Novelist Philip Caputo (Acts of Faith, A Rumor of War) skillfully interweaves the post-9/11 reality of drug cartels and immigrant hordes with the early 20th-century world of the Mexican-U.S. border in a multigenerational tale. The lives of a grieving widower, an illegal Mexican alien, and various narcotraficantes—as well as the hordes who give this story, Crossers (Knopf), its name—interact to form the best story set in this volatile landscape that I have read since I chanced to discover Don Winslow’s great novel, The Power of the Dog. The border has its own culture and taxonomy, and Caputo’s novel displays that in its manifold forms—along with a serviceable plot and sympathetic characters. And beyond the border of his recent fiction Caputo has logged some serious investigative time to write a compelling complement to Crossers that cautions: “The stakes for the U.S. are high, especially as the prospect of a failed state on our southern border begins to seem all too real.” In the piece he spotlights a pandemic of slaughter that has claimed 14,000 lives amidst a struggle between drug lords, police, the army, politicians, and C.I.A.-sponsored operatives, and he asserts:

Of the many things Mexico lacks these days, clarity is near the top of the list. It is dangerous to know the truth. Finding it is frustrating. Statements by U.S. and Mexican government officials, repeated by a news media that prefers simple story lines, have fostered the impression in the United States that the conflict in Mexico is between Calderón’s white hats and the crime syndicates’ black hats…

What, then, accounts for the carnage, the worst Mexico has suffered since the revolution, a century ago? To be sure, many of the dead have been cartel criminals. Some were killed in firefights with the army, others in battles between the cartels for control of smuggling routes, and still others in power struggles within the cartels. The toll includes more than 1,000 police officers, some of whom, according to Mexican press reports, were executed by soldiers for suspected links to drug traffickers. Conversely, a number of the fallen soldiers may have been killed by policemen moonlighting as cartel hit men, though that cannot be proved. Meanwhile, human-rights groups have accused the military of unleashing a reign of terror—carrying out forced disappearances, illegal detentions, acts of torture, and assassinations—not only to fight organized crime but also to suppress dissidents and other political troublemakers. What began as a war on drug trafficking has evolved into a low-intensity civil war with more than two sides and no white hats, only shades of black. The ordinary Mexican citizen—never sure who is on what side, or who is fighting whom and for what reason—retreats into a private world where he becomes willfully blind, deaf, and above all, dumb.

 —Robert Birnbaum, Nov. 19, 2009

While preparing my chat with American short fiction samurai Tobias Wolff for publication, I realized that though I greatly appreciate short stories I have not been paying sufficient attention to them in this space. Luckily, I have the 2009 edition of The Best American Short Stories at hand.

As you may know, this series has a long and honorable history dating back to 1915, as well as a permanent editor, Heidi Pitlor, who is joined each year by a guest editor—this year, Alice Sebold. And as is the customary practice, each volume contains about 20 short fictions, culled from a wide-ranging smorgasbord of magazines and finally selected from about a hundred stories by the guest editor. And, as has been the case, there are well-known names from well-known publications and newcomers from not-so-well-known periodicals.

This year, Daniel Alarcón, Annie Proulx, Yiyun Li, Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum (The New Yorker), Joseph Epstein (Commentary), Richard Powers (Conjunctions), Kevin Moffett, Adam Johnson (Tin House), Ron Rash (The Southern Review), and Jill McCorkle (Narrative Magazine) are joined by Steve De Jarnatt (Santa Monica Review), Alice Fulton (Tin House), Karl Taro Greenfeld (American Short Fiction), Eleanor Henderson (Agni), Greg Hrbek (Black Warrior Review), Victoria Lancelotta (The Gettysburg Review), Rebecca Makkai (New England Review), Alex Rose (Ploughshares), Ethan Rutherford (American Short Fiction), and Namwali Serpell (Callaloo) to round out a cornucopia of short narratives.

Sebold introduces the anthology:

More than mere solace is to be gained by reading good stories—short stories in particular. Stories provide an endless access into another world, brought forth by an infinite number of gifted minds. A story about grief can comfort; a story about arrogance can shock and yet confirm; a story populated largely by landscape, whether lush or industrial, can expand the realm that we as individuals inhabit.

She echoes Pitlor’s conviction that these selections “demonstrate the human ability to endure crises and to regenerate afterward. There is nothing safe about these stories.” —Robert Birnbaum, Nov. 12, 2009

Amongst the incalculably lengthy list of authors who have not received their due (also an incalculable notion) you will find, with regularity, the name of Padgett Powell. Powell (Edisto), who teaches at the University of Florida and has collected plaudits from Ian Frazier and Barry Hannah to Saul Bellow, has a new fiction out that his publisher labels “an exuberant book” and a “wildly inventive, jazzy meditation on life and language,” and about which Richard Ford blurbs, “If Duchamp or maybe Magritte wrote a novel (and maybe they did. Did they?) it might look something like this remarkable little book of Padgett Powell’s.”

And what is this “bebop solo of a book?” Well, it seems the authorial conceit exhibited in The Interrogative Mood (Ecco) is that its 164 pages are composed entirely of questions—a literary feat you may or may not find engrossing. Despite the well-intentioned promoters hyper-enthusiasm for this tome, this “playful and profound book” may not be the best access point into Powell’s oeuvre, since it is a huge deviation from the lyricism exhibited in his past work. And then again its originality puts it in a class by itself.

In the Important to the Book Industry venue, Josh Emmons intones the book is:

…a fearless meditation on the sublime and the trivial, a hydra-headed reflection of life as it is experienced and of thought as it is felt. With echoes of the Tao Te Ching, “My Funny Valentine,” Pascal’s “Pensées,” “Green Eggs and Ham,” Annie Dillard’s “This Is the Life” and countless other quests for conviction that secretly understand and depend on the futility of such quests, it is wondrous strange.

