Critics' choices for Christmas
Mason, Alane & Hansen, Ron & Weakland, Rembert G. & Maitland, Sara & McConnell, Frank & Coles, Robert & Keen, Suzanne
BOOKS Critics1 choices for Christmas Sara Naitland Sara Maitland, a novelist and theologian, lives in Kettering, England. Her most recent novel is Ancestral Truths (Henry Holt). asily the...
...They are still all around us, these ancient stories—in the naming of the planets, and so many of the stars...
...he judges of the big literary prizes have done a great job recently, and the books I have most often pressed on my friends include several winners from the past year...
...One of the dangers is that we will lose the ability to be nourished by myth—by the deep stories, the beautiful, the magical, and the symbolic...
...Kress invents a twentysecond-century world in which genetic engineering and high tech have made America both affluent and class-stratified, and in which the high-functioning, trans-human mutants—the Sleeplessare involved in a scheme which aims either at the destruction or the salvation of the human race altogether...
...Among his many books is The Spiritual Life of Children...
...The economic aspect of that period, in this case capitalism as then understood, is central to the thesis that the author seeks to make...
...Surgery failed to get rid of the growth, radiation only hastened the gradual paralysis of his legs, whence followed chronic and excruciating pain, malaise, depression, and the too-ordinary difficulties of the handicapped...
...Crowley layers story within story...
...You can learn all you would ever want to know about the beginnings of McDonald's and Holiday Inn...
...Unlike most contemporary priests, he does not act as if theology were a specialized area of knowledge, like neuroscience, limited to an initiate...
...earns him comparison with Chekhov, the greatest writing physician of them all...
...Weakland, O.S.B., is the archbishop of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and the author of Faith and the Human Enterprise (Orbis...
...If you were right here I'd make you borrow my copy...
...Detective fiction doesn't get much better than this...
...Wells— can be...
...A Tremor of Bliss (Harcourt Brace, $22, 323 pp...
...the sense of belonging to oneself alone which had nothing to do with "abstaining" from sex...
...uses quotes from the early Christian desert fathers to limn the windswept landscape of the Dakotas, the land itself a meditation on the poverty and riches of' asceticism...
...Ethan Canin, whose recent The Palace Thief (Random House, $21,205 pp...
...I often feel as though I work in a bakery, my arms ever mired up to the elbows in pastry dough while trays of fragrant tarts and turnovers fresh from the oven pass beneath my nose...
...In case the endorsement of the Booker Prize, the Pulitzer, and National Book Award were not enough publicity, I want to recommend Roddy Doyle's Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha (Viking, $20.95, 282 pp...
...But the novel is so huge, so ingenious and prodigal in its plotting, so full of rambunctious, quirky life, that it seems to be about everything...
...No editor can resist recommending books he or she has worked on, and such recommendations may not be as untrustworthy as they seem...
...Why are we Christians so conspicuously failing to find a language, a grasp on our own tradition, which would enable us to say the same only better: "These things have happened and they are always...
...It cannot fail but make us long for the deepening of our own imaginations and the retelling, remythologizing of our own stories...
...All the Pretty Horses, winner of the National Book Award, was the first volume of The Border Trilogy and The Crossing is the second...
...Why are we so patently terrified of Mary's virginity, of angels, and of miracles...
...in art and literature...
...A novel about a ten-year-old Barrytown (Dublin) boy, Paddy Clarke conjures up the world of "sticks and stones may break my bones/but names and faces will never hurt me," showing that this child's motto can only be true when everything is okay at home...
...I've long forgotten most of them, but one has stuck fast to my memory: "I had a nice time here most of the time...
...Life Work is Hall's sage and inspiring paean to "absorbedness" and to the consolation his healthy obsession offers him when cancer forces him to come to terms with his own mortality...
...Memory will, of course, fail" them—particular readers die...
...in the wailing of police sirens and the agony of torn Achilles tendons...
...When not watching TV, listening to jazz, or reading comic books, the abstemious McConnell teaches English at the University of California at Santa Barbara...
...Obviously Kress, like all fine s-f writers, is talking not about the future but about the current awful state of affairs in class-ridden America...
...Suzanne Keen Suzanne Keen, a regular Commonweal contributor, teaches English at Yale University...
...In this book there is, with one exception, everything anyone could ever think of that happened in the fifties—or at least it looks that way...
...He is, as always, a marvelously humorous, sharply observant writer, whose fiction and nonfiction, both, have been an important part of our reading for many years...
