back. If you're not willing to look at the history, then you're still in the condition of being anxious about it.

CB: Your grandfather was the publisher of The New York Daily News and you grew up in a reading family. What was your first memory of a book that really...your first reading experience that actually meant something to you.

RM: Well, one cool thing about my grandfather was, because people shipped him books all the time, he had all these really fabulous, beautiful editions of really old books...and one thing he had was the full, complete set of The Wizard of Oz books...there was the guy with the pumpkinhead, what was his name?

CB: He was like the scarecrow, wasn't he?

RM: Yeah. And that became one of the books that I became really obsessed with and we had this 1929 edition that I read as a kid. So, that was a really early reading experience, but I think the life-changing reading experiences came in 5th and 6th grade. So, I suddenly had this thing for a while, where I was reading like bestsellers in 5th grade, like Serpico, I remember I read when I was 10 and stuff like that. But then I read The Old Man and the Sea and that was really the first like...oh, my god...the language is so incredible, getting me somewhere I've never been.

CB: A thing I heard Joan Didion say, which I really like, which is 'When I finish a book, it's done. The minute the book is published, it's the past and it's not who I am or where I am anymore.' Do you feel like a book recedes in a similar way or is it still kind of floating around when you're in the wake of it being published and touring?

RM: Well, this book is hangin' around...you know, because the subject is me. If I'm doing an interview, I'm constrained to talk on that subject, which as I've said, makes me nervous and kind of uncomfortable. So, this one isn't being let go of as easily as the others. But I guarantee on June 9, I will never think about this book again. I've been looking forward to it.

CB: What are you reading right now?

RM: Contemporary or what's on the night table?

CB: What's on the night table and which of the contemporary authors have made you look up and take notice.

RM: Well, what's on the night table is 40 Stories by Donald Barthelme. And one of these New York Review of Books paperback reissues called The Cold Wind From Jamaica, [actually called A High Wind in Jamaica] which someone told me was really great, but I haven't started it yet. And there's an Ivy Compton-Burnett in between series. So I sort of brought stuff that's just not related to anything else I'm doing right now because I'm reading on the plane and stuff like that.

Contemporaries that I've recently read: Colson Whitehead's book [John Henry Days]I really dug, I liked pretty well The Death of Vishnu by Manil Suri. Mark Danielewski's book, I think is pretty great, House of Leaves. And there's a first novel by a friend of mine that I think is pretty extraordinary...Wavemaker II by Mary Beth Hughes, it's about Roy Cohn . That's a great book.

CB: You mentioned that in the diary you did on Slate, right?

RM: Yeah, yeah. I think that book is really strong. I'm looking forward to reading Jeffrey Eugenides' new book, Middlesex, which comes out in September.

CB: We didn't get to BEA, but our scout picked up a lot of stuff...I'm guessing you get a lot of books pressed into your hands by a lot of people. How do you discriminate and choose what's next---what to pay attention to and what not?

RM: It's hard and sometimes I make mistakes, actually. You know, because so much stuff comes, a lot of it goes straight upstairs to the attic and sometimes you know, six months go by and I haven't heard anything about the galley, then I just take it to this library, I don't even bother to...If public opinion seems to adhere to something, then I try but...do you know that book, Lightning Field by Dana Spiotta? That was one that I just gave away immediately and then I was judging some prize and there it was on the stacks and I figured I would read it finally. And I thought the first half of it was pretty strong, there was some nice prose in it. So, I definitely underestimated that one.

CB: I actually almost did that with The Ice Storm when it was in galley. I worked at a bookstore and the cover, it looked like a romance novel.

RM: Yeah, I don't like that cover so much. Yeah, that's true. Lightning Fields had a really boring cover.

CB: So what do you trust as sort of your cultural sieve? Who do you listen to? Who do you pay attention to in deciding what to read?

RM: Well, I really like The New York Review of Books. I like Rain Taxi a lot. That guy's right on. I think his name is Eric Lorbert. He's great...and Book Forum I also think is pretty fabulous, although I'm not as happy about the new fiction guys as in the old days. But they cover pretty great books and they often get really unusual people to review them. Occasionally, a website turns up something I'm interested in. I like Laura Miller at Salon, sometimes she's got a good angle on stuff.

CB: I wanted to ask you about the italics. A lot of people always comment on your use of italics. What purpose do they serve for you in your writing, whether or not people always understand it? Some people like it, some don't.

RM: Boy, some people don't! (Laughs) Well, in this book, it's meant to look on the page like Cotton Mather. Cotton Mather's sermons were really heavily italicized and I wanted that density of the page, so you look at it and it's like where's the breath going to be? So actually looking at the page brings anxiety to the reader. I like that. So that's good. It started when I got Microsoft Word.

CB: Do you just like the look of it?

RM: Well, it became really easy to do.

CB: You didn't have to remember to shift on the typewriters.

RM: Yeah, because you know, Garden State was almost half-written on IBM Selectric II, so then when I finally got a computer, I got this really ancient word processing program that doesn't even exist anymore. So there was an extra keystroke to italicize. So it wasn't until I got Word, which was like 1993, as I was finishing up The Ice Storm, that I finally had the real capacity to italicize. So what happened is the results were so seductive, that I just kept doing it and what I've done is commit wholeheartedly to it. Nobody can say that I've pussy-footed around the italics.

CB: You also use dashes instead of quotation marks for dialogue in your books

RM: Yes, talents may ebb and flow but the dashes are not going to ebb and flow. I find quotation marks really sort of interruptive.

CB: Roddy Doyle is a favorite author of mine and he uses the dashes too. I always thought he did it because his first three novels have extremely large casts and it was a great way to convey a sort of Babel of voices, when it really didn't matter who was talking, it's just that you knew there were a lot of people talking at once.

RM: Yeah, well in Gaddis too. In JR and in The Recognitions, it's the same idea. There's a 50-page party scene. That's a lot of quotation marks, that's the way I feel.

CB: And a lot of the word 'said' to determine that.

RM: Exactly.

CB: I know you're really sick of comparisons to Cheever and Updike, which mostly, I think, stem from your depictions of suburbia. How did growing up in the suburbs and the experience of it and also particularly, the Northeast, how did that shape you or constrict you and how do you feel it continues to do so for a lot of young people. The suburbs, in particular, are a very universal experience of American youth now.

RM: Well, I agree. Everybody lives there. That's the thing. People say 'why do you write about the suburbs?' Well, actually, everybody lives there. I mean why would you write about...I didn't grow up in a rural region, so I knew nothing about it. but I didn't live in the city until I was an adult. So I don't know much about that either. But everybody grew up in the suburbs. So you're trying to get at some kind of material that's punitively universal, with a certain kind of psychology, it's a pretty good place to situate yourself. I think, that the suburbs now, are quite distinct from how they were when I grew up.

I mean when I grew up, they were ethnically homogenous, perfectly so. Like my brother now lives in Stamford, which is one of the towns we lived in as kids, and it's just not that way. There's middle-class black families living next to middle-class white families living next to middle-class Jewish families. We grew up in Darien, while my parents were still married, which was WASP from border to border and then we moved over to the next town, Stamford, which was Jewish from border to border. Except for the railroad tracks, because all of the African-Americans lived on the other side of there. So we went to this school in Stamford, where on Rosh Hashanah, there were only five kids there, us and the four other kids. That's just not the case. I think the sort of building boom and the kind of sprawl in American culture has really done more to make them less stultifying, less conformist than they were when I grew up, which seems all for the better. I mean, kids are going to always feel that they're kicking against the pricks if they grew up in the suburbs and they're teenagers and stuff. But I think that probably ethically, they're more flexible and engaging then they were back then

CB: You do talk a little bit about Kip Kinkel and the rash of school shootings and the suburban milieu came up quite a bit in discussions of those rash of school shootings. These are bored and hopeless kids because of that setting. Was there a connection in your mind when that passage ended up in The Black Veil?

RM: Yeah, it's because...if I had been a teenager now and people were looking to try and catch the problem kid before he picked up the gun, they would have gotten me with a net. Because I wore black all the time, I listened to the worst, loudest shit I could find...if it irritated people, all the better so far as I was concerned. I was taking a lot of drugs. I was doing all the problem stuff, so for me, there's still kind of wild disjunction in the fact that these kids that I identify with, in terms of their awkwardness and their marginalized feelings about themselves, then came the phase to shoot someone...that's total nonsense. Like, did you read the testimony of one of the two kids in the Dartmouth killings turned witness on the other kid last week? You know the story, right? And he said that they wanted to rob a bunch of people...well, first they wanted to be explorers, but they realized that everything had been explored. So, they decided that they wanted to go to Australia and they needed to rob a bunch of people to get the money to go to Australia. And then they decided that they shouldn't leave any witnesses. So, end of story. The murder part was just like built-in from the beginning. Where did they get this idea? I just don't know. I mean, I watched a lot of violent TV when I was a kid. It never occurred to me that that was a solution. Somehow, I don't know the answer to that one.

CB: I know you are sick of questions about the film adaptation of The Ice Storm. You wrote an essay about this in Zoetrope, expressing your ambivalence about the whole experience. What was good and what was bad about having one of your books adapting for film?

RM: I don't know that I really liked it. But it's a really good marketing tool. It helps get books to readers.

CB: I think a lot of people probably discovered you through that.

RM: Totally. And I've kept most of that audience, which I would not have had otherwise.

CB: You mentioned something when we were talking about the suburbs that sort of ...'punitively universal' I think you said...Is that your aim when you write a book? To reach people, a critical mass of people?

RM: I don't really care how large the audience is, but what I want the work to do, is really get at human psychology. That I think is what my job is. That's what I'm supposed to be doing. It's most interesting if you can get at human psychology in a way that's completely accessible, that's not sort of culturally specific. So that some demographic group of readers is going to say 'Oh, I don't understand these people. I don't give a shit.' But that doesn't mean that I need...that I have some world domination fantasy by writing that way.

CB: To that end, does that mean that you're thinking about expanding beyond, I mean, you've already done it to some extent, but expanding beyond the Northeast part of the United States?

RM: Yeah, the next book hopefully is international.

CB: Have you laid the groundwork for it?

