It would be easier, one would think, for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for Norman Mailer to write a novel about Jesus without involving the son of God in at least one sex act, or at least a little lusting in the heart. But Mailer manages the feat, and more's the pity. His Jesus is a curiously sterile figure.
Not only does Mailer shy away from Jesus' carnal urges, he also avoids a crucial issue that anyone examining Jesus' life ought to confront: how Jesus dealt with his divinity. Even though Mailer envisions Jesus having been forewarned—through some unexplained mechanism—of his suffering and death on the cross and subsequent resurrection, Jesus never seriously ponders the meaning of this momentous event.
Writing in the first person as Jesus, Mailer rarely strays from the New Testament in chronicling the life of the carpenter from Nazareth, nor—sensibly—does he try to outwrite Matthew, Mark, Luke or John as he retells their familiar tales.
The novel's most striking sequence is a dialogue between Jesus and Satan, who snorts like a horse at one point. As Mailer writes, " 'Your father,' said the Devil, '... does not even have the power to command His own Jews in their own land even though so many see him as the only One. You would do better to consider the breadth of His rages; they are unseemly for a great god.... Whereas I confide to you that a hint of disobedience and a whiff of treachery are among the joys of life, and are to be ranked with its spoils rather than its evils.'
" 'That is not so,' I [Jesus] was able to answer. 'My Father is God, and of many dimensions and of all dimensions.' But my words tasted like straw."
That highly spirited exchange suggests how much more fascinating this novel might well have been had Mailer not demurred with such uncharacteristic timidity in the face of his supremely imposing protagonist. (Random House, $22)
by Joseph Kanon
Spring 1945: An Army security officer is murdered in Santa Fe, an apparent victim of an assault by a homosexual lover. That's what Washington wants it to be. But for investigator Michael Connolly, the case becomes a thrilling footnote to history. The victim worked at nearby Los Alamos, where the best minds in the country are laboring to develop the weapon that will end the war. Could the murder be related to the super-secret Manhattan Project? As Connolly races to untangle the social, political and sexual thicket that surrounds the project in search of an answer, the countdown to a new age has already begun.
Author Kanon, a former publishing executive, evokes the time and place of the atomic bomb's birth with a minimalist's eye and a storyteller's gift. He seamlessly weaves his fictional extras together with actual figures like scientists Edward Teller and Robert Oppenheimer in a way that brings this portentous page of history to vivid life. (Broadway, $25)
by Patricia Bosworth
In Anything Your Little Heart Desires, Patricia Bosworth explores the chasm between public success and private failure, between political achievement and domestic disaster. The center of this deeply felt memoir is Bosworth's father, Bartley Crum, a lawyer who defended blacklisted screenwriters and directors against the anticommunist hysteria that swept Hollywood in the 1950s and who—as a member of the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry into Palestine—helped establish Israel as a homeland for Jews displaced by World War II.
Growing up in San Francisco, Manhattan and on the family ranch in Aptos, Calif., Patricia and her brother Bart Jr. soon realized that the veneer of glamor gilding their parents' lives (Crum represented Rita Hayworth in her divorce from Aly Khan) barely concealed a leaden core of misery and rage. Bosworth's mother was an embittered, failed writer, given to passionate affairs with inappropriate men. Alcoholic and addicted to Seconal and Nembutal, Crum repeatedly attempted suicide until finally he succeeded, and Bosworth's brother also killed himself while he was away at college.
Absorbing as this is, it is not until the end, when the writer learns a startling fact about her father, that the litany of tragic events comes into some kind of perspective. At this point, one wishes that Bosworth had more closely examined her father's life through the lens of this new information. Still, this is an admirable book, a bittersweet tribute to a man of great conviction who worked for justice and world peace but failed to settle the dangerous strife within himself and at home. (Simon & Schuster, $27.50)
by Jeanne White with Susan Dworkin
The old saw that suffering ennobles rarely does much to comfort the sufferer. But there is something comforting, as well as painful, about the experience of reading Jeanne White's account of the much publicized illness and death from AIDS of her son Ryan—and of the strength and sense of purpose that she has gained as a legacy of Ryan's brief life.
The book begins with an account of Jeanne's early years as a "straight arrow" in a close-knit Indiana family; of her work on an assembly line in an electronics factory; her troubled marriage to Wayne White; the birth of her two children Ryan and Andrea; the difficult—but manageable—struggle to cope with Ryan's hemophilia. These troubles pale in comparison to the moment when Ryan is diagnosed with AIDS, contracted from the blood products used to control his bleeding.
