Can there be a soul so calloused by modern life that he or she doesn't thrill to the sight of a magnificent palomino rearing up, to the sorrowful sound of a lonesome cowboy song, or to the inviting smell of bacon sizzling in a skillet over the morning camp-fire?" Well, maybe, but not by the name of Jane or Michael Stern. The Sterns are American pop culture vultures who always bring an air of unbridled zest to their books, which have included Roadfood, Elvis World and, more recently, The Encyclopedia of Bad Taste.
In Way Out West, their 18th volume, the Sterns happily hit the trail again, this time roping readers into big-sky country and points south with their eye-popping illustrations, goofy photos, witty text and quirky observations. A chapter on cowboy sidekicks, for example, divides the species into grizzled cranks (Gabby Hayes), men of girth (Andy Devine), strangely behaved ethnics (Tonto) and the physically challenged (Zorro's mute manservant, Bernardo).
There are sections on how to ride, rope, dress, dance and sing like a cowboy or cowgirl. (If you are going to dress and dance like a cowboy, you should wear pointy boots, a big belt buckle and a loud, tight shirt with pearl snap buttons. Also, keep your fancy footwork below the belt: "Above the belt line, a cowboy always maintains his purposeful, masculine demeanor."
In a chapter on equine superstars, the Sterns visit Gene Autry's Champion—the World's Wonder Horse—and Roy Rogers's beloved Trigger (he is not stuffed, he is mounted, meaning his hide is stretched over an armature). And, as they hop along the highway past ghost towns, trading posts and signs that shout "Howdy!" the Sterns tell us where to eat (barbecue in Texas, hot chile in New Mexico, tacos in Arizona). sleep and shop in this fastidiously researched and affectionately rendered work. If you feel inspired to go West with the Sterns as your guide, just remember: You can cuss all you want...but only around men, horses and cows. And fer gosh sakes, never try on another man's cowboy hat. (HarperCollins, $35)
by Howard Stern
A funny thing happened to Howard Stern on the way to cranking out a typically wretched ghostwritten celebrity autobiography: He worked hard with his collaborator, the peerless Larry "Ratso" Sloman, and has produced a reasonably funny book.
Unlike other smart people masquerading as morons who have taken pen to paper in the recent pas I—Rush Limbaugh, Morton Downey Jr., Charles Barkley, Frank Zappa—Howard Stern has not written Private Parts as a plea for compassion and understanding—as an attempt to prove that there's more to Howard Stern than meets the eye. Instead, he has written a book that is even meaner, more tasteless and more demented than his incredibly offensive radio and TV shows, and a book that reveals him to be a human being with serious personal problems. Sort of a tall, ugly, still-breathing Sam Kinison or an Andrew Dice Clay with a brain. Anyway, not Jay Leno.
Stern's twin obsessions are lesbianism and bullocks—there is, of course, some overlap here—so the book is filled with tales about rectal thermometers, lesbians, youthful adventures in his mom's undergarments, lesbians, spanking, lesbians, flatulence, lesbians and a controversial percussive diversion known as Butt Bongo. This material will be familiar—and reassuring—to his listeners, many of whom are not, in fact, reasonably intelligent people masquerading as morons, but are, in fact, real-life morons.
Material that will have somewhat wider appeal are the author's hilarious tirades against such acknowledged threats to world peace as Sinéad O'Connor and Michael Landon, all of whom deserve Howard Stern—and a lot worse. The poet laureate of urban American white trash, Stern has written a book that reads like a direct transcript of his radio show: 85 percent racist, sexist, homophobic ranting, mixed in with some really good jokes about Rodney King's dubious driving record and the big girl in Wilson Phillips that no one else in the media wants to describe as "chunky."
There's also a lot of stuff about lesbians in the book. (Simon & Schuster, $23)
by Margaret Atwood
Atwood's eighth novel, a dark, dark comedy of sexual manners, swirls around a villainess drawn with the subtlety of a cartoonist's palette. This particular she devil, Zenia, comes with a hundred histories: Her mother was stoned to death in Romania; no, her mother was forced into prostitution in Paris; no, she was a persecuted Jew in Hitler's Berlin.... And so she wins her female victims' sympathies as she circles their husbands and lovers. "In the war of the sexes," writes Atwood, "Zenia was a double agent. Or not even that, because Zenia wasn't working for one side or the other. She was on no side but her own."
Tony, Roz and Charis have nothing in common but the most important thing: In their youth, all lost their men to Zenia. And so they are now fast friends, enjoying their monthly lunch date at the aptly named Toxique when Zenia walks in, not only returned from the dead, but with silicone-enhanced breasts.
The three women do not exactly get revenge, but they do come to terms with previous torture as they gather forces to fend off their nemesis.
