This poised first novel is told from the point of view of a grownup Richard Freely, whose nicely ordered and luxuriously appointed life is upended the summer he turns 5 (brother Jon is 7)—the summer his mother, Joan, decides to become a painter. Her success is immediate; she's the new darling of the capricious art world, selling an amazing 75 canvases in a single year. But just as quickly as Joan is embraced—and soon after she and her husband divorce and the boys move in with their father—she is discarded. "She was an abstract painter and the problem with abstraction is that your moods too clearly come through," says Richard. "No one wanted to hang pictures in their home that so clearly told—in the vocabulary of colors—that here was a woman who was depressed because she'd lost both her sons."
Richard, feeling partly responsible for his mother's fall from grace (it was he, after all, who decided to abandon his mother's downtown loft for his father's uptown apartment), is determined to recoup her life and career, mortgaging his own in the process. Lipsky's portrayal of the '70s art world is unblinking, his portrayal of the ties between parent and child deeply affecting. (Doubleday, $22.50)
by Stephen Fenichell
Despite all its many glorious forms—from clingy vinyl hip-huggers to Kodak film, Scotch tape and artificial heart valves—plastic doesn't get the respect it deserves. Mike Nichols's 1967 film The Graduate fixed the substance in infamy when the aimless grad played by Dustin Hoffman was given a fatuous tip: "I just want to say one word to you, Ben. Just one word...plastics."
Fenichell's quirky and informative history of plastic is also a scientific adventure full of successes and failures. An early stumble came in 1869, when prototype plastic-coated billiard balls were patented. One problem: If touched by a lighted cigar, the balls exploded. In 1875 a Newark plant that made celluloid dental plates spontaneously combusted, injuring workers. Newspapers of the era reported horror stories of men's shirt cuffs and women's dress buttons, both made of celluloid, bursting into flames on the wearers.
Over time, as technology improved, our lives (and landfills) filled with plastic. Sure, cotton, silk and wool are pleasing natural fibers. But before you snicker at plastic, imagine a life without credit cards, CDs, computer disks, movies, telephones, no-iron polyester and poker chips, not to mention those delightful pink flamingos that decorate our lawns. (HarperBusiness, $25)
by Bob Woodward
Bill Clinton is prominent on the book's cover, and Hillary steals the headlines by communing with Eleanor Roosevelt. But Woodward's examination of early machinations in the 1996 presidential race is ultimately about Bob Dole, probably because Clinton declined to be interviewed, while Dole spoke at length with the Washington Post journalist.
To be sure, Woodward offers plenty of reportage—too much for most of us—on political fund-raising, polling and internecine staff warfare. Still, the end result is a nuanced, humanized portrait of the man lampooned by late-night comedians as a wooden politician speaking in the imperial third person. When Dole's nastiest critic in the Republican primaries, Phil Gramm, dropped out of the race, Dole called to commiserate, recalling his own failed campaign in 1988. "As he spoke about defeat and what it meant," Woodward writes, "Dole suddenly broke down. His voice choked and his body started heaving." As for his speaking about himself as "Bob Dole," he explains to Woodward that he reflexively balks at using "I" or "me" because his mother taught him never to brag. Perhaps not the best trait to instill in a future politician, but appealing all the same.
Indeed, Dole comes across as an awkward campaigner, mortified by the self-promotion it requires and chafed by top aides who vigilantly try to keep him "on-message." And all the while, they live in terror of Dole's showing his age by stumbling in front of photographers. When he took a tumble in New Hampshire last year, a local TV station shot a tape of the fall. Network news organizations clamored for it, but the state's Republican senator Judd Gregg put in a call to the station, Woodward writes, and "the tape never got out."
President Clinton may have committed a slip of his own in not talking to Woodward. Defined by others, including his own staff, Clinton comes-off as the consummate political creature, stalking a message, any message, that will help get him reelected in November. Lots can happen between now and then, but the election is clearly Dole's to lose—if only among readers who manage to finish this book. (Simon & Schuster, $26)
by Sandra Tsing Loh
The frayed outskirts of Southern California paradise may not be familiar territory, but you'll recognize the inhabitants. Born too late for the affluent '80s, the rapidly aging post-gen Xers in these trenchant, bittersweet and very funny dispatches stumble toward the millennium in Payless shoes, plugging away at soul-deadening temp jobs until they can line up that lucrative, consulting-over-the-Internet-on-a-part-time-basis deal.
