August 2009: Seabiscuit

by Laura Hillenbrand

June 2009: Where the Red Fern Grows

by Wilson Rawls

May 2009: Short Stories

- "Towel Season" by Ron Carlson from At the Jim Bridger
(read on Selected Shorts here)
- "The Secret Goldfish" by David Means from The Secret Golfish
(read on Selected Shorts here)
- "Wes Amerigo's Giant Fear" by David Schickler from The New Yorker, March 17, 2003
(read on Selected Shorts here)
- "Symbols and Signs" by Vladimir Nabokov from The New Yorker, May 15, 1948
(read on The New Yorker podcast here)
- "Kubuku Rides (This is It)" by Larry Brown from Facing the Music
(read on Selected Shorts here)
- "Gleason" by Louise Erdrich from The New Yorker, March 20, 2006
(read on Selected Shorts here)
- "The Year of Silence" by Kevin Brockmeier from The View From the Seventh Layer
(read on Selected Shorts here)

April 2009: The Road

by Cormac McCarthy

March 2009: The Eyre Affair

by Jasper Fforde

February 2009: The Canterbury Tales (selections)

by Geoffrey Chaucer

We're reading:

General Prologue
Prologue to Miller's tale
Miller's tale
Pardoner's tale (with prologues)
Knight's interruption of the monk's tale
The nun's priest's tale

Essays & Criticism
The Tales themselves, if you don't want to buy the book
Some Audio & Study Guides

January 2009: A Fine Balance

by Rohinton Mistry

"An Accidental Family"
by A. G. Mojtabi
The New York Times Book Review
June 23, 1996

Those who continue to harp on the inevitable decline of the novel ought to hold off for a while. The unique task of the genre, after all, is truthfulness to human experience in all its variety, and thanks to the great migrations of population in our time, human variety is to be found in replenished abundance all around us. The displacements, comminglings and clashings of peoples and cultures have released new energies, strange pollens; indeed, the harvest has barely begun.

Consider Rohinton Mistry, a Parsi, born in Bombay in 1952, who has lived in Canada since 1975. His first book was a widely praised collection of stories, "Swimming Lessons and Other Stories From Firozsha Baag." It was followed by the novel "Such a Long Journey," which received the Commonwealth Writers Prize for best book of 1991. His third book, "A Fine Balance," defies easy categorization. Calling it a domestic novel would not be altogether amiss, provided one added: a domestic novel that refuses to remain within walls.

Set in 1975 in an unidentified Indian city, it opens quietly and builds slowly, starting with a simple, centripetal narrative premise. Mrs. Dina Dalal, a financially pressed Parsi widow in her early 40's, is determined to keep her independence, resisting the options of remarriage or a return to the bullying charity of her brother's household. To make ends meet, Dina takes in a paying boarder, Maneck Kohlah, the son of a Parsi school chum, and hires two Hindu tailors, Ishvar and Omprakash Darji, to sew dresses for an export company. At first she sets the tailors to work under sweatshop conditions. The author charts the transformation of an empty apartment into a home full to bursting, and the binding of mismatched strangers into a communion as close as family.

Each of the four main characters is a refugee from one thing or another. Dina seeks to escape from the suffocating strictures imposed upon respectable, single, aging women. Maneck, the paying boarder, has been sent down from the hill country to attend college. His beloved mountain village in its majestic natural setting has been scarred by road construction and electrification projects, its forests depopulated. Seeking an education in step with the times, Maneck is studying for a diploma in refrigeration and air conditioning, for entry into "an industry that would grow with the nation's prosperity."

The tailors, Ishvar and Om, have been fleeing all their lives; they are refugees from caste and communal violence and, finally, from the institutional violence of Indira Gandhi's emergency rule. Om, just 17, is the son of Ishvar's murdered brother, and Ishvar, in his 40's, who has never married, has dedicated his life to being father-protector to his nephew. Their histories are joined in unending misfortune. Living from hand to mouth (even their sewing machines are rented), entirely at the mercy of the social upheavals of the hour, they are subject to periodic sweeps of the city to provide crowds for political rallies and conscripted manual labor for civic beautification schemes. Each time they are beaten down, they have to pick themselves up and start over. This happens again and again.

Under these circumstances, Dina's apartment becomes a haven for the tailors. The four strangers start sharing their stories, then meals, then living space, until, over the divides of caste, class and religion, the ties of human kinship prevail. In this one shabby little apartment, at least, the human family becomes more than a phrase, a metaphor, a piety. The author takes his own sweet time here, as well he should. I balked at the slowness at first, but just when I'd started to mutter "This really is much too sweet!" and "What are the odds of such harmony coming to be under such conditions?" and "I only wish. . . ." the downslope began, a veritable avalanche of catastrophe ensued, and I keenly regretted my reluctance to bask in the brief patch of sunshine Mr. Mistry had provided.

What follows is a double misfortune of catastrophic event and narrative stance, because from here on it feels as if some invisible but essential substance -- like air or love -- that has hitherto flowed unstintingly from author to character has been siphoned off, leaving the dry machinations of plot design in its stead. This withdrawal is especially disconcerting where Dina and Ishvar are concerned.

Since decency is often drab, dogged and undramatic (or at least not obviously dramatic), Dina and Ishvar are people of a kind rarely found in fiction today. And here they are, moving, breathing, fully dimensional figures -- placed at the very center of the novel. All the more disappointing, then, to find myself losing touch with them, except for a few external landmarks passed during the final eight-year stretch of the narrative, which encompasses only a few chapters. I for one wanted news of their interior journeys as well.

At book's end, I returned to ponder the title, "A Fine Balance," because my sense of imbalance -- of despair over hope, of sustained moral injury beyond reach of remedy -- was keen. Perhaps this residual imbalance is due in part to a conflict between Mr. Mistry's political and literary aims. Certainly the indictment of Mrs. Gandhi's regime served up in these pages could not be more trenchantly clear.

There seemed also to be an imbalance in the construction of the novel itself, a disproportion of background to foreground. Mr. Mistry intensely loves the marginal, and his street people -- proofreaders, renting agents, peddlers of potency nostrums, beggars and beggarmasters -- are often so vibrantly ensouled, so diverting, that they threaten to upstage everyone else. A woman drying her laundered sari, her only garment, one half at a time, for example, is captured in a brief imperishable glimpse: "One end was wound wet round her waist and over her shrunken breasts, as far as it would go. The drying half was stretched along the railway fence, flowing from her body like a prayer in the evening sun."

And here is a legless beggar, extolling the creativity of his beggarmaster -- the man who stage-manages a theater of misfortune, casting the players, scripting them, designing costumes and wounds:

"If all beggars have the same injury, public gets used to it and feels no pity. Public likes to see variety. . . . Blind beggars are everywhere. But blind, with eyeballs missing, face showing empty sockets, plus nose chopped off -- now anyone will give money for that. Diseases are also useful. A big growth on the neck or face, oozing yellow pus. That works well."

Even animals, performing animals with walk-on parts, are capable of stealing the show. A "communicating cow" is mentioned in passing:

"The cow, caparisoned in colorful brocaded fabrics, a string of tiny silver bells round her neck, was led into the ring of spectators by a man with a drum. Though the fellow's shirt and turban were bright-hued, he seemed quite drab compared to the richly bedizened cow. The two walked the circle: once, twice, thrice -- however long it took him to recite the cow's curriculum vitae, with special emphasis on prophecies and forecasts accurately completed to date. His voice was deafeningly raucous, his eyes bloodshot, his gestures manic, and all this frenzy was calculated as a masterly counterpoint to the cow's calm demeanor. . . . When the drum ceased, the man shouted the paying customer's question into the cow's ear, loud enough for the entire ring of humans to hear. And she answered with a nod or shake of her intricately made-up head, tinkling the tiny silver bells round her neck."

American readers hearing the name of yet another important English-language novelist from Bombay probably want to know how he compares with Salman Rushdie, so I'll give it a try: Less hyper, to start with the obvious, less given to flashy virtuoso display, more open to genuine wonder and sorrow at the ways people manage to endure. When both authors are at their very best, Mr. Mistry brings to mind Bruegel, Mr. Rushdie Hieronymus Bosch. As you can see from the communicating cow passage quoted above, Rohinton Mistry needs no infusions of magical realism to vivify the real. The real world, through his eyes, is quite magical enough.