...If you love somebody, buy them one of these books, and if you love them a lot, buy them all...
...The ending may seem a bit contrived, but the rest was sheer joy...
...And her novel, rich and splendidly told, is both an apocalypse and a mitzvah, an assertion about the ineradicable goodness of people that reminds me of what s-f at its best—as in H.G...
...McConnell has written criticism on the Bible as literature and on the modern novel...
...In Dixie City Jam the plot involves a sunken submarine, sadistic neo-Nazis, a gangland feud, and a few neat torture scenes...
...Materialism allows the reader to encounter a thinking poet's thought...
...Reynolds Price also faced the affliction of cancer when, in 1984, an eel-like tumor was found braided onto his spinal cord...
...Robert Coles Robert Coles is a child psychiatrist who teaches at Harvard University...
...Read this terrific book...
...The reason, I believe, is that daily life extracts too much—takes it all...the home front—here—will break your heart every time...
...Cormac McCarthy's The Crossing (Alfred A. Knopf, $23,426 pp...
...Zemurray was the head of United Fruit and was involved in the banana problems of Guatemala...
...Ron Hansen Ron Hansen is the author of five books, including most recently Mariette in Ecstasy (HarperCollins...
...I go back now to that long-ago time because each of the four recently published books that I recommend here somehow connects in my mind to Madeleine and her way of taking on life's unnerving (sometimes terrible) mysteries...
...stands out as the one that most surprised me...
...Again, Madeleine's lonely struggle with life's fickle nature returns to me, decades later, as I meet the various kinds of loneliness a tremendously gifted storytelling physician explores so thoughtfullyRembeii G. Weaklnnd RembertG...
...Twenty years ago, the prize-winning poet gave up a full professorship at the University of Michigan to go back to his grandparents' farm in New Hampshire and commit himself as wholly to his prose and poetry writing as his forebears did to their fields...
...Whence her strength of character, of soul— we who have been given so much more in life keep wondering...
...Nicholas TilFs Mozart and the Enlightenment: Truth, Virtue, and Beauty in Mozart's Operas (W.W...
...For her, time meant less than a decade...
...I find no animosity in the book...
...Wise, passionate, beautifully written, it's the finest portrayal of fear and hiddenness in families that I have ever read...
...Much has been known about Mozart and Freemasonry but Till places that relationship in a new and clearer perspective...
...Of the books I've insisted my friends read this year, Melissa Fay Greene's Praying for Sheetrock: A Work of Nonfiction (Addison Wesley, $10,335 pp...
...Love & Sleep is the second book in a four-novel sequence (Aegypt, the first installment, has been re-released in paper [Bantam, $12.95,390 pp.], along with Crowley's magnificent fantasy novel, Little, Big [Bantam, $12.95,538 pp...
...Nancy Kress's Beggars and Choosers (Tor Books, $22.95, 320 pp...
...I spent a lot of time with children who were never going to become grown-ups—and they knew it...
...n old professor from my seminary days once told the class that we should always be i reading at least three different books: a novel, a work in our field of specialization, and a book that is totally out of our field, as a way of stretching our minds a bit, of adding new information to our storehouse, and of creating a curiosity in us for new vistas...
...He has found a language so fabulous that it feels inevitable and a multilayered structure that perfectly reflects the sense of change, fluidity, uncertainty, metamorphosis which is the stuff of this body of tales...
...Father Viladesau will go right to the heart of the difficulty, usually providing some historical or theological context which makes muddied waters somehow clear...
...I still remember some of those boys and girls...
...27 Alane Mason Alane Mason is an editor at W. W. Norton...
...is a literary dip into a magnificent store of tradition and inspiration...
...What at first seems to be episodic, twists into a complicated knot of story...
...When Billy Parham gets back home, he finds his parents murdered, the horses stolen, and he takes his little brother with him on another strange journey into Mexico to get back what is theirs...
...our sense of mystery so diluted...
...Meanwhile there are girls' basketball games, gossip that the coach is a lesbian, and skirmishes about sex education in the high school...
...for Frazier, time goes back hundreds of years—to his ancestors and their struggle to be Americans, then to build up a strong and sound life for themselves and their descendants...
...In the area of religion (I hope I do not seem to stretch that point since the work I cite is not deep speculative theology), I read Father Joe Dunn's No Lions in the Hierarchy: An Anthology of Sorts (The Columbia Press, Dublin...