RM: Yeah, I've started. I only have about 30 pages, but I'm trying.

CB: How do you like to write, style-wise? Mechanically speaking?

RM: Whenever the mood strikes. I have bad work habits. I don't write every day. I don't...

CB: I mean, but do you do it standing on your head or do you...

RM: Actually, I've been doing a lot of it in bed, lately. To get away from the fucking telephone line, because I check e-mail so much.

CB: You said once that you believe short stories can 'save lives.' Can you point to stories that you've read that got you through?

RM: "Signs and Symbols" by Nabokov. "Use of Force" by William Carlos Williams. "In the Heart of the Heart of the Country" by William Gass. "Conversations With My Father" by Grace Paley. "See the Moon" by Donald Barthelme. "In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried" by Amy Hempel. There's so many. "A Poetics for Bullies" by Stanley Elkin. That's an amazing story. Definitely read it if you haven't.

CB: What is something that an interviewer has never asked you that you would like them to ask you?

RM: Hmm, let me think carefully about this....(long pause). I really can't think of anything. Maybe that's just the failure to imagine the proper interviewer. People have asked me that before, like 'what would you liked to be asked?'

CB: Here, I thought I was being so original.

RM: I think I'm so often thinking how to deflect really horrible questions that I don't imagine what the really good ones would be.

CB: What is the worst question you've ever been asked, then?

RM: Well, when I was on the tour for Purple America, I did Terry Gross, and in the middle of the interview, she said: 'So, you were in the psychiatric hospital?'

CB: She is bad at that. We had interviewed Han Ong recently for the site and he had an interview with her where she asked him if he ever gave blow jobs in the Port Authority.

RM: She really likes the dirt, man. She does that. This time I was on the show, she said to me in the middle of the show: 'So, do you do the 12-Step thing?' And to answer that...if I did answer that, would be to violate the traditions of AA.

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Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer

Reviewed by Jon Garber

It’s the kind of debut most novelists can only dream about: an excerpt in The New Yorker, a deal with Houghton Mifflin worth half a million dollars, plans to publish in a dozen languages and advance raves from the likes of Joyce Carol Oates and Russell Banks. Such an auspicious bow is all the more remarkable when you consider that Jonathan Safran Foer wrote this first novel, Everything Is Illuminated (Houghton Mifflin, 276 pp.), when he was just 24 years old. Not since last fall’s The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen has a novel caused such buzz and anticipation among the literary movers-and-shakers. Nearly every prominent critic and publication has heaped mounds of praise upon Foer’s fictionalized account of his search for his Jewish ancestry in Ukraine. It hardly seems necessary to offer more here...but I’ll try anyway.

For all its ballyhoo, Everything Is Illuminated tells a relatively simple story in a frustratingly convoluted way, but it does so with enough power, humor and sensitivity to make the journey as important as the destination. The author’s literary alter ego, one Jonathan Safran Foer, is a college student who has embarked on a search for his grandfather’s Eastern European ancestors. He is hoping to find the town of Trachimbrod, what was once a Jewish shtetl during the 18th century and which was destroyed during the Nazi persecutions of World War II. His tour guide/translator, Alex Perchov, is a charmingly forthcoming Ukrainian with a fascination for all things American and a tendency to speak English that is riddled with amusing malapropisms. Also along for the trip to Trachimbrod is Alex’s widowed grandfather, nearly blind and (of course) the designated driver and his aggressively amorous dog, Sammy Davis, Jr., Jr.

Foer and his companions comb the countryside for anyone who has heard of Trachimbrod or who may know of Augustine, a woman whose family hid the author’s grandfather from the Nazis. Interwoven with this experience are Alex’s correspondence with Jonathan, in which he shares his opinions of the manuscript of the novel itself, and a fable-like account of Trachimbrod’s history through several decades. It’s an elaborate set-up for a first-time novelist, but amazingly, Foer’s writing is very assured, even playful, and he rarely lets the intricate plot spin out of control.

A lot of the humor in the book centers around Alex’s broken English. In his letters to the author, who is often referred to as "the hero" and "a very ingenious Jew," Alex drops such phrases as “having shit between his brains," "manufacturing Z’s" and "being carnal." He "digs Negroes, particularly Michael Jackson" and believes that the sexual position 69 was invented in 1969, before which people relied solely on "blow jobs and masticating box, but never in chorus." Foer has a great ear for Alex’s voice in the book, that of a person writing and speaking in a language not his own. Though the misspoken words and bad grammar begin to seem grating after awhile, a wearily quaint joke at Alex’s expense, it is Alex who is the true hero of the book. It is his voice that remains the most vivid.

The history of the Trachimbrod shtetl is imagined with a verve and warmth that will remind many of the works of Sholem Aleichem and Isaac Bashevis Singer. Beginning in 1791, we learn about a wagon accident that supposedly killed Trachim B along the Brod River (though his body was never found). Among the curios and debris from the overturned wagon, emerges a newly born infant girl. This mysterious event takes on a mythic quality in the little village and even provides the shtetl with its name. The girl is adopted by the lonely Yankel D, who was disgraced in the village for usury and abandoned by his wife years ago. He names the girl Brod and she will become the great-great-great-great-great-grandmother of Jonathan Safran Foer.

Foer draws a memorable portrait of shtetl life and its eccentric, passionate and melancholy characters. There is Sofiowka N, the town crazy, who is taken to skinny-dipping in the public fountains and tying strings across every inch of his body to remember things that he always forgets anyway. There is Harry V, the town’s "resident pervert" who is working on but never finishing a book called "The Host of Hoists," which argues that God loves the promiscuous. There is the wealthy Menachem, who enjoys constructing his Double House so much, that he decides to leave the scaffolding up and keep it a perpetual work in progress. There are even two synagogues--one for the more orthodox, known as the Uprighters, the other for the looser, less pious Slouchers. For all its odd, frequently combative residents, Trachimbrod is a town where community is wholly important. The shtetl’s "Book of Recurrent Dreams" keeps a faithful record of the people’s thoughts and hopes beyond the waking life while "The Book of Antecedents" is a collective history of every event, from the mundane to the magical, that has ever occurred in Trachimbrod. The citizens even vote to determine the name of their village, with "Time Capsule of Dust and String" and "Gefilteville" losing out to Trachimbrod.

Brod herself grows up into a beautiful, preternaturally intelligent young girl, who endures traumas and loss and a loving yet tragic marriage to the doomed factory worker known as the Kolker. She also documents the many kinds of sadness she has discovered--613 to be exact.

I found the sections set in Trachimbrod to be the most powerful and impressive in the book. It is here where Foer is really able to demonstrate his skills for lyrical writing and subtle metaphor. In the present-day chapters, Jonathan, Alex and his grandfather continue to search for the past, learning mostly that they are unable to understand it. There are some comic interludes involving Jonathan’s culture shock--he is terrified by the overly friendly and flatulent Sammy Davis, Jr., Jr. and his vegetarianism is met with great befuddlement at the Ukrainian restaurants they dine at. But somehow, Jonathan is the least interesting character in Everything Is Illuminated. He is a shadowy and elusive figure and his experiences are mostly filtered through the eyes of Alex. Perhaps Foer felt a bit reticent writing about himself even in the guise of fiction. He has said that his own trip to the Ukraine was somewhat less eventful than that in the book, but it is his reluctance to share a bit more of himself that winds up muting the power of the contemporary passages.

Still, this is an impressive and insightful work, one that was obviously written with great care and love. Though it inevitably suffers somewhat from the high levels of hype and superlatives that accompany it, Everything Is Illuminated is a haunting exploration of loss and the search for redemption, the efforts to reconcile the uncertain present with an unknowable past. By the time the Nazis barge into Trachimbrod, the novel takes an expectedly solemn tone, recounting the horrors of the Holocaust with grim honesty. Not everything is illuminated at the close of Everything Is Illuminated and maybe that’s the point--that we can only confront, understand and accept so much from our pasts, that the mysteries of the human heart remain profound, curious and if we’re lucky, hilarious.

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Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage by Alice Munro

Reviewed by Jon Garber

Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (Knopf, 323 pp.), the rather old-fashioned title of Alice Munro’s 10th short story collection, might suggest the kind of mundane scenes of domesticity that populate so many contemporary short stories. While this is indeed the setting of Munro’s tales, few writers can summon the prism-like perception and haunting eloquence of this Canadian author. It turns out to be an apt name for this book, which traverses each of these emotions and life events in all their simultaneous complexity and simplicity. As Munro’s legion of fans (this book had a robust first printing of 75,000 copies) know, this is expert territory for her. For those who haven’t read her work, these stories are as good a place as any to become acquainted with Munro’s richly evoked world.

One of the best (if not the best) current practitioners of the short fiction form, Munro breathes life into the stifled lives of women, people whose disappointments and regrets stem seemingly from their own choices but just as often from the vagaries of fate. Munro’s artfully honed stories reside in the kind of ambiguous surprises that characterize all our lives. Written with a generous wisdom that can only come with age, these stories recall the psychological depth of Anton Chekhov. Like the Russian master’s short fiction (whom Atlantic Monthly compared Munro to last year), they take on the lingering power of the best novels. Though the longest of the stories numbers fewer than 50 pages, these are works to be savored one at a time.

The title story opens the book and takes, at first, a little time warming up. Its protagonist, the spinster housekeeper Johanna, with her “frizz of reddish hair” and teeth “crowded to the front of her mouth as if they were ready for an argument,” is intentionally cold and prickly, someone who has learned to expect little from life. Her drably practical view of the world is all too clear when she tries on fancy dresses that seem to reject her body for its hardscrabble simplicity. When two young girls begin writing Johanna fake love letters, using the name of a man she clearly admires, heartbreak seems sure to follow. The unexpectedly hopeful ending is one of the few in this collection and seems to operate on a whole other level of irony. This tale may be the weakest of the book but persistence is rewarded in the eight stories that follow.

In “Floating Bridge,” Jinny, is a married woman who has begun to find solace and escape in the cancer she is certain she will die from: “the unspeakable excitement you feel when a galloping disaster promises to release you from all responsibility for your own life.” The optimistic results of the chemotherapy leave her clinging to the comfort of giving up not just on herself but on the casual betrayals of her cheerfully insensitive husband. “It made her have to go back and start this year all over again. It removed a certain low-grade freedom. A dull, protecting membrane that she had not even known was there had been pulled away and left her raw.”