True enough. —Robert Birnbaum, Nov. 6, 2009

Po Bronson first came to my attention with his 1995 lampoon of the insular world of bond-trading, Bombardiers. My next awareness of him came in a conversation with novelist and Iowa Writers’ Workshop mentor Ethan Canin, who spoke highly of Bronson and, if memory serves well, suggested Bronson was an impressive polymath—which seems to be borne out by Bronson’s subsequent CV.

A founder of the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto, a children’s soccer coach, and having written the bestselling What Should I Do With My Life? (and three other books) and until 2006, served on the board of directors of Consortium Book Sales & Distribution, he has turned his considerable acumen—in collaboration with Ashley Merryman, who runs a church-based tutoring program for inner-city children in Los Angeles—to a supremely important topic examined in NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children (Twelve).

Essentially, the argument—exposing fascinating anomalies such as cross-racial friendships decrease in schools that are more integrated—and assembled evidence asserts that “many of modern society’s strategies for nurturing children are in fact backfiring.” Mostly because we ignore the science that updates our knowledge of childhood development and such.

Unlike the junk science and pretentious claptrap found in the parenting/self-help section of bookstores, NurtureShock is an exploration, not a manual—one that continues in the ongoing discussions at its web site and other forums. Its a subject, whether or not one is a parent, it would do well to ponder. —Robert Birnbaum, Oct. 30, 2009

Ana Menéndez, (Loving Che) a former columnist/reporter for the Miami Herald has written, variously, about Cuba, Kashmir, Afghanistan, Istanbul, and India, her base for three years. With her new opus, The Last War (HarperCollins), she has authored two novels (in addition to a story collection).

Set in Istanbul, The Last War ranges temporally and geographically between Iraq and Afghanistan and India. Flash, a freelance photojournalist who frequently works with her war-reporting husband Brando, is laying over in Istanbul and mulling over joining him in Iraq. Apparently, not possessing an upbeat worldview as she wanders the streets, things quickly turn darker when Flash receives an anonymous letter from Iraq alleging her husband has been unfaithful. Though regularly speaking with Brando, she is unable to confront him with the allegations. As this plays itself out—and Flash continues to haunt the compelling streets of Istanbul, trying to reach a decision about her future and come to an accommodation about her past—enter Alexandra, a colleague from the past (Afghanistan) whose presence pries the lid off Flash’s tightly boxed self-consciousness.

The coloration of this dyspeptic novel (Flash is smart, questioning, and perceptive) is foretold by the The Last War’s epigram, which quotes Gay Talese: “Most journalists are restless voyeurs who see the warts on the world, the imperfections in people and places. Gloom is their game, the spectacle their passion, normalcy their nemesis.” (She might have quoted my favorite Talese observation: “The real problem is what to do with the problem-solvers after the problems are solved.”)

Late in the novel, Flash relates:

I returned to covering the wars. It’s steady work. And I know how to do it. Now every time some young reporter writes a beautifully crafted piece about a promising cease-fire or a new peace deal, I think of Brando: “The warrior will always triumph over the poet.”

That’s the flawed evolution we’ve been handed. In some other corner of the universe, the laws of existence must be reversed. Surely, not every manifestation of life is this fucked up. Somewhere, the long victory ends up going to the plodding, pacific parasite who lives outside history and its multitude of mad scribes.

But not here. That’s not our story. Here, the warrior always triumphs over the poet. The only mistake I made was insisting all along that the warrior had been Brando.

 —Robert Birnbaum, Oct. 20, 2009

Not exactly a household name (except in certain effete and cultivated households) thespian (his credits include over a hundred movie and TV appearances—My Dinner With Andre, Shadows and Fog, Toy Story, The Princess Bride, Life on Mars among them) playwright (The Designated Mourner and The Fever) Wallace Shawn, scion of revered New Yorker editor, brother of composer Allan Shawn, has penned Essays (Haymarket Press), a dozen pieces on a mélange of subjects. In the case of Shawn, the question is not about what he has written but why. Here’s his explanation:

…I like to take a break from fantasyland, and go off to the place called Reality for a brief vacation. Its happened a dozen or so in the course of my life I’ve looked at the world from my own point of view and I’ve written these essays, I’ve written essays about reality, the world and I’ve even written a few essays about the dreamworld of “art” in which I normally dwell. In a bold mood I’ve brooded once or twice on the question, Where do the dreams go, and what do they do, in the world of the real?

…the schizophrenic nature of this book…gives a pretty good picture of my own mind. Born by most definitions into the ruling class, I was destined to lead a comfortable life. And to spend one’s life as a so-called “creative artist” is probably the most comfortable, cozy and privileged life that one can live on this earth…

To lie in bed and watch words bump together until they become sentences is a form of hedonism…Its very agreeable to live like that…but I am not quite enough of a hedonist to forget it [the world] entirely and forever…in other words I’ve been divided like this book…

Some how poetry and the search for a more just order on earth are not contradictory and rational thought and dreams are not contradictory and there may be something necessary as well as ridiculous in the odd activity of racing back and forth on the bridge between reality and the world of dreams.

Indeed. —Robert Birnbaum, Oct. 1, 2009

There are some writers—for me, Rick Russo, Jim Harrison, Elmore Leonard, George Pelecanos, Amy Bloom, to name a few—for whom the matter at hand is not whether but rather how much I will like their latest creation. To be honest in Russo’s (Bridge of Sighs, Empire Falls) case, only Straight Man didn’t work for me, and looking back I’d bet even that one might improve with a reread.

The new opus, That Old Cape Magic (Knopf), focuses on the havoc created by familial relations; in middle-aged university professor and unrepentant screenwriter Griffin’s case, havoc lingers well past his childhood. Here’s a guy who cannot rest easy, as much of the story he is burdened with his mother’s persistent telephonic intrusions and an urn of his father’s ashes. His parents, both university professors stranded at midwestern universities (not the Ivy League of their aspirations), are most certainly a pair that beats a full house. What psychic baggage his parents have bequeathed to Griffin manages to wear down his seemingly viable marriage to Joy and dangle him in an emotional limbo.