...Corny as it sounds, the older I get the more I believe that the true joy of Christmas lies in the receiving...
...Not all the poems are strictly metrical...
...Ruthie Bolton is a pseudonym for a black resident of Charleston, South Carolina, who has given us her autobiographical Gal (Harcourt Brace, $19.95,279 pp...
...But an exceptionally talented writer manages something else, too—an implicit challenge to the very nature of our human mortality...
...That is a shame, since there are many other worthwhile vignettes to be found in this collection of essays...
...Humor balances the attention given to pain, although enjoying "the crunch of someone else's pain" is always an ingredient in the laughter represented and elicited...
...This is my booklist of the staircase...
...Yes, we all go into the dark...
...though directed toward his fellow priests to share ideas for Sunday reflections (much needed, many parishioners might add), also offers to the layperson that rare combination of intellectual depth and spiritual sustenance Father Viladesau proffers in his own ministry...
...Calasso says of his tales: "These things have never happened, but they are always...
...I haven't mentioned half the fiction, histories, biographies, and books of poetry and theology I have profited from this past year...
...Filling the spaces between others' texts are Graham's poems, including "Manifest Destiny," a wonderful poem about Shiloh, a bullet with a bite mark in it, and the process of sympathetic imagination...
...From the novels read recently, I have selected for recommendation Anna Quindlen's One True Thing ( Random House, $22, 289 pp...
...I was drawn to the shortest (with so much catching up to do, one must move quickly), and those with a flavor of foreigness to challenge New York City's particular provinciality: James Joyce's Dubliners, Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, Milan Kundera's The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Max Frisch's Man in the Holocene, Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop (the foreign place in the novel being the eighteenth-century American Southwest...
...It is not per se a religious novel, but that was okay with me...
...But it also involves what I find most appealing about Burke's work, the insistence that in a violent and messy world we—that's we;—must remain nonviolent, not messy, and sane...
...Among more recent works, those remote in time or place satisfy best: In an Antique Land (Vintage, $13, 393 pp...
...I do actually suspect that The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony may turn out to be one of the great texts of the twentieth century: that its claim to our attention cannot be vaunted too highly and that it is lovely and sexy just in itself as well as driven forward by an enormous poetic intelligence...
...It proves that Mozart understood well what the Enlightenment was all about and set about to incorporate that vision in his operas...
...Farrokh Daruwalla, an orthopedic surgeon in Toronto who is visiting his hometown of Bombay to work with crippled children and dwarfs when he gets caught up in a murder investigation and the first meeting of separated twins, one a zealous Jesuit from California, the other an actor in hackneyed mystery films that have offended all of India...
...Charles Johnson's Middle Passage (Plume, $10,220 pp...
...kay, Christmas books...
...The heroism of daily life is wonderfully limned in Joanne Meschery's smart, perceptive, achingly tender novel, Home and Away (Simon and Schuster, $21,284 pp...
...And now I can make up for that...
...When he meets Tert Card, the editor at The Shipping News, Proulx's protagonist Quoyle registers the "voice querulous in complaint...
...It is by no means an action novel, but instead tackles the very difficult topic of the psychological growth processes of an angry young woman who is faced with some difficult life choices...
...Each of the multitude of characters introduced in the first half of the book plays a role in the accelerating plot...
...This book has much to offer all of us who someday, in some way, will come upon those fateful (and fearful) moments that will tell us a lot about who we are...
...Annie Finch's A Formal Feeling Comes invites readers to consider contemporary women poets thinking about and using form...
...a deft, funny, disquieting thriller about the unforeseen eruption of violence in an Italian Catholic family in Connecticut...
...The book is elegantly written...
...He has entered into a long tradition, paying proper debts to Ovid and Homer, without any subservience or loss of his own voice...
...is, in its own way, an effort of a wonderfully gifted and knowing essayist to tackle the same great imponderables young Madeleine contemplated...
...In these stories we can encounter a world in which sexuality, in its most diverse forms, is respected, even loved, without being slavishly worshiped...
...publishers changed the name to one that is less capricious and not as felicitous: The Rest of Us Catholics: The Loyal Opposition (Templegate Publishers, $14.95, 314 pp...
...The subject of Pierce's research is magic, the magic of a world that no longer exists (but once did), a magic in which he does not believe (but practices...
...In a similar vein, two Southerners speak to us of their lives, ask us to remember the suffering they have experienced, the losses sustained, the victories nevertheless won...
