On the surface, Mayan Stevenson has her life in order. She's a determined medical student. People seek her advice and company. She seems to have made the transition from wayward teen to confident adult easily.
Mayan, however, is never at ease. She is haunted by a man who disappeared from her life when she needed him most. That man is Mayan's father, who left her in the care of her mother when Mayan was about 8. She recalls clearly the last time she saw him: "He tied one of my shoes—I remember the strict upward pull of the bow-knot thrilling like all rectitude. He straightened my collar, lay his palm over my neck, as if that were where the heartbeat felt. He touched the serrated edges of my two new front teeth, growing in.
" 'Don't forget I am your father. Nobody else can ever be that.' "
She never forgets. Indeed, for years she has saved things to show him should he ever reappear at the door: a favorite doll, a cup, a lock of hair. Though absent, this lost father dominates Mayan's life. Resolving to find him once and for all, she enlists the aid of detectives and family members, new boyfriends and old foes.
The Lost Father is the haunting, beautifully written record of Mayan's search, in the course of which she reevaluates all her relationships and her sense of self. In Anywhere But Here, Simpson's well-received first novel, the reader followed Mayan's childhood travels with her capricious mother. That breakthrough book was touching, funny and heartfelt. Yet it is no match for the emotional range and power of The Lost Father.
Here Simpson writes with mature skill and energy about a character fueled by complex aches and longings. Mayan desperately feels the need to find her father, if only to prove to him that she made a life for herself, despite his absence. At book's end she does find the understanding she seeks. She finds her safe place within herself.
With The Lost Father, Mayan Stevenson will become one of those rare and special characters who enter a reader's heart and remain there for years after the book is put back on the shelf. (Knopf, $22.00)
by David Grafton
The Cushings were, as a wag of their day put it, the Gabor sisters of Manhattan's Upper East Side. "All three captivated and captured not only the bluest of America's blue blood but very nearly the richest of the nation's rich, eligible men," writes Grafton in this surprisingly dull and cliché-ridden triple biography of Minnie (1906-78), Betsey (born 1908) and Barbara, known as Babe (1915-78).
The sisters were raised in upper-crust Boston, daughters of a socially ambitious mother and one of the country's leading neurosurgeons. All three married very deep-pocketed New Yorkers. Betsey, dubbed the Queen of the WASPs some years ago, was wed first to James Roosevelt, the eldest son of Franklin D. Roosevelt, and then to John "Jock" Hay Whitney, one of the nation's leading philanthropists and bons vivants. Minnie, who had artistic tendencies but no real talent, was married first to Vincent Astor, a millionaire of sour disposition and dubious heterosexuality, and then to James Fosburgh, a moderately gifted artist who was both a homosexual and a hard drinker. Babe, the best-known, most beautiful and most soigné of the three, was wed first to Stanley Grafton Mortimer Jr., an old-line blue-blood oil heir, and then to William S. Paley, founder and ruler of CBS.
Betsey's marriage to Whitney was probably the truest and happiest pairing. Both of Minnie's marriages lacked passion, and Babe, though a trendsetter and a perpetual Best Dressed listee, was regarded as little more than hostess and proud possession by Paley, a compulsive philanderer. Or, as Grafton puts it in his unfailingly hackneyed way, "...each in her own fashion had paid an enormous price for [her] success."
Much of the territory Grafton covers, particularly the chapters on Babe, has been covered before and better in recent biographies of Paley by Sally Bedell Smith and of Truman Capote (Babe's best pal until he betrayed her in one of his Answered Prayers short stories) by Gerald Clarke. Doubtless, there is a spicy book to be done about the Cushings (maybe even a Broadway musical!), but this ain't it. (Villard, $22.50)
by Harry Crews
Pete Butcher is a nowhere man. He lives in a Jacksonville, Fla., boardinghouse, and he feels like a walking jinx. He's the only physically whole survivor of a series of horrendous mishaps that cost him his immediate family. His brother, for instance, is a vegetable, the result of a car crash that occurred while Pete was driving.