October 2008: The Man Who Loved China

The Man Who Loved China
by Simon Winchester

"Behind the Wall"
by Alida Becker
June 8, 2008
The New York Times Book Review

On a winter evening in 1938, Joseph Needham, one of Cambridge University’s most brilliant scientists — and one of its most avid skirt-chasers — lay in bed with a Chinese microbiologist who was also a colleague of Needham’s extremely tolerant wife. Enjoying a post-coital cigarette, he asked her how its name might be rendered in Chinese. His diary records that she obliged by guiding him through the ideogram for “fragrant smoke.” Charmed, he instantly resolved to learn this fascinating language. It was the first step in a project that would absorb Needham until his death in 1995, turning him into one of the foremost Western authorities on China, dedicated to reminding the world that the Middle Kingdom’s decline into backwardness and turmoil had been preceded by centuries of extraordinary creativity — including crucial inventions like gunpowder, printing and the compass, all mistakenly thought to have originated elsewhere. The vehicle for these and countless other revelations was to be a work “addressed,” as Needham put it, “to all educated people.” The first volume of “Science and Civilisation in China,” published in 1954, has never gone out of print. Eighteen volumes were released during Needham’s lifetime; there are now 24, with more still to come.

Despite its hyperbolic new subtitle (apparently the original, “Joseph Needham and the Making of a Masterpiece,” was considered too tame), Simon Winchester’s biography, “The Man Who Loved China,” presents a low-key, often beguiling view of a man who hardly beguiled the postwar American authorities — or, for a time, his own countrymen. A committed socialist and Communist sympathizer, Needham lent his authority to a dubiously documented investigation whose report, issued in 1952, concluded that the United States had used biological weapons in Manchuria and North Korea. Blacklisted by the Americans well into the 1970s and denounced for his political naïveté by the British establishment, Needham retreated into the scholarly realm, where his accomplishments did much to restore his good name.

Cambridge had saved him once before, offering escape from the “spectacularly disastrous Edwardian marriage” of Needham’s parents: a red-headed Irish spendthrift, fond of spiritualism and plate-throwing tantrums, and a solemn London doctor, who used the boy as an operating-room assistant. Noël Joseph Terence Montgomery Needham, called Noël by his father and Terence by his mother, took care to sign letters to each of his warring parents by the name they preferred. But at Cambridge this shy, introspective only child became someone else entirely — the outgoing and seductive polymath Joseph. As Winchester demonstrated in his best-selling earlier book, “The Professor and the Madman,” he is fascinated by the quirks of genius. And Needham had plenty of quirks, both minor (breakfast toast must be burned black) and major (an ardent advocacy of nudism). “Handsome, in a studious way,” Needham spoke with “a silkiness, almost a lisp” and left few women free from his attentions. For almost 50 years, he kept both his wife and his Chinese mistress content, not only with him but with each other, even as he continued to play the field.

Winchester has spent a good deal of his career as a journalist in East Asia, so it’s not surprising that the liveliest stretch of his narrative presents Needham’s first encounter with the country whose language he had mastered from afar. Early in 1943, Needham was sent to China by the British Foreign Office, charged with organizing aid for Chinese scholars and scientists in flight from the Japanese invasion, who were attempting to re-establish their universities in the inner provinces. His travels over the next few years took him from the jungles of the Burmese border to the Gobi Desert and the seacoast of Fujian, on 11 expeditions that covered roughly 30,000 miles. He lived a life of grand adventure in wartime China, and Winchester presents its dangers and pleasures with panache. Whether Needham is donkey racing near ancient Buddhist caves or packed into a train full of refugees speeding across a soon-to-be-bombed railway bridge, the exhilaration of this part of his life is immediately engaging. And so are the colorful characters who come his way.

But if Winchester’s account of these excursions seems faithful to Needham’s character, some careless aspects of the narrative are less so. Do we need to be told twice within the space of three pages that Needham demanded a British boycott of the 1936 Berlin Olympics? Or reminded three times of his father’s dictum “No knowledge is ever wasted or to be despised?” Isn’t it odd that a map of China accompanying the World War II section should include as-yet-unborn nations like Pakistan, Bangladesh and North and South Korea? It’s hard to imagine Needham, renowned for his photographic memory, countenancing such slips. Especially if you credit the story his wife used to tell about the period just before the publication of his three-volume treatise on chemical embryology: “She recalled watching him lying awake in bed, mentally visualizing the book’s page proofs, and then correcting in a notebook any errors or infelicities. Once this activity became too humdrum for him, she said, he further occupied himself by translating the selfsame pages from English into French, also in his head, and then correcting any errors that he fancied he could also see in this new translated text.”

Alida Becker is an editor at the Book Review.

July 2008: A Dirty Job: A Novel

by Christopher Moore

"Dipping a Toe in Supernatural Waters"
by Janet Maslin
The New York Times Book Review
March 20, 2006

No one will ever accuse Christopher Moore of gravitas. Mr. Moore can impose gallows hilarity on virtually any subject, and has already inflicted his brand of good-time ghoulishness upon whales ("Fluke"), the Gospel ("Lamb") and Santa Claus ("The Stupidest Angel"). A giant Micronesian fruit bat in tiny Ray-Bans remains one of his books' most emblematic images.

But his latest and wobbliest story, "A Dirty Job," suggests that Mr. Moore's gonzo irreverence has its limits. This novel makes light of hellhounds, demons and outlandishly costumed squirrel cadavers (which are inspired by real dead-animal dolls sculptured by an acquaintance of the author's). Though it works hard to wring wildly improbable humor from all of the above, it's very much a book written in the shadow of death.

Charlie Asher and his wife, Rachel Goldstein, have just had a baby girl named Sophie as "A Dirty Job" begins. Charlie has yet to become accustomed to the word Daddy. "He had once asked Rachel, 'Who's your daddy?' during sex, to which she had replied, 'Saul Goldstein,' thus rendering him impotent for a week and raising all kinds of issues that he didn't really like to think about," Mr. Moore writes. But the book has barely gotten off this witticism before Charlie realizes that he has become a widower.

As Mr. Moore acknowledges in an author's note, this part of the book is grounded in reality: the deaths of several loved ones helped to send him down this novel's puzzling, convoluted trail. But reality, grim or otherwise, is still not a big factor here. Once Charlie spots a tall, thin black man in a green suit near Rachel's bedside, the story takes its first tentatively supernatural turn.

The stranger is named Minty Fresh. That is not one of Mr. Moore's funnier monikers, nor is it a promise of smart plotting to come. Somehow, Charlie becomes the recipient of an all-about-the-afterlife instruction book that sounds like something for children ("The Great Big Book of Death"). And then he winds up joining Minty as a death merchant, brokering macabre deals between souls and the earthly vessels that the souls inhabit. The vessels can be anything, the odder the better. Still, they quickly lose their novelty, as the book harps and harps on their way of giving off a strange reddish glow.

If this isn't theology, neither is it really humor: the book's funniest sight gag has to do with a stripper who has no idea that her breast implants hold the essence of her everlasting spirit. Mr. Moore must find a way to kill her off, leave the implant idea lighthearted and somehow keep a larger, more elaborate plot in motion. Tall order: no wonder the book winds up filling the sewers of San Francisco with Charlie-baiting harpies and letting those harpies sometimes materialize as giant crows. If you are lost by this point, you needn't feel alone. Mr. Moore is temporarily lost too.

But he is a writer whose irreverence generates immense reserves of good will, if only for the fearlessly nutty range of his imagination. Soon "A Dirty Job" has thrown in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the Irish goddess of Death, assorted other mythological creatures, the cynical Goth teen who works at Charlie's secondhand clothing store, and the contrast between alpha and beta male personalities.

As evidence of both Charlie's beta qualities and perhaps his own, Mr. Moore writes: "He makes a great house sitter, especially if you aren't especially attached to your house pets. A Beta Male is trustworthy: your girlfriend is generally in safe hands with a Beta Male friend, unless, of course, she is a complete slut." Fortunately, Charlie's beta-ness makes him just passive enough to accept the book's nonsensical extremes. An alpha would be demanding an explanation of how the book apprehends death — and, on the evidence displayed, probably not getting a very good one.

Even when seriously off-kilter, Mr. Moore is always worth reading. His books always have inspired moments, no matter how scattered those moments happen to be. A running gag in "A Dirty Job" concerns the so-called "great powers of Asia": Mrs. Ling and Mrs. Korjev, immigrant housekeepers who reach a Sino-Russian accord over the raising of Sophie, who remains a blithe spirit throughout the book despite her mother's death. "Daddy's sorry he made you a shiksa," Charlie tells his half-Jewish daughter, using a phrase that is comically misinterpreted through the rest of the story.

Shiksa is mistaken to mean Shih Tzu, which is most definitely not the huge, menacing breed of dog that keeps Sophie safe while her father makes his forays into the spirit world. Meanwhile, in similarly blissful ignorance, Charlie pretends to know more than he actually does about the religious realms in which he now dabbles. Charlie's knowledge of Eastern religions is not deep. It consists of "just Discovery Channel stuff — you know, Buddha, Shiva, Gandalf — the biggies."

