Since it began rolling off the assembly line in 1908, the automobile has raced unchecked into the American psyche and redefined freedom as four wheels and the open road. That high octane spirit is celebrated in Drive, They Said, a fascinating anthology of poems devoted to Americans and their cars. "So much has happened in cars—birth, death, illumination, sorrow, anxiety, joy," writes editor Kurt Brown. So what better vehicle for dramatizing these experiences than poetry?
The results sweep past your open window at 70 mph—a stunning blur of desert landscapes, small towns and empty turnpikes. Journeys often lead to revelations: A hilly road driven at night is a reason for wanting to have a baby, and jump-starting a dead engine becomes a way of grasping the possibilities of life. Some poems simply celebrate the need to cut loose with the windows rolled down and the accelerator floored. "The center line pours tracer bullets at the bug-splattered windshield," writes Jonathan Holden.
"You're weightless in the thick of speed, going nowhere in all directions."
Featuring well-known writers (Robert Bly, Elizabeth Bishop and e.e. cummings) and lesser knowns, Drive is accessible and eloquent—a description of life as Henry Ford could never have imagined it. By the end you have to wonder what carried us in our dreams before cars were invented. (Milkweed Editions, $14.95)
by Edna O'Brien
Ireland's political strife is reduced to the microcosm of a moldering lakeside estate in O'Brien's new novel. An IRA gunman named McGreevey has jumped off a police van in Northern Ireland and conned his way across the border. He heads for Josie O'Meara's house, but the widow has returned unexpectedly from a nursing home—alone, bedridden and haunted by memories of her marriage to a brutish horse breeder and by her humiliating attempt at romance with the parish priest. The two fall prey to Stockholm syndrome, that strange breakdown of barriers between captive and captor, and their fates become entwined.
Though it contains some beautiful passages, House is disappointing. The men are stick figures who spout political clichés, and when the terrorists pick a target, we barely know who he is. O'Brien has told interviewers she has said all she has to say about melancholy women, but Josie is the only vivid character. After 14 novels the author is obviously searching for new themes, but it may be that O'Brien—who has lived in London for some 20 years—has been gone from her homeland too long. (Farrar Strauss Giroux, $21)
by Susan Power
A multigenerational tale of love and loyalty written in musical, incantatory prose, Dancer is the story of Red Dress, a beautiful Dakota Sioux warrior woman who is brutally murdered in the 1860s, and Ghost Horse, the sacred clown who, the day after her death, marries her spirit. "You will see the world," he says, after eating a plum and placing the pit in his bride's mouth. A spiritual pact has been drawn—the dead watch over the living, and the living honor the dead.
And so when Ghost Horse is slain in battle a year later, his wife remains forever "hitched to the living, still moved by their concerns." In chapters as complete as short stories, the descendants of Red Dress and Ghost Horse each tell their tales of being visited in dreams by their ancestors. Novels told in multiple points of view often become diffuse, but these voices swell with cumulative power. The author, an enrolled member of the Standing Rock Sioux, has borrowed from their tribal art of storytelling to create a narrative that will haunt readers—and perhaps give them pause to check the sky for ancestors of their own. (Putnam,$22.95)
by David Lindsey
Someone is killing the great cops of Houston. Or so thinks Marcus Graver, head of the Houston PD's Intelligence Division. One by one, the men who work for him start turning up dead. But these are not your typical cop killings; the men had been working on highly sensitive cases and died in mysterious ways. Suspecting that some very evil scheme is afoot, Graver begins investigating.
Relying on the expertise of a former CIA agent, Graver reconstructs a web of deceit and counterdeceit so complicated that readers must occasionally go back and retrace their steps. Fans of Lindsey's previous novels will recognize his fluid prose and the surprising human touch he brings to his characters, allowing even hard-boiled cops and criminals deep feelings and insights. This is a multilayered thriller that races to an explosive conclusion. (Doubleday, $23)
>Susan Power
SPIRIT IN THE SKY
YOU WOULDN'T EXPECT SUSAN POWER to joke that her claim to fame was studying law with Alan Dershowitz. Power, 32, who collected degrees from Radcliffe and Harvard Law, promptly put her diplomas in a drawer as soon as she graduated and began writing fiction in 1986. "It was a matter of being sensible," she says of her law school experience. "It helped my writing, because in law school they teach you to write precisely."
Power, who worked as a secretary and attended the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop before publishing Dancer, still lives in Cambridge, Mass., near Harvard Square—a long way from her bicultural upbringing in Chicago. Her mother, Susan, is descended from Chief Two Bears of the Yanktonnai branch of the Dakota Sioux, and her father, Carleton, a publishing sales representative who died when she was 11, was the great-great-grandson of the governor of New Hampshire during the Civil War. Growing up in a world of prep schools, Power also spent weekends mingling with Chicago's sizable Native American community.
"People in that community believe in magic, spirits and ghosts," she says. "My mother tells me my ancestors really wanted me to write Grass Dancer. I'm not a person of real faith—but I try to keep an open mind about it."
- Contributors:
- Thomas Curwen,
- Jean Reynolds,
- Dani Shapiro,
- Sara Nelson.
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!