My favorite story of the bunch, “Family Furnishings” is an unforgettable portrait of how the intimacy of family can change from admiration to shame with the passage of time. Gracefully moving between the past and the present, Munro captures without a shred of judgment or sentimentality, the quiet resentment and gradual estrangement adults come to feel for the filial heroes of their childhood. For the story’s young narrator, her father’s cousin, Alfrida is a standard of urban glamour, an eccentric, independent career woman who lives in the city, smokes cigarettes and is outspoken in her opinions. When the young girl goes off to college and acquires new friends and knowledge, her attitude towards Alfrida and her entire family changes to one of cold indifference and superiority. “There was a danger whenever I was on home ground. It was the danger of seeing my life through other eyes than my own. Seeing it as an ever-increasing roll of words like barbed wire, intricate, bewildering, uncomforting—set against the rich productions, the food, flowers, and knitted garments, of other women’s domesticity. It became harder to say that it was worth the trouble.”

“Comfort” looks at the subdued passions and vulnerability that remain frozen beneath a marriage lived without tenderness. Munro’s stories tend to center on the lives and perspectives of women but she manages to draw a juicy male character in Lewis, a stubborn science teacher whose disdain for creationist theories causes controversy at the small-town high school. His hilarious, scathing letter to the local newspaper is one of the highlights of a story that shows the author’s versatility. It is this icy logic that keeps everyone, including his wife, at bay, even in death.

The constricting realities of marriage, motherhood and family are powerfully conveyed in “Post and Beam,” in which Lorna first jealously guards her life and home from a sad sack relative only to discover that the structure isn‘t all that sound. When she silently prays against an imagined tragedy from coming true, she realizes she is no stranger to compromise.

“The bargain she was bound to was to go on living as she had been doing. The bargain was already in force. To accept what had happened and be clear about what would happen. Days and years and feelings much the same, except that the children would grow up, and there might be one or two more of them and they too would grow up, and she and Brendan would grow older and then old. It was not until now, not until this moment, that she had seen so clearly that she was counting on something happening, something that would change her life. She had accepted her marriage as one big change, but not as the last one.”

The women of the remaining stories are similarly acquainted with compromise, taking comfort where they can find it, whether it is a one-time affair (“What Is Remembered”), an abusive yet consistent marriage (“Queenie”) or madness (“The Bear Came Over the Mountain”). It is tempting (and easy) to point out the feminist themes in Munro’s stories. Her women are consistently conflicted by the stagnant orderliness of their domestic cages and trapped by the unreliability or cruelty of the men with whom they have spent their lives. Yet Munro’s characters achieve a relevance that surpasses ideology of even gender itself. Fluttering beneath the wasted lives, deceptive memories and unrealized dreams that populate these superb and ineffably sad tales, is the fragile yet enduring heart of the human condition.

Reviewed by Jon Garber

In the past five years, feng shui, an ancient Chinese practice involving the arrangement of living interiors to achieve harmony and good fortune, has become the de rigueur trend among the bored and overprivileged “beautiful people,” looking to maintain or increase their wealth and “happiness” in the spiritual uncertainty of the millennium. These people are the primary targets of William Paulinha, a Filipino, gay hustler, who transforms himself into a Chinese feng shui master.

This unique scenario forms the heart of playwright and MacArthur fellow, Han Ong’s debut novel, Fixer Chao (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 377 pages), a bitter and frequently brilliant satire, with insight reminiscent of Tom Wolfe’s 1980s time capsule, The Bonfire of the Vanities.

While the shallow ideals of Manhattan’s top echelons may be its focus, Fixer Chao has much more on its mind, taking aim at everything from racial identity and the affluent’s appropriation of Asian culture to the glossy spectacles of mainstream theater and the empty quest for material possessions. The result is a darkly humorous, angry and quite moving dissection of the American dream and those it is designed to leave behind.

William is in the seedy Savoy bar, where the lost and the broken congregate, when he encounters Shem C., a failed Jewish writer with a fiendishly clever plan for revenge. Shem blames the movers and shakers of the literary and society worlds for his aborted attempts at prestige and fame and he wants to get back at them by chipping away at their pride and sense of superiority. His idea is to introduce William into their exclusive sphere as “Master Chao,” the all-knowing feng shui guru who will charge top dollar for his faulty, inaccurate advice. Though Will is Filipino, Shem correctly assures him that to these clueless socialites, any Asian face can easily be mistaken for Chinese.

The ruse succeeds beyond their wildest expectations and soon Master Chao is the hottest feng shui consultant in Manhattan, even winning an award from trend-setting H magazine (a thinly veiled reference to W). The novel follows William into the kind of chicly designed homes that get loving photo spreads in Metropolitan Home and Condé Nast and their supercilious but surprisingly vulnerable owners. We meet Lindsay S., a closeted poet whose luxurious lifestyle doesn’t prevent him from writing books called Despair; Brian Q. a top business executive whose money can’t shield him from the perils of hair loss and herpes; Cardie Kerchpoff, a magazine editor who complains about the inadequacies of her “Third World” nanny and Max Brill Carlton, a Tony Award-winning playwright best known for his missionaries-save-the-savages opus, Primitives.

There are also a few people of color who have managed to gain acceptance in this mostly white clique: Rowley P., a biracial man who earned his fortune in ball-bearing and especially, Suzy Yamada, a stylish yet haughty entrepreneur who shares a name with Isuzu Yamada, the Japanese actress who played ruthless, driven characters in Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood and The Lower Depths.

Shem is particularly eager to see Suzy get her just deserts and instructs William to “fix” her house so that disaster will follow. Things are complicated though, by the presence of Suzy’s rebellious young son, Kendo, who is wise to William’s fraud yet looks up to him as a glamorous ideal of criminal grace and racial empowerment.

All of these wealthy characters are drawn with sharply venomous precision, aimed at the phoniness and hypocrisy of class structure. “In these people’s self-projections, they appeared as colorful characters given distinct outlines by private areas of expertise--admen, screenwriters, Wall Streeters, realtors, magazine editors -- but really they were nothing more than blind lemmings with the instinct to follow. And what they all seemed so eager to get behind was this new trend. They fancied themselves to have artistic sensibilities and/or sympathies--who talked about ‘inspiration’ and ‘the muse’ as things more concrete and vivid than anything from their hidden pasts--and therefore had a natural predisposition to believe in the unseen. And if this unseen was given the weighty cultural imprimatur of two thousand years of Chinese civilization--well, that’s as good as gold!”

Ingenious as it is, Fixer Chao’s plot eventually becomes secondary to Ong’s cynical observations of modern mores at the dawn of a new millennium (the novel is set in 1999). “The nagging awareness that the year 2000 was around the corner had as good as driven these people back to the time-consuming faiths of their parents and their grandparents. Their return was like an insurance policy for the next life...People were being encouraged to go further inward, where true peace could be located. Stability. Family values. The good old days. A return to tradition. You even heard that phrase in the magazines I perused--’Tradition makes a comeback!’”

It isn't the only time Ong stops the narrative for extended misanthropic rants on the idiocy and emptiness of society. But what rants they are. He hits his targets (obvious as they may seem) with such dead-on accuracy, that you hardly mind the intrusion. Few topics escape his wrath, whether it’s the dot-com boom (“a morass of idiocy being led by the idiots who were smart enough to recognize that since nobody else knew anything, they might as well, by passing themselves off as experts”) or Madonna (“that undertaker of music...the head mall girl who approached everything as a trying on and taking off”).

In the end, Fixer Chao’s resolutions of its central mystery -- Shem’s real motivation for revenge--is hardly as compelling as the bloodlust it engenders. Broadway extravaganzas summed up as “...Happy, happy shows, filled with actors exuding tireless, determined cheer, their smiles like wax decorations applied on top of their real faces. This director had a simplemindedness that made me think he was deprived in childhood of everything but the basic eight-color Crayola set," are but one of the curmudgeonly observations set throughout the novel like beartraps. Depending on your tolerance for undiluted bile, this will either impress you or turn you off, but they cannot be ignored. The author has his finger on the pulse of New York life, to the extent that he wrote this (about one of his immigrant characters) well before the tragedy of September 11:

“He took history students, he said, and tourists and U.N. workers and city lore buffs to various spots linked to the recent plots by a handful of Palestinians to terrorize New York--the World Trade Center bombing, which had been successful; and two or three others, including a subway bomb scare, which had been discovered and foiled in the nick of time. There were the crumbling apartments in Brooklyn and Queens where the terrorists hid out, devising their campaigns. There were the greasy spoons and bazaars hawking Palestinian goods that they frequented. There was the World Trade Center itself. And most fun of all, there were all the other places the terrorists had intended to destroy, names discovered on several lists the authorities found in the terrorists’ apartments. Such as? He smiled at me, confessed that most of them were made up. But that it gave his audience pause for thought, which was what they were paying for. They wanted to be scared. Conspiracies all around. They wanted to find the Devil.”

This passage, which, under any other circumstance, would be an interesting sidenote, is one of the most uncomfortable moments in a novel filled with them. It is one example of how some of Fixer Chao’s observations have already been shunted to another era and the novel may eventually be viewed as an entertaining example of a very specific time and place (like the works of Jay McInerney, Tama Janowitz, and Bret Easton Ellis). In its startling depiction of what it means to be a person of color, a stranger in one’s own country, however, Fixer Chao earns comparison with Chang-Rae Lee’s Native Speaker, Maxine Hong Kingston’s Tripmaster Monkey, Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist and even, Ralph Ellison’s American classic, Invisible Man. Overlooked in its hardcover release last year, Fixer Chao will hopefully garner the cult following it deserves, when it hits paperback this April.

Jon Garber is the editor of Central Booking.

