Be incredibly careful what you wish for: You may get it. That's the message of this latest thriller—a neat variation on the old Faust story—from the megaselling author of Absolute Power and Total Control.
LuAnn Tyler, a 20-year-old truck-stop waitress with movie-star looks and an undeveloped mind, is living in a trailer in rural Georgia with her loser boyfriend Duane and their baby Lisa, dreaming of a better life. Enter one Mr. Jackson, the devil of this tale, with a suitably diabolical offer. A brilliant, sexually ambiguous, murderous character, Jackson has found a way to fix the National Lottery. And if LuAnn follows his instructions without question, he will guarantee her a minimum of $50 million, just as he did the last 11 winners (while pocketing several times that figure himself). LuAnn, a good soul at bottom, at first resists but later, in desperation, makes her pact with the satanic Jackson. Years pass before her better nature reasserts itself and her real struggles begin.
The novel takes a while to get going as Baldacci assembles his cast and lays out the lottery device. But the momentum picks up in the second half, when a wiser and more polished LuAnn acquires a strapping love interest and goes after the man, or monster, who made her. Baldacci fans will find The Winner aptly named. (Warner, $25)
by Mordecai Richler
Few things in life give 67-year-old TV producer Barney Panofsky more pleasure than single-malt scotch, Monte Cristo cigars and his beloved Montreal Canadiens hockey team. Add wickedly vengeful pranks to the list and you've made a good start toward understanding the lead character in Mordecai Richler's 10th novel.
Pricked by a malicious biographer's threat to unmask him as a "wife-beater, an intellectual fraud, a purveyor of pap, a drunk with a penchant for violence and probably a murderer," Panofsky launches a preemptive strike by writing his memoirs. His comic account wends through his halcyon days in '50s Paris and three failed marriages before taking up his role in the mysterious drowning of his best friend, an obscure literary genius named Boogie Moscovitch. Inconveniently, a failing memory trips Barney up and the story careens from clever riposte to maudlin confession.
Ultimately, whether Panofsky killed Moscovitch matters little to the reader. Barney's devotion to his ex-wife Miriam transforms this novel from a whodunit to a touching tale of love lost. He may have lived a wasted life and learned to regret his dirty tricks, but thanks to Richler's hilarious and piercingly sympathetic storytelling, Barney becomes too heartbreakingly human for us to sit in judgment. (Knopf, $25)
by John McCabe
Unlike many stars of his vintage, James Cagney (1899-1986) endures in the public consciousness for his incandescent work in more than 60 films, among them The Public Enemy (1931)—yes, that's the one where he squashed a grapefruit in Mae Clarke's face—and Yankee Doodle Dandy, for which he won the 1942 Academy Award as Best Actor.
Author John McCabe tracks the amiable Cagney from his Irish roots in New York City through his vaudeville days and on to Hollywood, with an analysis of each film and engaging accounts of high jinks with the Irish actors—like Pat O'Brien and Spencer Tracy—who became his best friends. But the lack of analysis about Cag-ney's personal life detracts from this biography. Much is made of Cagney's love for his wife, Willie, but halfway through the book we are told, in only 14 lines, that after years of hoping for children Cagney learned that he was infertile, Willie arranged the adoption of two children, and that, "in view of Jim's need to study his roles," the couple had another, smaller house built on their Coldwater Canyon property, where the children lived. Subsequent scattered references to the kids suggest, not surprisingly, a painful estrangement from their parents.
McCabe ghostwrote James Cagney's 1976 autobiography and became his friend. Cagney's lack of intimate detail suggests discretion, but it lessens the impact of an otherwise admirable book. (Knopf, $29.95)
by Robert Olen Butler
In a deceptively understated manner, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Robert Olen Butler introduces us to a pair of improbable modern lovers: Ben is an aging Vietnam vet, haunted by war dreams, who has returned to Saigon "because of a desire just like that one you can have about sex, the desire for things to be whole." Tien, a virginal tour guide, is the daughter of a barmaid who used to sell her body to American GIs, one of whom is Tien's father. Since her mother fled Saigon in 1975 in fear of what the triumphant North Vietnamese might do to women who consorted with Americans, Tien (who was abandoned) has been grappling alone with her mixed-race heritage and the perils of the modern communist state. In each other's arms, Ben and Tien discover a sensuality and solace that had been lacking in both their lives.
Bit by bit, as they shed their outer garments, the lovers also shed their respective layers of mistrust and fear, revealing their darkest inner secrets. The unsettled Ben confesses to a wartime love affair with a Vietnamese woman who was a prostitute; Tien reveals that she prays daily for the spirit of the father whom she has never met, a man who she has been told perished in the war. In that sharing, Butler plants the seeds of a tragedy that will haunt his readers long after they finish this lyrical love story. (Holt, $23)
by Jeff Shesol
It would take a novelist of genius to invent a tale as vividly eventful as this account of the personal and political feud that haunted two of the century's most intriguing Americans, Lyndon B. Johnson and Robert F. Kennedy.
