With its brooding Irish backdrop, lyrical language and shrouded secrets, The Nature of Water and Air is a modern myth. Clodagh, a wild and wily girl whose father and twin sister have died, lives in a run-down mansion on Ireland's east coast with her unstable mother, Agatha.
Clodagh half believes her mother is a selkie: half human, half seal. For her part, Agatha looks haunted, wears a sealskin gown and often wanders down to the sea at night. Consumed by a curiosity "that would grow in me like an affliction," Clodagh edges toward an unspeakable act. At times McBride, a poet, drives her debut novel perilously close to the gothic, but she hits the brakes in time. (Scribner, $13)
Bottom Line: This saga casts a spell
by Bebe Moore Campbell
Once upon a time in a place called Los Angeles, two fair young maids dream of a better life as they scrub toilets in a fancy hotel. Hosanna, who is black, and Gilda, a Holocaust survivor, become friends, then business partners. But evil forces—betrayal and prejudice—gobble up their happy ending.
Fifty years later Hosanna's daughter—and heiress to her mother's rage—must reclaim what Gilda, now head of a giant cosmetics company, took from her family. Campbell has created an urban fairy tale spanning three generations, but she doesn't sugarcoat the realities facing her characters. (Putnam, $25.95)
Bottom Line: Honor this debt
By Katie Roiphe
A demented haberdasher, a cat with invisibility issues, a queen who lusts for capital punishment. Ever wonder what sort of deliciously renegade mind invented the Alice's Adventures in Wonderland characters? Meet Charles L. Dodgson (pen name: Lewis Carroll), a stuttering bachelor and amateur photographer who was teaching at Oxford when he met an enchanting girl named Alice Liddell.
In an accomplished first novel informed by unpublished manuscripts, letters and Dodgson's diary, Roiphe imagines a love story of sorts. In Victorian England, Dodgson avoided women his own age to spend time with Alice, the daughter of his college dean. For four years he took her photograph, he wrote her letters, he told her stories—until the day Mrs. Liddell wrote to say that his visits were no longer welcome. The reasons why have been deleted from the historical record.
Roiphe's impressionistic style is packed with period and biographical detail. Her Dodgson, a shy insomniac, could be the spokesman for Victorian repression. Yet she paints a delicately convincing portrait of a chaste courtship that culminates, in Roiphe's rendering, in a near fatal opium overdose. (Dial, $23.95)
Bottom Line: Class, inside the looking glass
By P.J. O'Rourke
Nobody dishes an insult like P.J. O'Rourke, and as a conservative humorist, he has the field almost to himself. Of the Clinton impeachment, he asks, "When had the federal government spent millions in such an entertaining fashion? Certainly not by funding PBS." On autopathographies: "Out of chaos the memoir brings order—a huge order from a major bookstore chain." But in this collection of seamfully assembled magazine pieces, the sound of your laughter at times will be overwhelmed by the clang of O'Rourke's elbow in your ribs. (Atlantic Monthly, $25)
Bottom Line: Beats watching Politically Incorrect
By Glen David Gold
Page-turner of the week
Lasting fame may have eluded the real Carter the Great, but in Glen David Gold's transmogrification, the prewar illusionist is larger than life. A blur of fact and fiction, sleight-of-hand secrets and crackling intrigue, Gold's first novel opens in 1923, as Carter "kills" President Warren G. Harding in his stage act. Two hours later, the President, who had confided to Carter a "great and terrible secret" that could tear the country apart, suddenly dies.
As Carter is pursued by a motley cast of characters, Gold conjures up his adventurous past. Born into a prominent San Francisco family, Carter discovers a magic book at age 9 while stuck at home during a rare blizzard. His obsession takes him from the ignominy of a ragtag vaudeville tour (traveling with farm animals) to the height of fame (hanging with Harry Houdini), to the edge of the world (attacked by pirates) and back down to earth (nearly bankrupted by his extravagant illusions).
Gold saves his best trick for last. The secret that bedeviled Harding turns out to be, to modern eyes, amusingly mundane. By then the only mystery left is what Gold can do for an encore.
(Hyperion, $24.95) Bottom Line: Mesmerizing
By Rick Bragg
Four years ago Bragg's All Over but the Shoutin' gave tongue to the tale of his poor mama Margaret's struggle to raise him and two brothers in the '60s after she finally had her fill of their father, a mean drunk. Ava's Man, just as beautifully told as its predecessor, is about Bragg's maternal grandfather, Charlie Bundrum, who with his wife, Ava, struggled to raise Margaret—and six other younguns—in Georgia and Alabama during and after the Depression.
Charlie was a roofer, carpenter, devoted father, fistfighter, occasional jailbird, banjo-plucker, buck-dancer and bootlegger. Too strong a taste for mountain-made moonshine helped do him in at age 51, a year before Bragg was borm in 1959. Through interviews with kin who remember Charlie, Bragg has quilted a richly detailed story that is in contrast to the plain poor folks it's about. A tidy yard is "as neat as a widow's closet"; a perfect blue sky is a "bluebird day." For readers who like their writing southern-style, Bragg's is as toothsome as a catfish supper. He is every bit the equal of two other Alabama-bred authors—Harper Lee and Truman Capote. (Knopf, $25)
Bottom Line: Author has Bragging rights to one fine book
By Laura Esquivel
From the moment Júbilo Chi is born with a smile on his face, he connects with people. Growing up to be a telegraph operator in 1940s Mexico, he senses what is in people's hearts before they do. He hooks people up.
Sadly, the wires are crossed between Júbilo and his wife, and the two separate for mysterious reason amid much anguish. The telegraph has given way to the Internet and Júbilo is on his deathbed by the time the couple's daughter Lluvia sets out to solve the riddle.
The sensuousness of Esquivel's writing in the popular novel Like Water for Chocolate has dried up this time. Using little dialogue, she relies awkwardly on description, leaving Swift as Desire feeling a bit parched. (Crown, $22)
Bottom Line: Fuzzy connection
By Sue Miller
San Francisco, the present: Cath, fresh from her second divorce, her children grown and scattered, finds herself alone.
Maine, 1919: Georgia is diagnosed with tuberculosis and sent to a sanitarium, where she falls in love with a dying boy.
Maine, the present: Cath seeks solace in her grandparents' home, where she muses on their seemingly idyllic marriage and what went wrong with her own. But as she sifts through the journals that belonged to her grandmother—Georgia—a different story emerges.
Miller (While I Was Gone) probes marriage and family with characteristic insight and poignancy. Deftly interlacing past and present, she sees the things that waver just below the surface of everyday life: a first love, an old betrayal, even an abandoned town drowned by a lake when a river was dammed. Cath recalls seeing the submerged buildings on a long-ago fishing trip with her grandfather and remarking on how sad it was. "Well of course you're right," her grandfather said. "Sad, and beautiful too." (Knopf, $25)
Bottom Line: Past and present perfect
- Contributors:
- Christina Cheakalos,
- Amy Waldman,
- Erica Sanders,
- Kyle Smith,
- Julie K.L. Dam,
- David Cobb Craig,
- Laura Braunstein,
- Michelle Vellucci.
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!