...It takes a little patience at the beginning, but The Shipping News turns into a wonderful novel...
...At the other em of the scale, The Encyclopedia of Lai i Invertebrate Behavior (Contu led on page 24) 15 (MIT Press, $45, 320 pp...
...Mainly set in Newfoundland, the novel also examines family life, but the bewildered perspectives belong to adults rather than to a child...
...The protagonist is Hedy Gallagher Castle, 29 30 an officer at a border station below the Sierra's eastern wall...
...Her essay on Anthony Burgess appeared in Commonweal's February 11,1994, issue...
...A user-friendly volume, A Formal Feeling Comes includes comments by each of the poets on form, and two appendices explaining the forms 26 of specific poems...
...Eight great books, and the list is still far too short...
...Naturally, in book after book he finds himself drawn back into the byzantine, Berlinesque criminal scene in New Orleans (the most complicated city in America—no kidding), and gambling his own tensely maintained dignity against the riot of the Big Easy...
...Healings of the spirit also occur in Harriet Doerr' s charming second novel, Consider This, Senora (Harcourt Brace, $21.95, 241 pp...
...is a haunting, enthralling, lyrical tale of a stoical teenaged boy tracking a she-wolf in the rangelands of New Mexico just before World War II...
...When the trilogy is finished it just may be the great American novel...
...the story of the trial of a Japanese-American fisherman in the Pacific Northwest in the 1950s—an old-fashioned page-turner with a graceful prose style, a novel of subtle courage, ethical concern, resonance, even hope...
...I should receive a gold medal for having read every page of David Halberstam' s The Fifties (Fawcett Columbine, $15,800 pp...
...It is a constant complaint of those in book publishing that we are too overloaded with manuscripts to read for pleasure...
...Much of what Father Dunn is saying in the book can be heard in the corridors of any Catholic institution these days...
...Norton, $29.95, 371 pp...
...But I think too that it throws down a particular gauntlet to theologians, liturgists, and any who want their religious convictions to be a "faith for the whole person"—why is our hagiography so sparse...
...Tis we, 'tis our estranged faces that miss the many-splendored thing...
...Like the author I am convinced that one cannot understand the famous sixties nor what has happened since that eventful decade without knowing well what happened in the fifties...
...The book itself then is a delight, but more—it made me think...
...The principal theme of Donald Hall's Life Work (Beacon Press, $15,124 pp...
...and she went further— she wrote it again and again on a note pad she kept nearby her hospital bed...
...hasn't yet won abig prize, although it appeared on Harold Bloom's list of "278 Books You Should Have Read by Now" (Esquire, September 1994) barely a month after it appeared in bookstores...
...is the latest in his series about Dave Robicheaux, and nails it down that Brother Burke is one of the very best fellows currently working in the great tradition of the American hardboiled detective story...
...Finally, as Christmas draws near and gift-giving devolves into frantic search and empty obligation, Lewis Hyde's The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property (Vintage, $14, 354 pp...
...The writer who has created those characters knows how to bring wisdom to us—the kind that, ironically, comes from frustration and pain...
...And Burke's descriptions of New Orleans are so bang-on that you can almost taste the gumbo...
...Cycle B, $7.95, 132 pp...
...The espousal of both economic freedom and social cohesion, with the tensions embodied in trying to hold these two together, is the backdrop for the analysis of Mozart's works...
...The troubling or confusing aspects of Scripture or doctrine will not be circumvented here...
...Like her first novel, Stones for Ibarra, for which she won an American Book Award, Consider This, Senora focuses on the changes wrought by the land and people of Mexico on exiles from America, in this case a California artist getting over her divorce, an old widow awaiting death in the country of her birth, a frustrated woman seeking a new life, a feckless investor fleeing tax evasion charges in Arizona...
...E. Annie Proulx's The Shipping News is the polar opposite to Doyle's novel...
...Hours later I have a huge list in my head, but up there in front of those eager readers I fall back on a few eminently worthwhile but well-known titles that most people there had probably beaten me to...
...I would say this about Faulkner, Blake, and not many others, but I say it about Gaiman: if you don't read Mister Punch, your life will be a little less radiant than it could be...
...It's written by Neil Gaiman and drawn by Dave McKean, and I repeat my earlier assertion in these pages that Gaiman may just be the most gifted and important storyteller in English...
...Why are we rendered anxious and irritable by the psychological depths of imaginative and emotionally engaged faith...
