Ever since the spectacular success of her 1982 novel, The Color Purple, people avidly read whatever Alice Walker writes. The Temple of My Familiar, a plodding but imaginative novel, was a 1989 best-seller, and a recent volume of poems sold a strong 40,000 copies. The irony is that Walker is seldom a breezy read, and her rigorously feminist outlook often foments controversy. Some libraries banned Purple because of its candid treatment of lesbianism, and critics were dismayed by Walker's seeming disregard for patriarchal traditions in Familiar.
Walker's bold and intriguing fifth novel is similarly challenging. At its center is Tashi, first introduced in The Color Purple as an African girl who falls in with American Christian missionaries, is baptized by them and eventually marries their son, Adam.
As a Christian, Tashi was spared the childhood tribal initiation ritual of female genital circumcision. But, as we learn in Joy, her sister bled to death following the procedure. That loss is but one of the memories that haunt Tashi as she re-examines her past through psychotherapy. Now known as Evelyn Johnson, she is living with Adam, a minister, in America.
Walker presents this Adam and Eve as a couple sprung from a misogynist African Eden. Feeling a deep need to assert her African identity, Tashi voluntarily undergoes the circumcision, to her husband's horror, and is left with a painful shuffling gait. The author makes clear that while cultural tradition sanctions such suffering, she herself regards it as unspeakable.
None of this is presented linearly—Walker's tale of anxiety and recovery unfolds in short chapters narrated by different characters. Walker weaves in some of her voluminous research into Jungian psychoanalysis, cultural anthropology and religious symbolism. Not all of this fits comfortably. Too often characters resort to slogans and bald explanations to make themselves clear. For example, when comparing Christian and tribal baptism practices, Tashi reflects: "I was baptized by...the missionary...and I held my tongue for I knew their church's water was a substitute for woman's blood."
In the end, such problems are minor, depriving Joy of grace, not power. The novel will trigger strong reactions, but then, it is a story neither for nor about the weak. (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, $19.95)
by Chaim Potok
Fans of The Chosen, The Promise and My Name Is Asher Lev may be surprised that Potok's latest work isn't even remotely connected to his usual subject, Jewish life in America. Instead, the author, who served as an Army chaplain during the Korean War, has turned out a slight novel about an old peasant couple and the injured orphan they rescue in war-torn Korea.
While Potok skillfully conveys the boy's fear of being abandoned, the woman's fierce maternal instincts and the old man's resentment of the child, the characters never quite emerge as flesh-and-blood creations. Meant to be a meditation on how men are molded by life's unpredictability, I Am the Clay (the title is a biblical reference) ends up as a heavy-handed allegory.
The book is further freighted with repetitive descriptions of the family's hardships. Frequent accounts of rice soup made from boiled snow leave the reader hungry for more and feeling that this meager tale would have made a better short story than novel (Knopf, $20)
by Bob Simon
One of the more haunting TV images of last year's Persian Gulf War was a gaunt, haggard, unshaven Simon, then 49, being interviewed on 60 Minutes. The normally poised and handsome CBS News Middle East correspondent (a 25-year veteran who had previously covered bloodshed in Belfast, Beirut and Bucharest) suddenly—and shakily—found himself on the other end of the camera, having just been released (along with his three-man video crew) from 40 days of imprisonment in Iraq.
During their confinement, Simon was beaten by fists, canes and rifle butts, stricken with dysentery, blindfolded, repeatedly interrogated and (because he was based in Tel Aviv) told that he was considered to be an Israeli spy. (Fortunately for Simon, who's Jewish, his Red Cross ID mistakenly listed him as Protestant, but he was certain at one point that his captors would execute him anyway.)
Despite his ordeal, not everyone was sympathetic, Simon writes. "Serves you right," wrote a doctor from Memphis who thought Simon had been seeking to "discredit American motives" in the gulf when he was captured on Jan. 21, 1991. In fact, as Simon admits in this painfully self-effacing memoir, it was Indiana Jones-style bravado that motivated him and producer Peter Bluff, 46, to thumb their noses at Pentagon-sanitized press briefings and wander into Iraqi-occupied Kuwait. They and cameraman Roberto Alvarez, 37, and soundman Juan Caldera, 29, were quickly scooped up and spirited away by an Iraqi patrol—just 300 yards from the Saudi border. They wound up in the basement of Saddam Hussein's infamous intelligence headquarters in Baghdad, where the screams of tortured political prisoners pierced the newsmen's solitary confinement. Earlier, hearing Caldera being beaten one night, the author writes, "I thought I was invading [his] privacy. It's a very intimate thing, the way you scream."
Simon himself, slowly starving (he dropped 35 lbs., and his 34-inch waist shrunk several inches), fantasizing not about sex but about chocolate, and reduced to cadging extra rations from his guards like an "itinerant beggar," keeps the reader grimly captivated. But the narrative gels sidetracked by Simon's windy digressions into his childhood, marriage and career. Worse, the last 88 pages of this 318-page book are taken up with Simon's heady adjustments to freedom and celebrity: He's wined and dined by politicians—Jerusalem Mayor Teddy Kollek promises to "fatten you up." Simon's ego seems bloated enough as he quotes excerpts from a CBS obituary prepared for broadcast when his bosses feared he'd been killed.
What brings Simon down to earth are the words of an anonymous Iraqi he meets upon returning to Baghdad for a Gulf War follow-up report. "You had 40 days and you're out," this prisoner of Saddam's regime reminds Simon. "We're still there." (Putnam's, $22.95)
by Cormac McCarthy
Until recently McCarthy was the most famous author you never heard of, though he won a MacArthur "genius" award in 1981. None of his previous five novels—long, non-chronological and daunting, if Faulknerian in prose—had sold more than 5,000 copies in hardback. Now this 58-year-old Tennessean living in El Paso is being lifted into the pantheon of great American writers by a legion of critics and fellow writers. And All the Pretty Horses is the reason.
Horses puts all that is daring and original in McCarthy into a much more accessible package, a best-selling western that travels Lonesome Dove territory by way of cinema noir.
For the first time, moreover, McCarthy gives us, instead of his usual outcasts, a protagonist we can root for. It's 1949, and John Grady Cole, 16 and no longer needed on the family's West Texas ranch, saddles up his horse and rides into Mexico. Joined by two other boys, his journey begins as a coming-of-age saga. Then storm clouds gather, literally and symbolically: "Shrouded in the black thunderheads the distant lightning glowed mutely like welding seen through foundry smoke. As if repairs were under way at some flawed place in the iron dark of the world."
John Grady's genius with horses wins him a job on a hacienda and leads to a romance with the estate owner's rebellious daughter. But at the core of the novel is a descent into that iron dark of the world, and McCarthy's fascination with evil takes center stage. Only near the end does the book reward us with a touch of kindness.
McCarthy has said that Horses is the first of a trilogy. This is unsettling, because in Horses exalted moments have an ominous ring, and violence is often coiled just out of sight. But the darkness also offers rich compensations: McCarthy's utterly steady eye—and a voice that makes the English language new. (Knopf, $21)
- Contributors:
- V.R. Peterson,
- Jill Rachlin,
- Michael A. Lipton,
- Joseph Poindexter.
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!
