In this compelling story of passion and betrayal, a young cricket player, Kenneth Fleming, is found dead in an English cottage, the victim of arson. The author's narration alternates with that of Olivia Whitelaw, a former prostitute slowly wasting away from Lou Gehrig's disease, who scrawls her bitter thoughts onto a legal pad, trying to make sense of her "dreary shambles of lives and loves." Her estranged schoolteacher mother, Miriam, was the patron of the young Fleming; by pulling himself out of the lower class to become a cricket star, Fleming, Olivia notes, had become "possibility personified" for Miriam.
The author's moral compass, detective inspector Thomas Lynley, joins with his grumpy and beleaguered sergeant Barbara Havers to investigate the many suspects, including Fleming's flighty lover, his distraught ex-wife, the possessive Miriam and jealous Olivia. The crime is solved, but solution does not mean resolution. Only George, with her remarkable talent for exploring the harshest aberrations of the heart, could make Ashes such an infinitely engrossing story. (Bantam, $21.95)
by Rick Moody
Something's amiss in the suburb of New Canaan, Conn. The year is 1973, and the sexual revolution is in high gear. The Hoods and the Williamses are neighbors and close friends—in fact, Mr. Hood is having an affair with Mrs. Williams, and the Hood's 13-year-old daughter Wendy is doing her best to have an affair with the Williamses' son Mike.
The natives are restless—drinking, drugs and adultery are symptoms of the confusion rampant in this bedroom community. "Desire wasn't about large breasts in Cross Your Heart brassieres anymore," muses Benjamin Hood as he waits for his mistress in the guest room of her house. "It was about hunting for comfort."
Moody, whose previous novel, Garden State, won a Pushcart Press Editors' Book Award in 1991, possesses a near-encyclopedic knowledge of his suburban turf. Storm is a gripping roller-coaster ride through the dark side of the American Dream. (Little, Brown, $19.95)
by Elaine Kagan
Initially readers of this novel may have deep sympathy for Frances, one of a sextet of childhood friends reunited by a tragic death. It's Frances, after all, who listens for 80 pages as four chums, now in their 40s, unburden themselves in digressive monologues ("Well, it was just a regular Tuesday morning, Frances," or "I know it's awful to say, Frances, but if Mother were here she couldn't take this"). But then Frances, a semi-famous New York City actress, delivers her monologue, and all reader good-will vanishes. The subject of everybody's palaver is blond, blue-eyed Pete Chinnery, a bounder who has left his print on every one of "the girls."
First-time novelist Kagan, a film and television actress, has set herself a task that would daunt more seasoned writers: fashioning six sharply distinct voices. But so interchangeable are the characters that one must repeatedly refer to early chapters for the precise nature of their quirks and their relationships with the busy Pete. The monologues that take up half of The Girls have the quality of cut-rate Tennessee Williams: "Did you ever feel like your life is passing you by like the dates on the tops of yogurt cartons?" one character muses. "Someday I'll expire like an old date on a milk carton. I'll go sour and they can throw me out. What a relief that'll be." Amen. (Knopf, $23)
by Jim Bouton and Eliot Asinof
It has been 10 years since the Chicago Cubs had a chance to play for the National League championship, and the race has come down to the last game of the season. They are up against the Philadelphia Phillies, and Sam Ward, a 32-year-old rookie, is on the mound for the Cubs. Behind home plate, however, is umpire Ernie Kolacha, who is going to call the game for the Phillies—a payoff to an old friend for something that once happened in Korea.
The gutsiness of players like Ward and the chill of a possible fix are familiar ground for both authors: Bouton, a former New York Yankees pitcher, wrote the 1970 bestseller Ball Four, and Asinof penned the definitive account of the 1919 Black Sox scandal, Eight Men Out. As Kolacha calls strikes balls, Ward, baffled, begins to wonder why this man he barely knows has it in for him.
The game quickly heats up on the field as well as in their hearts and minds. In alternating chapters, Bouton and Asinof create compelling fictional portraits of an idealistic ballplayer and an embittered umpire. In memories drawn out between the plays, Ward and Kolacha reflect upon their difficult lives. Estranged from their wives and families, they have pursued the dream of baseball—a dream that is being tested by this final game. Re-creating the camaraderie of the players in colorful play-by-play, Bouton (who writes Ward's part) and Asinof (the ump's creator) show that baseball is still a game of individual honor—in spite of occasional lapses of faith. (Viking, $21.95)
by Anne River Siddons
In this modern-day fairy tale set in the '60s, young Smoky O'Donnell is trapped in the airlessness of small-town Catholic family life when she's offered a job at Downtown, Atlanta's city magazine. She arrives in town Thanksgiving weekend. By Christmas she has learned how to drink and flirt at parties and is also dating handsome, rich Bradley Hunt III; by spring she's working with photographer extraordinaire Lucas Geary—another possible Prince Charming—exposing the living conditions of Atlanta's impoverished blacks. And she's been accepted by Baptist minister/freedom-fighter John Howard. Little wonder that when Smoky gets to meet Martin Luther King Jr., he knows her name and likes her work.
Downtown tells two stories—Smoky's discovery of her own civil liberties and what to do with them, and the South's attempt to reconcile its history of black oppression. Unfortunately, Siddons proves a more plausible historian than novelist. Smoky's rapid rise defies belief—unless readers know that it comes close to Siddons' own odyssey from collegiate journalist to best-selling author. (HarperCollins, $24)
by Kyle Roderick
With divorce rates holding steady and celebrity marriages crumbling at every turn, sometimes it seems like the only truly eternal unions are in the movies—perfect love preserved forever on celluloid. Thus this slender but elegant Hollywood wedding album, a collection of 55 black-and-white photographs commemorating classic movie nuptials. You'll find shots from both the Spencer Tracy and Steve Martin versions of Father of the Bride, a nifty Vivien Leigh in Gone with the Wind, Cary Grant getting married in three different movies and a scary Anne Bancroft after wild man Dustin Hoffman disrupts her daughter's wedding in The Graduate.
Production notes or plot summaries would certainly have enhanced this tiny book, which also suffers from too many shots that have a static, publicity-still photography feel. Hardcore movie buffs and hopeless romantics may coo at Married's nostalgic sweetness; others will find it much "I do" about nothing. (Collins, $14.95)
by Brett Easton Ellis
One can only hope Ellis intends his latest effort to be a comedy. To read it any other way is to be engulfed by a bleak and cynical vision, an excruciating brand of literary monotony.
The Informers centers on a group of upper-middle-class Los Angeles folk—students, studio execs, rock stars, wives, mistresses and even vampires—with too much time and money on their hands. Suffering from angst and ennui, they take turns narrating chapters in which nothing adds up—save for an array of drugs like cocaine, heroin, lithium and thorazine that by page 50 of this exhausting tale have been ingested by one and all. Ellis, the controversial author of American Psycho, has both expanded and watered down his previous themes. The senseless violence is here but presented without a point of view. "Jesus, his parents had the wake at Spago, for Christ sakes," says Dirk, one of many interchangeable characters, about a friend killed in a car crash. Utterly self-referential, Ellis makes no room for readers who don't know that Spago is a hip L.A. eatery. The Informers doesn't so much inform as pollute the reader—giving new meaning to the phrase "terminally hip." (Knopf, $22)
- Contributors:
- Susan Toepfer,
- Dani Shapiro,
- Joanne Kaufman,
- Thomas Curwen,
- Laurel Tielis,
- Alex Tresniowski.
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!
