Four ravishing sisters, grounded by their parents in the wake of their youngest sibling's suicide, become a symbol of adolescent angst and eroticism for a group of boys in Jeffrey Eugenides's rhapsodic first novel.
The confined girls—14, 15, 16, 17—communicate to the outside world by relaying semaphore flashes from candles at their darkened windows. The novel begins with the suicide of 13-year-old Cecilia Lisbon and tracks how her demise ultimately sets off a domino effect in the suicides of her remaining sisters. The story is told through the choral voice of a collective first-person narrator: the boys in the suburban neighborhood looking back as grown men.
The story is driven by the narrator's lustful fascination with the Lisbon sisters, particularly 14-year-old Lux, the most gregarious and sexually extroverted of them. After the death of Cecilia, Lux rebels against her parents' relentless vigilance. She recklessly seduces neighborhood boys in public places, as well as on the roof of her house, which the despairing family allows to fall into decrepitude.
With a deft, often comedic touch, Eugenides examines the concept of mass suicide in a way that might, in less assured hands, strain a reader's credulity. By skillfully displaying the parents' inability to succor the grief of their surviving daughters and by showing a father "with the lost look of a man who realized that all this dying was going to be all the life he ever had," the author makes the reader understand the lemminglike conduct of a group of adolescent siblings. By turns hypnotic and elegiac, the novel manages to sustain a high level of suspense in what is clearly an impressive debut. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $18)
by Kevin Phillips
Phillips is the astute political analyst who presciently identified the end of the Democratic Party's hold on presidential power in his 1969 book, The Emerging Republican Majority. (His research earned him a position as Richard Nixon's unofficial trend spotter.) In 1990's The Politics of Rich and Poor, Phillips again proved prescient in warning that the complacent Republicans were likely to run afoul of middle-class discontent—a gutsy prediction at a time when President Bush was considered unbeatable.
This new book further documents how far "charcoal grill and lawn mower America" has fallen from prosperity. In the 1980s the value of a house actually declined in some suburban areas, decimating the average family's largest nest egg. Urban troubles began to visit the suburbs, and the cities continued to decay. Bill Clinton and Ross Perot did not ignore the warning signals, but Phillips makes it clear that Clinton will fail if he does not deliver on his promise to better the lives of "those who do the work, pay the taxes and play by the rules."
Unfortunately, for all its cogent reasoning and statistical backing, Boiling Point breaks no new ground and is more remarkable for the author's unrelenting I-told-you-so style. Phillips seems particularly reluctant to take a stand on whether real class warfare will ever come to pass. If there is any optimism here, it's in the implication that America—like many of its troubled banks and corporations—is simply too big to fail. (Random House, $23)
by Jackie Collins
The best Collins novels, infused with a cheerful vulgarity and raunchiness, are embarrassing to pick up, impossible to put down. But here the author of Hollywood Husbands and Hollywood Wives seems merely to be going through the motions. At 624 pages, the slow motions.
The surprisingly uninventive story centers on Nick Angel (né Angelo), a compelling, brooding, green-eyed kid from the wrong side of the trailer park. Nick eventually meets Lauren Roberts, a beautiful, aloof, straight-A student whose parents refuse to let her have anything to do with him. Naturally, they fall in love. Naturally, true love doesn't run smooth as he becomes an actor and she a model. There is also a slack subplot involving Nick's half sister, Cyndra, an aspiring singer who, like her brother, doesn't always exhibit the best judgment. (Simon & Schuster, $23)
by John McPhee
It's been a long and rock-filled road since the day in 1978 when McPhee and a geologist named Karen Kleinspehn stood on the west end of the George Washington Bridge outside New York City and, to the presumed consternation of the truckers rumbling by on Interstate 80, began peering at the history of the world as it lay exposed in the cracks and fractures of a road cut. McPhee has since followed 1-80 westward across the continent in the company of other geologists, using a literary equivalent of the scientists' Hastings Triplet lens to examine the modern theory of plate tectonics in three previous books on geology, Basin and Range (1980), In Suspect Terrain (1982) and Rising from the Plains (1986). Now, in the fourth and concluding book in his geological tetralogy, McPhee and Interstate 80 plunge into California at a moment when human time intersected with geological time—the shattering Loma Prieta earthquake near San Francisco in October 1989. His guide is geologist Eldridge Moores, a cello-playing Arizonan who got moved to California by his interest in the San Andreas Fault. (Moores's rate of northward progress was considerably faster than that of the fault's, which can move you and everything under you about a mile north every 60,000 years.) McPhee renders Moores's side trips to the wine country, gold-mining camps and even the Acropolis in Greece in typically fascinating detail.
