There's a picture on the inside cover of this sensitive, revealing photographic tribute to poet-novelist-short story writer Raymond Carver of a message the writer hastily jotted to himself in the spiral notebook he carried. In the bone-clean style that Carver was noted for, it says, "Write stories."
That simple reminder cuts straight to the core of Carver's tragic but ultimately triumphant life and career. Among the pioneers of minimalist fiction, Carver knew firsthand of the sorrow-filled, comfortless world about which he wrote. Raised in the lumber town of Yakima, Wash., he married out of high school and worked as a truck driver, janitor and tulip picker while sending out stories. Booze was kinder to him than New York City editors. "But I recovered," he said in 1987, "and pulled my socks up, and so much of that is due to Tess."
Tess is poet Tess Gallagher, who became Carvers companion in 1977. married him in 1988 and, said Carver, "changed my life forever." Gallagher's emotional, in-depth introduction to this book should help anyone who appreciated such Carver stories as "Cathedral" and "Why Don't You Dance?" to appreciate Adelman's work.
Adelman is a New York City-based photographer whose work has appeared in LIFE, the London Times magazine and Esquire. His pictures of Carver are most effective when they peer directly into Carver's sad, dark eyes, the scribbled pages of his writer's notebooks and, of course, Gallagher's face. His text, taken from Carver's letters, stories and poems, tells why this gentle man was so universally mourned when he died from lung cancer at age 50 in 1988.
In a posthumously published poem, "Gravy," Carver asked not to be pitied: "Don't weep for me...I'm a lucky man. I've had 10 years longer than I or anyone expected. Pure gravy. And don't forget it."
This collection is a worthy tribute. Better still is the literature that inspired it. (Scribner's, $35)
by Peter Straub
Stories Without Purpose is more like it. Straub has forgotten a crucial tenet of the horror game: No matter how loathsome, no matter how unspeakably evil are the creatures that people one's pages, they must be balanced by the forces of good. The reader needs someone to root for, an ordinary person struggling against circumstances beyond his control. Following this simple rule is what keeps Stephen King and Dean Koontz at the top of the best-seller lists, while violating it is what relegates Straub to a distant third in this genre.
More's the pity, because, of the three, Straub may be the most accomplished writer. His prose shows range and versatility: he's capable of irony and subtlety and rarely stoops to garden-variety guts and gore.
This collection consists of six cheerless tales. Sandwiched between the stories are a series of curious, enigmatic and. finally, irritating narrative fragments—or Interludes, as Straub labels them—that have no connection with the stories, nor any apparent relation to each other.
Straub's characters are misfits, outcasts who are so vile or just plain unlikable that they are incapable of generating any sympathy. It is hard to pick a favorite among the stories, but perhaps "A Short Guide to the City." a wry Baedeker to an unnamed mid-western town, qualifies because it contains no characters at all. Then there's "Something About a Death, Something About a Fire." Great title; indecipherable story—something about a taxi.
The most intriguing tale is the final one, "Mrs. God," in which an English professor at a second-rate midwestern college wins a fellowship to study at a literary retreat in England called Esswood. With casually dropped hints, Straub builds a menacing aura of mystery about this bargain-basement Bloomsbury. By the time the professor figures out the secret of Esswood, he is on a headlong descent into madness.
Taken from an Emily Dickinson poem, the title of this collection refers to the characters who are trapped in horrible situations from which there is no escape. Unsuspecting readers of Houses Without Doors may feel the same way. (Dutton, $19.95)
by Sally Bedell Smith
That William S. Paley, who departed this earth last Oct. 26 at age 89, died at all probably surprised many who knew him. "His will is the only one that reads, if I die,' " a business acquaintance said three years ago after watching the 85-year-old Paley hold center stage at a reception.
When reality caught up with Paley, the obits all hosannaed him as the last pioneer of broadcasting. Paley, who, as head of the CBS radio and television networks for nearly 60 years, never shared credit when, justifiably or not, he might claim it for himself, would have loved the attention. Not so Smith's fortuitously timed biography, which offers a less flattering—though more complex and fascinating—view of Paley.
Smith, who reported on the TV networks for TV Guide and the New York Times, contends that "Paley's peculiar genius [was] the ability to graft his own charm and class onto the network, so that in the end they were indistinguishable." Under Paley, CBS was considered the Tiffany of networks, even though there were damn few diamonds (Edward R. Murrow's World War II broadcasts, I Love Lucy, The Mary Tyler Moore Show) scattered among CBS's rhinestones (The Beverly Hillbillies, Petticoat Junction. The Dukes of Hazzard).
The outline of the Paley story is familiar. In 1928 the 26-year-old Paley, whose father had made millions in the cigar business, spent $503,000 for a controlling share in the fledgling Columbia network that became CBS. Through hard work and innovative programming, he was successful, first in radio, later in TV. As Paley's fortune grew, so did his social status. In 1932 he married Dorothy Hart Hearst, a socialite with intellectual leanings who introduced him to politics and art. He left her in 1945 and married Barbara "Babe" Mortimer Cushing, a less-challenging partner but a world-class beauty and hostess.
To Paley, Babe was more of a prize than a wife. An inveterate womanizer, he continued to stray, mostly with floozies. As his first wife tells Smith of her years with Paley, "There were always girls. He never stopped. It was absolutely pathological."