For all its tumultuous lunacy, "A Dirty Job" requires the occasional level-headed individual to provide a semblance of focus. The police inspector assigned to Charlie is one of them. "Rivera had once been a by-the-book kind of cop," Mr. More writes late in the story. "That was before the demons, the giant owls, the bankruptcy, the polar bears, the vampires, the divorce, and the saber-clawed woman-thing that turned into a bird. Now, not so much." If the cop is baffled, who can blame him?

May 2008: The Corrections

"American Gothic"
by David Gates
September 9, 2001
The New York Times Book Review

Jonathan Franzen's marvelous new novel, ''The Corrections,'' starts out as discouragingly as any marvelous new novel you'll ever read. The very first page devotes a full paragraph to overextending the metaphor of an ''alarm bell of anxiety'' ringing in a suburban house, in a community heavy-handedly called St. Jude. Then, when a septuagenarian Parkinson's sufferer named Alfred Lambert goes into demented exile in that house's basement, Franzen set off my alarm bell of anxiety by warning that some larger significance might be about to hit me over the head: ''And so in the house of the Lamberts, as in St. Jude, as in the country as a whole, life came to be lived underground.'' Next we meet Chip Lambert, the black-sheep son -- hey, I didn't name these people Lambert -- who had to leave his teaching job because he (yawn) had an affair with a student and is now writing a screenplay, based on the (yawn) Lewinsky scandal, and beginning it with a parodically preposterous monologue on ''anxieties of the phallus in Tudor drama.'' Even though Franzen spares us the monologue itself, I was all set to bail on him, despite the microfelicities (ants ''storming'' a dead opossum; ''assassin-like chauffeurs'' holding up signs at La Guardia) that showed he could actually write. Did I need several hundred more pages of standard-issue smarty-pants high jinks? Or, worse yet, of suburban angst speaking, in large caps, boldface and italics, to our condition? Cripes, why not just call the book ''American Something-or-other''? You know, truth in packaging.

You could read ''The Corrections'' as a conventional realist saga of multigenerational family dynamics -- that's how the publisher spins it -- and love's mutating mysteries, with just enough novel-of-paranoia touches so Oprah won't assign it and ruin Franzen's street cred. Or you could read it as a trickier and trendier sort of work, which flawlessly mimics old-school plottiness, readability and character development in order to seduce you into realms of bottomless geopolitical-spiritual disquiet. Damned if I know. But I know what made me decide to stick with the thing long enough to tell I liked it. It was Chip's cockamamie justification for the obviously suicidal beginning of his own magnum opus: '' 'My idea,' Chip said, 'was to have this ''hump'' that the moviegoer has to get over. Putting something off-putting at the beginning, it's a classic modernist strategy. There's a lot of rich suspense toward the end.' '' Aha. Was this Franzen's own way of hinting that he himself had a bunch of goodies up his sleeve that he meant to hold back awhile longer out of sheer modernist cussedness? And that I'd miss out if I didn't pull up my socks and soldier on?

Well, sure enough, just a few pages later the book started getting better. First Chip's apparently sane sister, Denise, arrives and immediately makes herself the reader's ally. ''If I grant that these are interesting issues,'' she asks Chip, who is delivering a too-familiar aria about antidepressants as an adjunct to consumerism, ''will you stop talking about them?'' Next comes a flashback in which one of Chip's students (she's splendidly hostile and relentlessly seductive) lays siege to his virtue and gives him a mysterious drug, an antidepressant-aphrodisiac in golden caplets she calls ''Mexican A'' -- and which we somehow sense (and if we don't, I'm telling you) that we'll learn much, much more about. And suddenly we were rocking: I only put the book down again when my life needed tending to. Mind you, I'm still not convinced that Franzen actually meant his first 30 pages to be such a slog, but it's an awfully funny coincidence.

It shouldn't interfere with anybody's rich suspense to report that all the mighty bulk of ''The Corrections'' turns on a single, definingly American question: Will Mom be able to get the whole family home for one last Christmas? Franzen tucks the more momentous questions into a branching system of subplots, starring each of the main characters in turn and making each one equally sympathetic. Will Alfred (a) be put in a nursing home, (b) enter a radical new treatment plan that proposes to restructure his brain or (c) deliver himself with that Hemingway-evoking shotgun in the basement? Will Denise, who cooks at a nouveller-than-thou restaurant, end up in bed with (a) her financial backer, (b) his wife or (c) both? Will Chip get (a) rich off that screenplay, (b) his married girlfriend back or (c) himself killed during a coup in Lithuania, where he goes as an aide to a politician turned con man? Will Gary, the banker who's the oldest of the Lamberts' offspring, (a) make a killing in biotech stocks, (b) stand up to his crafty wife and mocking children or (c) just keep drinking? Finally, will Enid, the materfamilias, ever get a grip?

And those are just a few of the balls Franzen keeps in the air. What will a drug, trade-named Aslan after the Christly lion in C. S. Lewis's Narnia books, do to his characters (if they end up hooked on it) and to society as a whole (if the stuff ever gets F.D.A. approval)? ''Mexican A'' is only one variety of Aslan; another is a revolutionary Parkinson's medication called Corecktall. What does the upcoming execution of a brutal killer have to do with it all? Can Corecktall also detangle the criminal brain? What's the connection between a long-forgotten patent held by Alfred and the schemes of a gurulike neurobiologist? Unless I missed something, Franzen ultimately lets this ball drop, and I wasn't sorry to see the last of it. Psychotropic drugs and their supposedly problematic effects on human autonomy and identity is a topic as old as ''Brave New World'' and as new as Peter D. Kramer's ''Listening to Prozac'' -- which is no longer all that new. In his own recent novel, ''Spectacular Happiness,'' Kramer himself seems bored with the topic.

Sure, I guess it's a no-no to put stuff in your book that doesn't pay off, but I can't scrape together much outrage when I'm basically having a good time. Anyhow, you have to expect a degree of indeterminacy in an ambitious novel these days; an intricately, perfectly paranoid book like Pynchon's ''Crying of Lot 49,'' in which everything seems to have some sinister relation to everything else, now seems as quaintly formalist as ''The Waste Land.'' Franzen coyly tips his hat to several forebears along the way: he gives us a Web address called gaddisfly.com (Franzen's title, of course, echoes that of William Gaddis's novel ''The Recognitions''), a magician named Alain Gregarius, a ''brainy-looking'' cruise-ship passenger named Roth, a slasher movie called ''Moody Fruit,'' even a city park with the same name (Waindell) as the college where Nabokov's Pnin teaches. And some of the white noise in Alfred's head -- cirruslike clusterings of very high frequencies off in deep stratosphere behind his ears'' -- must derive from Don DeLillo. These shadow presences announce that Franzen likes his fiction smart and larky, with glimpses of scary depths and a flirtatious, on-and-off relationship with realism. But you already knew that. And the success of David Foster Wallace's epic, minutely interconnected, ultimately unresolved ''Infinite Jest'' has made a novel like ''The Corrections'' -- a far less dense and demanding read -- seem part of a new mainstream, in which either teasing hints of formalism dress up the randomness or irruptions of randomness juice up the formalism. (Choose one. Or not.) Whether or not this is a good idea is a matter of taste -- and a debate dating back to the Dionysians versus the Apollonians.

In ''The Corrections,'' though, Franzen maintains a scrupulous neutrality on questions of order versus energy, control versus license, tradition versus innovation, old stick-in-the-muds versus their unmoored children. Lamberts versus lions. Alfred is an open-and-shut case of anality and sexual repression (and I guess I should admit that the R. Crumb-like talking feces he hallucinates may not be the book's subtlest moment), yet he's silently self-sacrificing, and admirable in his rigorous work ethic and fidelity. Enid is silly, obsessive and manipulative, yet loving and blessed with an unsuspected capacity for acceptance and self-reinvention. Franzen doesn't caricature either Gary's desperate embrace of family values or Denise's addled sexual adventurism; and he soon shows us Chip as far more than a cartoon of breast-fixation and arty self-delusion. The end of the novel has the same ambivalence Kafka achieves at the end of ''The Metamorphosis'': we're glad that one character has been released from an oppressive bond, yet we also suspect that a nobler soul has been undervalued. If you don't end up liking each one of Franzen's people, you probably just don't like people. And by the way, assuming the book really does speak to our condition, it doesn't pretend to know more about it than we do.

Still, it's often the microfelicities that keep you barreling through ''The Corrections'' toward its larger satisfactions. Wordplay worthy of Nabokov: a few pages after a discussion of a museum of transportation, Alfred and Enid slip into their marital bed, ''the museum of antique transports.'' Tiny, revelatory gestures: the fastidious Gary sniffing his mother's dish towel before drying his hands on it. Magically precise images: a sandwich opened to ''a slice of bologna on which the texture of bread was lithographed in yellow mustard.'' Knowing one-liners: ''Police in ski masks,'' Chip says at a particularly bad moment in his Lithuanian adventure. ''I'm struggling to put a positive construction on this.'' Franzen writes with convincing authority about the minutiae of railroads, clothing, medicine, economics, industry, cuisine and Eastern European politics, and he knows just when to push his conceits over the top -- like his Lithuanian city built of radioactive cinder blocks from Belarus. But he also knows his way around more intimate territory. Enid painfully contrasts her current married life not only with ''the loving-kindness of other couples,'' but with the days when Alfred had ''been mad for her and had looked into her eyes.''