In the end, though, the real central character of all four books is time—deep time—time enough to allow the globe's continents to go sliding and slipping and colliding like so many bumper cars. After reading this book, you too will marvel with McPhee over the fact that the rocks on the summit of Mount Everest are marine limestone. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $21)
>Jeffrey Eugenides
EXPLORING THE DARK ALLURE OF SUICIDE
THE IDEA OF ADOLESCENT SUICIDE BECAME an acquired fascination for Jeffrey Eugenides, 32, who was told by "a bouncy Catholic baby-sitter that she and all her sisters had at one time tried to commit suicide. When I asked why, she shrugged and said, 'Pressure.' I did have contact with other suicides, too. When I was a student at Brown, reading a lot of religion and philosophy, this guy I barely knew came into my room one day and spoke to me very intensely about Zen. I lent him a book on the subject, and shortly thereafter he went down into the basement of the Asian restaurant where he worked as a prep-chef and disemboweled himself. Then someone else I knew, after a breakdown, went home to his parents' apartment on Park Avenue in Manhattan and threw himself off the roof."
He also had a fascination with female characters. "I grew up in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, with two brothers. A house full of girls seemed otherworldly to me. I tended to exalt the idea.
"When I began writing, I would lie in bed and try to imagine one of my family members committing suicide and how betrayed and angry I'd feel. I got the beginning and end of the novel quickly, but labored over the middle. I wrote while I worked full-time at the Academy of American Poets. I wrote during a trip down the Nile."
Eugenides, who is single and lives in Brooklyn, feels blessed by having had a marvelously astute copy editor, Elaine Chubb. "She tracked down what time the sun set in June in Michigan in 1973, what kind of vaccinations would have been given that year, that late in August you'd spray rose bushes instead of pinning them. It was like sending a manuscript to God."
>DEAD MOGUL BEATS REAGAN, BUSH, QUAYLE!
WITH COMMENTS LIKE "IT'S A QUESTION of whether we're going to go forward into the future, or past to the back" Dan Quayle turned the Vice Presidency into a malaprop platform—and earned himself a place on page 74 of THE 776 STUPIDEST THINGS EVER SAID, compiled by Ross and Kathryn Petras (Doubleday, $8.99). But Dan's total of 17 entries ranks him only sixth in the book, behind San Diego Padres announcer Jerry Coleman (18), George Bush (19), Ronald Reagan (24), Yogi Berra (37) and, the master of manglement, film producer Samuel Goldwyn (38).
Actually, many of Goldwyn's citations are not so stupid: "A verbal contract is not worth the paper it's written on" is word to the wise. "I was always an independent, even when I had partners" is an unsentimental self-assessment. The only thing wrong with the Yog's indisputable "It ain't over till it's over" is that it probably originated during the 1973 NL pennant race as, the authors note, the more parochial "We're not out till we're out."
Not surprisingly, athletes and politicians abound here, requiring the reader to distinguish dopey from dumb from deluded, as in boxer Marlon Starling's "I'll fight him for nothing if the price is right"; Washington councilman John Bowman's "If crime went down 100 percent, it would still be 50 times higher than it should be"; or a suggestion from the Federal Reserve System: "It would be a good thing to take your bankbook to the fallout shelter with you." One quote suggests foot-in-mouth disease may be hereditary. Said Dale Berra, true son of Yogi: "The similarities between me and my father are different."
- Contributors:
- Joseph Olshan,
- David Ellis,
- Joanne Kaufman,
- L.Y. Jones,
- Eric Levin.
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!
