Venus, Kansas, is the kind of town where, after a funeral, neighbors bring a pot of baked beans to the home of the bereaved. It's also the setting of West of Venus, a funny, breezy, and deeply knowing first novel.
To a passing stranger, the restaurant where Holly Parker—the book's feisty, sympathetic heroine—works as a waitress might seem like an ordinary truck stop. In fact the Hearth is a hotbed of frustrated love and misdirected passion. Between orders, Holly is having an affair with her boss and fending off the tentative advances of the town veterinarian, even as she begins falling in love with a kindly state trooper named Gene. Meanwhile, Owen, Holly's 16-year-old son, is romantically involved with his former sixth-grade teacher. And Marvelle, Holly's best friend, is recovering from the shock of her husband's suicide.
Troy lets her complicated (yet perfectly ordinary) men and women reveal themselves through spirited, plausible dialogue. She is smart about the lengths to which we go to keep ourselves unhappy, about the emotional risks we take by being fully alive, and about the glorious, almost divine strength and resilience with which we humans, after falling from grace, can pick ourselves up and keep going. (Random House, $23)
by Frans Evenhuis and Robert Landau
In Hollywood's heyday, movie-studio publicists aimed their sights at luxurious new swimming pools as the ideal backdrop—exotic, even erotic, yet also symbolic of good clean fun—for photos that would springboard scantily attired stars into the nation's fantasy life. (They also helped turn backyard pools into the ultimate liquid asset.) As collected in this entertaining eyeful of a snapshot album, such celebs as Veronica Lake, Rita Hayworth, Sophia Loren and even Rudolph Valentino gamely preened, stretched out or actually got in the swim—like an exuberant Ronald Reagan playfully splashing his first wife, Jane Wyman. Originally destined for fan magazines, the sun-drenched images contrast with the accompanying real-life stories of lost love and swan-diving careers.
By the late 1960s, the comparatively innocent setup shots had all but vanished in the riptide of a public whose thirst for sensationalism had grown keener. Hollywood Poolside plunges us back into the era when glamor was still wet behind the ears. (Angel City, $29.95)
by John Lescroart
John Lescroart's latest has all the makings of a great thriller: breakneck pacing, electrifying courtroom scenes and a cast of richly crafted characters. There's the protagonist, a cunning San Francisco attorney named Mark Dooher, who may be ruthless enough to murder anyone who gets in his way; his pursuer, Detective Abe Glitsky, who tracks Dooher while exploring his own guilt over his wife's death from cancer; Wes Farrell, Dooher's ne'er-do-well best friend, who is vainly battling his own sense of failure; and Christina Carrera, a young attorney emotionally scarred by an ex-lover's betrayal, who is pursued, sexually, by the charismatic Dooher.
In the end, although Lescroart has seduced us with vivid scenes and neatly dispensed clues, we are left flat. Unable to wrap up the inherently messy question of legal versus moral guilt, the author lets his once-taut tale deteriorate into movie-of-the-week melodrama. The real guilty party here is the author, for wasting so promising a premise. (Delacorte, $24.95)
by Rick Archbold and Dana McCauley
At 11:40 p.m. on April 14, 1912, the unsinkable vessel gave a loud shudder, sending a pan of freshly baked rolls tumbling to the floor of the first-class galley. RMS Titanic had made its fatal contact with an iceberg. Not that many of its wealthier passengers would have noticed—most were already in their cabins, sated after eating a nine-course, Escoffier-inspired menu that included quail eggs with caviar and lobster thermidor. Part cookbook, part Edwardian history text, Dinner recreates the culinary world of that White Star-crossed liner with archival photographs and some 50 recipes served onboard, from the elegant first-class dining saloon to the simpler communal tables of third-class (where passengers ate a last supper of beef stew and pickles). The result is a handsome and sadly fascinating volume that could help you plan your own night to remember, right down to the specially folded napkins. (Hyperion, $24.95)
by Misha Defonseca
In the spring of 1941, Misha Defonseca was a plucky, Jewish 7-year-old when her parents were arrested in Nazi-occupied Belgium and she was sent to a safe house in Brussels. When she learned her guardian was about to hand her over to the Germans, she fled into the woods, beginning a four-year, 3,000-mile trek across the continent of Europe in the vain hope of finding her family. Along the way she witnessed massacres and rapes, she sneaked in and out of the Warsaw Ghetto, and she relied on the kindness of partisans, nuns and even wild wolves. Her lupine close encounters—being adopted by adults, curling up with them on cold nights, sharing regurgitated meat with the pups—are what distinguish this moving story from the accounts of other survivors of Nazi terror.
Some of the narrative strains credulity. It's an extraordinary young child who would be so resourceful as to chase crows away from a dead hare, skin it and line her shoes with fur. Or be so moral that, despite severe hunger, she would throw away candy from an SS soldier (who mistook her for Aryan). The book's publisher emphasizes that Misha is not testimony, but memoir—a literary form in which fact can be different from truth. It's up to the reader to decide which is which. (Mt. Ivy, $24.95)
by Richard Russo
So here's the deal," shouts the hero of Richard Russo's wicked campus satire. "Starting Monday I kill a duck a day until I get a budget." He's live on local television news, wearing a fake Groucho nose and eyebrows and clutching a frightened goose by the neck. What ails William Henry Devereaux Jr.? He's the interim chairman of a ludicrously combative English department at a cash-strapped, third-rate state university in the Pennsylvania boondocks—and that's just for starters.
With his wife out of town, his libido acting up, his health iffy, his daughter in the dumps and his job in jeopardy, Devereaux can't for the life of him stop wisecracking. A softhearted cynic, he deals as disastrously with the byzantine world of faculty politics—the goose-hostage ploy is but one amusing example—as he does with domestic challenges.
Poking fun at petty campus quarrels is a tired game, and to perk things up the author puts Devereaux through too many slapstick-flavored torments. The result is funny but frantic and, finally, hollow. A short sabbatical leave, and Russo—author of Nobody's Fool and two other fine novels—should be back in top form. (Random House, $25)
by Stephen Dobyns
Beach Book of the Week
PICTURE OUR TOWN AS RETOLD BY Stephen King, and you'll have some idea of the tantalizingly sinister crime wave sweeping Aurelius, N.Y. One by one, a trio of teens vanishes from the sleepy 'burb as if they had ridden their bicycles over the hill into another dimension, while their snatcher taunts his pursuers with increasing audacity.
Dobyns, author of the bestselling Saratoga mystery series, hooks us from the first sentence. But without detracting from the potent suspense of his tale, he also has other matters to relate. As we view the fall and winter of Aurelius's discontent through the dispassionate eyes of Dobyns's narrator, a high school biology teacher, we glimpse the undercurrents of desire and corruption beneath the surface of small-town life. After the suspicion unleashed by the crimes shatters this civilized veneer, it becomes clear just how skillfully Dobyns has set us up for a horror story of a very different sort. (Metropolitan, $23)
- Contributors:
- Francine Prose,
- Marlene McCampbell,
- Cynthia Sanz,
- Pam Lambert,
- Paula Chin,
- Adam Begley.
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!
