CRITIC'S CHOICE
Some writers grow cautious with success; not Mosley. In 1998 he briefly jilted the popular Easy Rawlins series, tapped his inner Ray Bradbury and produced Blue Light, an intriguing but often dense sci-fi novel. With The Man in My Basement Mosley revisits the bizarre, crafting a chilling tale told with the wry economy and psychological zing of Rod Serling's Twilight Zone.
Submitted for your approval: one Charles Blakey, a 33-year-old black American who drinks too much and works too little, a ne'er-do-well living somewhere between sloth and self-knowledge. A liar and a thief, Charles has borrowed against his family's 200-year-old Sag Harbor home and is now months behind on the payments. Enter a shady businessman, Anniston Bennet of Greenwich, Conn. He is both courteous and curt, a man used to getting his way and inexplicably interested in renting Blakey's dungeonlike basement for a couple of months. For the opportunity, he offers to pay nearly $50,000. The catch: With Blakey's assistance, Bennet plans to install a prison cell—and move into it.
And that's just one of many twists in this smart, deceptively simple fable about power, evil and humanity. From the contentious exchanges between Bennet and Blakey, scattered bits of mother wit (a mean white man is so cold "he could take a bath in ice water and still take his whiskey on the rocks") and pointed references to Ellison's Invisible Man and Melville's Moby Dick, Mosley builds a remarkable story that considers race but is ultimately focused on individual responsibility.
THRILLER
by Colin Harrison
At night after the tourists have drifted away, New York City's elite gather beneath a steak house in a bar called the Havana Room to make deals. Bill Wyeth, a real estate lawyer who lost his job after he accidentally killed his son's pal, is so eager to join the club that he engineers a multimillion-dollar deal for a guy he barely knows. Every club has dues, though, and Wyeth soon finds himself on Long Island at 3 a.m. staring at a frozen corpse. His troubles are just beginning.
A veteran of four previous Manhattan thrillers, Harrison populates this hard-boiled novel with characters fixated not just on riches but on exotic meals: a noir Bonfire of the Vanities meets Iron Chef. Kinky sex also plays a part. At one point an obese club owner forces Wyeth to watch him sport with a prostitute while he extorts money from the lawyer. Wyeth says wryly, "We were living in different movies, both terrifying." Terrifying, but hugely entertaining.
NOVEL
by Susan Vreeland
Vreeland, whose first novel Girl in Hyacinth Blue explored the back-story of a Vermeer painting, this time retraces the steps of the Canadian painter Emily Carr, one of the most influential women artists of the early 20th century. Vreeland takes us with Carr to Paris, where she studied the modernist Fauve painters such as Matisse, and then into Canada's wilderness. Carr was on a quest to paint the native tribes' totem poles before they were all destroyed and became one of the few white women allowed a glimpse of the tribes' inner lives.
It's an interesting tale that ambles along as pleasantly as a forest path Carr herself might have strode, though one with few ups and downs. More drama and a sharper eye toward reality could have made an enjoyable book gripping. As Vreeland imagines Carr saying in the book, artists carry the burden of "proving [their] talent to people who have none. Stuffed-shirted critics, yakety-yakking...."
NOVEL
by Jo-Ann Mapson
Mapson fans who have already seen cancer, miscarriages, a fatal car crash, murder and prison time might think that the author would have run out of disasters. Far from it. In Goodbye, Earl, the final book of the popular Bad Girl Creektrilogy, Mapson's quartet of friends are again beset by another full slate of tragedies—some old, some new, all compelling.
This sweet valentine to sisterhood tracks the overlapping lives of Beryl Anne, Nance, Ness and Phoebe, who bonded in the series' first book while working at a California farm but have since separated geographically and emotionally. Each character's narrative unfolds with the subtlety and patience of a blooming flower.
Of course, there are thorns. For Beryl Anne there is an AWOL boyfriend and an aneurysm; for Ness it's losing her gay husband to AIDS. But before the story becomes a prescription for Prozac, good fortune arrives: Phoebe falls in love, Nance becomes pregnant, Ness meets a heretofore unknown half brother. The women's engaging tales are told in an unvarnished style with just the right dose of emotion (no big weepy moments), and it's easy to get swept up in their highs and lows. Now that the drama is over, perhaps the women can finally get a break.
SHORT STORIES
by Paul Theroux
The men and boys who populate this collection are a desperate bunch, driven by libidinous desires. An aimless young man prostitutes himself to a countess, a boy suffers a crisis of faith while ogling a girl during mass, a lonely retiree stalks his two maids to Las Vegas. It sounds like melodrama, but Theroux has a light touch. In "Scouting for Boys," a standout, the smutty banter between prepubescent pals is hilarious, though the revelation that a priest has sexually abused one of them is anything but. In each story Theroux's prose is shot through with gentle melancholy, evoking the complexities of matters of the heart with subtlety and grace.
John Stossel
Chill. That's John Stossel's message to everyone—especially his media colleagues—in Give Me a Break: How I Exposed Hucksters, Cheats, and Scam Artists and Became the Scourge of the Liberal Media.... Stop fretting about coffee and mad cows, says the coanchor of ABC's 20/20. Here's a sampling of what else Stossel, 56, has to say:
ON CRYING WOLF The government and the press have spent a ton of money worrying about tiny amounts of pesticide in food, secondhand smoke. Driving a car or taking a bath is riskier.
ON EXPLODING BICS A producer said, "Let's do a story on Bic lighters." He was all excited. I said, "I'll do Bic lighters if you do plastic bags or toilets, because they kill more people." He called me callous.
ON HYSTERIA FATIGUE People aren't endlessly stupid. After scares about tiny amounts of this and that go on for year after year, people wise up.
ON HIS HOPE FOR THE BOOK That other reporters will say, "He has a point. We ought to lower the hysteria over the small stuff." I realize my wish is utterly naive.
- Contributors:
- V.R. Peterson,
- Edward Nawotka,
- Allison Lynn,
- Andrea L. Sachs,
- Rebecca Donner.
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!