Reviewed by Jon Garber

Perhaps it’s the relentless pressure of hype or simply a personal reluctance to be the lone sourpuss in a room filled with praise, but it’s not easy for me to say that I didn’t particularly enjoy Carter Beats the Devil (Hyperion, 483 pp.), the much-loved debut novel by Glen David Gold. Given the heaps of accolades the book has received from nearly every notable publication, critic and author (including fellow magic lover Michael Chabon and flavor-of-the-season Jonathan Franzen), I would be better off saying I hate chocolate, puppies or walking barefoot on the beach. It’s easy to chide the mass appeal of a Danielle Steel or Tom Clancy. Hipper-than-thou intellectuals pride themselves on taking potshots at anything that seems too mainstream or popular as if this was in itself a bad thing. But what about when a critical and commercial giant like The Sopranos, Forrest Gump or Bruce Springsteen leaves you cold? Yep, all three of those sacred cows kind of fail to impress me. Please continue reading then at your own risk.

There’s nothing wrong with Carter Beats the Devil, an old-fashioned mystery set against a colorful backdrop of magic shows, espionage and real-life figures from Roaring Twenties-era America. Gold has thoroughly researched both the time and the industry of illusion and has thrown enough twists and themes into his densely plotted tale to please almost everybody. He does a fantastic job conjuring up real-life magician Charles Carter’s lavish magic tricks and he packs the narrative with Presidents, pirates and plucky heroines. Still, after struggling through this rather lengthy novel, I couldn’t help wondering what all the fuss was about.

The story begins in 1923 San Francisco, where Carter has just performed another astounding show and enlisted a volunteer from the audience, one President Harding to help "beat the Devil" in his gory finale. The magician challenges Old Scratch himself to a series of sorcery showdowns culminating in one with a lion and Harding’s dismemberment. It’s all an illusion, of course, but no one’s applauding when the President suddenly dies hours later in his hotel room. The death is assumed to be of natural causes but given Harding’s scandal-wracked administration and his brief, unsupervised meeting with Carter, suspicion quickly falls on the entertainer.

Soon, Carter is eluding unscrupulous Secret Service agents and diabolical assassins in what promises to be a crackling mystery. But this is just the beginning. Gold loads up the plot with a tragic romance, childhood traumas involving medieval torture devices and appearances by Harry Houdini, The Marx Brothers and Borax, the creator of a revolutionary cleanser. The result -- for me, anyway -- is a gumbo filled with too many ingredients but in the end, not enough flavor.

Carter is part of the problem. He's meant to be a tortured, melancholy hero besieged with cutthroat rivals, personal tragedies and a declining career, but he never emerges as a fully evolved character. Early sections depict his lonely, privileged childhood with a remote father and mentally ill mother during which he learns to escape into magic. These are some of the more memorable moments of the book, when we get some insight into how Carter became the eccentric loner of his Yale-educated family. Still, it is overshadowed with too many historical flourishes including an extended detour involving an invention that promises to change the world of communication and illusion.

Gold does a great job evoking the atmosphere of San Francisco in the ‘20s with colorful danger lurking at every corner of the speakeasies and whorehouses. His novel is also peppered with truly exciting adventures and escapes that seem worthy of an old movie serial. Vintage posters (including the vibrant book jacket) from real magic shows adorn each section of the book adding to the authenticity. Like many spectacles of the stage, Carter Beats the Devil is ambitious, flashy and eager to please. It certainly will entertain anyone who loves magic or the kind of historical panoramas E.L. Doctorow is famous for. For me though, it tries to juggle too many props and, in the end, the smoke and mirrors trappings are just that.

Maybe if I wasn’t expecting literary magic from the mounds of advance kudos, I would have enjoyed this book a bit more. As it is, Carter Beats the Devil is a trick that seems too calculated to inspire real wonder in me but energetic enough to make me wish I liked it more.

Reviewed by Jon Garber

One of the most distinctive and enticing things about The Dying Ground, the debut novel by Nichelle D. Tramble, is its subtitle: “a hip-hop noir novel”. It suggests that the author has created a new genre of fiction -- a heady task for any writer in our post-postmodern world. She hasn’t (early Iceberg Slim and later Walter Mosley have paved the way), leaving me to suspect this savvy tagline is a creation of her publisher, Strivers Row, Random House’s new imprint for quality African-American fiction. If it persuades enough readers to pick up this book, though, it’s all the better, since Tramble is one fledgling author worth discovering.

Even if The Dying Ground does not manage to fulfill the promise of this literary hybrid,, it demonstrates Tramble’s remarkable ear for the culture and cadence of young African-American men during the heady drug wars of the late 1980’s in Oakland. Tramble evokes with authority a violent, bleak era in the Bay Area city, when young black men were dying on the streets at the hands of their peers and their funerals were a weekly occurrence. The book’s title refers to a quote from Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, where the dying ground is named as the place where “you will survive if you fight quickly and perish if you do not.”

The story centers on Maceo Albert Bouchaund Redfield, a short guy with a tall name. A college dropout, whose promising baseball career was cut short by injury, Maceo has avoided the life of crime and drugs that two of his childhood friends, Holly Ford and Billy Crane, have fallen into. Though orphaned at an early age, Maceo has thrived in the loving family of his maternal grandparents, tradition-minded entrepreneurs who represent the promise and possibility Oakland (and really most American cities) used to offer African-American families.

In the late ‘80s, crack cocaine has changed all that and now the quickest path to money, power and ultimate self-destruction lies in the deadly drug trade. Tramble quickly introduces her flair for character, dialogue and setting with The Crowning Glory, a venerable Oakland barbershop and Cutty, its salty, no-nonsense proprietor. It is here where Maceo first hears about the fatal shooting of Billy and it is Billy’s death that propels the plot. Billy, one of the town’s chief drug kingpins, was gunned down in his car while stopped at a traffic light. Felicia, Billy’s girlfriend (and Maceo’s unrequited love), was in the passenger’s seat and has now disappeared. Gang rivalries are due to erupt into a full-fledged turf war and Maceo may not be able to stay immune for long.

“Fellas who, a mere two years before, never rated second glances now had all the props of true hustlers, and they used every opportunity possible to flaunt them. I rode the wave as a person on the edge of the inner circle, aware all the time that the Wizard was just inside the curtain. Anyone who looked closely knew the center would not hold; the smoke and mirrors would disappear and reveal a body count to equal a homegrown war.”

As Maceo and Holly try to solve the mystery of Billy’s murder and Felicia’s disappearance, secrets are revealed, betrayals between friends and family are discovered and the bodies continue to pile up. Along the way Tramble weaves a colorful array of vivid characters into the hardboiled plot. There’s Black Jeff, a dreadlocked pro-skater dude who is the first African-American to dominate the sport; Crowley, who speaks only in obscure rap lyrics and Off-Beat, a white wannabe gangsta; Felicia’s L.A. thug brothers Reggie and Crim and natty dresser Emmet with the trophy wife. Tramble juggles so many characters, in fact, it is often hard to keep track of everybody. Much is made of Maceo’s childhood bonds with Billy and Holly but little is depicted of the past that haunts them so.

It is a testament to the author’s skill with these characters, despite their numbers, that we want to know more about each of them. Most impressively, the female author believably inhabits her streetwise, predominately male antiheroes, proving she has more in common with Chester Himes than she does with Terry McMillan. Tramble doesn’t shy away from the gritty realities and relentless violence of the neighborhood, but by investing real heart and soul into her characters, she avoids the lurid sensationalism that has marred similar stories by Donald Goines and most films starring hip-hop musicians. She manages to neither glamorize nor condemn a life of crime, instead showing how racism, and the aimlessness of youth combined with drugs and fast cash can lure everyone from the high school beauty queen to the star athlete.

“The bottom line was drugs, the common denominator for us all,” Maceo ponders. “Drugs and a self-hatred so deeply embedded in the psyche of our community that we gave away the souls of our children for a golden calf.”

Tramble expertly captures the details of Oakland life whether it’s the surreal funeral of Billy, which draws the entire community and is televised on a local channel or the ghetto fabulous parties that women throw, complete with off-the-rack designer clothes and male strippers.

The only area where the author falters a bit is in the so-called mystery itself. Spotting the killer may not be too difficult for most readers and the blood-strewn finale somehow lacks suspense though it’s supposed to change Maceo’s life forever. Tramble attempts to inject some noir-ist trappings in Maceo’s conflicting feelings for femme fatale Felicia and the more centered Alixe, who urges him to take the straight and narrow path. Somehow neither relationship seems convincing or fleshed out, merely placed to fill in some good girl-bad girl dichotomy. And while The Dying Ground is at heart a genre novel, here the character shorthand feels truncated instead of just enough to propel plot and enhance setting.

Still, this is an impressive debut that manages to approach a familiar subject with intelligence and perspective. In that sense, it may be the literary equivalent of Boyz n the Hood, a provocative yet somehow timeless look at the American inner city that still remains as entertaining as pulp, and one I easily devoured in one sitting. Tramble promises a sequel to The Dying Ground, which will take a newly hardened Maceo into the ‘90s. Bring it on.

Reviewed by Jon Garber

For all those self-proclaimed, aspiring writers who somehow never get anything written, John Colapinto's debut novel, About the Author will elicit a shudder of recognition. Its flawed hero, Cal Cunningham, toils as a stock boy at a chain bookstore by day and chases skirt at bars by night. He hopes to write the next Great American Novel and join the ranks of literary wonder boys like 21-year-old Hower J. Brent, whose book, ZeitGuy caused an overnight sensation.

But Cal can never get more than a dozen ill-assembled words together. He likes the idea of being a writer more than the actual effort involved. And who can blame him? How many of us have hoped and wished that we too could match the prodigious achievements of such early bloomers as Michael Chabon, Zadie Smith and Nathan Englander? As a perpetually blocked writer, who, for years, barely subsisted on the meager wages of a chain bookstore stock boy, I certainly could relate to Cal's plight.

Thankfully, the similarities end there, because Cal gets himself into a mighty big mess with lies, fraud, extortion and murder. Cal is shocked to discover that his law student roommate Stewart has written a brilliant novel called Almost Like Suicide about Cal's randy exploits. Before Cal has a chance to confront him, Stewart is killed in a traffic accident, leaving behind the promising manuscript and an opportunity to claim credit for it.