The narrative dovetails at his daughter’s wedding, where hilarity abounds and various self-truths are realized. It is, of course, one of Russo’s talents that he can extract humor out of the tangled and frayed lifelines of his characters. An extra benefit of this novel is the author’s keen observation of the silliness of the Hollywood film industry, Russo also being a successful screenwriter. I have earlier this year quoted one those juicy tidbits, so that will give you a taste of what you can expect.

Oh, did I mention that important parts of the novel are set on Cape Cod? —Robert Birnbaum, Sep. 23, 2009

Looking at Rebecca Solnit’s body of published work—Hope in the Dark, River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Wanderlust: A History of Walking, and As Eve Said to the Serpent: On Landscape, Gender, and Art—makes obvious her penchant for observation from oblique and tangential angles (her only obvious aspect). With her new opus, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster (Viking), Lannan Literary Prize-winner Solnit takes on the aftermaths of disasters—including the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, the 1917 explosion that tore up Halifax, Nova Scotia, the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, Sept. 11, and Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans—and the communities that arise in response. Among other problems she cites is the misinformation frequently ladled out by first-responding media. Contrary to expectations, people respond altruistically, and Solnit notes, “The real question is not why this brief paradise of mutual aid and altruism appears but rather why it is ordinarily overwhelmed by another world order.” Or to put it simply, panic seems to come from the top. For example, the misleading reports of lawlessness in New Orleans disregarded and discouraged the far more common acts of altruism. Pointedly, Solnit asserts that “no evidence exists that anyone was shot or killed by the supposed gangs.” This is an eye-opening investigation by an original and diligent thinker: a kind of feel-good book for smart people. And we probably don’t have enough of those.

Her recent essay on Sept. 11 at Tom’s Dispatch concludes:

The dead must be remembered, but the living are the monument, the living who coexist in peace in ordinary times and who save one another in extraordinary times. Civil society triumphed that morning in full glory. Look at it: remember that this is who we were and can be.

 —Robert Birnbaum, Sep. 21, 2009

There are probably a few handfuls of writers who fall into the unfortunate category of being designated writers’ writers. I say unfortunate because it suggests an explanation for a lack of wide(r) recognition—though ostensibly it is meant as something positive. The late Frederick Busch seemed to be pigeonholed in this manner despite the fact that some of his nearly 30 books of fiction were commercially successful—and there was nothing arcane or exotic about his fiction or person.

Fred, with whom I spoke intermittently over two decades, was very friendly with Ward Just, another author who has written a shelf full of finely crafted novels—now 16, with Exiles in the Garden (Houghton Mifflin).

But let me table any discussion of literary stature and offer something about Just’s new narrative. It is set in Washington, D.C., and spans the Kennedy years to the near present, with occasional references to the F.D.R. years. Alec Malone is the only child of a U.S. senator who, to his father’s chagrin, forgoes a life of public service and politics to become a photographer. He marries Lucia, a Czech émigré by way of Zurich, and they have a daughter. The story picks up steam as they begin to socialize with their neighbors and the cosmopolitan milieu (at least, Lucia does) of which they are a part, and it is here that we have forewarning of the impact of Lucia’s long-missing father, an anti-fascist partisan who disappeared after World War II. Here also is where she meets a Hungarian intellectual for whom she deserts Alec.

Just is acutely observant as he explicates the hall of mirrors that constitutes the culture of Washington, the (once) so-called capital of the free world. And his characterization of Alec’s personality—his triumphs and foibles—is as engaging as anyone writing for grown-ups today. I concur with Sven Birkets’s engaging conclusion:

Just’s novel addresses power, but not in its deployment. Rather, “Exiles in the Garden” seeks to understand the individual’s ability—and will—to make a full self-­accounting and to act accordingly. The unexamined life may not be worth living, but the unlived life, examined, yields a stark cautionary wisdom.

 —Robert Birnbaum, Sep. 14, 2009

I suppose if there were many American readers who were interested in the harrowing and haunting recollections of Haifa Zangana, an exiled Iraqi patriot and lifelong (since the ’70s) resistance fighter, the tone and palette of U.S. involvement in Iraq and the Middle East might have taken a different form. Nonetheless, some enlightened and fortunate souls will find Zangana’s Dreaming of Baghdad (The Feminist Press) and learn what should have been known well ahead of the mess the U.S. created.

And in case you are deluded enough to think that the 200-day-old 44th presidency is coming to grips with the mess that our nation created, consider this. The continuities in American foreign and military policy are striking no matter who is in the White House. The first-term Obama foreign policy now looks increasingly like the second-term Bush foreign policy. Even where change can be spotted, it regularly seems to follow in the same vein…

But so it goes. —Robert Birnbaum, Sep. 11, 2009

To say the dreary miasma of orthodox socialism was additionally burdened with the psychotic tyranny of Josef “Man of Steel” Stalin cannot adequately represent the terrors and horrors of the Stalinist regime. Martin Amis, in his controversial Koba the Dread, drums up Robert Conquest’s heuristic device of representing the letters on the page (and then multiplied exponentially) to represent the death toll under Stalin. That and the book’s subtitle Laughter and the Twenty Million should remove any illusions of Soviet history as a garden party.

In The Secret Speech (Grand Central), Tom Rob Smith (Child 44), Cambridge graduate and student of that sordid history, fashions a gripping albeit gray narrative around the speech Nikolai Krushchev, survivor of the post-Stalin Machiavellian scrum, gave to the party faithful in 1956. It’s hard to know what Krushchev intended by acknowledging Stalin’s tyranny and promising change in the U.S.S.R., and in Smith’s novel any number of apparatchiks and party henchmen are fearful of what change might mean. Thus, former state security officer Leo Demidov (a man not without past sins) is called to solve the string of murders that targeted complicit Stalinist officials.