Standing very much apart from the action, Atwood (The Handmaid's Tale, Cat's Eye) saves her most delicate strokes for her heroines: Charis, aka Karen, who favors new-age philosophies; Roz, a wealthy businesswoman; and birdlike Tony, a professor specializing in war. When Tony can't sleep, she settles down at her basement sand-table map of Europe and replays great battles with troops composed of kidney beans and grains of rice. In the class-room, she mesmerizes students with such wacky insights as the extent to which wartime casualties can be traced to military clothing designers. For amusement, she falls back on the backward language she created in childhood, renaming the scary things, including her husband, West (formerly Stew).
With The Robber Bride, Atwood has written a book that doesn't bear too much analysis. Take it for the delicious romp that it is, a horrifying, breathtaking, stinging fable that, like its unforgettable temptress, causes worlds of trouble "just for the fun of it." (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, $23.50)
by David Rosenbaum
Blending classic whodunit, European Jewish lore and magic realism into a rich and heady brew, journalist David Rosenbaum's ambitious first novel delightfully pushes the mystery genre's envelope.
When a dealer in Manhattan's diamond district is brutally murdered—over an egg-size 72-carat stone with a rich and dangerous history—former NYPD detective and recovering alcoholic Dov Taylor is hired by a sect of ultraconservative Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn to get the bauble back. The hunt for what Taylor learns is the Seer's Stone takes him into odd corners of the Yiddish-speaking world from Crown Heights, in New York City, to London, and pits him against ex-Nazis, the Mossad, the beautiful but dangerous Maria and Taylor's own imagination.
With the help of a mystical rabbi, Taylor is put into a trance and mentally journeys back to 19th-century Lublin, Poland. There he meets an ancestor, his hard-drinking great-great-grandfather Hirsh Leib, a zaddik, or righteous man, who points Taylor to the heart of the contemporary riddle: Salvation is more important than success. Rich in finely observed details of Jewish history and ritual and leavened with dead-on humor, Zaddik is a diamond in the rough. (Mysterious Press, $19.95)
by Donald Antrim
There could hardly be a worse world than the one Antrim has conjured in this funny first novel, where neighbors secure yards with snake pits and spiked fences, families stage battles in the park and the mayor is drawn and quartered by constituents.
These are some of the tamer deeds described in this post-Orwellian fable of social and moral disintegration. Set somewhere on a southeast coast, the novel is narrated by Pete Robinson, a would-be contender for mayor and a teacher whose specialty is the history of medieval torture devices. When the town's school system is voted out of existence, Robinson holds a class in his basement, which is outfitted with the very torture devices he has so impressively lectured about, providing the story's monstrously macabre ending.
It is a testament to Antrim's skill that he keeps us laughing in the face of so much horror. By novel's end, one needs no convincing that any world would be better than the one this talented newcomer has so vividly invented. (Viking, $20)
>Jane and Michael Stern
DRIVE, SHE SAID
Jane and Michael Stern, both 47, have been navigating the back roads of America for the past 20 years. To get Way Out West, they set their compass toward the Pacific, making 20-odd trips, covering some 150,000 miles over two years. "We'd decide we hadn't seen Montana, so we'd go spend a month there," says Michael, who is usually the one behind the wheel of their Jeep Wagoneer. "I drive too fast," he says. "I never ask directions, and so we get lost constantly." Often with serendipitous results. How else, for example, would they have discovered May's Exotic World of Giant Tropical Insects in Colorado Springs? While Michael drives, Jane complains. "I'm one of the great travel neurotics," she confesses. "What if I get an anxiety attack and there's no hospital for 200 miles? Michael likes to choose the skinniest roads on the map. The last route he look, we ended up in a ditch and had to wait 10 hours to be towed, while vultures gathered overhead." She keeps a survival kit in the car stocked with club soda, spray-on cheese, Triskets, M&Ms and, to combat bee stings, adrenaline.
Home off the range is a colonial house in Redding, Conn., now decorated with the 4-foot piaster cactus, 25-pound chile ristra and 8-foot-wide Longhorn skull that the Sterns, who met when they were students at Yale in 1968, could not resist on their last trip west. "We just celebrated our 23rd anniversary," says Jane. "In all these years, Michael has survived my kvetching. And I've survived his getting us lost in buzzard territory."
>A BONE-IFIED STAR FROM LASSIE: A DOG'S LIFE The First Fifty Years by Ace Collins
"How big a star would Gary Cooper, Bette Davis, or Humphrey Bogart have been if their writers had allowed them to use only one word?"
Think about it.
- Contributors:
- Kristin McMurran,
- Joe Queenan,
- Susan Toepfer,
- J.D. Reed,
- Lisa Shea.
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!
