In this affecting first novel, Medoff captures the angst of female gen Xers as manifested in eating disorders, random sexual encounters and a vague sense of hopelessness. The main character, Frannie Hunter, has all those problems as well as the additional misery of living at home and working as a waitress in a "dirty duck apron serving plates of fried cheese." Frannie has a mother who is obsessed with her own appearance and everyone else's, a passive father and a younger sister, Shelly, who was on her way to Harvard until her weight dipped so dangerously that she had to be hospitalized. On the plus side, Frannie has a best friend, Abby Friedman, a successful Manhattan lawyer, who remains her soulmate when it comes to insecurities about being desirable and one-night stands.
Everyone is a mess in this book, but the author manages to give her characters some dignity, even the Rat Boys (Frannie's and Abby's pet name for the unspeakable men they've bedded). Medoff, who spent nearly a decade battling pathological eating disorders, has written a funny novel that confronts the terrors of anorexia and other modern ills with empathy and understanding. (Regan-Books, $23)
by David Sedaris
These days Sedaris is a New York City playwright and frequent commentator for National Public Radio, but in past lives he has been a fruit picker, paint stripper and one of Santa's elves at Macy's. He's also a smartass born and raised, as he proved in his sassy 1994 debut, Barrel Fever. Sedaris is all grown up in this brilliant new collection of autobiographical essays, but he has lost none of his mordant edge.
Revisiting his childhood—spent largely in the South—Sedaris recounts a summer he spent in Greece ("Camp lasted a month, during which time I never once had a bowel movement") and the time he discovered Shakespeare and tried to introduce Elizabethan speech into rural North Carolina ("Be there not garments to launder and iron free of turbulence?" he asks his mother. "Get thee to work, damnable lady!").
Sedaris spares no details about his dysfunctional family or his own harebrained odysseys (including shoplifting for quadriplegic friends and his stay at a nudist colony). But there's wisdom in these stories—fables, really, with their touching, cautionary lessons at the end (his rueful account of his mother's death from lung cancer is the book's most moving). For all the laughs, Sedaris lays himself bare, faults and all. (Little Brown, $21.95)
by Jay Neugeboren
After Robert Neugeboren suffers his first mental breakdown in 1962 at 19, his is not the only life changed forever. Over the next three decades, while Robert moves in and out of psychiatric wards—being treated and mistreated first for schizophrenia, then manic depression—his brother and parents seesaw between hope of a magical cure and disappointment at Robert's failure to improve. As doctors alternately blame biology and sociology for his condition, the family's guilt, anger and frustration only deepen.
In this unflinching memoir, older brother Jay, a novelist, details both Robert's struggle to survive and the battles he and his parents wage against an illness that "exhausts, strains and informs all the moments and relations of a family's life." After his father dies and his mother, unable to tolerate Robert's illness any longer, decamps to Florida, Jay assumes rigorous oversight of Robert's hospital care. He is convinced that institutional cruelty and neglect are as responsible for his brother's mental torture as anything else. Though both his story and absurdly long sentences could use pruning, Neugeboren delivers an account that is loving and fascinating. (Morrow, $24)
by Diane Johnson
Isabel (Izzy) Walker, like Henry James's Isabel Archer (The Portrait of a Lady), is an innocent abroad. A film school dropout, she has come from Santa Barbara to Paris ostensibly to help her pregnant stepsister Roxeanne, in fact to delay getting her life in gear. But Roxy, a part-time poet, and full-time romantic and Francophile, needs more help than Izzy had calculated.
Roxy's husband, Charles-Henri, a man of "resolute insouciance," has fallen in love with another woman—a married Czech sociologist named Magda, to be precise—and wants a divorce. Between tending Roxy's 3-year-old daughter Genie, doing odd jobs for other expatriates and trying to make sense of the French, Izzy embarks on an affair with Roxy's uncle by marriage, a political-pundit boulevardier who has a large following, endless charm, almost 50 years on his fresh-faced California mistress, and a wife.
In much the way that Alison Lurie wittily played a disintegrating marriage against the backdrop of the Vietnam War in The War Between the Tates, so does Johnson (a National Book Award finalist) use the battles between the Serbs and Croats as counterpoint and commentary in Le Divorce, which deals glancingly with the long-running conflict in Bosnia. And like Lurie's work, Le Divorce is a terrifically adroit comedy of manners. Witness Izzy's encounter with her future ex-brother-in-law: " 'La petite Isabel? ça va?' I am tall, but in France anything is petite if you want it to seem negligible, like a petit problem or a petit invoice...." Unfortunately the novel runs out of steam at the end, with matters resolved in what seems too perfunctory a fashion. But for the most part Le Divorce is le champagne cocktail with more than a petit kick. (Dutton, $23.95)
by Dennis McFarland
Splintering families are a McFarland specialty. The author's quietly mesmerizing first novel, The Music Room, dealt with a young man's attempts to come to terms with his brother's suicide, while School for the Blind centered on the complex and troubled memories of an elderly brother and sister. Now, in the phantasmagoric and frustrating A Face at the Window, McFarland is decidedly upping the stakes. He focuses on a fragile family and the way it's all but undone by a troubling clan of ghosts.
The story is narrated by Cookson Selway, the son of a sociopath who has a history of drug abuse (he made a bundle in the cocaine trade) and a less documented link to the paranormal. With their beloved only child settled in boarding school, Selway and his wife, a mystery novelist, settle for a protracted stay in England at a hotel recommended by their broker. But almost immediately, Selway begins hearing music no one else can hear, seeing people who register only with him. He becomes increasingly attached to these spirits and increasingly detached from the realm of the real—putting his marriage, ultimately his life, at peril.
