FICTION
‘The Little Friend,’ by Donna Tartt (Knopf)
“The Little Friend” is a terrific story–a much better book than “The Secret History,” Tartt’s heralded debut of 10 years ago. It’s got a main character, a 12-year-old girl named Harriet Cleve Dufresnes, who ranks up there with Huck Finn, Miss Havisham, Quentin Compson and Philip Marlowe, fictional creations who don’t seem in the least fictional. Harriet is not a particularly nice kid (“Harriet,” the book tells us when she is introduced 26 pages into the story, “was neither pretty nor sweet. Harriet was smart.”), but she seems as real as your own children.
In the book’s opening pages, Harriet’s 9-year-old brother, Robin, is found dead, hanging from a tree in the Dufresnes yard on Mother’s Day. At the time, Harriet is only a baby. Twelve years later–the novel is set in the late ’70s–she sets out to find his murderer. Her search occupies the rest of the book, and along the way we meet her loony mother, her dotty great-aunts, her magisterial grandmother and a clan of drug-dealing white trash who would scare anyone but Harriet halfway into the next county. The 38-year-old author etches each of these characters with indelible assurance. Any one of them could single-handedly dominate most novels. But Harriet outshines them all.
Snakes, and snake handling, play pivotal parts in this novel. In one especially frightening scene, Harriet breaks into a house filled with a fundamentalist’s caged serpents, “the hissing treasure chests of nightmare.” This is where she steals a cobra–and where the book turns inexorably away from the world of children’s fantasy and toward the dirty realities of drug dealing, paranoia and murder.
Set in the author’s native Mississippi, “The Little Friend” gets all its Southernisms just right: a boy talks of having his photograph “made,” not “taken”; a man answers the phone: “Yellope”; a redneck names his German shepherd “Van Zant” (it’s a Lynyrd Skynyrd homage). On a grander scale, Tartt writes shrewdly about race and class, especially when the two subjects are entwined: “Families like Harriet’s … would not tolerate for one moment brick-throwing at children white or black … And yet there Harriet was, at the all-white [private] school.”
“The Little Friend” is about childhood, but there’s nothing sentimental about it. As one of Harriet’s aunts observes, “It’s awful being a child, always at the mercy of other people.” The novel reaches its climax when Harriet belatedly realizes how irrevocable life can be, and what a serious business it is. It is not, though, one of those cliched loss-of-innocence stories." If “To Kill a Mockingbird” is the childhood that everyone wanted and no one really had, “The Little Friend” is childhood as it is, by turns enchanting and terrifying. –M.J.
‘Atonement,’ by Ian McEwan (Doubleday)
The author began his career in the mid-’70s in Britain with a series of dark, chilling stories and novels that made “Lord of the Flies” look like a weekend retreat and were consoling only insofar as they were lean, brilliant and addictive. But McEwan has long since left the macabre behind–in 1998 he won the Booker Prize for a knowing, mordantly comic novel about creativity, morality and middle age entitled “Amsterdam.” But no one could have predicted how far afield he would travel for his latest novel, “Atonement,” which has spent the past six months on best-seller lists in England. “Atonement” is a rich, meditative World War II-era novel about a headstrong 13-year-old girl named Briony Tallis who witnesses a rape at her wealthy family’s country house, sends an innocent working-class man to jail and ruins more than one life in the process. The novel is part Jane Austen (nuanced portraits of “polite” society), part Virginia Woolf (probing interior monologues) and part Hemingway (gripping reportage of soldiers and nurses). There’s no earthly reason such a literary meeting of minds should work, but it does–superbly. –J.G.
‘By the Lake,’ by John McGahern (Knopf)
This is one of the most perfect novels anyone’s written in years–perfect in the sense of its craft. It’s like a handcrafted table, with everything mortised and sanded and finished to a T. Things happen in this book the way they happen in life. We meet people, but we may not learn their first or last names or what exactly they do until the story is half over. Most of the people live on the edges of a lake in the Irish countryside. One couple, the Ruttledges, are transplants from London, and watching them assimilate–and watching them learn the degree to which they will always remain outsiders–is the spark that drives this story. Through the Ruttledges we meet the rest: Jamesie and Mary, a kindly older couple across the lake; John Quinn, a womanizer, and Patrick Ryan, a handyman and a brooding soul, one of those disagreeable people who see to the heart of things and then use what they know like a hammer. Mostly McGahern lets them introduce themselves according to what they talk about: the weather, the livestock, the coming of telephone poles to the neighborhood. The story covers a year, and seasons and change are its building blocks. And while the people who live beside this lake are not terribly wise, they are at home in their world: “Happiness,” one Ruttledge decides, “could not be sought or worried into being, or even fully grasped; it should be allowed its own slow pace so that it passes unnoticed, if it ever comes at all.” This is a hard book to finish, simply because you never want it to end. –M.J.