...But, strange25 ly enough, in all 800 pages you will not find the name of Fulton J. Sheen anywhere...
...He lives in Santa Clara, California...
...are books that raise all the right questions and deepen our sense of living in a vastly complex, strange, and beautiful universe...
...he speaks not only to our need to be guided or consoled or challenged, but also to understand...
...So he jumped overboard in protest...
...The variety of the writing collected by Finch makes this book a very interesting collection of poems by sixty poets, and amply demonstrates the vitality of form in contemporary writing...
...At the same time we need to have them retold, remembered, revitalized for our own time and Calasso has done it...
...some use syllables and some use patterns of repetition and internal rhyme to give free verse a backbone...
...I'll be going soon: Good-by...
...The book was an eye-opener for me...
...is precisely that of the monks of the Middle Ages, Laborare et orare, to work and to pray...
...and a profound joy...
...Graham's Materialism, her fifth book of poems, investigates the relationship between the b6dy and the soul, the seen and the unseen, the time-bound self and history...
...editing, I fear, is making me an ignoramus In reaction I turned this spring and summer to books I should have read before, during years spent reading mostly manuscripts...
...Operation Desert Storm is underway and her father, a former minister and recent stroke victim, is in the house with her and heading further into bewilderment, while her famous and often childish husband, for five years the fastest man on skis, is, in his forties, trying a comeback in Europe...
...Toward the end of her life she asked her parents, her older brother, please to call her by her full name...
...Kathleen Norris's Dakota: A Spiritual Geography (Houghton Mifflin, $9.95,224 pp...
...She lives in New York City...
...and The Van (Penguin, $10, 311pp...
...When—ever in your life— is gratification so damned licit...
...Hedy' s teen-aged daughter gets her first lessons in loss and love through a friend who undergoes an abortion, even as her mother falls into an affair with a part-time soldier shipped off to Iraq...
...Kiss of the Wolf is a tight, tense, chilling novel about how human frailty and deception can offer a home to terror...
...The Snapper (Penguin, $10, 216 pp...
...The son of the title is Dr...
...She signed that poignant, resigned statement, and dated it...
...It is we, in the twentieth century, who have a problem...
...His book is, in part, an extraordinary social history of our nation, told through a narration of one family's fate...
...in liturgy...
...Where is the artful theology that can make the sort of claims that Calasso not merely makes but delivers on...
...yet his book gives a life to generations of men, women, children: they are handed to us as companions by one of their own, their record a collective new life...
...Paddy Clarke left me breathless, moved, and amazed by the subtlety of Doyle's craft...
...They are: a detective novel, a science fiction novel, and a thing for which we have as yet no good name...
...He is also the author of the Harry Garnish/Sister Bridget O 'Toole mystery novel series (Walker and Company...
...And then there's Mister Punch (DC/Vertigo, $24.95, 96 pp...
...Although people rightly bemoan what is happening to publishing, the fact is that American writing is as healthy and fascinating as it's ever been...
...was a revelation to me...
...Paul Davies—the professor of natural philosophy (a new chair created especially for him) at the University of Adelaide—writes wonderfully for the lay scientist: The Mind of God (Touchstone, $12, 254 pp...
...Susan Bergman's Anonymity (Farrar Straus and Giroux, $20,198 pp...
...Of course, fiction, too, can bring us such moments: the spell of revelation woven by great storytellers such as Reynolds Price—and too, Dr...
...Some of the best stuff occurs when the novel loops back to Pierce's Catholic childhood, spent in an isolated Kentucky mountain town, where, among other things, Pierce and his cousins shelter and furtively baptize a girl from a mining community up the mountain...
...So there...
...But I'll probably be thinking of them as I again trudge up the staircase...
...Frank McConnell Frank McConnell writes regularly in these pages on the media...
...We fail to recognize them to our very great loss: How much, for instance, might Mary—and the great virgin martyrs of the Christian tradition— be restored to women if we understood better the fierce, wild power of the Greek virgin goddesses...
...It would seem that, to the author of this otherwise exhaustive account, religion was not worth recording...
...Why isn't contemporary Christianity producing texts like this...
...Two books of poetry would be worth looking around for: Jorie Graham's Materialism (Ecco Press, $ 13,146 pp...
...it's truly a work of genius...
...John Crowley's Love & Sleep (Bantam, $22.95,503 pp...
