In her fourth novel, a spy caper called Olivia Joules and the Overactive Imagination, Helen Fielding (Bridget Jones's Diary) pits an intrepid beauty reporter against (yes) al-Qaeda. From her home in L.A. (where she's spending time with her son, born in February), Fielding tells PEOPLE how Olivia took shape:
Q: Why a thriller?
A: The essential ingredient in all the best novels from Austen to Dickens is the ability to make the reader wonder what's going to happen next. The thriller uses that quality in its purest form; I thought if I taught myself how to write one it would be an excellent basis for my future profound works- and would mean I didn't have to steal any more of Jane Austen's plots.
Why bring in Osama bin Laden?
It's a contemporary spy novel. Bin Laden and al-Qaeda are the enemy now. It would have been ridiculous in the 21st century to have a spy take on the KGB.
Is the world ready for a madcap tale about tracking terrorists?
Absolutely—though it's not exactly madcap. It's more of a Bond-type fantasy with comedy in it.... Olivia is a fantasy heroine full of pluck and grit. You think, "If she can do it, then maybe, if the chips were down, so could I."
Will Olivia spark controversy?
Definitely. Like many of us, she's thinking about bin Laden a bit too much. She imagines that she sees him in absurd places, like a face-cream launch. I suspect that Olivia's imaginings are being repeated in airports and elevators all over the Western world. I think it's important to air out that kind of fear and laugh at it; if you can't, it's beaten you. This, however, is bound to annoy people who don't see life the same way as me.
Colm Toíbín
NOVEL
CRITIC'S CHOICE
Between 1902 and 1905, Henry James published three of the 20th century's finest novels: The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors and The Golden Bowl. Ten years prior, however, he was in a rut and hardly writing. In To (bin's luminous fifth novel, he imagines the life of this intensely private American novelist during his darkest hour.
The story opens in 1895, when James's first play was booed out of the theater. In a style elegantly reminiscent of James's own work, Toíbín depicts his humiliated hero vowing to create his art anew. The Master is a tale in which precious little happens: James, a lifelong bachelor, nearly acts on his homosexual impulses (but always withdraws back into himself); he almost falls out with his family (but makes amends with them in the end). For the most part, the important action takes place in his head as he tames his appetites—for sex, his need for love—and sublimates them into fiction. It's a delicate, mysterious process, this act of creation, fraught with psychological tension, but Toíbín captures it beautifully. He makes us understand how miraculous it is that anyone writes at all.
William Langewiesche
NONFICTION
In this terse, terrifying study, Atlantic Monthly correspondent Langewiesche explores the high seas and finds anarchy: He reports that, of the 43,000 merchant vessels that ply the world's oceans, as many as 20 are thought to be owned or controlled by Osama bin Laden. He also notes that since America has 95,000 miles of coastline, keeping our shores safe is a matter of intelligence-gathering as well as luck. "By the time a ship pops over the horizon and pulls into port, little defense is possible," writes Langewiesche. For the author, who wrote the masterly American Ground: Unbuilding the World Trade Center, the growing threat on the oceans is an example of free-market capitalism gone awry. Though ships can be rogue states unto themselves—rusty hulks owned by phantom corporations and flying "flags of convenience"—so much of the global economy depends on shipping that no international body attempts to monitor them. Punctuated with harrowing scenes of shipwrecks, oil spills and pirate attacks, The Outlaw Sea is impossible to put down.
Dan Chaon
NOVEL
Lost souls searching for happiness come up short in this somber first novel by Chaon, whose short-story collection Among' the Missing was a 2001 National Book Award finalist. A series of seemingly unrelated events—a boy attacked by the family dog, a vanished child, a teen languishing in a home for unwed mothers and a young man lured to a life of drugs—are woven into a tapestry of dashed hopes.
The first half of the novel thrums with the mystery of how these people became who they are and who they are to each other. Jonah, the boy mauled by his dog, is the link between the characters. Disfigured, he lives in relative isolation until, grown and desperate for human contact, he decides to reclaim the missing pieces of his life. But as his connections to the others become clear, we see that the tenuous threads binding these near-strangers are not strong enough to save them.
This is by no means a feel-good read, but neither is it gratuitously tragic. Instead, Chaon deftly reveals the quiet suffering of ordinary people in a way that can be uncomfortably realistic but is always compelling.
Jeanine Cummins
MEMOIR
In the early hours of April 5,1991, a brutal attack near St. Louis left two of Cummins's cousins dead—and her family emotionally scarred. Julie and Robin Kerry, then 20 and 19, were gang raped and shoved off a bridge to their deaths in the raging Mississippi; Tom Cummins, 19, the author's brother, was beaten but survived the horrific fall. Then, with the case making sensational headlines across the country, the St. Louis police arrested Tom as a suspect in the murders. The nightmare changed course that June, when the real assailants were arrested, tried and found guilty (and three of the four were sent to death row). Tom, however, remained under a cloud that obscured his status as a victim and left him awash in anger and guilt. In this forceful memoir Cummins recounts the wrenching drama in a straightforward, expertly paced narrative that reads like a novel. Writing the book "as a love letter to my cousins, as a voice for my brother," she shows how the quest for justice was nearly as traumatic as the crimes themselves—and how her family survived the heartbreaking process by pulling together and keeping the girls' memories alive.
Maureen Orth
NONFICTION
Interviewing a young Shaquille O'Neal in 1995, Orth asked the basketball superstar about the letters on his giant gold belt buckle: TWISM. Their ensuing exchange neatly sets the tone for Orth's new book. "What do they stand for?" she asked the then-23-year-old athlete. "This world is mine," he replied.
And so it goes in the "celebrity-industrial complex," a term Orth uses to describe "the media monster that creates the reality we think we see, and the people who thrive or perish there." Famous is essentially a compendium of Orth's greatest hits as a Vanity Fair contributor, including memorable pieces on Woody Allen, Madonna, Russian president Vladimir Putin and Michael Jackson. Yet the book achieves a fresh spin thanks to incisive updates and story-behind-the-story anecdotes, all peppered with the author's pull-no-punches observations. (She calls Jackson "the saddest, most tragic—and, unfortunately, dangerous—of clowns.") Gutsy and fiercely intelligent, Orth, who is married to Meet the Press moderator Tim Russert, makes you wish she'd turn up at your next dinner party.
- Contributors:
- John Freeman,
- Alex Abramovich,
- Michelle Vellucci,
- Melanie Danburg,
- Michelle Tauber.
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!