No one book, of course, can provide everything we want in a novel. But a book as strong as ''The Corrections'' seems ruled only by its own self-generated aesthetic: it creates the illusion of giving a complete account of a world, and while we're under its enchantment it temporarily eclipses whatever else we may have read. But I guess that is everything we want in a novel -- except, when it's rocking along, for it never to be over. In that respect, ''The Corrections'' ends as disappointingly as it began. And in that respect only.

David Gates's most recent book is ''The Wonders of the Invisible World,'' a collection of stories.

* * *

When The Corrections was chosen for Oprah's Book Club, Franzen made a public stink about his discomfort with "logo of corporate ownership" on the book's jacket. He later issued a public mea culpa; the story is here from USA Today.

April 2008: The Laments

The Laments
by George Hagen

"Black Comedy, White Family"
by Jonathan Wilson
The New York Times Book Review
August 22, 2004

THE family story has been a durable mainstay of the novel for more than a century. If the family is British or German, watch out; you could be stuck for months with the plodding affairs of the dreary Forsytes or the door-stopping Buddenbrookses. The contemporary American version, which generally weighs in on the high hundred-page scale, has at its heart a corrosive narcissism: perhaps that's why Oprah stopped inflicting it on her book club audience and switched to ''classics.'' George Hagen's first novel, ''The Laments,'' is a lively corrective to the subgenre, a family story on speed, with a jolt of black comedy that makes it a close relative to that greatest of all American family stories, ''The Simpsons.''

We follow the eponymous Laments -- Julia, Howard and their three children, Will, Marcus and Julius -- as they travel from South Africa and the Rhodesias to England and on to their final touchdown in the New Jersey suburbs. We begin in the ignorant 1950's and conclude in the enlightened 70's, and all along the way there are somber times. But the tragedies and difficulties that afflict the Laments -- a dead baby, a son with a severed hand, a suicidal out-of-work father and worse -- are carried carefully in a basket of bitter humor; any apparent invitation to either characters or readers to fall into a sentimental slump is quickly withdrawn. The only other novel I can think of that creates this effect with equal success is John Irving's ''World According to Garp.''

The first 30 pages or so of ''The Laments'' are a thrill ride: bleak, deep and hilarious. We begin with a baby switch and an adoption. A deranged new mother in Salisbury's appropriately named Mercy Hospital (almost every place and person in ''The Laments'' is appropriately named), Mary Boyd, finds the Laments' new addition more attractive than her own and steals off with their baby. Almost immediately she, her estranged husband, and the purloined baby are killed in a horrendous car crash. Not long later Mercy's head of obstretics, Dr. Samuel Underberg, an ahead-of-his-time antiracist liberal/genius/wacko soon to die in a nasty accident himself, persuades the Laments to adopt Mary's baby, whom they name Will.

You can't switch a baby like this without engaging some kind of nature-vs.- nurture debate. Mark Twain took on the whole shebang in ''Pudd'nhead Wilson'' by making one baby white and the other white in appearance but the child of a slave. George Hagen is also interested in race, and particularly the legacy carried by the children and grandchildren of old colonial racists, but he wants to complicate (or perhaps simplify) the issue. He is most interested in character as fate, and in names as quirky tests of that fate. ''A child's name is his portal to the world. It had to be right,'' Julia thinks right after the birth of her son. ''If people were named at the end of their lives, we wouldn't have mistakes like selfish children named Charity, and timid ones named Leo,'' she declares. Can the foundling Will will himself out of the Book of Lamentations that is the Laments' family life? Or is he doomed to share their troubled destiny?

Eventually, the novel answers the question in nicely ambiguous fashion, but it's the journey out that catches the imagination. Folded into Will's picaresque adventures are deft skewerings of whatever country and community the Laments happen to be in. Memorial Day in the Jersey burbs gets a great going-over. Julia Lament is warned by her neighbors that she will be shunned if she doesn't decorate her house with a flag. She responds by tacking a four-foot-square Union Jack to her front door. The resulting ''honks of outrage'' from passing cars are, we can imagine, the orchestra warming up for the George Bush years. As a wandering troupe with a hard-to-grasp identity -- white African liberals on the run -- the Laments are also well placed to satirize the elective ethnic affinities of their American friends. '' 'I'm Irish,' said Abby. 'Really?' said Julia. 'Which part of Ireland are you from?' 'Cork,' Abby replied, 'but that was three generations ago.' '' The acquiring of identities and the shrugging them off is, inevitably, part and parcel of nature/nurture. Hagen likes his favorite characters to move before their identities ossify into national stereotypes.

Much of the novel is taken up with Will's schooling across the continents, his teachers and the girls he loves. There are no superfast times at high school in Jersey, but neither is there any dark sarcasm in the classroom, and in this, as elsewhere, Hagen is a delicate observer of the social scene. Such problems as arise in ''The Laments'' are mainly side effects of the stylized Garp-like form. It's never easy to make tragic death real, and it is truly hard when you have ambitiously committed yourself to stand firm against emoting (phony or otherwise). A truly horrible fate does overtake two of the most likable characters, but I found it hard to care. Howard Lament, an engineer by trade, and a specialist in ''the conveyance of liquids through valves of every shape and size,'' eventually comes up with an artificial heart that he then discards in a fit of despair. It seems a suitable moment for a novel in which matters of the heart are so frequently subjects for black comedy.

The novel has other, smaller, defects: some of the Laments' flatter adventures, including an episode in Bahrain, read like memoir dressed up as fiction; and Hagen's ear is not always pitch-perfect, especially in the British and American sections. The recorded dialogue can be jarring: ''I can beatchu up, y'know!'' (England) just didn't sound right to me. Nevertheless, there is an admirable and enviable range and ambition in ''The Laments,'' and something lucidly democratic in the novel's insistence that a wandering life grants perspectives and perceptions that stay-at-homes can't achieve. Julia, bright, long-suffering and staunchly loyal to her family, notes that ''whenever the Laments moved, they lost something'' but more often the reverse seems to be the case. Certainly, the appearance of George Hagen on the literary scene is a gain for readers everywhere.

Jonathan Wilson's most recent novel is ''A Palestine Affair.''

March 2008: Short stories, part 2

I chose a handful of the stories after hearing them on two fabulous short story podcasts, The New Yorker Fiction podcast with Deborah Treasman, the fiction editor, who has current writers choose past published stories and read and talk about them, and Selected Shorts, in which actors read short stories live on stage in New York. The links below are to web-based recordings, but you can also download the podcasts themselves on iTunes. The dates and readers are listed here for The New Yorker and here for Selected Shorts. Because the Selected Shorts ones are read live, there is an audience, and they laugh a lot more than I care for, and the actor reading usually does a little acting. Just a warning.

1. "Kansas" by Antonya Nelson

2. "Why I Live at the P.O." by Eudora Welty (Selected Shorts: Program 2: Week of October 13 - October 19, 2007)

3. "The Gospel According to Mark" by Jorge Luis Borges

4. "A Day" by William Trevor

5. "Half a Grapefruit" by Alice Munro

6. "Where the Door Is Always Open and the Welcome Mat Is Out" by Patricia Highsmith

7. "Fredericka the Beautiful" by Ann Hood (From Seventeen January, 1992)

8. "Sermon in the Guava Tree" by Kiran Desai (Selected Shorts: Program 11: Week of December 15 - December 21, 2007)

February 2008: Water for Elephants

by Sara Gruen

"Trunk Show"
by Elizabeth Judd
The New York Times Book Review
June 4, 2006

On our first date, my husband took me to see Tod Browning's "Freaks," a 1932 horror film with a distinctly Diane Arbus feel that takes a voyeuristic delight in dwarfs, fat ladies and other sideshow improbabilities. Sara Gruen's arresting new novel, "Water for Elephants," explores similar subject matter — the pathetic grandeur of the Depression-era circus. And like Browning, Gruen infuses her audacious material with a surprisingly uplifting strain of sentimentality.

"Water for Elephants" begins violently and then veers into weirder terrain. Jacob Jankowski, a veterinary student at Cornell, discovers that his parents have been killed in a car accident. Aimless and distraught, he climbs aboard a train that happens to be carrying the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth, and inveigles a job as an animal doctor. His responsibilities draw him into the unpredictable orbit of August Rosenbluth, the circus's mercurial menagerie director, and his beautiful wife, Marlena, whose equestrian act attracts enthusiastic crowds.