When she's not defining her demographics by degree of IKEA-lust, L.A. native Tsing Loh—a Buzz magazine columnist and NPR commentator—focuses her high beams on current phenomena, from Baywatch to cyber-sex to Nintendo Power Magazine, tempering even her most barbed observations with rueful, self-deprecating humor. If life has been all downhill since you were labeled a gifted child, let this wicked wit of the West tickle your reluctantly adult psyche. (River-head, $22.95)
by E. Annie Proulx
The accordion that passes from hand to hand in this novel is the instrumental version of the Hope Diamond, Typhoid Mary or Jessica Fletcher. Wherever it goes, illness, death and murder surely follow. Crimes begins in 1890 with a Sicilian who arrives in New Orleans and makes the perfect accordion, only to be killed soon after by a lynch mob. Proulx goes on to chronicle the grim lives of other immigrants—German-Americans founding a new town in South Dakota, Mexican field-workers in Texas, African sharecroppers in Mississippi—all of whom find the promised land sullied by poverty, racism and utterly senseless acts of violence.
Fans of the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Shipping News—a tough, poignant novel about redemption through love—are likely to be disappointed by Crimes. Though Proulx's ear is sharp and her prose smart and stinging, her characters remain remote, and the violence—people are impaled, decapitated, even boiled alive—seems viciously mechanical. In the end the accordion becomes a battered piece of junk, much like the country Proulx's characters inhabit. "Everything over there deliberately ruined," says one, "to prove it could be ruined." (Scribner, $25.)
by Zev Chafets
Beach Book of the Week
MIXING METAPHORS CAN BE DANGEROUS in the thriller biz, but Pontiac, Michigan-born author Chafets, who has served as Israel's top press officer, makes the most of it in a slam-dunk tale that intertwines professional basketball with Middle Eastern terrorism.
On a goodwill tour of Tel Aviv, beloved NCAA coach Digger Dawkins and NBA star forward Tyrone Holliman are kidnapped by a ruthless Palestinian splinter group. The fanatic surgeon Dr. Abu Walid, follower of a deaf and blind Moslem cleric in Dearborn, Mich., intends to use them to sabotage a fragile peace.
While the White House plays its own games with the Knesset over their fate, Holliman, a street-smart ghetto escapee, stays alive by teaching Walid's 6'5" teenage son how to play basketball and enjoy the fruits of stardom instead of Islam. As a rescue finally gets under way, Holliman is already ahead on the scoreboard. More exciting than a Final Four play-off, Hang Time will keep readers floating well above the rim. (Warner, $21.95)
>Margret Rey
MONKEY BUSINESS
"MY HUSBAND AND I ALWAYS LOVED animals," says Margret Rey, who, with H.A. (Hans Augusto) Rey, created one of the toddler set's most durable characters, the irrepressible Curious George. "Whenever we moved to a new town, we would immediately go to the zoo," she adds.
And move they did. After meeting in their native Hamburg, Germany, in the 1920s, the Reys married in Rio de Janeiro, where H.A., an artist and linguist, sold bathtubs for a relative. In 1935 the couple moved to Paris, where they worked as a freelance artist-writer team, first on advertising, then on a children's book, Cecily G and the Nine Monkeys. "We said, 'This is fun, let's do one about a monkey,' " Margret, now 90, recalls. "But we didn't call him Curious George. It was something stupid like Zoe-Zoe or Coco."
In 1940, just hours before Nazi troops paraded into Paris, the Reys headed south toward Portugal. "It was dark and raining, and all we had was our topcoats and our manuscripts," Margret says. "We rode our bicycles to the Spanish border and sold them to get train fare to Lisbon." Eventually the Reys, who had no children, made their way to New York City, where in 1941, Curious George was born. Six more titles followed in the series, which has sold more than 20 million copies worldwide in 12 languages and spawned more than 50 lucrative licenses. "There's a very nice apron and tote bag," says Margret, a widow living in Cambridge, Mass., who in May gave $1 million both to the Boston Public Library and to the city's Beth Israel Hospital. "Someone wanted to do sneakers, but they were ugly, and another tried pajamas, but the cloth was cheap, so I had to say no."
- Contributors:
- Joanne Kaufman,
- Mark Bautz,
- Mark Lasswell,
- Marlene McCampbell,
- Paula Chin,
- J.D. Reed,
- Kristin McMurran.
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!