Smith spins a well-woven web of crimes and punishments that range from the streets of Moscow to the Siberian gulags to Budapest for the Hungarian Insurrection of 1956 (floating the not-preposterous notion that the uprising was a Soviet-plotted provocation). Smith succeeds on a number of levels, exhibiting a realistic grasp of the dynamics of Soviet society—especially the criminal gangs that were a countervailing element to the state apparatus. The plotline, action, and characters do fine service to a plausible picture of life in the mid-century Soviet Union. —Robert Birnbaum, Sep. 2, 2009

Shamefully, I must confess that while full of springtime ambition and whatever else is in that season that spurs us to grasp beyond our reach, I had intended to assemble a gaggle of poetry titles coincident with National Poetry Month—though that commemoration has about as much weight as National Lawn Trash Month and National Septic Tank Renewal Month—nonetheless, as Plato warned (sort of), poetry makes us do crazy things, thus I will periodically try to make up for my oversight.

Jim Harrison, who has authored more than 30 books (novels, novellas, an anthology of food writing, nonfiction, poetry, screenplays) sees himself foremost as a poet: “Poetry, there’s still a bit of the burning bush aspect of poetry descending on you, bang, you know? As they say, you never quite see it coming.” He has published 12 collections of poetry—his latest is In Search of Small Gods (Copper Canyon Press), which contains this gem:

“The Quarter”

Maybe the problem is
that I got involved with
the wrong crowd of gods
when I was seven. At first
they weren’t harmful and
only showed themselves
as fish, birds, especially
herons and loons, turtles,
a bobcat and a small bear,
but not deer and rabbits
who only offered
themselves as food. And
maybe I spent too much
time inside the water of
lakes and rivers.
Underwater seemed like
the safest church I could
go to. And sleeping
outside that young might
have seeped too much
dark into my brain and
bones. It was not for me
to ever recover. The other
day I found a quarter in
the driveway I lost at the
Mecosta County Fair in
1947 and missed out on
five rides including the
Ferris wheel and the
Tilt-A-Whirl. I sat in anger
for hours in the bull barn
mourning my lost quarter
on which the entire tragic
history of earth is
written. I looked up into
the holes of the bulls’
massive noses and at the
brass rings puncturing
their noses which allowed
them to be led. It would
have been an easier life if
I had allowed a ring in my
nose, but so many years
later I still find the spore
of the gods here and there
but never in the vicinity
of quarters.

Spore of the gods, indeed. —Robert Birnbaum, Aug. 20, 2009

OK, unlike everyone else in my generation, I was not at Woodstock. (Then and now, not exactly my idea of fun.) But as this week marks the 40th anniversary of the legendary cultural milestone, you will be carpet-bombed with endless blather and footage—unless you are sequestered in Guantánamo. Michael Lang, who with Artie Kornfeld produced the festival, weighs in with his bird’s-eye, present-at-the-creation point of view with The Road to Woodstock (Ecco). The New York Times, performing one of the diminishing tasks at which it excels, rounded up a panel of commentators with shrewd opining such as Morris Dickstein’s:

Woodstock the concert, Woodstock the actual 1969 event, may be remembered through a haze of nostalgia by those who were actually there, now approaching retirement age. But the real influence on America came from Woodstock the legend, set off first by sensational press coverage, then the 1970 movie by Michael Wadleigh, then by frequent anniversaries like the one coming up this week.

By the way, plans for a 40th anniversary concert have reportedly been tabled. —Robert Birnbaum, Aug. 17, 2009

Meryl Streep’s uncanny film portrayal of Julia Child in Julie & Julia (based on Julie Powell’s Julie & Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen and Child’s My Life in France) has now occasioned Michael Pollan’s New York Times Magazine piece, “Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch,” which, contrary to what you might expect (or at least what I expected), quotes veteran food-marketing researcher Harry Balzer:

“We’re all looking for someone else to cook for us. The next American cook is going to be the supermarket. Takeout from the supermarket, that’s the future. All we need now is the drive-through supermarket….You want Americans to eat less? I have the diet for you. It’s short, and it’s simple. Here’s my diet plan: Cook it yourself. That’s it. Eat anything you want—just as long as you’re willing to cook it yourself.”

With Watching What We Eat: The Evolution of Television Cooking Shows (Continuum), Kathleen Collins, a prodigious researcher, has surveyed the cooking show landscape from the foggy origins of television, past Child’s 1962 The French Chef (which among other things demystified French haute cuisine), to the present. Even if you do not give a fig for the new foodie culture (include me in that disinterest), this social history is a litmus of social and cultural transformation. Barbara Haber, former Curator of Books at the Schlesinger Library (which has a legendary cookbook collection) and author of the invaluable From Hardtack to Home Fries: An Uncommon History of American Cooks and Meals opines:

In her lively and informative narrative of television food shows, Kathleen Collins captures the phenomenal growth of food as entertainment, what has evolved into a new form of spectator sport in America. The rise of TV celebrity chefs within the context of the nation’s growing sophistication about food are stories that needed to be told, and Collins has told them well.

So, where does that leave us? —Robert Birnbaum, Aug. 13, 2009

If you have read novelist John Crowley’s fiction (Endless Things and Little, Big), his new opus may come as something of a surprise—as his penchant is for what some refer to as slipstream or interstitial fiction.

Four Freedoms (William Morrow) is set in the early years of World War II (the worn-out phrase “back in the day” may actually apply here) and revolves around a sprawling aircraft bomber plant—the B-30 Pax (the largest bomber ever built)—and the community in the middle of Oklahoma that was created to support it. All manner of oddballs, drawn by a multitude of reasons and circumstances, end up at the Van Damme factory. Prosper Olander, the novel’s disabled and protean protagonist, serves as the touchstone for Vi, Connie, and Dianne, women who have embarked on liberating and evolving paths that will radically alter America’s social fabric. Crowley creates a quasi-utopian industrial organism with midgets, cripples, misfits, and women taking up the slack as American men ship off to a war. As the novel winds down, Pancho (is the name too obviously a literary reference?), Prosper’s roommate and a malcontent of the progressive stripe, considers attending the United Nations conference held in San Francisco to reaffirm the Four Freedoms that President Roosevelt enunciated on January 6, 1941: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. Crowley’s presentation of mid-century America is well and plausibly rendered (down to the price of condoms in 1944), though none more evocative than the mention of Sammy Cahn and Julie Styne’s “It’s Been a Long, Long Time.” It’s a pitch-perfect reference point for yet another transformational shift in America. Listen to June Christie croon and see if you don’t agree.