Pete prefers to mourn in silence and solitude, trying to ignore his history of futility and tragedy. It is only when he looks up from his funk long enough to notice his next-door neighbor, Sarah Leemer, that a few rays of sunlight interrupt his torment. Not that he wants to let those rays in. Sarah has breast cancer. After spreading to a lung, it is in remission. No matter, Pete doesn't want to hear about it. Her hard knocks simply remind him of his own.
In most fiction, Sarah and Pete would not be so afflicted and would simply fall in love and get on with their lives. But Scar Lover is a trek through Crews country, a place where welts and scars and all kinds of personal wreckage are the norm and must be paid for with buckets of pain.
Sarah and Pete, scarred physically and psychically, navigate their love right through the crisscrossing wakes of their ruined emotions. Pete gets stony when Sarah starts talking about her cancer in their most intimate moments. Still, she won't let him push her away. Pete's a mess, true, but he's honest and decent and won't hurt her, and that's a lot better than anything she's found elsewhere.
Scar Lover ranks with the best of Crews's novels (The Gypsy's Curse, A Feast of Snakes, Body). The prose is rhythmic and pure, the pace maintained at quarter-horse speed, the dialogue an eccentric blend of Southern charm and gothic humor.
One reason Crews's novels haven't found a wider audience is because they're about strange people, deformed physically or emotionally. This time he has written a love story and fashioned it in his gnarled way into something both hellish and enthralling. If the theme attracts more readers, they will find that Scar Lover is not a freak show. Like all Crews, it's as real as life. (Poseidon, $19)
by Fay Weldon
by Fay Weldon
By now, after 18 books of fiction (and several plays, works of non-fiction and collections of children's stories), British author Fay Weldon's themes are pretty clear: women, their relationships with each other, with men, and with a basically sexist world. While neither Life Force nor the stories in Moon over Minneapolis (most of which have already been published in American or British magazines) has the bite of a Weldon classic like The Lives and Loves of a She-Devil, both have witty, ironic moments and provoke the occasional laugh out loud.
The more successful of the two works, Life Force (Viking, $21) is also the more Weldonian. Told in alternating first-person accounts by Marion and by Nora, the novel recounts the adventures of one Leslie Beck, a twice-married Englishman possessed of a "life force" (i.e., sexual drive) so strong that he has also seduced four close women friends (including Marion and Nora) and fathered at least three of their children. A master manipulator whose seductions begin with the stock line "Tell me about it.... I can tell by your eyes you're unhappy," Beck manages to continue inciting lust in these married middle-class women, even when he reappears in their lives after an absence of 15 years. Like a prepaternal Warren Beatty, he runs through women "like electricity"; only-Marion's young female art-gallery assistants see him for the creep he is.
But for all the discussion of "Leslie Dong the Magnificent," Weldon's book is at least as much about the love-hate relationships between the women as it is about men and adultery. Although, for example, Nora and Marion politely yield the storytelling floor to each other, their mutual mistrust and competition becomes clear. There's more here than different perspectives, the author seems to be saying; when a man's involved, it's every woman for herself. But then, very few cultural ironies escape Weldon. She has Marion, the art dealer, observe, for example, that "just because it's art doesn't make it good. Just because it sells doesn't make it bad."
Unfortunately, the stories in Moon over Minneapolis (Penguin, paper, $9) are not similarly multilayered. A woman tries to kill herself because her lover dated another woman; a 40-year-old executive goes for an abortion; four different women talk to their therapists. These are all very short stories, some of which read like outlines or pieces patched together to meet magazine deadlines. And the points they make are often simplistic. But even the occasional wry observation—"Peter said I had a good mind but not a first-class mind, and somehow I didn't take it as an insult. I had a feeling first-class minds weren't all that good in bed"—isn't enough to lift these stories beyond aphorism. Better to take Fay Weldon in larger, more complex doses.
- Contributors:
- Lorenzo Carcaterra,
- Leah Rozen,
- 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!