Jacob immerses himself in the bizarre subculture of acrobats, aerialists, sword swallowers and lion tamers, mastering a vernacular that reflects a rigid caste system. Ringling Brothers is nicknamed "Big Bertha," performers are "kinkers" and members of the audience are always "rubes." When an aged Jacob observes a contemporary circus, he sees children carrying blinking toys: "Bet their parents paid an arm and a leg for them, too. Some things never change. Rubes are still rubes, and you can still tell the performers from the workers."

The troupe crisscrosses the country cannibalizing acts that have gone bankrupt in the Depression-era economy. After Uncle Al, the autocratic ringmaster, purchases Rosie, an elephant with an unquenchable thirst for lemonade and the inability to follow the simplest command, Benzini Brothers looks doomed. How Jacob coaxes Rosie to perform — thereby saving the circus — lies at the heart of the novel.

Gruen, whose first novel was "Riding Lessons," turns horses and other creatures into sympathetic characters. According to an author's note, she studied elephant body language and behavior with a former handler at the Kansas City Zoo. The research pays off. August's mistreatment of Marlena pales beside the visceral wallop of his nonchalant cruelty toward Rosie: "I look up just as he flicks the cigarette. It arcs through the air and lands in Rosie's open mouth, sizzling as it hits her tongue. She roars, panicked, throwing her head and fishing inside her mouth with her trunk. August marches off. I turn back to Rosie. She stares at me, a look of unspeakable sadness on her face. Her amber eyes are filled with tears."

Second-rate and seedy, Benzini Brothers suffers a collective inferiority complex (no one is permitted to utter the word "Ringling" in Uncle Al's presence). When Lovely Lucinda, the 400-pound fat lady, dies suddenly, Uncle Al orchestrates a funeral procession led by 24 black Percherons and an army of mourners competing for the three dollars and bottle of Canadian whiskey promised to whoever puts on the best show. "You've never seen such grief — even the dogs are howling."

Gruen's circus, with its frankly mercantile morality, symbolizes the warped vigor of capitalism. No matter how miserable or oppressed, the performers love the manufacturing of illusion, sewing a new sequined headdress for Rosie or feeding the llamas as men die of starvation in a devastated America. August's paranoid schizophrenia feels emblematic — an indictment of a lifetime spent feigning emotions to make a buck.

At its finest, "Water for Elephants" resembles stealth hits like "The Giant's House," by Elizabeth McCracken, or "The Lovely Bones," by Alice Sebold, books that combine outrageously whimsical premises with crowd-pleasing romanticism. But Gruen's prose is merely serviceable, and she hurtles through cataclysmic events, overstuffing her whiplash narrative with drama (there's an animal stampede, two murders and countless fights). She also asserts a grand passion between Jacob and Marlena that's never convincingly demonstrated.

Black-and-white photographs of real American circus scenes from the first half of the century are interspersed throughout the novel, and they brilliantly evoke the dignified power contained in the quieter moments of this unusual brotherhood. The grainy photos capture the unexpected daintiness of an elephant disembarking from a train, the symmetry of a marching band, a gaggle of plumed showgirls stepping gingerly across a patchy lawn and the haunting solitude of an impeccably dressed cook.

Circuses showcase human beings at their silliest and most sublime, and many unlikely literary figures have been drawn to their glitzy pageantry, soaring pretensions and metaphorical potential (Marianne Moore leaps to mind). Unsurprisingly, writers seem liberated by imagining a spectacle where no comparison ever seems inflated, no development impossible. For better and for worse, Gruen has fallen under the spell. With a showman's expert timing, she saves a terrific revelation for the final pages, transforming a glimpse of Americana into an enchanting escapist fairy tale.

Elizabeth Judd has written for The Atlantic Monthly, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Salon and other publications.

January 2008: A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering American on the Appalachian Trail

by Bill Bryson

'A Walk in the Woods': On the Trail, With Wit and Insights
May 21, 1998
New York Times Book Review
by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt

Short of doing it yourself, the best way of escaping into nature is to read a book like Bill Bryson's latest, "A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail." The only risk is the one posed by all books on nature: a certain monotony.

Or as Bryson describes what he calls "the world on foot": "You have no engagements, commitments, obligations, or duties; no special ambitions and only the smallest, least complicated of wants; you exist in a tranquil tedium, serenely beyond the reach of exasperation, 'far removed from the seats of strife,' as the early explorer and botanist William Bartram put it. All that is required of you is a willingness to trudge."

A willingness to trudge, in Bryson's case, the full length of the Appalachian Trail, some 2,160 miles, from Springer Mountain, in Georgia, to Mount Katahdin, in Maine. He decided to do it because a little voice in his head said one day: "Sounds neat! Let's do it!"

So the challenge to Bryson -- a writer of travel books ("The Lost Continent," "Notes from a Small Island") and books about language ("The Mother Tongue," "Made in America") -- was to lend variety to his account of trudging. More variety even than the terrain of the 12 states through which the trail passes.

Bryson has met this challenge with zest and considerable humor. He begins by scaring you a little. He tells you of the trail's perils: its dangerous animals, killing diseases, "loony hillbillies destabilized by gross quantities of impure corn liquor and generations of profoundly unbiblical sex." And bears that bite.

He tells you of the power of woods to unnerve. "The inestimably priggish and tiresome Henry David Thoreau thought nature was splendid, splendid indeed, so long as he could stroll to town for cakes and barley wine, but when he experienced real wilderness, on a visit to Katahdin in 1846, he was unnerved to the core."

He tells you of his hiking partner, Stephen Katz, a childhood friend from Iowa who had been attracted to drugs and alcohol until he was found by the police "in an upended car in a field outside the little town of Mingo, hanging upside down by his seatbelt, still clutching the steering wheel and saying, 'Well, what seems to be the problem, officers?"' Katz is seriously out of shape and given to seizures ever since he took "some contaminated phenylthiamines about 10 years ago." Bryson remarks, "I imagined him bouncing around on the Appalachian Trail like some wind-up toy that had fallen on its back."

When he gets through being scared, Bryson entertains you with the history of the trail, the hell of the early going when he and his partner were not yet conditioned, the quirky characters they met, the geology, biology, ecology of the terrain, and jokes. You turn the pages not knowing what's around the next bend.

Then, after trudging for what seems like forever, he arrives in Gatlinburg, Tenn., and sees a map of the trail "about six inches wide and four feet high." He writes: "I looked at it with polite, almost proprietorial interest -- it was the first time since leaving New Hampshire that I had considered the trail in its entirety -- and then inclined closer, with bigger eyes and slightly parted lips. Of the four feet of trail map before me, reaching approximately from my knees to the top of my head, we had done the bottom two inches."

"My hair had grown more than that."

He concludes: "One thing was obvious. We were never going to walk to Maine."

"A Walk in the Woods" is a funny book, full of dry humor in the native-American grain. It is also a serious book. Nothing really terrible happened to the author, but by playing on our fears, he captures the ambivalence of our feelings about the wild. We revere it but we're also intimidated. We want to protect animals but we also want to kill them. The woods are lovely, dark and deep, but they also "choke off views and leave you muddled and without bearings." He continues: "They make you feel small and confused and vulnerable, like a small child lost in a crowd of strange legs."

One other contradiction is also captured in these pages. Americans may be destroying their environment, wiping out species, mismanaging ecology, but our forests remain vast and impressive. "One third of the landscape of the lower 48 states is covered in trees -- 728 million acres in all," Bryson writes. "Maine alone has 10 million uninhabited acres. That's 15,600 square miles, an area considerably bigger than Belgium, without a single resident. Altogether, just 2 percent of the United States is classified as built up."

What's more, in the past century and a half, the woods have reclaimed 40 percent of New England, Bryson writes. The feeling he leaves you with is that despite all our abuse of it, nature may be too powerful to take notice.

Bryson himself was liberated by nature's vastness. The impossibility of walking the whole length of the trail freed him to sample it in stages. All the same, he ended up walking 870 miles of it -- or 39.5 percent of its total -- a distance slightly greater than that from New York to Chicago.

He was often exhausted, his "brain like a balloon tethered with string, accompanying but not actually part of the body below." The reader, by contrast, is rarely anything but exhilarated. And you don't have to take a step.

December 2007: 2001: A Space Odyssey

by Arthur C. Clarke

From Wikipedia: It was developed concurrently with Stanley Kubrick's film version and published after the release of the film. The story is based in part on various short stories by Clarke, most notably "The Sentinel" (written in 1948 for a BBC competition but first published in 1951 under the title "Sentinel of Eternity").

Review by Lester del Rey
Copyright ©1968 by Galaxy Publishing Corp.; reprinted in "The Year's Best Science Fiction No. 2" edited by Harry Harrison and Brian W. Aldiss, by permission of the author and Scott Meredith Literary Agency, Inc.