What follows should be familiar to anyone who has read a lot of thrillers or watched TV crime melodramas: Cal appropriates Stewart's work, garners stratospheric acclaim and riches and appears to get away with it. He's even married Stewart's lost love, Janet and left New York for an idyllic Vermont town, where he can quietly rest on his ill-gotten laurels. Of course, no one ever emerges from such Faustian bargains unscathed and Cal is no exception. Enter Les, a one-night stand from Cal's forgotten past, who knows his secret and demands money to keep it that way.

As suspense novels go, Colapinto's is serviceable yet fairly standard. There are few real surprises in the plot and much of the action seems predictable. Your enthusiasm for the book will depend on how appealing and sympathetic you find Cal as a character and ultimately a person. Much like in a Hitchcock film, you ultimately need to root for flawed Cal not to get caught for the suspense to play. Yet Cal comes off as smug, almost to the point of being delusional, that it's hard not to relish his inevitable downfall. While his choices and conflicts are certainly understandable, Cal is not quite the fully developed protagonist that would keep us strapped in for the duration.

The other characters are similarly lacking in depth. Les, a foul-mouthed, bisexual junkie is such a caricature of devious venality that she seems to have wandered in from an episode of Melrose Place. Janet, in turn, is such an idealized paragon of the perfect woman that she hardly seems to exist at all. Literary agent Blackie Yaeger, a hard-drinking, blunt-speaking player of the publishing world who's always trolling for youngblood genius, lifts his head above cliché for a moment but not for long.

In the end, what buoys About the Author are the sly, dead-on references to the simultaneous hype and pretensions of mainstream contemporary literature. Cal gets rich not off the literary merits of Stewart's book, but from the media synergism that sustains most serious writers these days (yes, even you, Jonathan Franzen). Almost a Suicide, regardless of its true authorship, is not so much a creation as it is a product, one with enough high-concept potential to fatten the bottom line, as Yaeger explains to his new discovery: "It's a fin de siècle Bright Lights, Big City, with a Gen X twist and some post-po-mo juju thrown in for good measure. The shitty apartment, the minimum-wage McJob, the dysfunctional family. The anger. Frankly, your looks don't hurt, either. Gotta think of that author shot."

And sure enough, Almost Like Suicide becomes the sensation Jay McInerney and Tama Janowitz can only dream about today. It becomes one of the most successful publications in history. "I can't remember anything like it," one astonished publisher flack exclaims. "Except maybe for our book on the Broccoli Diet, and of course Having a Chat with the Lord. And it's not even on her club!"

These satirical touches are what elevates About the Author beyond its color-by-numbers plot and have earned it its own level of media buzz. Its ironic coda may provoke a love-it-or-hate-it response in some, but it's a fitting finale to a book that is smarter than its hero.

In the end, it's a question of untapped potential. If Almost Like Suicide is the catalyst for Cal's madness, why don't we have any excerpts from it? Colapinto raises provocative questions about what constitutes an author -- their experience or their creation of it -- that are never fully explored but his meta-postmodern twists at the end are enough to make a Blackie Yaeger drool, making this mixed-bag novel worth a look, if not much else.

by Jon Garber

Writers have always had a strangely synergistic but frequently unsatisfying relationship with Hollywood. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dorothy Parker, Aldous Huxley, and William Faulkner are among the revered authors who found themselves toiling for Tinseltown, seduced by the allure of big money and celluloid glamour. More often than not, it has been a troubling partnership for writers, who see their vision on the page mangled or bastardized into the flashy images of the big screen. But a quick scan of the movie listings, currently represented by The Hours, About Schmidt, and Nicholas Nickleby, confirms that for better or worse, literature and movies remain forever intertwined. Who can blame novelists a little sweet revenge then in their razor-sharp satires of the Dream Factory? Certainly not Hollywood, which has taken some of the best if unflattering books about itself—Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust, Michael Tolkin’s The Player, and Get Shorty by Elmore Leonard—and turned them back into movies. Here are five others that take a few well-aimed jabs at the movie industry.

Popcorn by Ben Elton (Griffin Trade, 304 pp., $13.95)

Elton, who wrote for the cult British comedy series, Blackadder, knows a thing or two about both the silver screen and farce, and he puts it to good use in this cheeky deconstruction of media-fueled greed and violence. Bruce Delamitri is a Quentin Tarantino-esque filmmaker, whose latest high-body-count opus, has just won him the Best Director Oscar and the affections of a Playboy Playmate. But his triumph is soon subverted by the sudden arrival of two film-geek psycho fans, who take his cinematic renderings of bloody mayhem quite literally. Popcorn has a field day slamming just about everybody—the greedy Hollywood players, the dumbed-down public, obsessive admirers, and the sensationalistic media—and it does so with such vicious glee and insight, it’s hard to resist going along for the ride. The biggest surprise about this thriller, though, is that it hasn’t been made into a movie yet.

Hollywood by Charles Bukowski (Black Sparrow Press, 239 pp., $16.00)

Bukowski’s novel is about an alcoholic poet who is offered the chance to write a screenplay. Coincidence? No. Hollywood was obviously inspired by Bukowski’s experiences writing the movie Barfly, which based on this account, appears to have been an absurd, demoralizing, but lucrative affair, enough to buy more booze, at the very least. In fact, Bukowski’s alter-ego, Harry Chinaski (the same name of the character Mickey Rourke plays in Barfly) is little concerned about much of anything, except where his next drink is coming from. Nobody conveys the sad release of a drunken bender like Bukowski, and Hollywood is full of them. But it also packs enough punches about the egos and artifice of the movie business to make any sensible writer think twice before heading down that road.

Laughing Gas by P.G. Wodehouse (Overlook Press, 286 pp., $16.95)

P.G. Wodehouse was (and remains) perhaps the most inspired practitioner of the deliciously dry British wit. His light comic touch is in full force in Laughing Gas, a zany yarn in which a trip to the dentist leads to an exchange of souls between English aristocrat Lord Havershot and bratty child star Joel Cooley. With the obnoxious, malevolent moppet now inhabiting the Earl’s adult body, he sets out to get revenge on the Hollywood movers and shakers who have turned his childhood into a source of entertainment for millions. Meanwhile, the disoriented Havershot must learn to adjust to the ruthless realities of celebrity, including several has-been child stars who want to knock him from the top of the box-office. Though this has all the makings of a high-concept Hollywood farce, the movie moguls have yet to mine it for the screen. And it’s just as well, they’d probably turn it into a Disneyfied mess.

Playland by John Gregory Dunne (Plume Books, 352 pp., $13.95)

Like James Ellroy’s L.A. Confidential, Playland depicts the sleazy underbelly of ‘40s-era Hollywood and its connections to organized crime. The story centers on Blue Tyler, yet another victim of the child star system who went from America’s sweetheart to a trivia footnote in a matter of years. More than 40 years after her heyday, she is discovered living in a trashy trailer park, now a burnt-out old woman. As a journalist struggles to piece together Blue’s life after stardom, from her romance with a Vegas gangster to her eventual existence in squalor, we learn the difference between a life and a legend. Dunne’s dissection of the star-making machinery, and the identity it inevitably consumes and discards, feels real, even when placed in the stylized trappings of noir. Dunne knows Hollywood all too well; he wrote the screenplay for Barbra Streisand's disastrous remake of A Star is Born. For an even more personalized view of the Dream Factory, check out Dunne’s Monster, a blistering account of his experiences writing the compromised screenplay (with his wife, Joan Didion) for Up Close and Personal.

A Way of Life, Like Any Other by Darcy O’Brien (New York Review of Books, 153 pp., $12.95)

Like all institutions built on the pillars of wealth, power, and ambition, Hollywood prefers to keep its privilege in the family. Try to think of a major celebrity who hasn’t either a sibling, child, or parent in the business. This insightful, PEN/Faulkner Award-winning novel shows just how tricky it is for those who enter the Tinseltown dynasty by birth to achieve a firm sense of identity and reality. The author, whose parents, George O’Brien and Marguerite Churchill, were once movie stars, paints a convincing portrait of his Hollywood life during the ‘40s and ‘50s. Though some of the trappings of this coming-of-age tale are familiar-- the wide-eyed wonder of a privileged childhood, the disillusionment of adolescence—what really stands out is the deeply human pain that peeks out from behind the movie star masks. His parents, abandoned by youth, fame, wealth, and each other, continue to seek fantasy as a way of coping. Their son can follow them or break out. O’Brien chose the latter, allowing this sorrowful yet mordantly funny novel to end on a hopeful note.

by Jon Garber

It’s hard shopping for bookworms. You never know whether they’ve already bought that must-read novel or latest literary sensation. That’s why anthologies make such great gifts. Their smorgasbord approach to literature ensures a variety of tones and styles to please even the most finicky readers. Many of these collections include never-before published stories and essays and there are enough wild card authors thrown into the mix to keep things fresh and surprising. Reading anthologies is a surefire way to sample authors new and old with relatively low commitment. There are the annual stalwarts like The Best American Short Stories, the Norton Anthology series, and Houghton Mifflin’s ever-expanding Best American Writing collections (such as Best American Sports Writing, Mystery, Travel, etc.) But these anthologies are so heavily promoted, there’s a good chance that the avid reader has already picked them up. Try one of these off-the-beaten-path entries, which tackle some amazingly specific topics.

Dorothy Parker’s Elbow: Tattoos on Writers, Writers on Tattoos by Kim Addonizio and Cheryl Dumesnil, Editors (Warner Books, 288 pp., $13.95)

Writers as diverse as Rick Moody, Herman Melville, Franz Kafka, Elizabeth McCracken, William T. Vollmann, and Sylvia Plath weigh in on the art or self-mutilation (depending on your point-of-view) that is the tattoo. Addonizio and Dumesnil draw from sources expected (Ray Bradbury's The Illustrated Man) and unexpected (Kafka's “In the Penal Colony”) to create an anthology as provocative, indelible, and colorful as the tattoo itself. Don't miss Denise Duhamel's playful dissection of a Tattoo of a different kind--the popular sidekick character from '70s TV mainstay, Fantasy Island.