‘Everything is Illuminated,’ by Jonathan Safron Foer
(Houghton Mifflin)
The jacket of Jonathan Safran Foer’s debut novel “Everything is Illuminated” says that this is the story of a young man named Jonathan Safran Foer who goes back to Eastern Europe to find the woman who may have saved his grandfather from the Nazis. Actually, it’s a story about fantasy and truth and every emotion in between.
Narrated in part by Ukrainian tour guide Alexander Perchov, the book is equal parts hilarity and heartbreak. So what if Safran Foer can’t quite clean up his beautiful mess at the end. It was a blast getting there. –S.M.
‘Prague,’ by Arthur Phillips (Random House)
There used to be novels that managed to be both entertaining and thoughtful. Think Graham Greene or W. Somerset Maugham and those novels of naive Americans abroad and in over their heads. But since those two suave giants died, no one’s come along to fill their shoes. Which is the first of several good reasons to welcome the arrival of Arthur Phillips, whose debut novel not only keeps you turning pages but gives you something to think about and smile about–at the same time.
Start with the title. Nothing in this book takes place in Prague. To the story’s twentysomething denizens, Prague is the place where someone else is having all the fun, like the party train in Woody Allen’s “Stardust Memories.” Mark and Scott and Charles and Emily and John–a scholar, a teacher, a businessman, a journalist, an embassy assistant–none of these American expatriates has much to complain about, except that they live in Budapest, a city that they are convinced lacks all trace of hipness.
Yearning is only one of “Prague’s” themes. The other is misunderstanding. When these self-absorbed expats aren’t wanting what they don’t have, they are failing to understand what’s under their noses. John doesn’t get that Emily doesn’t love him back. More tragically, Charles, the venture capitalist who callously engineers the takeover of a venerable Hungarian publishing firm, doesn’t get that he’s trifling with two centuries’ worth of cultural history.
Phillips has been a child actor, jazz musician, speechwriter, failed entrepreneur and five-time “Jeopardy!” champion. Now he can add accomplished novelist to his resume. And we can stop yearning for that elegant, entertaining novel that used to be. Thanks to Phillips, it’s right here, right now. –M.J.
NONFICTION
‘Master of the Senate (The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Vol. 3)’, by Robert Caro (Knopf)
It’s taken the better part of three decades for people to agree that Lyndon Johnson was a tragic hero. And perhaps the most important tipping point was Robert A. Caro’s extraordinary multivolume biography of Johnson. Since the first volume appeared in 1982, readers have discovered just how fiercely the forces of darkness and light vied for Johnson’s soul. They’ve also been discovering, thanks to Caro’s writing, just how much fun a biography can be. “Master of the Senate,” like the two previous Johnson volumes and like Caro’s legendary biography of Robert Moses, is the historian’s equivalent of a Mahler symphony–vast, detailed and striving for the universal: Caro includes chapter-length portraits of major players (Sens. Richard Russell and Hubert Humphrey) and a 100-page-long history of the U.S. Senate. And while Caro is often as hard on Johnson the sneaky politician as he was in previous volumes, this time the carping serves a real purpose: it makes Johnson’s heroism in the cause of civil rights all the more believable and impressive. The writing is often too operatic. Details get repeated. And Caro tends to view the contradictions and subtleties of the South–a region central to this volume–with the one-dimensional vision of a Northern liberal who’s learned what he knows about the South from reading about it. But flaws and all, the end result is mesmerizing. –M.J.
‘Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight,’ by Alexandra Fuller (Random House)
[If you want to get picky, this book was published quite late in 2001, much too late to make anyone’s best-of-the-year list, and we didn’t get to review it until January 2002. It’s still too good to pass up, so here it is again.]
