by Nicole Krauss
"I was a small part of something larger than myself. Yes, human life. Human! Life!" That habit of writing about the largest possible subjects in the cutest possible way captivated fans of Dave Eggers (A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius) and Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close). Now this sticky baton passes to Foer's wife, Nicole Krauss, who revisits many of his ideas, such as authors who "write" blank pages and immigrants offering malapropisms. Krauss's Alma is a New Yorker tracing her namesake in a book called The History of Love—a volume given to her mother by her father, now dead. Along the way, her path converges with those of a crotchety Eastern European immigrant as Krauss riffs about a blind photographer, people who fear they're made of glass and others who have adorable quirks or say whimsically profound things about how unbearably beautiful life is. The Eggers and Foer fans will mm probably stain this one with their tears, but others will find that despite her fine writing, Krauss, 30, is too often on the wrong side of the line between precocious and precious. "There are two types of people in the world," writes Krauss, "those who prefer to be sad among others, and those who prefer to be sad alone." And there are two types of readers in the world: those who find this kind of writing lovable and those who find it cloying.
by Peter Pouncey
CRITICS CHOICE
Like the once idyllic house on Cape Cod in which Robert Maclver lives, his life is in decay. A retired scholar and recent widower, he's lonely, angry and sick with a terminal illness he treats only with Mahler, Schubert and his favorite whiskey. As he slips deeper into the abyss, the expatriate Scotsman and onetime rugby hero establishes a set of rules for living to bring "some order and resolve to his abject life" and to force himself to complete the story he still needs to tell. Dignity and honor during a century of war are the more obvious themes in this exquisitely detailed first novel by Pouncey, president emeritus of Amherst College. The story that Maclver struggles to complete is a morally vexing tale about infantrymen in World War I; his telling is made more poignant by his service in World War II and the loss of his son in Vietnam. An evocative writer, Pouncey limns characters with such grace that to read this novel is to understand not just Maclver's loves, joys and losses but our own as well.
by Eric Bogosian
The double entendre in the title of Bogosian's second novel refers to Reba Cook, a farm girl discovered by a lensman while she's chowing down at a Manhattan McDonald's. The leggy 20-year-old is signed to a modeling agency, and her life unravels when she develops a taste for heroin. Bogosian balances the black humor of Reba's life against the story of Rick, a sex-obsessed doctor who can't stand his wife or kids. In one sequence, he deconstructs Internet porn through Rick's eyes: "Maybe the girl posed for one session five years ago...now the picture is being endlessly recycled? Maybe these women have renounced sex and become nuns? But digital photos never die...." When Reba meets Rick, he learns the hard way that family life really isn't that bad. Bogosian jumps between narratives, building to a taut climax. Bottom line? Modeling is bad for your health.
SHORT STORIES
by Roxana Robinson
The privileged characters in Roxana Robinson's astute third book of tales—some of them previously published—vacation in quaint French villages and visit horse ranches in Santa Fe. Their families are settled in private schools and comfortable homes. But they also struggle to reconcile traditional upper-middle-class mores and responsibilities with private understandings of family, sexuality and social convention. As the narrator of "The Face-lift" says: "There was a line to be drawn, and it had to do with integrity and honesty and probity."
Frequently, Robinson—whose prose may remind readers of John Cheever or even Anita Brookner—explores that line by showing how her characters respond when their balance is thrown off. In the affecting "At the Beach" a man is transfixed by watching a frantic mother search the dunes for her missing child. Set in Paris, "Pilgrimage" offers a revealing glimpse of a woman trying "to understand the aesthetic" of an obscure French antiques dealer.
Throughout, Robinson fills her pages with detailed, sensuous writing that strikes a deep emotional chord. What one young character learns about family is true for this splendid collection: It is "immanent with love and sorrow."
THE GREEDY BASTARD DIARY Eric Idle
In 2003 Monty Python alum Eric Idle made a "comic tour" of the U.S.; in his new book he riffs on what he saw. Here, his free-association take on American culture.
FREE SPEECH Where people who have paid most yell loudest
AWARDS SHOWS Events in which highly paid celebrities will work for gift baskets
16-OZ. COFFEES What Americans drink in the morning to prepare for road rage
THE SUPER BOWL A sporting event between competing commercials
FAST FOOD Slow death
AMERICA IS ODD BECAUSE: •Paula Abdul is a judge •[Impotency drug] ads suggest that sex can improve your golf •People compete to be fired by Donald Trump
Because I Said So
Edited by Camille Peri and Kate Moses, this anthology of essays by mothers is smart, touching and often provocative.
FROM "THIRTEEN" BY JANET FITCH:
"She'd saved a box of books from her own childhood—the best-loved, treasured, and carefully preserved—for the time she would have her own daughter. She had just got to the best of them all—King of the Wind by Marguerite: Henry.... But when she finally opened that cherished volume and began to read it aloud, her daughter groaned and said, 'Oh God, not another sad horse story'.... She had a daughter who did not care for sad horse stories. She didn't need what her mother wanted to give her. She needed something else."
FROM "MOTHERLOVE" BY AYELET WALDMAN
"If a good mother is someone who would sacrifice anyone else to save her child then, unlike those other women in Mommy and Me, I am not a good mother. I am in fact quite the opposite. I am that most abominable thing—a bad mother. I love my husband more than I love my children."
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