Nobody slept at the New York press preview of 2001, but only because the raucous and silly noise from the sound track screamed painfully into our ears. Space was a tumult of din and the hero breathed in his spacesuit like a monstrous locomotive at 60 gasps a minute. It was the only evidence of excitement in the place. Almost half the audience had left by intermission, and most of us who stayed did so from curiosity and to complete our reviews.

The pictorial part was superb. The colour photography was generally excellent, and the special effects and technical tricks were the best ever done. Even the acting was unusually good. With all that, Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke should have given us the superlative movie promised by a barrage of publicity. If they had put Clarke's Earthlight on the screen with equal genius, it would have been a great science-fiction movie. Unfortunately, they didn't. Instead they gave us dullness and confusion.

The whole affair dragged. Every trick had to be stretched interminably and then repeated over and over again. Nothing was explained or given coherent flow, but everything was run on to boredom. Further cutting might help; surely it couldn't hurt.

The story staggers through four vaguely related episodes. First we get the theme of man's humanoid ancestors being given intelligence by an alien slab only to become murderers. Next we go to the moon to find future men have dug up the same slab -- excellent background but no drama -- and no reason for it being there. Then we take a trip to Jupiter because -- men think the slab came from there.

This episode has a conflict between men and an articulate computer. It might have been good, except for the lack of rationality. No motivation is provided for the computer's going mad, and the hero acts like a fool. He knows the cmputer can't be trusted, and we've seen that the computer can at least operate a rescue craft to bring back his dead friend. But he goes out himself, leaving his companions in hibernation to be killed by the computer.

Finally, we get an endless run of obvious and empty symbols on the screen, followed by our hero in a strange room. Apparently he's undergone intergalactic transfer and now grows old and dies in the room, followed by a metaphysical symbol at the end. The alien contact we've been promised is no more than a brief shot of the slab again.

If possible wait to see it for the effects until you can buy the soft cover book. Book and movie don't entirely agree, but maybe the book will provide some relief to the confusion of the movie.

The real message, of course, is one Kubrick has used before: intelligence is perhaps evil and certainly useless. The humanoid reaction and pointless madness of the computer show this. Men can only be saved by some vague and unshown mystic experience by aliens.

This isn't a normal science-fiction movie at all, you see. It's the first of the New Wave-Thing movies, with the usual empty symbolism. The New Thing advocates were exulting over it as a mind-blowing experience. It takes very little to blow some minds. But for the rest of us, it's a disaster.

It will probably be a box-office disaster, too, and thus set major science-fiction movie making back another ten years.

It's a great pity.

November 2007: The Lovely Bones

by Alice Sebold

"The Power of Love Leaps the Great Divide of Death"
by Michiko Kakutani
June 18, 2002
New York Times Book Review

At first it sounds like a high-concept movie, one of those supernatural heart-tuggers like ''Ghost'' or ''The Sixth Sense'': the story of a teenage girl's rape and murder, and the fallout those events have on her family, as narrated from heaven by the dead girl herself.

As it turns out, however, Alice Sebold's first novel, ''The Lovely Bones,'' is anything but a hokey, Ouija-board mystery. What might play as a sentimental melodrama in the hands of a lesser writer becomes in this volume a keenly observed portrait of familial love and how it endures and changes over time. The novel is an elegy, much like Alice McDermott's ''That Night,'' about a vanished place and time and the loss of childhood innocence. And it is also a deeply affecting meditation on the ways in which terrible pain and loss can be redeemed -- slowly, grudgingly and in fragments -- through love and acceptance.

In the novel's opening passage, Ms. Sebold's narrator introduces herself with matter-of-fact charm: ''My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie,'' she says. ''I was 14 when I was murdered on Dec. 6, 1973. In newspaper photos of missing girls from the 70's, most looked like me: white girls with mousy brown hair. This was before kids of all races and genders started appearing on milk cartons or in the daily mail. It was still back when people believed things like that didn't happen.''

Susie tells us right off what happened that awful day. She was taking a shortcut home from school when a neighbor known as Mr. Harvey lured her into a hideaway he'd built in a cornfield. He then brutally raped and murdered her -- as he'd done with a series of other girls -- and disposed of her body in a sinkhole. Her soul now inhabits a heaven that conforms to the lineaments of her 14-year-old dreams: there is a high school there, where the textbooks are Seventeen and Glamour and Vogue; there is a charming duplex for her and a roommate; and there are lots of dogs to play with.

From her vantage point in heaven, Susie looks down on the world, and she comes to believe that ''if I watched closely, and desired, I might change the lives of those I loved on earth.'' Not only is she able to follow the daily activities of her family -- her mom; dad; teenage sister, Lindsey; and baby brother, Buckley -- but she's also able to rewind their lives, to relive moments from their past from a cosmic VCR.

Being a ''watcher'' gives Susie the solace of staying in touch with her family, but at the same time it makes her yearn for her former life on earth. She is able to live vicariously through Lindsey -- sharing her sister's joy in falling in love with a boy, having sex for the first time and making plans for marriage -- but she is also reminded constantly that she has died before experiencing these rites of passage herself, that she now lives in a perpetual yesterday.

Her counselor in heaven warns her: ''If you stop asking why you were killed instead of someone else, stop investigating the vacuum left by your loss, stop wondering what everyone left on Earth is feeling, you can be free. Simply put, you have to give up on Earth.''

By providing Susie with omniscience of the past and present, Ms. Sebold -- the author of ''Lucky,'' a critically acclaimed memoir that chronicled her efforts to come to terms with being raped when she was a college freshman -- is able to construct an artful narrative that moves back and forth in time, while revealing what all of the principal characters, including the murderous Mr. Harvey, are thinking in the shadowed recesses of their minds.

For the members of Susie's family and their neighbors in a small suburban development, her murder rumbles through their lives like an avalanche: for some, it moves with breathtaking violence and speed, shattering old notions of safety and faith; for others, it moves in slow motion, catching them when they least expect it and tipping them off balance.

Susie's father is broken by her death: bereft and angry and convinced, in the ensuing days and weeks, that Harvey is the man who killed his daughter. When the police are unable to find evidence supporting his suspicion, he embarks on a one-man quest for justice that will earn him a reputation as a crackpot. Susie's mother desperately tries to escape the reality of her death, turning to an adulterous affair with a police detective, then leaving town altogether to try to invent a new life for herself, far away from her husband and surviving children.

Too young really to understand the disappearance of his sister, Buckley imagines that he continues to see Susie as he goes about his life. But Lindsey, so close to Susie in age and temperament, finds her life completely rocked by the loss of her sister. She tries to assume a mantle of detachment, to steel herself against the pain, but finds her classmates looking at her as a doppelgänger of a dead girl. She vows to help her father find evidence proving Mr. Harvey's guilt, a vow that will put her directly in the serial murderer's path.

Because Ms. Sebold makes us care so intensely about each member of the Salmon family, we are held rapt by their overlapping stories, fearful not only that Lindsey will fall prey to Mr. Harvey like her sister, but worried, as well, that the Salmons will never be able to reconstruct themselves as a family.

In the latter portions of the novel, Ms. Sebold's assured narration takes a few stumbles: there are portentous and highly abstract musings on Susie belonging to a historical continuum of murdered girls and women, and some unconvincing scenes dealing with an eccentric schoolmate's belief that she can somehow channel Susie's feelings.

In the end, however, even these lapses do not diminish Ms. Sebold's achievements: her ability to capture both the ordinary and the extraordinary, the banal and the horrific, in lyrical, unsentimental prose; her instinctive understanding of the mathematics of love between parents and children; her gift for making palpable the dreams, regrets and unstilled hopes of one girl and one family.

October 2007: Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder

by Richard Louv

"Growing up Denatured"
by Bradford McKee
New York Times
April 28, 2005

Were it not for the Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts, Neil Figler said, his sons, 7 and 11, might never peel themselves away from the Xbox to go outside and play.

"My kids want to finish their homework so they can play video games," said Mr. Figler, 47, a salesman and Cubmaster in Goldens Bridge, N.Y. In Scouting his sons have learned to light fires, handle knives and build sleds for trekking through the woods. But even those occasional encounters with nature are planned and supervised by adults.

Nonetheless, the outings seem wilder than most anything else going on in kidland these days. Mr. Figler said his sons find life easier and more familiar in front of a computer screen. Among the Scouts, he said, "that's more the norm than the exception."

The days of free-range childhood seem to be over. And parents can now add a new worry to the list of things that make them feel inept: increasingly their children, as Woody Allen might say, are at two with nature.

Doctors, teachers, therapists and even coaches have been saying for years that children spend too much time staring at video screens, booked up for sports or lessons or sequestered by their parents against the remote threat of abduction.