The story is rarely less than compelling, and McFarland's angular prose gleams. But this new novel never makes sufficiently clear why the ghosts glom on to Selway. McFarland seems to suggest that the gaggle of ghosts represent different aspects of the troubled Selway, but the connection is never quite fused. This journey into the paranormal begs for a bigger payoff. (Broadway, $25)
Photographs by John Gossage
In his stand-up days, Robin Williams used to pause between manic bits and marvel, "Reality—what a concept!" John Gossage might agree, but his pictures aren't punch lines, they're fiercely honed reminders that nothing is more mysterious and unsettling than the ordinary.
In his third book, the 50-year-old Washington-based photographer goes to the beach—with grainy surveillance film and extreme telephoto lenses. Standing on the California side of the border, he observes people splashing and lolling on the Mexican side. His technique flattens the scene, reducing faces to silhouettes, extracting body language. These are spy photos of a sort, coded glimpses of an intriguing alien species that just happens to be us.
In the book's second section, Gossage treads the homely trails and hiding places used by illegal immigrants crossing the border into California. He concludes with riddles, a third section examining details of neat residential areas just over the U.S. side of the border. In a flight of concrete steps stained by running water or in a short length of rope hanging from a garage door handle, Gossage finds triggers for the complex emotions that lurk within his tense and often startling compositions. (Nazraeli Press, $45)
by Jeffery Deaver
Page-Turner of the Week
LINCOLN RHYME HAS, HE BELIEVES, NO reason to live. Four years after an on-the-job accident turned him from top NYPD forensic expert into tormented quadriplegic, the bedridden Rhyme arranges a date with his very own Dr. Death. Fortunately for fans of harrowing, psychologically driven suspense, however, something stands between the criminalist and his quietus—a forensically savvy serial kidnapper who, on the eve of a UNESCO peace conference, is making Manhattan his personal killing field.
Bullied into assisting by his former colleagues, Rhyme taps balky but beautiful Amelia Sachs, the beat cop who discovered the first victim, to be his legs. Unexpected sparks—intellectual and otherwise—soon fly between the pair. Mixing fascinating forensics, quirky characters and stunning plot surprises like the veteran thriller writer he is, Deaver gives new meaning to the phrase "chilled to the bone." (Viking, $22.95)
>LET GEORGE DO IT Elmore Leonard wanted the Joker to star in the movie version of his latest, Out of Sight; instead he got Batman. "I saw Jack Nicholson for the part," says Leonard, 71, who was surprised, but then pleased, that ER hunk and current caped crusader George Clooney was signed to play an old bank robber in the movie, set to film in October. Says Leonard of the grizzled actor: "He's about the only one of the younger guys who could pull it off."
NO YOKE A payout in the high six figures may have been the main reason Margaret Atwood sold the film rights to her new bestseller, Alias Grace, to Jodie Foster's Egg Pictures, but it wasn't the only reason. "I love the name of the production company," says Atwood, 57. "I've always been very fond of eggs. I put eggs in my books a lot. It caught my attention immediately."
MOST SAPPY FELLA There is cold, hard cash in writing soft, warm novels. Just ask Nicholas Sparks, whose fuzzy 1996 debut, The Notebook, was snapped up for $1 million by Warner Books. Last week his next book, Message in a Bottle, was sold to the same publisher for an even higher seven-figure sum (film rights went for $1.5 million). "I wanted a follow-up to The Notebook," says Sparks, 31, "that would make readers very happy." So far at least one person is smiling.
>Michael Ondaatje and Anthony Minghella
AUTHOR! AUTHOR!
SOME WERE THERE BECAUSE they cherished the book. Others showed up because they flipped for the movie. Quite a few loved the book, the movie and the music. Whatever the reason, a sold-out crowd of 1,500 jammed New York City's stately Town Hall and paid $10 a pop to see author Michael Ondaatje and director-screenwriter Anthony Minghella, two of the men behind The English Patient experience.
"This is a celebration of a remarkable event," Minghella, 43, told the crowd. "Which is that a marvelous book is written and somehow even a movie from it hasn't spoiled it." The genial British filmmaker was referring to his own feat of Hollywood alchemy: turning Ondaatje's lyrical 1992 novel into a sweeping epic that earned 12 Academy Award nominations and, so far, more than $48 million at the box office—all without alienating the novel's many fans. "I couldn't imagine how it could be made into a film," said one such devotee, archivist Ellen Sowcheck, 45. "But the movie was very much in the spirit of the book. It didn't disappoint."
Neither did the evening's main attractions. After an orchestra under the direction of the film's composer, Gabriel Yared, played a song from the movie, Sri Lankan-born Ondaatje, 53, and Minghella read parts from the novel and the screenplay, respectively. The unusual event ended with a signing that saw dozens line up for autographs, some bearing novels, others clutching screenplays. "The film takes the audience seriously," explained Minghella, "and they are taking the film seriously."
To put it mildly. "I'm possessed," said David John Ackermann, 36, a composer. "I saw the film eight times in four weeks!" Even hardened movie types couldn't help getting swept up by the story of a count, a plane crash and a whole lot of sand. "In the making of it," said Ondaatje, "we were conscious that for everyone—the actors, the director, the whole company—it was a very emotional thing. And that's what made it a special, timeless film."
Get up-to-the-minute celebrity news and photos on your cellphone, iPhone or Blackberry at www.people.com!
