Suppose the tragic old man raging amid the storm is not on a heath but in a cornfield. Suppose that he is not an ancient British king named Lear but a prosperous Iowa farmer named Laurence Cook, and that his daughters are not Cordelia, Regan, and Goneril, but Caroline, Rose, and Ginny. Then suppose that what he suddenly suggests dividing among them is not his kingdom but his vast acreage of prime farmland. Before you say that it sounds pretty corny, consider what a plot lifted from the well-known Stratford playwright can become in the hands of a subtle and intelligent thief. The Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev wrote a fine, bitter novella called A Lear of the Steppes, and now Jane Smiley, author of Ordinary Love & Good Will and The Age of Grief, has written a fine, bitter, baffled, suspenseful novel that could as easily be called A Lear of the Plains. One thing that saves A Thousand Acres from being a schematic recasting of Shakespeare’s play is that the plains themselves share center stage with the tragic family fighting over a piece of them. The perfect flatness, as awe- inspiring as it is monotonous, the stunning heat and numbing cold, the dust and mud that defeat the most vigilant farm woman’s efforts to keep them out of the house, the storms gathering on the horizon, the marshes and flooded quarries ”where the surface of the earth dipped below the surface of the sea within it”-all are as precisely evoked as the clothes, food, manners, and intimate feelings of the hardworking farm people who have lived with them for generations. Another thing is that Smiley engineers a deft turning of the tables. Ginny is the narrator, so we get Goneril’s version and a Lear who is more wrong than wronged. The story is really about the transformation of Ginny, through painfully earned knowledge, from a compliant, trouble-suppressing, guilt- ridden daughter and wife into an angry-though still ambivalent-independent woman who has to cast off the only kind of life she has known. The crucial role played by a neighbor’s returned prodigal son, who has been converted to vegetarianism and organic farming, puts ecological as well as feminist issues on the table that Smiley has turned, though she has too much respect for her characters to make them figures in a tract.
Above all, Smiley’s formidable, stoical, laconic Lear, Laurence Cook, however abysmal his dark side (the novel is a bit overladen with dark sides), retains his tragic stature. In his adamant narrowness-his fatalistic motto is ”what you get is what you deserve”-he makes the other characters seem shallow and temporizing, and his daughter remains in awe of the man she has repudiated: ”Perhaps there is a distance that is the optimum distance for seeing one’s father, farther than across the supper table or across the room, somewhere in the middle distance: he is dwarfed by trees or the sweep of a hill, but his features are still visible. Well, that is a distance I never found. He was never dwarfed by the landscape-the fields, the buildings, the white pine windbreak were as much my father as if he had grown them and shed them like a husk.” Even with an anticlimactic ending in place of the original’s wrenching close, Smiley has succeeded in transplanting something of Lear’s mythic power to the bleak American plains. A-

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If you took seven years to compose a 614-page opus about the Vietnam War, it would probably be incredibly grating to read reviews employing the word quagmire. All apologies to Denis Johnson, then, because after reading his novel, Tree of Smoke, that’s the first word that comes to my mind.
To be clear, Smoke is impressive, a layered, rich, sweaty accomplishment of massive proportions, a novel whose first three pages are nothing short of perfect. But Johnson is a meticulous writer, and if anything, the next 611 pages suffer from an overabundance of care. Smoke isn’t just set in the tropics, it exudes them — Saigon, yes, but also Manila, Honolulu, and Damulog, their unfamiliar smells and persistent moisture clinging to the story like a fog. And even as I was marveling at Johnson’s narrative gifts, I was staggering under the heft of his ambition. Two decades of story lines tangle into a web of epic relationships, until I no longer bothered to flip back four chapters to remember how one character knew another —I just assumed a part of my brain had retained the information, and pressed on.
On the most basic level, this is the story of Skip Sands, a CIA officer straight out of Graham Greene’s arsenal — a fact that has not escaped Skip’s attention. He’s nominally in the employ of his uncle, Francis Xavier Sands, a.k.a. the colonel, a whiskey-swilling survivor focused only on turning the theater of war to his advantage. Countless characters swirl around the colonel: doomed GIs, loyal locals, assassins, and double agents, each carrying his or her own lovingly painted agenda, most of who fall by the wayside eventually. There are fewer pages of jagged action than there are of philosophy, though the Tet Offensive is recounted with particular vigor. Sands gets a small, tragic love story, which would have been novel enough for Greene. And there’s an obvious point at which the book should end but does not, instead slogging deeper into the jungle (literally) for another 10 years and hundred pages, on a desperate march toward an unclear conclusion.
It’s easy to lose interest in Smoke at this point, but that’s okay; Johnson’s point has largely been made anyway. Not surprisingly, it’s the same moral offered by everyone from Coppola to Creedence — i.e., war is bad, and Vietnam in particular really sucked. Tree of Smoke is a mammoth portrait of humanity in conflict, less about the message than the journey, which leads inextricably to one of the few uniquely American truths: People seem to get stuck in Vietnam. Only Johnson’s extraordinary literary gifts permit the tentative recommendation to join him there. “B”