The Van Damme brothers’ attempt to socially engineer a cohesive industrial community at what was called Henryville brings to mind Henry Ford’s ill-fated Fordlandia—his vision of recreating a Midwestern factory town in the Amazonian jungle. New York University mentor Greg Grandin ably assembles the details of Ford’s grandiose failure in Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City (Metropolitan Books). In 1927, Ford’s initial motive was to manufacture rubber for his automobiles on a plot of purchased land (which happened to be the size of Delaware)—but the plan apparently devolved into something more ambitious and impossible, and not one drop of rubber was ever produced that was used by Ford. Historian Susan Hecht properly credits Grandin as an author who “places the Ford story [within a] much broader social history of Amazonia, and rather than a saga of some novelty or the vanity of the rich, makes the resistance and the failure part of a larger Amazonian history rather than just the exotic ambitions of a man with too much money.” —Robert Birnbaum, Jul. 23, 2009

Tasmanian (go ahead, tell me you know where Tasmania is) novelist Richard Flanagan (Gould’s Book of Fish, The Unknown Terrorist [which he dedicated to the beleaguered and persecuted Australian Muslim convert David Hicks]) joins a growing and welcome list of novels that have the illustrious 19th century English cultural giant and the world’s most famous novelist of his day, Charles Dickens, as a character. If memory serves me, that includes Australian expatriate Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs and Joseph O’Connor’s Star of the Sea.

Flanagan’s Wanting (Atlantic Monthly Press) is set in the South Pacific and England in the middle of the 19th century. Sir John Franklin, the most celebrated explorer of his era, is prodded by his wife into adopting a young Aboriginal girl, Mathinna. As this “experiment” fails—Flanagan gives a vivid and harrowing sense of the depredation visited on the native peoples—Sir John is replaced as the viceroy and ends up returning to Arctic exploration, where his next expedition kills everyone involved. After some time, Franklin’s widow enlists the influential Dickens in a campaign to rebut the persistent rumors that the explorer’s disastrous final project ended with cannibalism.

Flanagan dovetails the two narratives, primitive Mathinna’s and rags-to-riches Dickens’s, into an intense and resonant exhibition of desires constrained and unleashed. The author has filmmaking experience, having written and directed the film of his first novel, The Sound of One Hand Clapping, and collaborated with Baz Luhrmann on the screenplay of Australia—wonderful as this novel is, it too would make a compelling film.

In May of this year Flanagan gave the closing address at the Sydney Writers’ Festival. Though as eloquent a brief for the continuation of territorial copyright as any powerful oration, it has greater application and specific gravity:

“For the last quarter of a century we had a politics, an economy and a society that had as their central dreaming a certain idea of life as being reduced to a fiction of a free market. I say fiction pointedly. We are after all a species defined by above all other things our capacity for reflecting, diving and creating anew our world through story.

The free market was a cocaine rush of a story, a blast of confidence and belief that fortuitously coincided with the collapse of a rival utopian tale, Communism. It gave unprecedented economic growth to the world, delivered millions from poverty and famine.

But at the beginning of this millennium it has become apparent that it also is running out of time: that it led us also to epidemics of depression, to ceaseless, unwinnable wars, to an economic malaise and environmental despair. Today more people live in poverty than in any time in human history. Today the land and the sea are under assault from a climate system stressed and unstable. We need new stories. We need the capacity to make those stories. And to do that we need to come together—readers, writers, politicians.”

 —Robert Birnbaum, Jul. 22, 2009

At some point, someone will probably fabricate one of those pop-sociology books about the generation that is averse to reading instruction manuals: The Dummies’ Guide to Dummies. (Who is buying all those self-help books and keeping windbags like Tony Roberts in silk?) As I belong to that set and to the subset that reads nothing of a blatantly self-improving mode, I would not normally read a guide to fatherhood, accidental or not, like Home Game: An Accidental Guide to Fatherhood (W.W. Norton & Co.) by Michael Lewis. However, I have read Lewis’s recent books, The Blind Side and Moneyball (which may or may not be made into a Brad Pitt film with Steven Soderbergh directing and a Steve Zaillian script. I asked Lewis about the film’s status: “They don’t tell me anything.”) What with those alongside a number of his pieces for the New York Times Magazine, I am hard put to find a better reporter working today. (Jon Lee Anderson, Alma Guillermoprieto?)

Not to mention, he can write. This tome collects his bulletins to Slate magazine in which he frankly and relatively lucidly recorded his thoughts about his three children. The book’s dedication is to those kids—“If you don’t want to see it in print, don’t do it”—sage advice for us all, especially in this YouTube life. Parenting (was it just in my lifetime that the word became a verb?) is of course serious business—so serious that some clear-eyed, honest humor is required, and which Lewis amply supplies.

Incidentally, Lewis made his bones doing financial reportage (Liar’s Poker) a subject he revisited for the late Portfolio magazine. —Robert Birnbaum, Jul. 20, 2009

Stories attach themselves to all manner of things, and occasionally those stories rise to some level of perpetuity. I wish I had a dramatic story for how I came to read Nick Antosca’s disturbing, riveting, and eerie second novel, Midnight Picnic (Word Riot Press). For all I know, he might have sent it to me, as I had no acquaintance with him, Word Riot Press, or his first novel, Fires. Book jacket information glibly provides the following: “Nick Antosca lives, works, and writes on the East Coast of America. He was born in the state of Louisiana.” If you search engine him, you may also find out that he went to Yale, where he was mentored by the inestimable John Crowley. But none of this really matters when you turn to page one and bear-like Bram is turning into the parking lot of Mom’s, only to realize he has just run over Baby, a hound, with his old busted-out Pontiac. Searching for the badly injured dog in order to put it out of its misery, Bram discovers a collection of bones that turn out to be those of a murdered child. Adam, that child, is seeking aid in tracking down and punishing his killer, and ineluctably entangles Bram in his pursuit. Bram, Adam, Jacob Bunny, suicides, alcoholics, misanthropes—all characters in this carny-show rumination (for my lack of a better word) on death: a tale as engaging and disorienting as Jim Crace’s Being Dead. —Robert Birnbaum, Jul. 7, 2009