For 475 absorbing pages, Shesol, a historian and Rhodes Scholar (and creator of Thatch, a nationally syndicated political comic strip), traces the obsessive rivalry between these two men, which began in the early '50s and escalated during the 1960 race for the Democratic presidential nomination, when Bobby managed his brother Jack's ultimately successful campaign, beating out LBJ. While Johnson felt himself often on the sidelines as Vice President, he watched the younger RFK's influence expand as the nation's Attorney General and the ultimate presidential right-hand man. The antagonism, fueled by both men's arrogance and insecurities, continued right until Senator Kennedy's assassination in June 1968, after his California primary victory in a presidential campaign begun to challenge Johnson.
Shesol isn't a great prose stylist, but, drawing on a wealth of published memoirs, he has a good eye for the telling anecdote and revealing quote. And in his hands, the book's supporting characters—Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Pierre Salinger, Bill Movers, Robert McNamara and Jackie Kennedy, among many others—are complex and fascinating. More remarkably, Shesol is so evenhanded that it's impossible to know where his own sympathies lie, even in this emotionally charged story about the vital, substantial figures who dominated American politics not all that long ago. (Norton, $32.50)
by Drew Fetherston
For centuries people looked across the English Channel and dreamed of new ways to traverse its turbulent waters. Any number of schemes were hatched; some involved roadways held up by balloons, while others would float on the water. But not until 1987, when construction of the channel tunnel (popularly dubbed the Chunnel) began in earnest, did any plan get beyond the drawing board.
Newsday business writer Drew Fetherston tells the story of how the Chunnel was dug, exploring the extraordinary technical demands, political sensitivities and diplomatic wrangling surrounding the task. Though his account lacks drama, Fetherston does successfully draw out the larger cultural conflicts between the continental French and the isolationist British societies and capture the moon-shot quality of the Chunnel challenge: No one knew, for example, whether two tunnels being dug from opposite coasts (as the final blueprints specified) would actually meet. When the Chunnel finally opened for passenger traffic in 1995, it was years late and seriously in debt, but it was a modern miracle, of sorts.
Like Lindbergh's solo crossing of the Atlantic, the Chunnel shows what humanity can overcome with patience, a design and a dream. (Times Books, $35)
by Ann Rule
Page-Turner of the Week
AT 44, DEBORA GREEN, M.D., SEEMED to have it all. She was a witty, forceful woman, an oncologist who had retired from practice and focused on her husband and three children. But on the night of Oct. 23, 1995, in upscale Prairie Village, Kans., her six-bedroom home was consumed in a savage fire, and her son Tim, 13, and daughter Kelly, 6, died amid the flames. Her daughter Lissa, 10, escaped the blaze. True-crime author Rule (Small Sacrifices) goes behind the physician's enviable lifestyle to detail an unraveling life: Green, it seems, had grappled for years with drug abuse, uncontrollable rage and paranoia. Her husband, fellow doctor Michael Farrar, had left her just weeks before the fire, after falling critically ill with a condition that proved to be a nearly undetectable kind of poisoning from castor bean seeds. Farrar, a cardiologist, rightly suspected his wife. Green was charged with two counts of capital murder and the attempted murder of Michael and Lissa, as well as arson. She entered a plea of no contest and was sentenced to 40 years in a Kansas state prison. With commendable thoroughness and an innate sense of cultural resonance, author Rule offers a must-read story of the '90s American dream turned, tragically and perhaps predictably, to self-absorbed ashes. (Simon & Schuster, $23)
>MAINE CHANCE Folks in Maine are known as a feisty lot; at the moment they're fighting it out over Dorothy Allison's critically acclaimed Bastard out of Carolina—a 1992 novel centering on a girl's struggle with poverty and sexual abuse. In November the state supreme court ruled that a local school board could, in effect, keep the book from being taught. Some Mainers, however, are objecting: Author Tabitha King, wife of Stephen King, has cofunded a drive to get free copies to high schoolers. "They haven't banned the book," says Allison, "[but] it is the modern version of censorship."
SLEUTH REVIVAL Agatha Christie's supercilious Belgian detective, Hercule Poirot, is back for what is surely his last adventure: Adapted from a 1930 Christie play Black Coffee will be published next September, to coincide with the 108th birthday of the grand dame of mystery (who died in 1976). "Christie's biographer Charles Osborne uncovered the play, which everyone had forgotten," explains St. Martin's editor Keith Kahla. "Essentially it is the very last Poirot novel Christie herself plotted and wrote the dialogue for." Expect an afterword by Christie's grandson, who comanages the estate.
- Contributors:
- William Plummer,
- Erica Sanders,
- Jeff Brown,
- Jill Smolowe,
- Ralph Novak,
- Steven Cook,
- J.D. Reed,
- Lan N. Nguyen.
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!
