REVIEWED BY LEE AITKEN
NOVEL
Hamilton's novel unspools two threads in the saga of a single family—one conventional and the other downright strange. The conventional tale follows a bookish boy, Mac, and his risk-taking older cousin Buddy, who dominates Mac and continues to preoccupy him through adulthood. Buddy volunteers for Vietnam while Mac inherits his mother's antiwar sentiments. In the final chapters, Buddy's son dies in Iraq, and the boys' childhood rivalries are amplified by clashing political convictions. The parallel story involves a bizarre family secret that is really no secret at all: Mac's father first married Madeline, a beautiful but somewhat shallow girl who soon after suffered severe brain damage in a bike accident. He then marries her spunky, unglamorous friend Julia and they incorporate Madeline into the family—a peculiar older "sister" to Mac and his siblings. Now a father, Mac recalls poignant, disturbing scenes from his upbringing: Madeline being victimized by boys; her romance with a mentally impaired neighbor; Julia's unflagging efforts to give her a normal life. Hamilton's careful, unpretentious prose finds moral nuances both in a full-blown antiwar debate and in the small details of Madeline's care. Mac comes to see that it was this strange domestic arrangement, even more than the crucible of Vietnam, that taught him and Buddy the lessons of loyalty, sacrifice and honor.
By Michael Tolkin
REVIEWED BY JOANNE KAUFMAN
CRITIC'S CHOICE
NOVEL
Poor Griffin Mill—once a mover in Los Angeles—is down to his last 6 million dollars, and that isn't the worst of it in Tolkin's sharply observed sequel to The Player. Mill's personal life is a shambles (he's impotent and looking at a divorce) and his professional life is in ruins (he's just lost his power job as a studio exec). Now, perhaps unwisely, he's joined up with a Mephistophelean heavy hitter and—oh yes—just pulled off his second murder. The plot isn't as shiny fresh as The Player's, but Tolkin's still got a firm hold on Tinseltown's fluttery pulse.
By William Sylvester Noonan with Robert Huber
REVIEWED BY NINA BURLEIGH
MEMOIR
Son of one of President Kennedy's Boston pals, Billy Noonan was one of J.F.K. Jr.'s lifelong friends. His frank but loyal memoir is an engrossing trip that covers the '70s and early '80s, when their crowd partied hard and John's life was full of promise.
The freshest bits involve J.F.K. Jr.'s marriage: Carolyn Bessette, Noonan claims, couldn't bear the constant scrutiny and did drugs that made her paranoid; she also worked to separate J.F.K. Jr. from pals after their '96 nuptials—to the point where he exploded, "She's so f---ing sneaky ... meddling and manipulating." By spring of '99, though, Kennedy reported that she had gotten clean, was in "intensive psychoanalysis" and taking antidepressants. In the week before he died, writes Noonan, J.F.K. Jr. hinted that he had made a momentous decision, possibly about politics. Now, however, not even his boon companion can say what he might have planned.
By Rebecca Campbell
NOVEL
It's a cliché to set the scene in certain romps with a reference to Manolo Blahniks, so Campbell upped the ante: Her heroine, Celeste, bemoans rain damage to her "third-favorite" pair of Manolos—signaling that we are deep in the jungle of featherweight romantic intrigue. Celeste is a buyer; husband Sean minds their son and does radio commentary as Mr. Mom. The plot unfolds in diary entries as they drift miles apart. This is really lad lit in the tradition of Nick Hornby; Sean's hilarious entries, laced with British humor and applied to matters such as housework, outshine the pedestrian plot.
By Margaret Atwood
SHORT STORIES
Billed as a collection of stories, Moral Disorder has the cadence of a memoir and the satisfying arc of a novel. Atwood fans will recognize the main character—a brainy daughter who spends her early adulthood drifting. This alter ego appears in guises from the 11-year-old puzzling out the facts of life to the aging wife letting go of the illusion that she can make a difference in the world. Atwood's incisive writing about being young and female made her reputation decades ago. Her writing about growing old cements it.
By Diane Setterfield
REVIEWED BY SUE CORBETT
NOVEL
Bookshop assistant Margaret Lea is summoned to the estate of British author Vida Winter to write her biography—a gothic tale of incest and identity swapping, adultery and arson. Margaret puzzles out the truth while keeping watch on her own heart, as Vida's story focuses on twin sisters, and Margaret has her own raw secret: She is a twin too, haunted by her infant sister's death. Readers will feel the magnetic pull of this paean to words, books and the power of story.
By Brian Morton
REVIEWED BY EMILY CHENOWETH
NOVEL
A literary theft, a death and the sparking of desire make for a tumultuous year in the lives of four New Yorkers fumbling toward belated self-discovery. Thanks to moderate fame (and Viagra), novelist Adam Weller is relishing a young girlfriend, while Eleanor, his ex-wife, is haltingly seeking a sense of purpose. Their daughter, grad student Maud, is waking to life outside the mind with the help of a man mourning a lost child. In this polished, affecting novel, their stories intertwine and uplift: As Maud, the book's tender heart, reflects, striving is "the law of life."
Mandy Moore
The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri. I think they're actually making it into a film coming out this [spring]. I'm 150 pages into it. And I'm loving it so far.
Maria Sharapova
I'm finishing my last subject in [high] school, so I've been reading a lot of economics. But I also read novels. Right now it's Cocktails for Three by Madeleine Wickham.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