National Book Award-winning writer Denis Johnson (Tree of Smoke) occupies an anomalous place in the melee that passes for the American literary culture. Viewed as a prickly sort and outsider (he lives in Northern Idaho and passed on attendance to the N.B.A. awards ceremony), Johnson’s Jesus’ Son (both the book and the film) won him a reverential cult audience and the questionable designation as a writer’s writer. Personally, I am fond (if that verb can be applied to Johnson’s discomfiting fictions) of Resuscitation of a Hanged Man and at this very moment am experiencing deep guilt for never getting around to reading his post-apocalyptic novel Fiskadoro. Johnson also seems ever to be known and attached to a scathing and unrelentingly vindictive critique by the Atlantic’s resident petit inquisitor.

Nobody Move (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux) is a droll, amusing, noiresque entertainment (first serialized in that great American literary institution, Playboy) that risks not being taken seriously, as easy to digest—such is the price of making things appear effortless. In it, assorted bottom feeders, oddballs, and lifelong felons vie for $2.3 million or their next drink and/or cigarette—whichever comes up first. It is a quintessentially American story, with Cadillac-driving Mafioso hitmen, high-spirited, alcoholic, Native American divorcees, and lots of cigarette smoking along with a fair amount of gunplay. No doubt there were lots of reviews that pegged this novel as a tribute to the American crime novel. Read ‘em if you care.

Reportedly, one explanation for Johnson’s demurral of the 2007 National Books Awards ceremony was a reportorial assignment in Kurdistan. Which I assure you, you’ll want to read, because it’s loaded with gems like this (and more):

And I’m thinking, Yes, this is the climax of the piece right here, affluent Kurds clowning around, the magazine’s going to love this entertaining stuff, so why does that make me feel like a pimp in a burgundy velvet suit? Who are these people who keep Al Qaeda from infiltrating their homeland while the U.S. Army scratches its head and watches the rest of Iraq fall to pieces? And why haven’t the New York Times and CNN taken notice? Here’s a guess, just one possibility: because journalists are pimps for war, my friends, in burgundy velvet suits. And that’s the news from here.”

 —Robert Birnbaum, Jul. 6, 2009

I first became aware of Uruguayan writer, activist, and dog lover Eduardo Galeano about 20 years ago through Lawrence Weschler’s investigations of the amnesty movements in Brazil and Argentina during their post-military dictatorship years (Weschler’s work culminated in his book, A Miracle, A Universe: Settling Accounts With Torturers; Galeano’s Open Veins of Latin America briefly put him in the news cycle when Hugo Chávez presented a copy to President Obama). Since then Galeano has gained international recognition, and in this country was awarded the (prestigious) Lannan Prize for Cultural Freedom. He also published his splendid Memory of Fire, the three-volume history of the Americas, and a number of other well-regarded tomes. Since Memory of Fire, Galeano has employed a kind of digressive anecdotal style which includes a variety of textual fragments, some fact-based, some invented. Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone (Nation Books) covers 5,000 years of human history with fragments, questions, vignettes, poems, dreamscapes, and more. Here is the book’s last entry, entitled “Lost and Found”:

The twentieth century, which was born proclaiming peace and justice, died bathed in blood. It passed on a world much more unjust than the one it inherited.
The twenty-first century, which also arrived heralding peace and justice, is following in its predecessor’s footsteps.
In my childhood, I was convinced that everything that went astray on earth ended up on the moon.
But the astronauts found no sign of dangerous dreams or broken promises or hopes betrayed.
If not on the moon, where might they be?
Perhaps they were never misplaced.
Perhaps they are in hiding here on earth. Waiting.

 —Robert Birnbaum, Jun. 30, 2009

Canadian poet and occasional novelist Anne Michaels, whose first novel, Fugitive Pieces, was internationally lauded and awarded, returns some 12 years later with a sophomore effort every bit as engaging. The Winter Vault (Knopf) is brimming with gorgeous prose and imagery—frequently cited as an example of, uh, “lyric fiction” (think Michael Ondaatje, John Berger, Nadeem Aslam)—with lyricism such as the novel’s first sentence, “Perhaps we painted on our own skin, with ochre and charcoal, long before we painted on stone.” If I were not duty bound to render some explicable notice of Michaels’s fine new novel, I would be tempted to utter the banality, “words cannot express…” or even the Wittgensteinian formulation, “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”

The story places two recently married Canadians, Avery and Jean, on the Nile River at a preservation project for the immense statuary and temple of Ramses at Abu Simbel (the time is circa 1964, during the construction of the Aswan Dam). Avery is an engineer, employed by this massive and intricate enterprise, and Jean is a botanist; they met while watching the seaway construction of the St. Lawrence river, grasping the irreversible impact on the lives and communities of that area. Now viewing the same process in Egypt, their idyll (living on a houseboat on the Nile) is interrupted by a tragedy that rends their marriage and sends them back to Toronto. There, Avery studies architecture and Jean takes up with a Polish émigré—whose stories of embattled Warsaw provide a distinctive dissonance against the world views of Avery and Jean.

Michaels’s narrative is a poignant and vivid illumination of the inevitability of time’s change. Or something like that. —Robert Birnbaum, Jun. 17, 2009

There was a time in the 1990s when turning to the New York Observer offered amusing and enlightening relief from the prevalence of so-called service journalism in the form of Michael M. Thomas and his column. (Thomas incisively pointed out that the new generation of journalists felt that reporting was having lunch with various publicists.) One way of identifying someone (writers not excepted) is by their enemies list, and it was to Thomas’s credit that he cheerfully indulged his disdain for blowhards and war criminals such as Barbara Walters, Henry Kissinger, Donald Trump, and Mort Zuckerman.