But a new front is opening in the campaign against children's indolence. Experts are speculating, without empirical evidence, that a variety of cultural pressures have pushed children too far from the natural world. The disconnection bodes ill, they say, both for children and for nature.

The author Richard Louv calls the problem "nature-deficit disorder." He came up with the term, he said, to describe an environmental ennui flowing from children's fixation on artificial entertainment rather than natural wonders. Those who are obsessed with computer games or are driven from sport to sport, he maintains, miss the restorative effects that come with the nimbler bodies, broader minds and sharper senses that are developed during random running-around at the relative edges of civilization.

Parents will probably encounter Mr. Louv in appearances and articles leading up to the publication next month of his seventh book, "Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder" (Algonquin Books). The book is an inch-thick caution against raising the fully automated child.

"I worked really hard to make this book not too depressing," Mr. Louv (pronounced "loov") said last week from his home in San Diego. He urges parents to restore childhood to the unplugged state of casual outdoor play that they may remember from their own youth but that few promote in their offspring. "It's society's whole attitude that nature isn't important anymore," said Mr. Louv, 56, who has two sons age 17 and 23.

Dr. Donald Shifrin, a pediatrician in Bellevue, Wash., and a professor of clinical pediatrics at the University of Washington in Seattle, said he sees the signs every day of the syndrome Mr. Louv describes in his book. His patients now arrive with fewer broken arms from falling out of trees (soccer and lacrosse injuries are most common) and more video games, cellphones and hand-held computers.

"We have mobile couch potatoes," Dr. Shifrin said. "The question is, Are we going to turn this around with more opportunities for kids to interact with nature?"

Even if parents think their children get too much screen time and not enough safari time, many have no idea what to do about it. "It's absolutely a phenomenon that nobody knows how to break," said Mark Fillipitch, 40, a manager for a Caterpillar dealer and the father of four children - 10-year-old triplets (two boys and a girl) and a 6-year-old boy- in Acworth, Ga. "It is stronger than we are."

When Mr. Fillipitch was growing up he and his friends played baseball in a big field. "And if there weren't enough kids, you'd close right field," he said. His own children have bicycles, skateboards and a swing set, he said. But "there's this magnet pulling them into the house." It is the Nintendo GameCube. "I have to throw them outside."

Tracy Herzog, 42, a hospital fitness director and the mother of boys age 7 and 12 in Pembroke Pines, Fla., in effect banishes her children outdoors, she said, by not allowing them near the television, the Game Boy or the PlayStation until after dark. And only if their homework is done.

"As parents we have to make it uncomfortable for them to be sedentary," Ms. Herzog said. "The temptation is to let the TV or PlayStation baby-sit them."

Playing on parental anxieties has become an industry unto itself, but substantive data are almost nonexistent on the presumably growing distance between children and bugs, flowers and seashells. Mr. Louv, who is also a columnist for The San Diego Union-Tribune, has studied the topic as much as anyone. He interviewed about 3,000 children nationwide and many of their parents for his book.

Few if any scientific studies exist showing that children now spend less time exploring nature or describing the ways they benefit from being where the wild things are.

"Who's going to pay for that research?" Mr. Louv asked. "What toy can we sell for natural play?"

Stephen R. Kellert, a professor of social ecology at Yale whose book "Building for Life: Designing and Understanding the Human-Nature Connection" (Island Press) is to be published this summer, said that he had not seen Mr. Louv's book but that ample anecdotal evidence exists to support its argument.

"When you look for the hard data, it's hard to find," Dr. Kellert said. "And people talk about children's contact with nature often in a very indiscriminate way."

Children, he said, experience nature in many settings, often indirectly. If the Internet or television prevents a child from looking for four-leaf clovers, it may also provide vicarious ways to discover Amazonian rain forests. But, he added, the passive watching of a video screen does not simulate the uncertainty and risk, however minor, that make natural exploration bracing.

The risk part, assuming that children do just want to wander or waste time outdoors, is perhaps never low enough for parents.

Tom Cara, 47, who lives in the Chicago suburb of Niles, Ill., said that he and his wife, Erin, take their son, 10, and daughter, 14, on bike trips and that he and his son, in particular, go camping and fishing in the Wisconsin wilderness. But it's hard to let children roam too freely, he said, because the news media have spooked parents with reports of child abductions and murders. "We've been conditioned to live in fear," he said.

That fear resounds for other parents, too. Mr. Figler, the Cubmaster, said that 12 rural acres lie behind his family's home, and that he and his sons often explore them together. But the woods are off limits to his younger son if he is alone. His older son may explore them, but only with a two-way radio. "It's more my wife than me" who worries, Mr. Figler said. But they both grew more concerned after their sons' school notified them that two registered sex offenders live nearby.

"We're in an awareness of safety now that may not have been as prevalent" in the past, Mr. Figler said. "You're always thinking about child abductions. You see the stories on TV, and it gets you nervous."

Like grim news stories, Amber Alerts, broadcast to help spot missing children, may also take a toll on parents' nerves by playing up the risk of criminal harm to their children. Dr. Daniel D. Broughton, a pediatrician at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., and a former chairman of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, said he understood the fear that parents have. But he said they need to balance that fear with reality and learn to create safe zones where their children can run around on their own.

"We definitely want kids to be able to go out and play," Dr. Broughton said. "The sedentary lifestyle is a huge problem in my practice every single day. I haven't gone a day where I don't see a kid who's too fat."

Mr. Louv refers to parents' abduction fears as "the bogeyman syndrome." But he suggests that the more likely bogeymen are people who "criminalize" outdoor play through neighborhood associations and their covenants. His own neighborhood's residents' association, he said, is known to go around tearing down tree houses.

"If all these covenants and regulations were enforced, then playing outdoors would be illegal," Mr. Louv said.

And to let a child loiter is almost unthinkable, said Hal Espen, the editor of Outside magazine in Santa Fe, N.M. "The ability to just wander around is a much more fraught and anxiety-prone proposition these days," he said. "There's a lot of social zoning to go along with the urban zoning."

For Ms. Herzog, the fitness director, the local schoolyard has become the latest casualty. It was fenced off recently for security: a "lockdown," she called it. "That doesn't allow active play on the school grounds" during off hours, Ms. Herzog said. "It's not getting any easier."

September 2007: Children of God

New York Times Book Review
May 24, 1998
by Jim Gladstone

This sequel to Mary Doria Russell's 1996 novel, ''The Sparrow,'' is at once more ambitious and somewhat less satisfying than its predecessor. Picking up the story of Father Emilio Sandoz -- a Jesuit who opts out of the priesthood after he returns to earth in the year 2060, having barely survived an intergalactic mission to the planet Rakhat -- Russell again offers a provocative mix of science, spiritualism and social policy as she cuts between two gradually merging plot lines. Sandoz's reluctant participation in a return mission to the place that once inspired his greatest religious awe is alternated with scenes of the violent civil unrest that erupted on Rakhat in the wake of human contact. While ''The Sparrow'' offered a resonant emotional center in the relationships within the ad hoc family of explorers on the first journey to Rakhat, Russell shifts her overall emphasis in ''Children of God'' from a small cluster of central characters to the complex interspecies conflicts of a faraway world, resulting in a book that's more diffuse in focus and a bit short on human heart. Very much a novel of unresolved ideas, ''Children of God'' heads toward its conclusion with Sandoz thinking ''whatever the truth is, blessed be the truth.'' Still, despite this philosophical muzziness, Russell succeeds in painting an alien culture with remarkably detailed verisimilitude.

August 2007: The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane

"Rabbit Redux"
by Edward Patrick Hearn
New York Times Book Review
May 14, 2006

Perhaps no other current American children's book writer has appeared on the scene so brightly and so quickly as Kate DiCamillo. Her heartfelt first novel, the genial dog-to-the-rescue tale "Because of Winn-Dixie" (2000), became a Newbery Honor book and a best seller. "The Tiger Rising" (2001), about two lonely children determined to release a caged animal, was nominated for the National Book Award. Then her odd story about a mouse who dares love a princess, "The Tale of Despereaux" (2003), won the coveted Newbery Medal.

DiCamillo's latest novel, "The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane," may well be her best. It is an elegant volume of creamy pages with a handsome typeface and generous margins in a pale green binding. Bagram Ibatoulline's haunting color plates and sepia illustrations at the beginning of each chapter evoke the era of Andrew Wyeth, Howard Pyle and Maxfield Parrish. The novel is set in the storybook land of no specific time or locale. There are no annoying cellphones or Starbucks cafes. Not even the pictures give a clue to the exact period covered by the events. It could be the America of the Great Depression reconstructed on a vast Hollywood back lot.