Alexandra Fuller grew up in Africa on the losing side. She was a little girl in the ’70s in what was then Rhodesia. Her parents, white English emigre farmers, supported white rule in the middle of a revolution that went the other way. Oh, and they weren’t just any sort of farmers. They grew tobacco. While British colonialism crumbled around them (“servants in white uniforms, stiff with desperate civilization”), the family struggled to keep a farm going and struggled even harder to maintain the pretense that their way of life was the right way, that everything was normal. Somehow, a bit at a time, Fuller made sense of it all, and in “Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight,” her memoir of this topsy-turvy childhood, she gets all the wrongness exactly right. She never shies away from her parents’ racism, or the fact of her mother’s alcoholism, but she is always a subtle, humane witness. She notes their humor and bravery and pluck in the face of multiple disasters: they lost a war, they lost land and they lost children, two in infancy, one by drowning. This is not a book you read just once, but a tale both awful and beautiful to get lost in over and over. –M.J.
‘Blue Latitudes,’ by Tony Horwitz (Henry Holt)
In his 1998 “Confederates in the Attic,” Horwitz observed the subculture of Civil War re-enactors; in this book, he observes his own re-enactment of voyages made by Capt. James Cook, the “discoverer” of Australia and Hawaii–where Cook was killed and dismembered by locals in 1779. But his true destination is a writerly one: not some unknown island or passage–there are none anymore–but the ultimately inaccessible soul (and the reputed shinbone) of Cook himself. Horwitz does endure some danger and much discomfort. He spends much of his journey seasick, both on a replica of the Endeavor and on a modern ferry off Alaska. And many of the places where he touches down have become hellholes, or at least heckholes, thanks to Cook and the Europeans who followed. Lest we dismiss this as contemporary P.C. cant, Horwitz reminds us that Cook himself saw it all coming: “We debauch their Morals,” he wrote of New Zealand’s Maori in 1777, “and we interduce among them wants and … diseases which they never before knew … If anyone denies the truth of this assertion, let him tell me what the Natives of … America have gained by the commerce they have had with Europeans.” Even the West’s archetypal adventurer doubted the excellence of his endeavor. Still, Horwitz tries to wring some optimism out of Cook’s story–if only because explorer and exploited managed to communicate. “There were almost always grounds for mutual understanding and respect.” That’s about as inconclusive as his attempts to discover what kind of guy Cook really was and whether an arrow in a museum storeroom in Sydney is really made from his shin. But in this book, not getting there is half the fun. –D.G.
‘American Ground,’ by William Langewiesche (North Point Press)
There is something particularly American about the response to the wreckage at Ground Zero in the wake of the September 11 attacks. The clean-up crews were emotional and territorial, as nearly everyone involved in the clean-up wanted to claim the tragedy as their own. At the same time there was evidence of enormous fortitude and quick thinking. No one had every seen a disaster of this scale, and the speed and intelligence with which engineers and others in authority formulated solutions was shockingly impressive. Langewiesche captures both the good and the bad in his book, supplying lucid accounts of the attacks, the internecine fighting in the aftermath and the months of excavating that followed.
The only journalist with unrestricted access to the site, he made the most of his privilege. This is a brilliant portrait of the American spirit: emotional, yes, but indomitable and above all smart, knowledgeable and willing to wing it when that’s what it takes to get the job done. –M.J.
‘The Lives of the Muses,’ by Francine Prose (Henry Holt)
Where do ideas come from? Most of them probably fall from the sky, but the idea of an inspirational muse is still pretty hard to resist. Case in point: Francine Prose’s “The Lives of the Muses,” a sad, glamorous and entirely riveting freak show. Here are nine women, all of whom floored geniuses and weirdos–Salvador Dali, George Balanchine, Samuel Johnson and Man Ray, among others–and some of whom were even serial muses.
Lou Andreas-Salome, for instance, was romanced by Nietzsche, Rilke and Freud. As Prose’s bio-ettes suggest, “muse” can be a fancy word for ego-booster, manager, opportunist; it almost always means lust object (though when an artist joneses, it seems like a nobler cause). Whatever their secrets, the muses’ lives tended to be operatic. Dante Gabriel Rossetti dug up his dead wife to retrieve the poetry manuscript he’d thrown into her coffin seven years earlier. Pervy Lewis Carroll created a wonderland for his beloved child-friend Alice Liddell, who later collected an honorary doctorate in muse-dom from Columbia University. John Lennon and Yoko Ono competed over who got to be artist and who was relegated to muse. And Prose–wry and flabbergasted–is the ideal disher. –S.M.