In the Stacks: Short Stories About Libraries and Librarians by Michael Cart, Editor (Overlook Press, 288 pp., $26.95)

This anthology should appeal to anyone who appreciates the sensual appeal of books and libraries. Isaac Babel, Lorrie Moore, Italo Calvino, John Cheever, Alice Munro, and Jorge Luis Borges are among the contributors to this collection of stories. The hushed, slightly mysterious, sometimes lonely atmosphere of libraries is mined in these memorable tales, to which your favorite bibliophile should be able to relate.

The Vintage Book of Amnesia: An Anthology of Writing on the Subject of Memory Loss by Jonathan Lethem, Editor (Vintage Books, 414 pp., $14.00)

Identity, memory, and the loss of both have always been fascinating fodder for fiction writers, as this well-chosen collection by Lethem (who tackled the subject in his own Amnesia Moon) proves. Crossing genres and moods, the collection includes Philip K. Dick, Vladimir Nabokov, Shirley Jackson, Julio Cortazar, Haruki Murakami, and Martin Amis, who each provide tales of alternate insight and uncertainty.

Our Working Lives: Short Stories of People and Work by Stuart Dybek, Bonnie Jo Campbell, et al (Bottom Dog Press, 232 pp., $12.95)

Most of the writers contributing stories to this collection about working stiffs are hardly marquee names, which suits us just fine. American culture, identity, and achievement are so inexorably tied to our jobs and these selections honor and give voice to the often invisible laborers, waitresses, carpenters, teachers, and other professions that represent our family members, our friends, and ourselves. Many of the stories are sad, some are hopeful, and they are likely to resonate with anybody who has desperately tried to hold on to their sanity during that hour before quittin' time.

Beach: Stories by the Sand and Sea by Lena Lencek and Gideon Bosker, Editors (Marlowe & Co., 332 pp., $15.95)

With most of the country blanketed in snow right about now, a little trip to the beach (at least on the page) may be a fitting escape from the winter doldrums. Lencek and Bosker love the beach--they wrote an acclaimed book about its cultural history in 1998--and their affection and nostalgia for the lure of the seashore comes through in the stories they've selected here. Hopping around the globe from Cape Cod to Australia's Great Barrier Reef, this anthology captures the pleasures, promise, and power of beaches. Rachel Carson, Albert Camus, Doris Lessing, John Cheever, and Vladimir Nabokov are all on deck for this book, which gives new meaning to the phrase "beach read."

by Jon Garber

I don’t know about the rest of you but I think it’s time to put a moratorium on the phrase, “serious reader” as if somehow reading things that lack humor is a testament to one’s intelligence and sensitivity. Especially in these trying times, a little laughter may be just what we need to get through the day. Comedy is such an elusive and subjective thing--what is side-splitting to one person can leave another underwhelmed--so these five books may or may not tickle your funny bone, depending on your own sense of humor.

Naked by David Sedaris

Frequent NPR contributor Sedaris has set a gold standard for comic writing with this collection of essays. Deliciously snide, unfailingly frank and often surprisingly touching, Naked is one of those rare books that actually made me laugh out loud. Whether it’s the humiliations of school and summer camp, a visit to a nudist colony or his own wacky and endearing family, Sedaris’s deadpan observations of life’s little miseries are as close to a sure thing as you can get for smart, ironic humor in print.

Island of the Sequined Love Nun by Christopher Moore

Besides his facility for picking great titles, Christopher Moore spins high-energy yarns full of bizarre, occasionally tasteless jokes. In this one, a pilot has crashed his cosmetic company employer’s pink plane into a Micronesian island, catapulting him into some zany adventures. Ninjas, talking bats, wise-cracking cannibals and a mad scientist are just some of the loons running loose in this unconventional tropical paradise. Oh, and there’s a hurricane coming. The author’s deliriously inventive, kitchen-sink approach to plot and character should leave you spinning.

Therapy by David Lodge

If you crave humor of the sparkling, sophisticated kind, Therapy may be just what the doctor ordered. Lodge, already a master of the patented British wit, adds characters that you actually care about and enough absurd twists to earn a devoted following. Here, a successful TV sitcom writer finds himself yearning for more and begins seeking answers through an odd mix of therapies, including those of the aroma, massage and psycho varieties. The laughs are sustained and frequent but Lodge never insults the intelligence of his readers with this literate and ingenious novel.

Side Effects by Woody Allen

His recent movies may be disappointments but Woody Allen can still manage one-liners with the best of them. He’s also an accomplished writer which Side Effects certainly demonstrates. Most of the essays and stories bear Allen’s trademark Jewish-neurotic-New Yorker style, which you either love or loathe. Best of all, though is the now classic short story, “The Kugelmass Episode,” in which a nebbish makes the woeful mistake of transporting Madame Bovary in his time machine to present-day Manhattan.

The Many Aspects of Mobile Home Living by Martin Clark

This ambitious genre-splicer--part mystery, part legal thriller, part trailer-trash comedy--follows a sad sack North Carolina judge as he navigates his way through a swamp of murder, femme fatales and his redneck, pothead brother’s inimitable approach to backwoods justice. It’s not for everyone, but Clark does have a way with loopy Southern humor that doesn't rely on tear-jerking and sappy sentiment to win over readers.

by Jon Garber

It’s hard shopping for bookworms. You never know whether they’ve already bought that must-read novel or latest literary sensation. That’s why anthologies make such great gifts. Their smorgasbord approach to literature ensures that a variety of tone and style to please even the most finicky readers. Many of these collections include never-before published stories and essays and there are enough wild card authors thrown into the mix to keep things fresh and surprising. Reading anthologies is a surefire way to sample authors new and old with relatively low commitment. There are the annual stalwarts like The Best American Short Stories, the Norton Anthology series, and Houghton Mifflin’s ever-expanding Best American Writing collections (such as Best American Sports Writing, Mystery, Travel, etc.) But these anthologies are so heavily promoted, there’s a good chance that the avid reader has already picked them up. Try one of these off-the-beaten path entries, which tackle some amazingly specific topics.

Dorothy Parker’s Elbow: Tattoos on Writers, Writers on Tattoos by Kim Addonizio and Cheryl Dumesnil, Editors (Warner Books, 288 pp., $13.95)

Writers as diverse as Rick Moody, Herman Melville, Franz Kafka, Elizabeth McCracken, William T. Vollmann, and Sylvia Plath weigh in on the art or self-mutilation (depending on your point-of-view) that is the tattoo. Addonizio and Dumesnil draw from sources expected (Ray Bradbury's The Illustrated Man) and unexpected (Kafka's “In the Penal Colony”) to create an anthology as provocative, indelible, and colorful as the tattoo itself. Don't miss Denise Duhamel's playful dissection of a Tattoo of a different kind--the popular sidekick character from '70s TV mainstay Fantasy Island.

In the Stacks: Short Stories About Libraries and Librarians by Michael Cart, Editor (Overlook Press, 288 pp., $26.95)

This anthology should appeal to anyone who appreciates the sensual appeal of books and libraries. Isaac Babel, Lorrie Moore, Italo Calvino, John Cheever, Alice Munro, and Jorge Luis Borges are among the contributors to this collection of stories. The hushed, slightly mysterious, sometimes lonely atmosphere of libraries is mined in these memorable tales, to which your favorite bibliophile should be able to relate.

The Vintage Book of Amnesia: An Anthology of Writing on the Subject of Memory Loss by Jonathan Lethem, Editor (Vintage Books, 414 pp., $14.00)

Identity, memory, and the loss of both have always been fascinating fodder for fiction writers, as this well-chosen collection by Lethem (who tackled the subject in his own Amnesia Moon) proves. Crossing genres and moods, the collection includes Philip K. Dick, Vladimir Nabokov, Shirley Jackson, Julio Cortazar, Haruki Murakami, and Martin Amis, who each provide tales of alternate insight and uncertainty.

Our Working Lives: Short Stories of People and Work by Stuart Dybek, Bonnie Jo Campbell, et al (Bottom Dog Press, 232 pp., $12.95)

Most of the writers contributing stories to this collection about working stiffs are hardly marquee names, which suits us just fine. American culture, identity, and achievement are so inexorably tied to our jobs and these selections honor and give voice to the often invisible laborers, waitresses, carpenters, teachers, and other professions that represent our family members, our friends, and ourselves. Many of the stories are sad, some are hopeful and they are likely to resonate with anybody who has desperately tried to hold on to their sanity during that hour before quittin' time.

Beach: Stories by the Sand and Sea by Lena Lencek and Gideon Bosker, Editors (Marlowe & Co., 332 pp., $15.95)

With most of the country blanketed in snow right about now, a little trip to the beach (at least on the page) may be a fitting escape from the winter doldrums. Lencek and Bosker love the beach--they wrote an acclaimed book about its cultural history in 1998--and their affection and nostalgia for the lure of the seashore comes through in the stories they've selected here. Hopping around the globe from Cape Cod to Australia's Great Barrier Reef, this anthology captures the pleasures, promise, and power of beaches. Rachel Carson, Albert Camus, Doris Lessing, John Cheever, and Vladimir Nabokov are all on deck for this book, which gives new meaning to the phrase "beach read."

by Jon Garber

The holiday season is upon us, which means lots of frantic running around for that perfect gift, not-so-quiet moments with family and friends, and food. Yep, heaping portions of rich, carbohydrate-laden recipes that tend to add a few extra inches to the waistline. To whet your appetite for the feasts ahead, dig into these food-obsessed books that are free of fat and empty calories, but chock full of insight into what and how we eat…and why. Bon Appétit!

The Devil’s Larder by Jim Crace (Picador, 176 pp., $12.00)

Leave it to Jim Crace, who managed to build an entire novel around two corpses in the indelible Being Dead, to mine the erotic, vaguely repulsive undertones of cooking and eating. Here, Crace explores food in all its enticing, essential, and grotesque forms, through 64 deceptively simple vignettes. Crace is an expert at weaving lyrical turns-of-phrase into his narratives, but those looking for the kind of tasteful, gourmet reveries of an MFK Fisher or Ruth Reichl, should best dine elsewhere. One character, for example, uses the remains of her deceased cat in a stew, and later, her dearly departed husband, only to discover that you can’t "swallow grief whole." Human flesh and insects surface as unexpected ingredients on a menu at a trendy Third World restaurant. In another story, a group of bored diners liven up their fondue party by stripping off their clothes and dipping their naked flesh into the hot melted cheese. A mother and daughter sample food from each other’s mouths to see if it will taste differently. The Devil’s Larder indulges in the kind of horrible beauty and uncertain mysteries that engulf all our appetites, whether we care to acknowledge our taste for it or not.

Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel (Anchor Books, 246 pp., $11.95)

Mexican author Esquivel created a winning recipe with readers and critics alike by carefully melding a number of familiar ingredients from other genres. Add a liberal dose of magical realism from Latin America, toss in a sexed-up version of Cinderella, sprinkle sensual contemplations about the rapture of food, mix in some exotic Mexican recipes, and what you’ve got is Like Water for Chocolate, a literary phenomenon that spawned a hit film and scores of imitators. What works best in Esquivel’s novel is how simple and universal her themes of food, family, and romantic fervor are for everyone who reads it. Tita’s tyrannical mother forbids her to marry Pedro, the man of her dreams, allowing spoiled, older daughter Rosaura to wed him instead. Fortunately, Tita’s unrequited passion finds its muse in the kitchen, where her gastronomic creations inspire tears, memories, and an erotic, mystical connection to her beloved. Like Water for Chocolate proudly wears its sentimental heart on its sleeve but cooks up enough spicy scenarios to keep even the staunchest cynic sated.

The Debt to Pleasure by John Lanchester (Picador, 256 pp., $13.00)

Lanchester, a former restuarant critic, takes the reader on a note-perfect journey into the skewed yet discerning psyche of one Tarquin Winot, a highly sophisticated chef and gourmand, as he drives through the French countryside. Along the way, we learn Tarquin's opinions on everything from what makes one cheese better than another to the psychology of a menu. While all his bitchy comments about food are fascinating and amusing, they serve as the crust to a much more malevolent nature and the real purpose of his road trip. How well the underlying thriller works may depend on how you respond to this rather chilly and remote character. Foodies will enjoy the genteel observations on gourmet cooking and dining, even if the unnerving finale leaves a bad taste in their mouth.

My Year of Meats by Ruth L. Ozeki (Viking Press, 366 pp., $14.00)

Ozeki's dead-on satire/exposé of the American beef industry should tickle your ribs and make you seriously consider becoming a vegetarian. And you don't have to be into sociological whistle-blowers like Fast Food Nation or Nickel and Dimed to respond to My Year of Meats. Politics aside, it works as a rollicking good read, with plenty of laughs and drama. A savvy Japanese-American filmmaker is assigned an intriguing project: direct a series of documentaries about idealized, all-American housewives preparing their favorite beef dishes. The concept will flesh out a series called “My American Wife!” to be broadcast in Japan to convince women there to adopt more red meat in their household meals. What transpires is a hilarious and somewhat sad look at both the hollow consumerism and overfed malaise of the American lifestyle and its increasing prominence in international culture. As entertainment, it goes down easy, and gives you plenty to chew on later.

The Edible Woman by Margaret Atwood (Anchor Books, 336 pp., $12.95)

With her debut novel, Atwood proved herself to be a feminist provocateur of the first order. This bizarre little parable, about a young career woman who suddenly and inexplicably loses her ability to eat after getting engaged, might seem a bit obvious in our post-post-feminist world (where Bridget Jones frets about calories, career, and suitors all at once). But consider that Atwood wrote this in 1965, and you can see how influential this novel has been. As the heroine/martyr, Marian, gets thinner and thinner and begins to actually feel like she is being cannibalized, the book takes the cruel, fairy tale-like turns that Atwood has become known for. An unnerving classic that though dated, still provides plenty of food for thought.

by Jon Garber

The last weeks of December are not just for wrapping gifts and drinking eggnog. They’re also a time when publications everywhere offer up their picks for the best books of the year. Book critics love to make lists--and people love to read them, even when they vehemently disagree with the titles selected (or omitted). Yet as fun as these "Best Of" retrospectives can be, they can sometimes be predictable and a little stale. Is anyone really surprised that Ian McEwan’s Atonement, Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones, or Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex dominated critics’ Top 10 lists? Are there any bibliophiles out there who haven’t heard about Jonathan Safran Foer? Since we believe that the people who visit CentralBooking are among the savviest readers around, we decided to buck the trend and shine the spotlight on the unsung literary gems of 2002. So while we applaud the artistry of the titles mentioned above, you won’t find them on this list. We figure they’ve received plenty of praise elsewhere. Here in no particular order, are the best books you haven’t read about in a Best Of list.

You’re An Animal, Viskovitz! by Alessandro Boffa (Knopf, 192 pp., $18)

Imagine a frequently hilarious, sexually charged version of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and you'll be in tune with the spirit of Boffa’s clever, inspired collection of fables about the title hero, who morphs into 20 different animals. Whether he’s a chameleon with an identity crisis, a philosophical parrot waxing profound on the nature of love, or a drug-addicted police dog, Viskovitz discovers how the experience and quandaries of life resonate with all species. A fun, rollicking read with a lot more on its mind than you might think.

The Golems of Gotham by Thane Rosenbaum (HarperCollins, 384 pp., $25.95)

A comic novel about the Holocaust? It shouldn’t work, but The Golems of Gotham does, as mystery writer Oliver struggles to create his next book and honor the memory of his parents, two concentration camp survivors who committed suicide. Help comes from his 14-year-old daughter, who conjures up the golems (or ghosts) of his parents along with six authors—Primo Levi and Jerzy Kosinski among them—all suicides who were haunted by the Holocaust. In addition to helping Oliver finish his book, the golems clean up New York City, ensuring that while they can never forget the damage of the Holocaust, they may just be able to prevent it from happening again.

Emporium by Adam Johnson (Viking Press, 256 pp., $24.95)

In this collection of powerful and disturbing stories, Johnson captures the desperation, paranoia, and rage bubbling beneath the surface of quiet, middle-class suburbs, which threaten to erupt into violence. If John Cheever’s characters packed heat, they would be something like the compromised lives on display here. Emporium is bleak for sure, but just as often, it is brilliant.

The Song of the Water Saints by Nelly Rosario (Pantheon Books, 256 pp., $23.00)

In this poetic, richly evoked saga of four generations of women from the Dominican Republic, debut novelist Rosario manages the considerable feat of making the political personal. Starting with the dreamy, unfulfilled existence of Graciela, and following the legacy of her daughter, granddaughter, and great-granddaughter, Rosario shows how each of them fall prey to their own passions and hopes. The Song of the Water Saints works both as a powerful historical rendering of the 20th-century Dominican Republic and as a deeply intimate exploration of how family, home, and political culture are inextricably linked.

The Life Before Her Eyes by Laura Kasischke (Harvest Books, 288 pp., $13.00)

As opening chapters go, the one in poet Kasischke’s haunting, unnerving novel, The Life Before Her Eyes, is every bit as harrowing as the opening pages of Alice Sebold’s more celebrated The Lovely Bones. Two teenage girls are confronted with their own mortality in a high school bathroom by a Columbine-like student sniper. They are given a choice: one may live, the other will die. The novel jumps forward to the surviving girl’s future as a wife and mother, dealing with middle-aged guilt and disappointment. Kasischke’s bold twist ending will inspire a love-it-or-hate-it response in readers, but her sharp eye for language and strong insight into adolescence make this one of the most distinctive books of the year.

Unsung Heroes of American Industry by Mark Jude Poirier (Miramax Books, 169 pp., $22.00)

Some of America’s most bizarre professions are given their due in Poirier’s fascinating, occasionally creepy stories. Meet a family that creates pearl buttons only to get caught up in the industry of chicken farming, a worm farmer whose hopeful marriage unravels, a beauty pageant contestant who does it all for mama, and a woman who skins alligators for a living. These characters are often punished for their bold dreams of American success, but the author has a real compassion for them, quirks and all.

Nowhere Man by Aleksandr Hemon (Doubleday, 256 pp., $23.95)

Like the more widely acclaimed The Impressionist, Nowhere Man reveals the shifting identities and values of the immigrant character without a country. Jozef Pronek has blended in with his listless surroundings in ‘90s Chicago, trying to shed the weight of his childhood in Sarajevo, even as a devastating war rages in Eastern Europe. Chronicling Jozef's awkward youth, which includes exploits as a member of a Beatles cover band and a humiliating stint as a soldier, Hemon has created an enduring character, one that often seems more convincing and genuine than the similarly conceived Alex Perchov of Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated.

Miniatures by Norah Labiner (Coffee House Press, 381 pp., $23.00)

Labiner doesn’t get the kind of praise that other experimental novelists like David Foster Wallace do, but her towers of language, shifts in time and setting, and continual streams of allusions both literary and pop cultural, make her every bit as inventive, adventurous, and occasionally indulgent. What there is of a plot in Miniatures involves a young woman who works as a housekeeper for a famous writing couple (shades of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath). The three eventually form a strange sort of triangle, in which many secrets and closeted skeletons are revealed. But the book is really a showcase for Labiner’s clever musings on our media-saturated culture and her seamless stylistic adaptation of everyone from Proust and Poe to Mary Shelley and the Brontë Sisters.

Man Walks Into a Room by Nicole Krauss (Doubleday, 224 pp., $23.95)

Not to be confused with Nicola Kraus, co-author of this year’s bestselling The Nanny Diaries, Nicole Krauss has crafted a much more ambitious debut novel. An English professor wakes up in the Las Vegas desert with no idea who he is, the result of a small brain tumor. After the tumor is removed, he can only remember the first 12 years of his life, forgetting the wife and career he held in New York. He can no longer adjust or contemplate who he has been, so he decides to participate in a groundbreaking research study in which his memories will be exchanged for someone else’s. Man Walks Into A Room is a profound exploration of how our past and present shape our future and how precarious our existence is without the framework of experience.