...The fantastic is often near at hand in a John Irving novel, and that's especially true of his latest, A Son of the Circus (Random House, $25, 633 pp...
...fax 503-466-3200...
...What this book must be like in the Italian original I hardly dare think, but Calasso is, I must suspect, well served by his translator Tim Parks, for the whole book reads richly, sinuously, and naturally...
...It was put into my hands by one of the nation's finest booksellers, appropriately enough, as a gift, and one well worth passing along...
...The volume includes not only poems but excerpts and adaptations from other texts by philosophers, poets, explorers, artists, and theologians, so it seems like an argument with all the evidence laid out in a trail, and the reasoning removed...
...Our stories are as good and as culturally pervasive...
...an extraordinarily beautiful, sexy, engaging, and intelligent retelling of the Greek myths...
...Without a hint of self-pity or false claims on beatitude, Price affectingly writes, in A Whole New Life (Atheneum, $20,214 pp...
...I remember the physical agonies they endured as one or another kind of cancer made its claim upon them, and I remember the fear, the apprehension, the sadness that they felt and tried to express in their often indirect ways...
...You don't have to know Aegypt to enjoy Love & Sleep, which relates the story of scholarly Pierce Moffat's quest for love and vocation...
...That a novel about the birth of empathy can work in such a pared-down style makes Doyle's achievement all the more impressive...
...in the discourse of psychoanalysis and in the structures of our imaginations...
...Greene avoids the morality-play scheme of vice and virtue that might make her story simpler, and she sacrifices nothing in vividness or in her reporting by showing the reader the failings of her hero and the kindness of her villain...
...winner of the 1990 National Book Award, combines the best of all worlds: a mere 209 pages, 150 years distant in its historical setting, cosmopolitan (in the best sense of the word) in its embrace of philosophy, literature, and human nature, and in its reflections on good and evil, on history and race, utterly contemporary, forceful, and wise...
...Even now I can remember her looking at me as I read it, then looking at me as I tried to keep looking at her—silence the only way we could both keep away tears...
...When he finds the wolf is pregnant, he takes her back to Old Mexico to free her, but she's caught and used for d'bgfighting and he finally has to kill her...
...Christianity would be far stronger today if, in the past, those who had rows with the skipper and crew of the Barque of Peter had stayed aboard and kept reminding both sailors and passengers that there were other possible directions in which to navigate...
...She is an ordinary working woman of no formal education who has a story to tell— though unlike so many of us, she also has the determination to do so, and the talent to give narrative shape to what she has seen, experienced...
...is a harrowingly honest and heartbreaking memoir, full of healthy anger and healing love, about a Christian evangelical family dealing with the loss of their husband and father to AIDS and with the shock that he was secretly homosexual—he'd claimed his illness was many other things...
...The author sums up his stance pretty well in the preface: "I once came across a story in a sermon book about a passenger who was critical of the way the captain was running the ship...
...and most recently The Last Three Minutes (Basic Books, $20,162 pp...
...Here you can look on page 280, as reported in the index...
...I wondered why she had announced that, around the end of the year, she would no longer be writing her columns for the New York Times on matters of current interest but would be devoting her time to writing novels...
...As Tiny Tim would have it, God bless them, every one...
...Both the economy and the imaginative excess of this character sketch suggest the paradoxical virtues of Proulx's style...
...She hides the evidence of the hit-and-run as well as she can, but in so doing orchestrates ever greater anguish for her son as she is forced to face her own capacity for wrongdoing and to find in her old flame, Bruno Minea, a friendly confidant whose own motives for helping Joanie may well be sinister...
...Billy Graham does receive one mention—for his opposition to the Kinsey report...
...Why they strive to be first in the world...
...Now I see why...
...Joanie Mucherino, whose husband has abandoned her and their eleven-year-old son, Todd, is hurrying home with the boy from his Confirmation party when her Buick slams into and kills a man walking on the highway...
...Confess now: is there any feeling in the world like standing there in your bathrobe, 9 a.m., the tree blinking away loonily, the coffee and brandy within reach, opening packages filled with really good stuff...
...of his illness and of his healing through self-hypnosis, prolific writing, the heroic help of his family and friends, and faith in the "now appalling, now astonishing grace of God...
...If there had been any doubt in my mind about Mozart's superior intelligence, in spite of all the nonsense that has been written about him and the way he has been portrayed in movies and theater, this book has taken that doubt away...
...and E. Annie Proulx's The Shipping News (Simon and Schuster, $12,337 pp...
