Despite its rather ominous title, McMurtry's newest is an adventure-filled, lighthearted farce. The Berry-benders, a comically dysfunctional British family of aristocrats, head to the U.S. in 1832 for a Missouri river expedition. With the family's guides, servants and assorted excesses of nobility, the story is like Gosford Park on a steamboat. McMurtry fillets his characters with wit: One woman among the Indians says she'd like to burn a white woman because "the people would enjoy a good burning, before it gets too cold."
A mismatched love affair grounds this Old World meets Old West tale, though the helter-skelter side action is as entertaining. While the boat is stuck on the river, the story's pace is like a ride through rapids. Characters meet an amazing variety of deaths, though McMurtry smartly saves a few: He is planning three more novels about the Berrybenders. (Simon and Schuster, $25)
Bottom Line: West world class act
By Raffaella Barker
Bridget Jones goes Green Acres in this daffy novel in diary form. Venetia Summers, a divorced mother, lives in the pastoral English countryside with her darling moppets Giles, Felix and the 3-year-old daughter she calls "the Beauty." With her carpenter beau, David, off building movie sets in the Brazilian rain forest, Venetia's emotional stability is buffeted daily by the joy and mayhem of child wrangling. In the meantime she tries to build a fashion business while fending off an amorous but disagreeable neighbor, Hedley Sale.
Barker's exquisite descriptions of the bucolic setting ("Petals drift and shore up like soap flakes") give much-needed relief from Venetia's nervous tics. The effect is engaging and often hilariously punctuated with Venetia's declarations of self-improvement ("Toy with the idea of abandoning alcohol until Easter. This too seems unwise..."). If some plot lines, such as the narrator's relationship with Hedley, are thinly developed, Barker draws us in by means of endearing characters (such as Minna, Venetia's fragile, patchouli-scented sister-in-law); a keen, if neurotic, wit ("The whole point of not being married is not having to deal with moments like this") and a touch that is as homey as a terry-cloth bathrobe. (Random House, $24.95)
Bottom Line: Warm and sunny
By Clare Naylor
Men are dogs. We've heard this before. In this version our spunky heroine, Liv, is 27 and English. She's living on GMT (that's Get Married Time) but gets jilted. So she and a friend visit Australia, where she not-so-coincidentally meets up with Ben, her teen sweetheart. A guy friend gives her a valuable tip about men: Metaphorically speaking, if you give them a little bit of your scent and stay just out of reach they will, much like dogs, keep sniffing the trail.
Readers will stay on Naylor's scent as she devises surprising ways to break up and re-pair brightly drawn characters (Liv, done up in an outfit with a high "cleavage-to-lower-body ratio," gets little for her trouble except "a proposal of bigamy"). While these love-hungry animals may suffer from ambivalence, imperfection and hangovers, they're never at a loss for a one-liner. Preparing for a date, Liv plans "enough eyelash batting to start a wind farm and power the national grid." Amid the comedy, though, the novel has a quietly confident, smart-girl sensibility. As for the dog metaphor: To Naylor's credit it doesn't get gnawed to death. (Ballantine, $12.95)
Bottom Line: Yip, yip, hooray!
By Tony Hillerman
Page-turner of the week
Hillerman's southwestern mysteries take noir and drive it out into the sunshine of mesas and canyons. Jim Leaphorn, the Navajo cop called the "legendary lieutenant" by colleagues, reteams with his testy ex-partner Jim Chee, who lures him out of retirement to help solve a new murder linked to lingering questions from the seemingly closed case of a convicted killer.
Complicating the mystery, Hillerman has tribal cop Bernadette Manuelitc compromise the scene of a murder because she is spooked by the Navajo belief that corpses are attended by malicious spirits. For their part the Native Americans in the book think white people are strange: They seem to be driven crazy by gold.
Manuelito, smart but human, personifies Hillerman's ability' to skillfully entwine cultural references; both she and Chee have the nuances to be protagonists of the series if Hillerman retires Leaphorn, the star of 14 books, permanently. The story plays out in a spare, deliberate manner, which provides a plausible fit for the aging, patient Leaphorn: "Well, now, Leaphorn thought, we Navajo are good at this waiting game. The Enduring Navajo, as one of the anthropologists had labeled them." Hillerman allows his twists enough space to unfurl teasingly, and there's plenty of majestic landscape to look at along the way. (HarperCollins, $25.95)
Bottom Line: Gale force hit
By David W. Shaw
This gripping tale of disaster showcases the best and worst in human nature. Launched in 1850, the Arctic was the largest and most luxurious steamship ever to have been built in America. Four years later it collided with the French steamship Vesta in a fog off Newfoundland and began to founder. Of the estimated 408 people on board the Arctic, 86 survived, none of them women or children. Worse, only 22 survivors were passengers at all.
Terrible events followed each other relentlessly as Capt. James Luce, a model of courage, first tried to aid the Vesta, then spent his last moments in command trying to impose order on the chaos of passengers and crew trying to save themselves.
Shaw, using media accounts of the day, has reconstructed a nearly minute-by-minute account full of startling coincidences and almost unbearable pathos. The suspense is palpable, but his true achievement is bringing to life the long-lost people aboard the Arctic. This book honors their memory. (Free Press, $25)
Bottom Line: Unsinkable
By David Lamb
When Vietnam War correspondent David Lamb returned to the country in 1997, he thought the U.S. involvement in the conflict would remain a sore subject among the Vietnamese. Despite the horror of the war and the hardship that followed, though, people who were once considered the enemy "treated me as an honored guest," writes Lamb.
Part political history, part memoir, Vietnam, Now has a simple thesis: It's time for the U.S. to reach a similar sense of closure. At times Lamb seems too eager to embrace the optimist's viewpoint and makes generalizations about the Vietnamese based on limited information. But the eloquently told stories of the vets (both Vietnamese and American) expats and widows he meets (others are profiled in Vietnam Passage: Journeys from War to Peace, a documentary narrated by Lamb that airs on PBS May 23) have an emotional resonance that drives home his point. As one elderly Vietnamese villager tells Lamb before giving him a farewell hug, "The war's past now. It belonged to my generation, not my sons'." (Public Affairs, $26)
Bottom Line: Eye-opening look at the other side
- Contributors:
- Joe Heim,
- Ting Yu,
- Joyce Cohen,
- Cathy Burke,
- Scott Nybakken,
- Julie K.L. Dam.
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!