Simon Silber: Works for Piano by Christopher Miller (Houghton Mifflin, 256 pp., $23.00)

Cannily written (and packaged) as a series of CD liner notes, Miller’s caustically funny novel is a sort of This is Spinal Tap set to classical music. Composer Simon Silber is a legend in his own mind, whose genius has been ignored by the world and his small Oregon hometown of Forest City. Somehow his creations, which include pieces inspired by ice cream truck renditions of Joplin, a work played in 24-hour real time, and a fugue for Tinkertoys, have failed to capture the public’s imagination. Simon hires a biographer, himself a frustrated artist, to chronicle his lonely childhood and eccentric adulthood. The result is a very bitchy, often tragic tale of the gaping chasm that lies between ambition and talent.

by Jon Garber

Oprah Quits! Book Sales Plummet! Historians Caught Copying! 2002 was full of screaming headlines about the book world. There were plenty of breakout bestsellers, shocking controversies, and head-scratching oddities. Join us as we take a look back at the big newsmakers and noteworthy stories of the year that was.

Been Caught Stealing

We were all warned time and again in college about the consequences of plagiarism, but 2002 was a strong example of what could actually happen to notable authors whose hands were caught in the citation-less cookie jar. The year kicked off with bestselling historian Stephen Ambrose facing widespread charges of lifting other people's research without credit and continued with similar revelations surfacing about the work of Pulitzer-Prize winner Doris Kearns Goodwin. In a telling case of media sexism, Goodwin bore the brunt of most of the criticism, though. While Ambrose defended his actions as commonplace among historians, Goodwin attempted a mea culpa in a Time magazine essay and was disinvited from both the university lecture circuit and the Pulitzer Prize judging committee. Ambrose, who was diagnosed with lung cancer, died last fall and few obituaries if any mentioned the plagiarism scandal. Will history be as forgiving to Goodwin? Only time will tell.

Meanwhile, writing fiction didn't spare authors from the copycat claims. J.K. Rowling went to court and won a suit which accused her of stealing the idea of her Harry Potter series from another writer. And this year's Booker Prize winner Yann Martel acknowledged that his novel, Life of Pi, was inspired by Brazilian author Moacyr Scliar's Max and the Cats, but still faced possible legal action for copying.

Child's Play

Buoyed by the phenomenal success of children's book franchises Harry Potter and Lemony Snicket, a gaggle of prestigious adult authors ventured into fiction for the younger set. Michael Chabon pitched a baseball fantasy novel, Summerland, which scored with audiences young and old. Isabel Allende offered her own Harry Potter-esque tale, City of the Beasts, as the first of a proposed series. Genre favorites Neil Gaiman, Carl Hiaasen, and Clive Barker weighed in with the junior-friendly Coraline, Hoot, and Abarat, respectively. The ever-prolific Joyce Carol Oates added another book category under her belt with her first young adult novel, Big Mouth & Ugly Girl and Toni Morrison teamed up with her son, Slade, to pen The Book of Mean People for kids. Kids-lit tutor Dave Eggers targeted 15-to-25-year old readers with The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2002 and even Judy Blume, who has written mostly adult fiction in recent years, was back with Double Fudge. With all this kids stuff goin' around, could 2003 be the year we finally get a fairy tale from Norman Mailer or some children's poetry from Amiri Baraka?

Controversy: Cachet or Curse?

Who doesn't love a little misstep or scandal from the rich & famous? OK, those three people can stop reading. To paraphrase Eminem, who knows a thing or two about the subject, things would be so empty without a little controversy. It can fuel a career like Slim Shady's or it can damage credibility (are you there God? It's me, Winona) And there was no shortage of it this year. Besides the twin pariahs of plagiarism, Stephen Ambrose and Doris Kearns Goodwin, there were a lot of authors writing themselves into a corner in 2003.

In the aftermath of September 11, several writers were taken to task for their words. Amiri Baraka, whose poem, "Somebody Blew Up America," connected the World Trade Center attack to the Israeli government, was denounced as an anti-Semite and will likely be stripped of his title as Poet Laureate of New Jersey (indeed, the whole program may be disbanded). The former Leroi Jones wasn't the only one whose loose lips caused trouble. The perpetually Prozac-popping, self-described "bitch", Elizabeth Wurtzel whined about how New Yorkers "overreacted" to the events of September 11 and found all the grief to be a "pain in the ass." The ensuing outrage from the media led Miramax to postpone the release of Prozac Nation, the film adaptation of Wurtzel's memoir. Poet Tom Paulin criticized Israeli occupation in the Palestinian West Bank and lost an invitation to speak at Harvard (though he was later re-invited).

In a political environment, where George W. Bush is a hero and conservative tomes by Ann Coulter and Sean Hannity were climbing the bestseller charts, somehow roly-poly rabblerouser Michael Moore is the one liberal everyone wants to listen to. He scored a one-two punch this year with his bestselling Stupid White Men and broke box-office records for a documentary film with the pro-gun control Bowling for Columbine.

Controversial behavior generally played much better abroad. Arundhati Roy spent a day in jail after being found in contempt of court by the Indian Supreme Court for outspoken comments about environmental policy. She was roundly applauded for her courage and conviction. La controverse also brought good tidings to French authors Catherine Millet, whose erotically frank The Sexual Life of Catherine M. sold like hotcakes, and Michel Houellebecq's misanthropic novel, The Elementary Particles, won literature's biggest monetary award, the Dublin-based IMPAC Prize. And Martha Stewart endured a year that included the release of an unauthorized bio called Martha Inc., a Congressional investigation of her investment activities (as her own stock plummeted), and the removal of her likeness from K-Mart ads. No wonder she just wanted to concentrate on her salad.

Eyes on the Prize

Literary awards spread the wealth this year, while avoiding such obvious favorites as Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections and Ian McEwan's Atonement. Richard Russo picked up his first Pulitzer for Empire Falls, the Booker (sorry, The Man Booker) went to a largely unknown author, Yann Martel, for his Life of Pi, and Julia Glass won the National Book Award for her first novel, Three Junes. The National Book Critics' Circle posthumously awarded W.G. Sebald, for Austerlitz, just months after his death in a car accident. Ann Patchett's universally lauded Bel Canto won both the Orange Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award. Hungarian poet Imre Kertész was recognized with the Nobel Prize for Literature. In the dubious honor categories were Living With Crazy Buttocks and Tread Softly, two books that won the Diagram Prize for Oddest Title of the Year and the Bad Sex in Fiction Award respectively.

The New Breed

Several authors hit a home run their first time at bat in 2002. The breakout hit of the year, Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones, was that rare book that everyone---critics and audiences---adored, and it's still going strong on the bestseller lists, six months after its debut. Two disgruntled nannies, Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus, found sweet revenge with their megaselling novel, The Nanny Diaries and Ann Packer made a big splash with The Dive From Clausen's Pier, the best Oprah book Oprah never chose. Allison Pearson showed there was life after Bridget Jones with her ode to working mothers, I Don't Know How She Does It. Every year needs a literary wonder boy and in 2002, it was 22-year-old Jonathan Safran Foer. His debut novel, Everything Is Illuminated, about a young writer searching for his roots in Ukraine, was the most buzzed about book since The Corrections. Eastern Europe also provided fertile literary ground for Arthur Phillips' Prague and Gary Shteyngart's The Russian Debutante's Handbook, both of which were debuts. You Are Not A Stranger Here, by newbie Adam Haslett, was one of the few short story collections to hit the bestseller lists, thanks to an endorsement by Jonathan Franzen on The Today Show. And two top literary prizes, the Booker and the National Book Award, were snapped up by neophytes Yann Martel (Life of Pi) and Julia Glass (Three Junes).

Calling It Quits

Amid the freshness of new talent, several notable names decided to retire from the book business. Stephen King, who scored solid reviews and sales with Everything's Eventual and From a Buick 8, vowed to quit writing after two more books. Clive Cussler announced this month he will stop producing the adventure novels that have made him a perennial bestseller. And Oprah Winfrey sent a shiver down the collective spines of every book publisher in America, after she closed the final chapter on her six-year-old book club. The woman who made household names out of Wally Lamb and Janet Fitch claimed that she couldn't find any more books worth recommending, yet many attributed the departure to sagging ratings and lingering resentment over last year's Franzen Fracas.

As Seen on TV (or the Movies)

If you were clueless about what you wanted to read next, sitting in front of the boob tube or movie screen this year could actually give you ideas. Those mourning the end of Oprah's Book Club were consoled with a glut of new media-driven knockoffs, with The Today Show, Good Morning America, Live With Regis & Kelly, USA Today, and Martha Stewart Living all swooping in to pick up the slack. So far, The Today Show has had the most success--boosting sales for The Emperor of Ocean Park, A Girl Named Zippy and You Are Not A Stranger Here. Meanwhile, Hollywood's insatiable need for new material led to the inevitable onslaught of film adaptations of beloved books. There were second helpings of Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings, as well as screen versions of White Oleander, Nicholas Nickleby, The Hours, The Bourne Identity, Tuck Everlasting, and The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood. Even Susan Orlean's acclaimed book, The Orchid Thief was turned into a bizarre and wholly original film about writer's block and adapted screenplays called Adaptation. All the publicity helped a struggling book industry stay afloat, so expect much more of the same strategies in 2003.

Tough Times for the Book Biz

With the entire country wracked by an economic recession and the looming threat of war, publishers and booksellers suffered serious financial setbacks. Book sales reached the lowest figures in years. Cash-strapped Vivendi tried and tried to sell off Houghton Mifflin. Borders resorted to grocery store tactics in its merchandising and one of its stores even tried selling beer at the café. Random House endured another nasty round of layoffs, while indie publishers held steady. For every sleeper hit like The Lovely Bones, there were scores of failures or pricey disappointments. A surplus of 9/11 pictorials and coffee table books suffered from the wounds that were all too fresh for America. Even surefire sellers like Michael Crichton, Tom Clancy, and John Grisham underperformed with their latest offerings. Switching genres though didn't hurt. Fiction authors Patricia Cornwell, Pat Conroy, and Mary Higgins Clark all did well with nonfiction releases.

The Long Goodbye

Though their books will live on forever, a number of beloved authors reached the last page in their brilliant careers and lives. So long, Iris Murdoch, Stephen Jay Gould, Harriet Doerr, Chaim Potok, Stephen Ambrose, Virginia Hamilton, Mildred Benson, Dee Brown, Jack Olsen, Eileen Fisher, and Maritta Wolff, and thanks for the memories.

That's 2002 in a nutshell, the Cliffs Notes version. Another year for the books.