...we seem to desire a stripped-down, hard-nosed faith, and an ugly, contentious theology...
...and so doing, he emerges stronger than ever in certain respects...
...Norman Vincent Peale isn't there, either, so it is not a question of nativism...
...Proulx' s deliberately choppy prose is the perfect vehicle for a style chockablock with epigrammatic statements, metaphors, and world-defining catalogs...
...In that last regard, she was obviously helped enormously by the novelist Josephine Humphries, also a resident of Charleston, who generously agreed to meet with her regularly, encouraged her to make a record of her memories and reflections...
...The second is Commonweal's own Paul Elie's collection of diverse, surprising, moving, and often profound reflections on the saints by contemporary writers (including, Richard Bausch, Avery Dulles, S.J., Tobias Wolf, Ron Hansen, Nancy Mairs, Kathleen Norris, Francine Prose...
...So it's not without bias that I, nonetheless, recommend as my two favorite books published this fall, David Guterson's Snow Falling on Cedars (Harcourt Brace, $21.95,352 pp...
...Is it, I wondered, impossible to make mythopoetic narratives out of ideas that you believe to be true...
...The U.S...
...For some specifically Catholic inspiration, Richard Viladesau's The Word in and out of Season, Homilies for the Sundays of Ordinary Time (Paulist Press, Cycle A, $9.95,138 pp...
...17, yielding in booty the goods for which black people could only pray...
...James Lee Burke's Dixie City Jam (Hyperion, $22.95, 367 pp...
...The narrator adds' "For the devil had long ago taken a shine to Tert Card, filled him like a cream horn with itch and irritation...
...A style with such energy of its own can detract from the story, but not here...
...Robicheaux is a cop in the parish of New Iberia, Louisiana, a recovering drunk who's been fired from the New Orleans police department and who's trying to build a decent life with his fragile wife and their adopted daughter...
...This stunning comic book—graphic novel—whatever—is easily the most haunting, inescapable story I've read in years...
...Poems take my breath away fairly frequently, but the last time I finished a novel and had to remind myself to breathe must have been nearly a decade ago (reading William Kennedy' s Ironweed...
...I think this book cannot fail but deepen our understanding of what the mythological really is, how it is a necessary part of what it is to be fully human...
...The writer's cinematographic expertise comes forth at once and the portrayals are vivid and always done with a sense of humor and compassion...
...Ian Frazier's Family (Farrar Straus and Giroux, $23,400 pp...
...Three of the four long stories in this collection are told in the first per24 son, not an easy writing strategy...
...Such a summary made me think the book would be worth reading...
...I, struck mute with embarrassment, try to remember the last time I read a book between hard or soft covers...
...With affection and humor, Doerr sketches the beauty of a Mexican hilltown where the homely and the magical delightfully coexist...
...thereby, we get close, indeed, to these somewhat puzzled and fragile souls, each trying so hard to make sense of a particular life' s circumstances, events...
...But neither Dante nor Milton had any such problem...
...I am sure that the new name was meant to underscore some of the criticisms of aspects of the present pontificate that are found in the book...
...His writing life has flourished, even as he obviously can't get around as he once did...
...restores to us the meaning of the giving of gifts, especially those gifts, tangible and intangible, we ourselves are given...
...If you don'tknow Zemurray— or, for that matter, Henry Aaron—the index won't help until you realize that in some instances the page number it offers is off by a page...
...is a vastly different novel, except that it shares—for me, anyhow—an exhilarating goodwill and joy of invention...
...he French have a phrase, L'esprit d'escalier, the wit of the staircase, which defines that frustrated feeling we have when we find the brilliant, parrying riposte only after the argument is long over and we're glumly going to bed...
...Most particularly, I add— it's my essay, sue me—Brother Gaiman...
...Not that suffering and vulnerability don't descend (out of nowhere) on all of us—as Reynolds Price's memoir of his bout with a potentially fatal spinal cancer certainly reminds us (A Whole New Life, Atheneum, $20,213 pp...
...The result is a book that gives one a great deal of pause: Here is a woman who has endured terrible pain, suffered innumerable betrayals, lived at the very edge of things— and yet the voice that engages us is shrewd, compassionate, sensitive, morally awake...
...His middle initial was X. Face like cottage cheese clawed with a fork...
...We have given too much ground to the demythologizers...
...and Annie Finch, ed., A Formal Feeling Comes: Poems in Form by Contemporary Women (Story Line Press, $15.95,308 pp...