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Some novelists darken with age, expressing ever deepening gloom about the human condition as they glimpse the bigger picture. (Exhibit A: Philip Roth.) Others, unaccountably, soften. In the latter category is Ian McEwan, the British writer who began his career in the 1970s and ’80s with a string of macabre books about incest, depravity, and murder, but whose more recent work glows with a sweetly romantic faith in the human potential for happiness. In particular, domestic happiness. It is not easily attained, however, this happiness of McEwan’s. And it is almost always under assault — by the demented stalker of Enduring Love, by Saturday’s disenfranchised intruder. In his latest novel, the exquisite On Chesil Beach, the threats to the good life are more prosaic but no less deadly: immaturity, impatience, the impulsive wrong decision.
”They were young, educated, and both virgins on this, their wedding night, and they lived in a time when a conversation about sexual difficulties was plainly impossible,” begins this compressed, crisp, but warmly specific fable. The year is 1962, and Edward Mayhew and Florence Ponting are dining in their hotel suite on England’s Chesil Beach. They are deeply in love, a state that McEwan treats tenderly and with utmost respect: ”They had so many plans, giddy plans, heaped up before them in the misty future, as richly tangled as the summer flora of the Dorset coast, and as beautiful.”
Moving gracefully between the two, McEwan captures both their shared joy and their terrible private worries, almost exclusively about what will transpire when they approach the ”four poster bed, rather narrow, whose bedcover was pure white and stretched startlingly smooth, as though by no human hand.” Edward — eager, ordinary — fears ”arriving too soon.” Florence agonizes not about arrival, but the journey itself. Sexual squeamishness has never been written about more adroitly or sympathetically. In a wedding handbook Florence finds ”certain phrases that almost make her gag: mucous membrane, and the sinister and glistening glans. Other phrases offended her intelligence, particularly those concerning entrances: Not long before he enters her…”
Put like this, you can hardly blame her. But toward that portentous bed and their future they proceed, Edward and Florence, with their anxieties as well as their ardent, fragile love. To reveal what lies in store would lessen the pleasure of reading this small masterpiece, though it’s hard to imagine that anything could spoil it. “A”

I just finished “The Thirteenth Tale” by Diane Setterfield and it is a worthy read. Imagine a plain brown sparrow dueling a gaudily plumed parrot: That’s what happens when Margaret Lea, biographer and daughter of a London bookseller, accepts a commission — or is it a challenge? — from Vida Winter, ”England’s best-loved writer,” to write her life story. But the flamboyant Winter has been embellishing her past for so long that it’s not entirely clear what’s true and what’s not.

As she stays at Angelfield, the author’s ghost-riddled Yorkshire estate, Lea carefully combs through the many strands of Winter’s history, trying to figure out exactly where the truth lies. Is Vida Winter — who long ago legally changed her name — really one of the infamously wild March twins whose upper-class parents teetered on the brink of ruin by the time the girls were born? And how much is Lea’s own infatuation with the project due to the fact that she too is a twin, a surviving conjoined twin whose sister died at their separation? (”My scar. My half-moon. Pale silver-pink, a nacreous translucence. The line that divides.”)

Diane Setterfield’s spooky, gloom-infused work lovingly invokes both Jane Eyre and Rebecca (indeed, the name Winter is clearly meant as an homage to Daphne du Maurier), but the mystery is very much her own. Pitch-perfect as it is, though, The Thirteenth Tale loses momentum in the last hundred pages, dragging out what should have been a swift knife thrust of a conclusion.