At some point Thomas absented himself from the pages of the Observer, but along the way he has written eight novels, including his new tome, Love & Money (Melville House). Having attended Yale, curated at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and joined his father on Wall Street at Lehman Brothers, Thomas (Hanover Place) is apparently comfortable with the golden life of designer labels, high-end watering holes and destinations, and the machinations of the wealthy and powerful.

In Love & Money, we are presented with a wholesome Martha Stewart/Oprah-esque media star who comes under the sway of a paramour referred to as Donkey Dong (you can guess the point of that), a dalliance that jeopardizes the escalating value of her brand and the ambitions (financial and philanthropic) of her corporate patron and sponsor. The adulteress’s film director husband, whose last project tanked (for which he believe he’s been blacklisted by a vulgarian media mogul) discovers the adultery—as does another mysterious party—and in the midst of this, Señor Donkey Dong is murdered in Miami. Hubby then consults a divorce lawyer nicknamed the Jackal, and this spins into the meat and potatoes of this novel, a good deal of which is devoted to bringing the issue of no-fault divorce before the Supreme Court.

Thomas obviously well researched the laws and high court protocols, and he presents the case dramatically and with as much compulsion as can be mustered by the rarefied matters to which the Supremes attend. Love & Money is certainly entertaining (though I found the few sex scenes leaden), but I feel compelled to take great exception to one character’s claim (no doubt mouthing Thomas’s view) that crime story writer Laurence Shames does “Miami crazy” better than Carl Hiaasen. —Robert Birnbaum, Jun. 11, 2009

David Foster Wallace’s suicide last autumn sent shockwaves through the literary world unleashing a torrent of verbiage, opinionizing, and hand wringing—it seemed as if anyone who ever read a book weighed in on the sorrow, D.F.W.’s legacy, or somesuch. How to explain the reaction? Wallace’s relative youth (46 years)? His zealous protection of his privacy (Michael Pietsch, then the editor responsible for acquiring Infinite Jest, “David was extremely uncomfortable at anything having to do with success, power, competition, anyone sort of putting themselves forward”)? Some residual cultural memory of Infinite Jest being tagged as “the grunge American novel” by the New York Times Magazine (truly one of the silliest editorial gestures in my recall)? Certainly that book, his opus magnum, with more than 1,000 pages and 100 pages of endnotes, gained him fleeting pop/mainstream notice in the mid-’90s (one wonders how many people actually read it?) such as the above referred-to Times idiocy. Now in this season of college graduations, we are treated to This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, About Living a Compassionate Life (Little, Brown), a slender volume containing Foster Wallace’s 2005 commencement oratory at Kenyon College. I inquired of Pietsch, now the publisher at Little, Brown about the circumstances of This Is Water’s publication. His response:

An editor at another house proposed making it a book to David’s agent. I had thought it was too short and intended to include it in an uncollected-works volume, but once we tried putting one sentence per page it worked wonderfully!

Wallace’s address in large part deals with the commonplace notion that the value of a college education was to teach one to think:

The point here is that I think this is one part of what teaching me how to think is really supposed to mean. To be just a little less arrogant. To have just a little critical awareness about myself and my certainties. Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. I have learned this the hard way, as I predict you graduates will, too.

And then there is Wallace’s conviction concerning “true freedom”:

[It] means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.

(By the way, my colleagues here at The Morning News have sponsored an interesting initiative to encourage the reading of Infinite Jest.)

Apropos of nothing, here is David Foster Wallace on the publishing business:

There’s a weird illogic about it, because the less important literary fiction gets to the culture, the harder those corporations who for whatever reason keep wanting to publish it, have to market it. So in order to keep it alive, you have to murder it to save it.

A book is also a product. At least the books that we’re talking about…Even a book that’s about living in a culture that relentlessly turns everything into a product is a product. There are not very complicated ironies built into that situation. But you know that happens maybe four or five times a year. There are these legions of very smart, nice, usually Seven Sisters-educated young publicists for all the different publishing houses whose entire job is networking and lunching and hanging out with the book reviewers and opinion makers again and again…hoping the cultural and marketing motor will catch, which one out of 200 times it does.

And finally, The Pale King, Wallace’s unfinished novel discovered posthumously by his widow, is scheduled for publication next spring. Though I am generally opposed to this kind of fiddling around, in fairness I should withhold comment until I can read it, yes? —Robert Birnbaum, Jun. 8, 2009

An April 1999 event at a Colorado high school should have changed the way Americans view childhood and child rearing. It did for me. As the parent of a young boy I can assure you that the harrowing and tragic events at Columbine High School, where two teenage students attempted to blow up the school lunchroom (which would have killed about 500 people) and, when the explosives failed, ended up slaughtering 12 of their fellows and one teacher, injuring countless others, and killing themselves, gave me pause to view adolescent boys and the world they are given with very different eyes.

A number of people have tried to tell this story in some fashion—including Gus Van Sant in the film Elephant and in an oblique way Lionel Shriver in We Need to Talk About Kevin, Jim Shepard’s Project X, Douglas Coupland’s Hey Nostradamus!, and Francine Prose’s young adult novel After. Now Denver writer Dave Cullen, who started covering the Columbine story as a journalist from the time it hit the police scanners and lower-third scrawls on cable stations (a distraction now employed by all of TV), has written a formidable treatise after having spent a decade immersed in this story. Aspiring to the benchmarks set by classic crime accounts such as In Cold Blood and Helter Skelter, Columbine (Twelve Publishers) focuses on killers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold’s motives and, more palpably, some of the impact (no doubt even 10 years may be too soon to tell) that this horror has had on the community. And now, through the wonderous (sic) confluence of new media and commerce, you can see and hear Cullen tout his book for yourself, in the below video. —Robert Birnbaum, Jun. 2, 2009

Alex Rodriguez stopped being interesting to me about the time he went from the Seattle Mariners—where he played with Junior Griffey—to Texas, where he was handed 200 million dollars to play baseball. Come to think of it, major-league baseball became much less interesting to me at about the same time, but that’s another matter.

