by John le Carré
The secret agents in le Carré's latest spyathon look nothing like Pierce Brosnan and would have a double-O chance of bedding Halle Berry. Instead, gangly Brit Ted and gnomish East German Sasha are spies like us—regular joes with bad fathers, sad love lives and a fatal knack for trusting the wrong people. Le Carré, 72, whose undercover man Smiley had a sly, sleuthy way about him, takes a warts-and-all approach in this decades-spanning epic about the unlikeliest of chums, who work first to defeat Communism and later to set up an antiwar university with a mysterious businessman. If Ted and Sasha are heroes, then they are tragic ones, whether as Cold War snoops working both sides of the Berlin Wall or present-day outcasts paranoid about their pasts.
Readers hoping for cool cloak-and-dagger doings should look elsewhere: Except for a bloody finale, le Carré forgoes gunplay for a thoughtful if sometimes meandering study of two flawed but honorable agents dealing with "the high cost of living a double life" and a constantly shifting political climate. It's about the men, not the missions. "Let's all pretend to be someone else," Ted thinks, "and then perhaps we'll find out who we are." Le Carré shifts to the style of a news report in a jarring final chapter. Blending fiction with a blistering attack on the war in Iraq, he takes aim at U.S. antiterrorist task forces, which he portrays as shooting first and evading questions later. He obviously longs for the days when the enemy wasn't so difficult to spot. After reading this sobering work from a modern master, you'll realize that 007 had it easy.
MYSTERY
by Elmore Leonard
CRITIC'S CHOICE
A widowed detective falls for a lingerie model who may or may not have links to her hooker best friend's murder. In another celebration of Detroit lowlifes, this marks Leonard's return to his hometown police force (he still lives nearby in Bloomfield Village, Mich.) after a two-decade detour to capers in Florida and Los Angeles. Bursting with note-perfect dialogue, knowing tours through the backrooms of Detroit Police Homicide Section and visits to the web of gritty side streets and interstates that intersect in Motown's decrepit downtown district, Mr. Paradise is nirvana for connoisseurs of memorable bit players. It's peppered with such characters as an octogenarian who has a soft spot for topless cheerleaders, a none-too-bright hits-for-hire crew and a squad-room full of smart cops and bad-luck robbers. At 78, Leonard leaves no doubts about his street cred: He turns out to be conversant in Eminem, Iggy Pop and hip-hop acts that work the genre's outer hard-core fringe. Who knew?
NOVEL
by Carrie Fisher
On her meds, bipolar cable talk show host Suzanne Vale is slightly odd. Off them, she's straitjacket material. Divorced from Leland Franklin, a film-studio exec who "forgot to tell her he was gay," Suzanne is still struggling with the split three years later. She bemoans her failure as a woman, as a daughter to her actress mom, Doris, and as a mother to Honey, her 6-year-old daughter. To boost her wounded ego, Suzanne racks up a couple of empty Hollywood trysts before making an unwise decision to stop taking her bipolar pills. That sets off a darkly funny episode of "psychotic breakdancing" from Tijuana to an L.A. rehab facility.
This sequel to Fisher's bestselling Postcards from the Edge (also a movie starring Meryl Streep and Shirley MacLaine) has its moments. Suzanne's descent into the kaleidoscopic haze of her mental illness is often hilarious, with Fisher's no-holds-barred humor and snappy banter keeping a tired plot afloat. Fans of Hollywood endings are in luck: With its quick, tidy (and semi-lame) resolution, Awful reads like a movie script.
NONFICTION
by Gregg Easterbrook
This important book lays out exactly why we should all quit whining. Polls show that most Americans think they're worse off than their parents, but consider: According to Easterbrook, we enjoy on average twice the buying power of our forebears of 1960, there are more deer than when the Mayflower arrived, cars emit 2 percent of the pollution they did in 1970, and life expectancy has jumped from 41 to 77 in the last century. You're also half as likely to be sued as an 1850 American.
Journalist Easterbrook spends most of the book tracing the various evolutionary, psychological and spiritual roots of our discontent, and though some may find his conclusions—count your blessings and think positive—to be unsatisfying, his scientifically backed optimism is a rare and eye-opening treat.
NONFICTION
by Marian Keyes
Known for her beguiling comic novels about women on the verge of fulfillment, Irish writer Keyes turns to nonfiction in this charming collection of essays on such personal obsessions as gardening, babies, Botox and shoes. Imagine a female Seinfeld with a brogue.
Some of these short pieces may ring familiar to her readers (the pre-wedding mud wrap is similar to an episode in Last Chance Saloon), but others won't. In "Does My Base Chakra Look Big in This," she frets about her expanding "aura" during a New Age tantric dance, while in "Time's Arrow" she rues aging. She prattles on about her footwear-craving inner Imelda and froths over her dream job as a beauty columnist. To keep her writings from vaporizing, she reaches for weightier topics too, such as Catholicism ("Cheaper than Prozac") and alcoholism ("No one sets out to be an alcoholic. It certainly wasn't part of my life plan"). Yet she always lightens her journalism with a quip, sounding just like one of her novels' characters.
- Contributors:
- Sean Daly,
- Steve Dougherty,
- Ting Yu,
- Kyle Smith,
- Andrea L. Sachs.
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!