Much is familiar here: the media blitz, Ryan's legal battle for the right to attend school, the bigotry and rampant homophobia to which the family was exposed. But what's interesting is the story of how tragedy thrust an ordinary family into the maelstrom of celebrity culture (among the stars who befriended Ryan were Michael Jackson and Elton John) and emboldened a woman convinced that she wasn't "smart enough to go to college" to address congressional committees and travel the world for the Ryan White Foundation. The woman we meet in these pages is quite unlike the girl who wanted only to "get married and have the happy homemaker life." Her dramatic transformation might make readers believe, as Jeanne White does, that her suffering may indeed have served a higher purpose. (Avon, $22)
by Randy Wayne White
This is the perfect novel for mystery fans with a taste for exotic settings, Schwarzenegger-style mayhem and scenes in which gorgeous lesbians get entangled with revolutionaries. Its hero is the quick-thinking, terse-talking Doc Ford, a marine biologist and CIA alum with a collection of nut-case chums. Summoned to Havana by his buddy Tomlinson, a calamity-prone mystic imprisoned after his boat blundered into Cuban waters, the tough-but-tender Ford embarks on a rescue mission that leads to a plot to assassinate Fidel Castro, a search for the secret grave of Christopher Columbus and a flight through the jungle with a Canadian businessman who proves to be a double agent. Whew!
Although some characters could have been fleshed out in a more satisfying way and a romantic involvement between Ford and his smart-mouthed lady friend simply peters out, the narrative moves along smartly. Most readers won't stop to fret over the surfeit of subplots or the far-fetched ending. White, a Florida-based journalist and outdoorsman who chronicles his own Doc Ford-ish exploits in Outside magazine, is an engaging storyteller. He has a naturalist's eye and an ironic sensibility that make this genre novel add up to more than the sum of its parts. (Putnam, $22.95)
by Eric Bowman
Beach Book of the Week
FICTIONAL BRITISH WRITER TERENCE KEYES HAS A FIENDISH idea. This time, however, it has nothing to do with the plot line for his next bestseller. The author plans to stage a series of actual, high-profile murders and makes a respected national news anchor his first victim. As an added twist, Keyes—under the guise of researching his new book—has cleverly arranged to attach himself to the hotshot Manhattan detective heading up the murder investigation.
The boldness of Keyes's scheme is matched by that of the pseudonymous Bowman (whom the publisher will identify only as the award-winning author of several screenplays and miniseries), tipping the trump card of most mysteries—whodunit?—on the very first page. It's a gamble that more than pays off thanks to the novel's ingenious construction, fascinating forensic details and mesmerizing cop/killer mind games. (Putnam, $24.95)
>Helen Bransford
THE KINDEST CUT
HELEN BRANSFORD CALLS IT HER "trigger event"—the night two years ago when her novelist husband, Jay McInerney, came home from interviewing Julia Roberts for a magazine profile. "I told her all about you," McInerney assured his wife. "Well, everything but your age," he amended. "I didn't tell her that." Bransford, then 47 to McInerney's 40, immediately dialed M for makeover—of the plastic surgery kind—and wrote about the experience in her guide Welcome to Your Facelift.
"It made me less self-conscious. I felt liberated," says Bransford, the mother—via surrogacy—of 2½ &-year-old twins. In 2½ hours of surgery, she had her eyes tightened, dermabrasion above her lips and under her eyes and a general peel to combat sun exposure.
Since her own nip, tuck and tighten, Bransford, a jewelry designer and contributor to Vogue, has become something of an expert at spotting other people's surgical makeovers. "It takes one to know one," she says. "Anybody in their 40s and beyond and who makes their living by their faces and is astonishingly great-looking, just book it. They've done something, and they've been doing little somethings for years."
Bransford, who divides her time between a 10-acre farm in Nashville and an apartment in Manhattan, has seen her inspiration several times since the surgery. "I told Julia," says Bransford, " 'I had a facelift because of you, and I want to thank you.' I'm not sure she knew what to say."
- Contributors:
- Ralph Novak,
- J.D. Reed,
- Francine Prose,
- Michelle Green,
- Pam Lambert,
- 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!