Selena Roberts, former New York Times and current Sports Illustrated writer, has apparently maintained a fascination with A-Rod (also referred to by his detractors as “A-Fraud” for his admitted use of performance-enhancing substances) and has cobbled together A-Rod: The Many Lives of Alex Rodriguez (Harper) from her exposé of Rodriguez’s use of performance enhancers to capture, as her publicist hyperbolizes, “baseball’s greatest player as a tragic figure in pinstripes.” Which tragically bends the notion of tragedy, as I know it.

These kinds of books tend toward the polarities of hagiography or hatchetry that—no surprise—mirrors the win-lose scoring of sports. I did attend to the recent Manny Ramirez study (Becoming Manny: Inside the Life of Baseball’s Most Enigmatic Slugger by Jean Rhodes and Shawn Boburg), which was a thoughtful and nuanced analysis of another man-child who had been handed hundreds of millions of dollars to play baseball. In Ramirez’s case, the carping in Boston about his paycheck continued almost unabated despite the schizoid BoSox winning their first two world championships in nearly a century during his tenure.

For publicity magnets, Rodriguez has the New York media echo chamber, Madonna, and other attention stuff going for him, and Roberts’s book assumes we care about this major-league narcissist—but it might be a better book if it suggested why we should. You can thank Drew Magary for that, who collected some of the most illuminating tidbits to be found in Roberts’s tome. —Robert Birnbaum, May. 29, 2009

While I am not a big fan of Oprah Winfrey, I don’t hold it against any writer that Oprah (who is not a tasteless dummy) may have brought them the immense commercial benefits that seem to accrue from her majestic anointment(s). Apparently, Jane Hamilton (A Map of the World) is one such author. I have not read that book, but 10 years ago I did read The Short History of a Prince, which I found smart, funny, and honest—clearly, Wisconsin native Hamilton can turn a phrase and elegantly fabricate a narrative. Her new opus, Laura Rider’s Masterpiece (Grand Central Publishing), confirms my past judgment.

Set in a small Wisconsin town, we are immediately informed that the townspeople think Laura’s husband is gay. The joke is, of course, on them: Charlie is tirelessly heterosexual—so much so that after 12 years of marriage, Laura, who is worn out, bans him from her bedroom. Enter popular radio show host Jenna Faroli, whose blossoming relationship with Charlie becomes the instrument for Laura’s transformation into the artist (romance novelist) she aspires to be. Hamilton does a splendid job rendering the threesome’s unlikely situation plausible—no small thing. The author’s good-natured sense of humor is rendered more potent with the wicked little plot twists. I suppose excerpts of her prose are available at the tips of your fingers, but I like this fine exhibit of Hamilton’s writing persona. —Robert Birnbaum, May. 28, 2009

As a young American, I was never enamored of the so-called horse operas that populated the airwaves in the ‘50s and ‘60s: Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, The Cisco Kid, Gunsmoke, Rawhide, The Rifleman, Bonanza, (Maverick and Have Gun—Will Travel excepted). What these stories had in common was the demonization of First Americans and the notion that good and evil were easily identifiable (a far cry from HBO’s recent revisionist take on the Wild West, Deadwood). Contemporary literary fiction has joined the recasting with a more accurate picture of the frontier: Thomas Berger’s Little Big Man, Percival Everett’s God’s Country, James Carlos Blake’s In the Rogue Blood, Pete Dexter’s Deadwood, and of course, Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove books. Yet—except for Berger—we are rarely given insight into the First People’s culture, mores, and worldview. Brian Hall’s excellent and gripping (though awkwardly titled) I Should Be Extremely Happy in Your Company: A Novel of Lewis and Clark is a vivid and plausible presentation of Sacagawea, especially effective in rendering the Indian guide’s point of view in a language-neutral way (meaning, we are clear her cognition is demarcated by English). Now comes Paulette Jiles’s The Color of Lightning (William Morrow), which follows Kentucky ex-slave Britt Johnson as he takes his family to east Texas at the end of the Civil War. Johnson, who intends to build up a freight hauling business, is away from his family when they are raided and captured by Comanche and Kiowa. His eldest son is killed and his wife and two younger children undergo the harrowing experience of being held captive in an experiential universe totally alien to them. Jiles’s rendering of that world, the elegant and simple prose, and a steadily forward-moving narrative makes this a novel that delivers on many levels. Add an ensemble of capable characters and this, Jiles’s third novel, is nearly perfect. —Robert Birnbaum, May. 27, 2009

Photographer Philippe Halsman snapped some of the planet’s most famous faces—Albert Einstein, Marilyn Monroe, Frank Sinatra, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Bob Hope, and countless others—and his portraits adorned more than 100 Life covers, when the magazine was a weekly publication and a real media force. Drawing on his experiences shooting a gaggle of NBC comedians—including Milton Berle, Ed Wynn, Sid Caesar, Groucho Marx, Bob Hope, and Red Skelton—Halsman famously began asking some of his “serious” subjects (the Ford Family, Richard Nixon) to jump during their photo sessions. For according to Halsman: “When you ask a person to jump, his attention is mostly directed toward the act of jumping and the mask falls so that the real person appears.”

Austin Ratner’s novel The Jump Artist (Bellvue Literary Press) is based on little-recalled events that took place earlier in Halsman’s life, when his father died on a hiking trip through Austria and, in an unbelievable miscarriage of justice, Halsman was accused and convicted of the crime. In what was called “The Austrian Dreyfus Affair,” influential intellectuals (including Einstein) were able to overcome the virulently hostile anti-Semitism of that time and place to secure Halsman’s freedom and exoneration. Ratner’s rendition vividly depicts his character’s ordeal and amazing recovery from the trauma of the event.

Charles Baxter, whose praise should go a long way to helping readers take up this tome, effuses: “This is a book about joy and despair, anti-Semitism and assimilation, and like a great photograph, it seems to miss nothing, and to catch its subject in all his complexity.” —Robert Birnbaum, May. 27, 2009