Even as an octogenarian, Paley was an active roué, carrying on an enthusiastic flirtation with Diane Sawyer or fuming at being seated next to his contemporary Claudette Colbert at a dinner party rather than next to a decorative bimbo.
Smith is not an especially deft writer, but she is a sublime reporter. Her biography is thoroughly researched and crammed with telling details, killer quotes and rousing anecdotes. Occasionally she swings her ax a bit heavily when whacking away at Paley's self-aggrandizing lies, but the material is so good and Smith has organized it so well that to carp would be snooty.
And why be snooty when her sources can do it so much better? Especially one socially prominent Paley pal (and relation of Babe's by marriage), Henry Mortimer, who tells Smith, "I'll bet you never heard a nice person say anything bad about Bill Paley." Smith tells him that, indeed, many who worked for Paley have said nasty things. "No," Mortimer answers. "I meant nice people. People like us." (Simon and Schuster, $29.95)
by Mavis Cheek
Patricia Murray, the heroine of this slight but amusing novel, is in the process of divorcing her husband and has decided to allow her 10-year-old daughter to adopt a dog as a sort of father substitute. Not that Patricia likes the dog better than she liked her husband. Dogs, she tells us, are "sniffers of personal places as their vile proprietors exhort you to enjoy the experience for [the dogs] are simply 'trying to be friendly...' My best friend, to my certain knowledge, has never lifted my skirts with her nose to establish rapport. I see no reason why a dog should expect such privileges."
It's a good line, and there are many others that will bring a smile, even an occasional guffaw, during the course of Dog Days, the third novel (the others are Pause Between Acts and Parlor Games) by British author Cheek. But they don't add up to much.
Dog Days is about a woman who calls it quits on her opera-singer spouse ("It had been just my luck to get caught up with an egocentric husband, one who could not only justify his egocentricity, but whose very performance depended upon it"). She feels badly for a while, gets a job and some self-esteem, and then meets and falls for a swell guy she thinks is married.
In the end, to no one's surprise but Patricia's, the dreamboat turns out to be single—the woman she mistook for his wife is his sister. Even readers more familiar with comic books than with Jane Austen, who is clearly the model for Cheek's sense and sensibility, will figure this out miles before.
Pleasant is the appropriately moderate word for this novel. Think of it as a Harlequin romance, hipper and with punch lines. (Simon and Schuster, $18.95)
by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson
Masson became a psychoanalyst for several reasons. He wanted the material comforts that were the portion of folks who could charge $75—this was the early 1970s—a session. He was fascinated with the work of Sigmund Freud; he was curious about other people's lives and rather bored with his own—that of an assistant professor of Sanskrit in the department of East Asian Studies at the University of Toronto.
What Masson did not bargain for, at least—how would Freud put this?—on a conscious level, was what would become his role as the enfant terrible of psychoanalysis, which he discusses in this diatribe masquerading as a memoir.
It was Masson who as project director at the Freud Archives published the explosive idea that Freud had abandoned the "seduction theory,' " a belief that some patients" neuroses stemmed from traumatic experiences with incest, not because of clinical evidence but because he feared the theory would hurt his career. Masson's career was certainly hurt: he was booted out of the Archives. And it was Masson who was the subject of a controversial New Yorker profile by Janet Malcolm; he sued her for libel, charging that she portrayed him as egotistical, irresponsible and sexually promiscuous.
From the time Masson was accepted for training at the Toronto Psychoanalytic Institute, his experiences with analysis and the analytic were less than salutary. His training analyst (such is the name given to those who analyze aspiring analysts) was, according to Masson. an ill-tempered, foul-mouthed, opinionated narcissist who often spoke of his other analysands to Masson (so much for patient confidentiality), was frequently 45 minutes late for his sessions with Masson and on one such occasion accused Masson of keeping him waiting.
Masson fared no better with other aspects of his eight-year training. And he found work with patients unfulfilling, professional meetings tedious, the political alliances among analysts repugnant and analysts themselves self-serving, unethical and frequently incompetent.
One is perfectly prepared to believe that there exist analysts who sleep with their patients and who hit up wealthy patients for donations to various analytic causes. One is also prepared to believe the ugly tales of infighting, backbiting and buffoonery. But gadflies (Masson surely is a gadfly and rather a sanctimonious one at that) are not the most reliable witnesses.
Masson would be a more credible reporter had he succeeded at his own analysis and his own analytic practice, become disenchanted, then decided to get out and write about it. And one can only wonder at the psychology of a man who, feeling as he did about the profession and most of its practitioners, staved in it so long. "What kept me going through all this," he writes, "was the firm belief that the core of psychoanalysis was good." Analyst, analyze thyself. (Addison-Wesley, $18.95)
>PICTURING WILL Ann Beattie's vivid novel about a 5-year-old and his divorced photographer mother develops an image of parenting that is both contemporary and wise. (Vintage)
THE BROKEN CORD Personal, moving and tragic is Michael Dorris's award-winning non-fiction book about his adopted son, Adam, a victim of fetal alcohol syndrome. (Harper Perennial)
THE QUINCUNX Take all things Dickensian, both wonderful and wretched, wrap them around a plot about a young man's efforts to recover an inheritance, obsess about the number 5, as in the title, and you have Charles Palliser's sprawling, modern Victorian novel. (Ballantine)
- Contributors:
- Todd Gold,
- Mark Donovan,
- Leah Rozen,
- Joanne Kaufman.
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!