...Among Hyde's epigraphs is this line from the poet Czeslaw Milosz: "There are nothing but gifts on this poor, poor Earth...
...The index goes on and on: from Henry Aaron (first listed) through thousands of others, like Dean Acheson, Sherman Adams, Henry Ashmore, Lucille Ball, Bernard Baruch, to Elvis, Jimmy Dean, Adlai Stevenson, Robert Taft, Harry Truman, Edward Teller, Earl Warren, and, after thirty-eight columns of names and other items, ending with Sam Zemurray...
...by Amitav Ghosh, is a wonderful travelogue cum scholarly detective story which evokes, through fragments from documents found in a Cairo synagogue, a complex and variegated world of cultural influence and trade between the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean during the eleventh century...
...The home front is a war zone, too, in Jim Shepard's Kiss of the Wo//(Harcourt Brace, $21.95,308 pp...
...Cycle C, $7.95,120 pp...
...So here are three books that are, purely and simply, really good stuff—which also means that they're the kind of stories that breathcatchingly renew your faith in the resilience of the imagination...
...Story Line Press: 503-466-5352...
...Finch construes form broadly to include kinds of poems (sonnets, sestinas, villanelles, ballads), poems in stanzas (quatrains, rhyme royal, heroic couplets), and poems in adaptations and new combinations of rhyme and meter...
...As with Madeleine, illness has urged someone to take stock of what his life means, where it is headed...
...She also wrote various brief statements about herself...
...when Pierce reads, we get to read the book (by imaginary historical novelist Fellowes Kraft) over his shoulder...
...For not dissimilar reasons I have also been inspired and empowered by the work of the more contemporary my thologizers— the scientists...
...But Ian Frazier has done his imaginative, sensitive best to enlarge our present world with that of others who have, like Madeleine, said good-by—and now, reach out^to touch us mightily...
...At the end of Christmas day, on the sofa in your bathrobe under the comforter—your brandy near at hand—could there be anything better than a finely told, brilliant story to enter into— on this day that commemorates one of the best of stories...
...The payoff in the novel's scheme of knots (diagrams and definitions adorn each chapter) could not be more satisfying...
...At one point it occurs to Hedy "why people are always leaving to strike new ground, set new records...
...There, you've learned something...
...I especially remember an eleven-year-old named Madeleine, called Maddy by all her kin and friends, who was waging a losing battle with leukemia...
...by R. and K. Preston-Mafham filled me with hilarity (the things the wood lice get up to...
...Crowley's children, women, and men are psychologically convincing, an accomplishment that makes the historical and fantastic elements of his novel all the more thrilling...
...Now, he tells of an illness, and a response to it—the strength of will it prompted as day by day he came to terms with the new circumstances of his life (he is confined to a wheelchair...
...A "chronicle of large and important things happening in a very little place," the book relates the struggle for civil rights in Mclntosh County, Georgia...
...If you have trouble finding poetry books, you can always call the publisher directly (Ecco Press: 800-342-3226...
...The author shows how the Enlightenment society searched for ways of uniting the new and successful capitalist endeavors with strong social authorities that would guarantee stability but not threaten the liberties upon which at least one segment of society depended...
...I won't even try to map its complexity for you, but it's about a boy (the young Neil) discovering, at the same time, the passion and perfidy of adult life, the terror of mortality, and the impossibly healing power of storytelling—storytelling incarnated in that crudest and most anarchic of plots, the Punch and Judy puppet show...
...Friends and family ask opinions of recent bestsellers and advice on new books to read...
...he exhorts, but he also teaches...
...Predictably, Milton Berle is all over the place...
...I often feel that way in hotel elevators when, after a fiction reading or 28 bookstore signing, I have once again blanked on the question, "Are there any recent books you'd recommend...
...In my late twenties I worked at the Children's Hospital in Boston...
...asily the most pleasurable and interesting book I have read this year has been Roberto Calasso's The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony (Vintage, $13,391 pp...
...I loved this novel even more than Doyle's Barrytown Trilogy: The Commitments (Vintage, $9, 165 pp...
...If after having read a book several times, after having lived with it, one still loves and believes in it, that might say something...
...I didn't imagine that I would be so bowled over by Greene' s writing, her skill at conveying personalities, and her dramatic construction of her story around the image of the wrecked trucks on U.S...
Vol. 121 • December 1994 • No. 21