"The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane" belongs to an undervalued but nonetheless beloved genre concerning the private lives of playthings. Every toy has its own history, as Hans Christian Andersen knew in "The Steadfast Tin Soldier." Some tales, like Johnny Gruelle's once popular Raggedy Ann and Andy books and the Pixar pictures "Toy Story" and "Toy Story 2," are entertaining fluff. Others, like DiCamillo's story, contain deeper implications. Rachel Field turned a doll's memoirs, "Hitty: Her First Hundred Years" (1929), into an American history lesson and a Newbery Medal winner. Margery Williams's "Velveteen Rabbit" (1922), William Steig's "Yellow & Pink" (1984) and Russell Hoban's supernal "Mouse and His Child" (1967) have been existential discourses. William Joyce explored similar territory in the lamentably underrated "Leaf Men and the Brave Good Bugs" (1996). It seems happy toys are all alike; every unhappy toy is unhappy in its own way.

Edward Tulane is a vain, self-absorbed three-foot-tall china rabbit from France who appears to have all he could want: fabulous clothes, a tiny gold pocket watch and a little girl, Abilene, who loves him. Then it all vanishes. Abilene's grandmother Pellegrina, who gave the child the china rabbit, is an unsettling kind of fairy godmother. She hovers about the house watchfully, and tells a disturbing tale about a beautiful, heartless princess who is transformed into a warthog and eaten because she cannot care for anyone but herself. The princess has no chance for redemption. Edward is luckier. But he disappoints Pellegrina, for she expects him to love Abilene as deeply as the child loves him.

When the family goes off on an ocean voyage, Pellegrina remains behind. That is when all the trouble starts. Edward's subsequent adventures unfold with much the same romantic abandon as the doll's in "Hitty." He too falls from grace and ends up in the water. Also like his predecessor, Edward is a passive character. He can neither walk nor talk. But he does think and observe and wonder.

His emotional journey through life encompasses several metamorphoses as a wide variety of owners adopt him. When a fisherman saves him from the sea, his wife calls him Susanna and puts a dress on him. But their nasty grown daughter tosses him in the trash. A hobo, reminiscent of one in "The Mouse and His Child," retrieves Edward from the garbage dump and names him Malone. Then he loses him. A crabby old woman uses him as a scarecrow in her cornfield until Bryce, an abused boy, rescues Edward for his poor little sister, Sarah Ruth. She christens him Jangles, and Bryce strings up the toy like a marionette to dance for money.

Loss is a common theme in DiCamillo's work. She has described "Because of Winn-Dixie" as "a book populated with stray dogs and strange musicians, lonely children and lonelier adults . . . all the kind of people that, too often, get lost in the mainstream rush of life." The writer often draws on the agony of her own childhood; her father left the family when she was 5. Edward Tulane does not realize what he has until it is gone.

He thinks he may have finally found unconditional love with Sarah Ruth, but she dies like Little Nell and Little Eva from incurable storybook sickness. His life is literally shattered when an angry diner owner dashes him on the counter edge. Then the toy rabbit suffers a symbolic death and resurrection. As seen on the book's somewhat sinister jacket, Edward enters the afterlife, in a Fellini-esque dream that returns him to the Tulane mansion on Egypt Street.

Of course this is a fairy tale: Edward, repaired, will end up in an antique shop and live happily ever after once an unexpected visitor walks in. There is at that moment the same slight chill of recognition shared when Peter Pan returns years later to Wendy, now a grown woman with a daughter of her own.

DiCamillo's style often echoes the rhythms and aspires to the grandiloquence of Victorian or Edwardian children's literature. More important for a young audience, she is a refreshingly graceful storyteller with a finely tuned ear for the discerning detail. True, "Edward Tulane" has the gratuitous vulgarity so expected in children's entertainments today: Rosie, the neighbor's brindled boxer, urinates on Abilene's family's dining room table and stains Edward's silk suit with drool. And perhaps the author's vocabulary is at times a bit inflated for young readers. (What child under 10 who has even heard the word ennui can grasp its meaning?) However, one reading is hardly enough to savor the rich philosophical nuances of DiCamillo's story. I think I will go read it again right now.

Michael Patrick Hearn's books include "The Annotated Wizard of Oz." His next, about children's book illustration in Russia, will be published in Moscow later this year.

July 2007: The Memory Keeper's Daughter

by Kim Edwards

Review by Ron Charles in The Washington Post
July 15, 2005

"Postpartum Blues"

My first daughter was born lifeless and gray-blue. "Like a seal," I remember thinking as the room went bright white and the doctor started suctioning her mouth. I pushed my wife's head back onto the pillow so she wouldn't be able to see the slick form down below. The oxygen tank hissed angrily. In the minutes that followed, as we waited and waited for my daughter to cry, all the hopes we'd stored up were suffocated under the weight of our new future that filled the room with fear.

Mercifully, few parents experience the shattering birth moment we did, and it may be that memories of my daughter's birth magnified the emotional impact of Kim Edwards's debut novel. But I think anyone would be struck by the extraordinary power and sympathy of The Memory Keeper's Daughter . The book opens during a snowstorm in Lexington, Ky., in 1964, when Norah Henry realizes that she's going into labor. The weather keeps her doctor from making it to the office in time, but her husband, David, is an orthopedic surgeon with enough experience to handle the situation. Under the partial influence of gas, Norah gives birth to a healthy baby boy, but as David tells her the happy news, another series of contractions begins. He quickly sedates his wife again, and she gives birth to another child, a girl with Down syndrome.

"Later," Edwards writes, "when he considered this night -- and he would think of it often, in the months and years to come: the turning point of his life, the moments around which everything else would always gather -- what he remembered was the silence in the room and the snow falling outside." In that quiet, terrifying moment, the grief and resentment caused by his sister's death at the age of 12 washes back over him, and he acts to preserve their vision of a happy future. He hands the baby to his nurse and asks her to take it to a home outside the city for handicapped children. When Norah awakens a few minutes later, he tells her their second baby was stillborn. "He had wanted to spare her," Edwards writes, "to protect her from loss and pain; he had not understood that loss would follow her regardless, as persistent and life-shaping as a stream of water. Nor had he anticipated his own grief, woven with the dark threads of his past."

Edwards has trouble maintaining the electrifying atmosphere of this long opening scene, but David's fateful decision that night is enough to power the novel through the next 25 years. The story runs along parallel tracks that don't converge until the very end: The first follows the picture-perfect Henry family, three healthy, talented people separated from one another by the secret that only David knows. The other track follows David's nurse, Caroline, who couldn't bring herself to follow his instructions that night. Instead, she left town with his baby, struggled through a series of part-time jobs, battled an unresponsive school system and managed to hammer out a joyful life.

As a single mother at a time when special-needs accommodations are unheard of or considered naively radical, Caroline would seem to have a far more difficult path to travel. Edwards does nothing to minimize or romanticize that struggle, but Caroline makes her humble way in the world through sheer determination and with the help of like-minded activist parents who are beginning to argue that children with disabilities should be raised at home and attend regular schools.

Those two sets of lives make for a thought-provoking contrast, a study in what really determines a family's happiness. With a successful, lucrative career, David can give his wife and son everything, except candor. As Edwards points out -- probably too many times -- the effort to conceal what he's done with their daughter poisons the atmosphere of their home with a colorless, odorless gas of deception. David throws himself into photography, a poignant attempt to freeze perfect moments and crop life just as he wants it. Barred from her husband's heart, Norah turns to alcohol, then to a series of affairs, trying to deaden or distract herself from a sense of loss she can't fully understand.

Some ominously saccharine moments indicate that Edwards can slip into the treacly trade -- "The love was within her all the time, and its only renewal came from giving it away"-- but these gaffes are relatively infrequent, especially considering the presence of a handicapped character, who would, in less disciplined hands, be used to generate a waterfall of sentimental tears.

The episodic structure allows Edwards to survey these two families through the '60s, '70s and '80s, but frankly she's best when she moves slowly. The middle section skips through the years, obscuring the characters behind Significant Historical Moments: Women's Lib, Vietnam, Disability Rights. The novel begins to look as though it's been planned by a divorced dad: Every alternating weekend encounter has to be packed with a major activity. This structural tendency may be the effect of Edwards's experience as a short story writer. We drop in on these characters only on important days -- separated by years that included all the minutiae of real life. They're reduced to saying things like, "The last few years have meant so much to me." I kept thinking, No, show the true nature of these people on a few ordinary days .

Edwards is entirely capable of doing that, as the opening and closing sections of her novel show. This tragedy of a man who thinks he can control how lives are redirected is as moving as the story of his nurse, who knows that her love can bless a damaged life. In the end, it's not just that David made a mistake in a moment of crisis; it's that he never realized that parenthood is an infinite series of opportunities for redemption. Years after the choice he could never forgive himself, for, as Caroline tells him, "You missed a lot of heartache, sure. But David, you missed a lot of joy." Readers of The Memory Keeper's Daughter will find ample stores of both. ·

Ron Charles is a senior editor of Book World.