http://www.bookswim.com/book/The_Thirteenth_Tale_A_Novel-119187353946244.html

The Yiddish Policemen’s Union: A Novel
Michael Chabon

In his wildest dreams, Dr. Joel Fleischman — the culturally dislocated Jewish doctor in the lox-out-of-water dramedy Northern Exposure — couldn’t have imagined the Alaskan wonders conjured by Michael Chabon in his marvelous reverie The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. But Isaac Bashevis Singer would feel right at home.
In Chabon’s virtuoso imagining — an ample meditation on the contradictions of Jewishness, disguised as an outlandish detective novel — Israel as we know it never got off the ground in 1948. Instead, the destination of choice for Jews who survived the fires of World War II was a stretch of Alaska set aside by Franklin Roosevelt as a temporary catchment for those dispossessed millions, with Sitka as its teeming, slushy center. The Frozen Chosen, Chabon calls the parade of saints — criminals, cops, dreamers, losers, and schemers who people his raucous pages. And in the society they create, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay charts nothing less than a psychic world map of his own peeps. The alternate universe he plays in is jokier and cartoon-broader than usual, but Chabon the serious artist means business.
At its heart is a hard-boiled mystery. A guy — evidently a chess pro, a heroin addict, and a former ”black hat,” or ultra-Orthodox Hasid — turns up dead in a fleabag hotel, and Det. Meyer Landsman is left to figure out who, how, and why. Landsman’s got a drinking problem, an ex-wife who’s now his boss, and a cop partner who’s half Jewish, half Tlingit. He’s also got to race a ticking clock since the northern Promised Land was promised for only 60 years. After that, a Reversion will go into effect, stymieing police procedure and forcing the Frozen Chosen to roam the chessboard of statelessness once again. ”These are strange times to be a Jew,” one tribal philosopher observes.
With each unruly fool Chabon introduces, further intriguing strangeness is revealed. Also exposed: charlatan rabbis, radical plans to restore the holy temple in Jerusalem, American Jewish funding of terrorist Hasidic activities, and a thwarted messianic candidate. No sect is spared, no viewpoint is sacred — and no remedial tutoring is offered to any reader who doesn’t know his Yiddish.
In Chabon’s pulpy world, gray bureaucrats sparkle as ”men with the variegated surnames of doomed crewmen in a submarine movie,” and one chess player’s ”mother is calling him on the ultrasonic frequency reserved by the government for Jewish mothers in the event of lunch.” By the end, the plot bulges like a fatty pastrami sandwich. But in such an unholy land, what’s not to love?

http://www.bookswim.com/book/The_Yiddish_Policemens_Union_A_Novel-119186000647639.html

Reading Scott Smith is like having a rope tied firmly round your middle, as you’re pulled on protesting tiptoes toward a door marked DOOM. The horror is in plain sight; there is no doubt things will end badly — the signs are everywhere. In Smith’s 1993 clockwork-perfect debut, A Simple Plan, hundreds of crows guard the crash site of a loot-filled plane. In The Ruins, Smith’s first novel since, six partying vacationers leave their Cancun hotel to explore an archaeological dig in the jungle. It’s meant to be a lark, but the day trip is immediately ruffled by small, unsettling events: The group ends up sharing a truck ride with a vicious little dog; the pathway to the site is illogically camouflaged; the Mayans whose village rests near the site pointedly ignore them, as if willing away a car crash.

Smith is a master of the ”if only” scenario, that most foolish and pungent form of regret: Here, a series of triggers, innocent or avoidable, ultimately traps the hapless twentysomethings on the ruins’ sun-blasted hillside, an ominously beautiful place covered entirely by vines pocked with blood-red flowers. It becomes apparent that they are meant to die up there; a malevolent organism is stalking them, a being sentient enough to plot.

But this is no Crichton-esque thriller — readers who demand careful scientific, biological explanations in their storytelling will, in fact, be infuriated. Smith’s forte is the psychological realm. Strong and passive personalities play their roles with frightening predictability: Eagle Scout Jeff throws himself into survival mode while childish Stacy daydreams and Amy, Jeff’s pessimistic girlfriend, pouts. Neither of these female characters is nearly as compelling as Simple Plan’s murderously pragmatic Sarah, but then Smith’s interest here lies in group dynamics. The vacationers aren’t just physically trapped on a cursed hillside, they’re mentally trapped in the roles they’ve played all their lives, and the resulting actions and reactions (particularly the yo-yo between assertive Jeff and heel-dragging Amy) are as dangerous as the flesh-craving being that surrounds them.

At its heart, The Ruins is an old-fashioned horror story (Ben Stiller’s company has snapped up the movie rights), and it’s the invasive, intuitive killer that provides the ice-water dread. Indeed, when one character becomes convinced the thing has gotten inside of him, the book’s most nauseating, unsettling scenes are unleashed. It’s Thomas Harris meets Poe in a decidedly timely story: Smith has tapped into our anxieties about global warming, lethal weather, supergerms — our collective fear that nature is finally battling back — and given us a decidedly organic nightmare.

I loved it–can’t wait for the movie.

http://www.bookswim.com/book/The_Ruins-119188016145384.html