Summer reading Books for the beach, cottage, couch, and brain
Bates, Timothy D & Duffy, James & Swick, Thomas & Steinfels, Margaret O'Brien & Keen, Suzanne & Finn, Molly
Summer reading Suzanne Keen Suzanne Keen writes frequently for Com-monweal and teaches English literature at Washington and Lee University in Lex-ington, Virginia. In this season of...
...Owen's death in battle during the final week of the war, always known as a devastating loss, here becomes poignantly emblematic of the ruinous costs of war...
...edited by David Selwyn...
...The books are written with an almost magical sim-plicity that manages to be more ex-pressive than any gnashing of teeth or tearing of hair...
...I can't resist mentioning another read-ing-I should say "reading"-pleasure of this past spring...
...Reminiscent of Sam Spade, Greenleaf's John Tanner series captures a kind of cynicism that is inextricably linked with the urge to do good...
...The lives of Greek villagers and Italian soldiers during World War II provide the material for excruciating comedy and poignant ironies...
...All four have the distinction of being su-perbly written in that ancient and dead language called English...
...Almost certainly autobiograph-ical in part, this memoir is cast as a novel...
...But what most assuredly should attract the reader is Banville's flowing prose style...
...Angela's Ashes (Scribner, $25,363 pp...
...As every reader must know by now, the book describes the author's life to age eighteen, begin-ning in Brooklyn in 1930 and soon shift-ing to Limerick...
...Their elegaic intensity obliterates any of the whiff of the formidable research that must have gone into their composition...
...and see the air so clear it seemed glowing too...
...Though I am temporari-ly stopped in the second chapter, it is clear that Katherine Meyer Graham is destined to overcome the constraining life of the little rich girl and do remark-able things...
...All three are collected in the Library of America edi-tion, Willa Cather, Later Novels, ($35,991 pp...
...To keep blacks from moving north, Leroy Percy had them confined to the tops of the levees under armed guard...
...I got a similar thrill recently on see-ing Pico Iyer's Tropical Classical: Essays from Several Directions (Knopf, $25, 314 pp...
...His artistic and fi-nancially remunerative burglaries allow him to underwrite his passion for books, while exposing him to more serious crimes, for which he is often a suspect...
...But I think he should probably be given some credit as a forerunner...
...If I were putting together a reading list with the theme "Family Secrets," I would certainly include not only Seamus Deane's book, but Gloria Nay lor's best novel, Mama Day (Random House, $12, 320 pp...
...Norton, $27.50,304 pp...
...Many of the reviews in this collection are of writers-Salman Rushdie, Vikram Seth, Romesh Gunesekera-who inhabit this new terrain, which Iyer must be the first to have mapped, if not identified...
...P.S...
...Especially if you have read and re-read the tiny canon of Austen nov-els, this collection of poems helps to recreate the world of word-play, rid-dling, charades, and verbal fun in which their author lived...
...The one novel that I've especially en-joyed this year is also a collection of sorts, Paul Theroux's My Other Life (Houghton Mifflin, $24.95,456 pp...
...Naipaul is not included because, though he wrote eloquently of his child-hood in Trinidad, he did so in the stud-ied cadences and syntax of the English canon...
...Old Mortality sets the standard for historical fiction in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: It has gripping adventure, brushes with the fa-mous, and complex characters...
...There is the Percy family (Walker Percy is a descendant) of Greenville, Mississippi, exemplifying all the well-meaning delusions of race and class...
...It is also available on audio cassette, and, if you have a com-mute that wouldn't be rendered life-en-dangering by paralyzing bouts of laughter, Corelli's Mandolin would make a fine choice for a book on tape...
...an appendix, "The River Today," brings the story up to date...
...If you have been following Oprah's reading list, Mama Day makes a stimu-lating companion to Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon...
...Naylor masterfully cre-ates a raft of memorable characters, and imagines a world with its own history, customs, folkways, charms, and dangers...
...I can't discuss the plot of Reading in the Dark without spoil-ing the surprises upon which the novel depends, but many of the lyrical vi-gnettes that make up the story made my hair stand on end...
...he was, in a sense, the Jackie Robinson to Rushdie's Deion Sanders...
...James Lee Burke: No longer a secret from the best-seller list, Burke features Dave Robichaux, a detective in New Iberia parish, outside New Orleans...
...If the mere thought of starting a novel makes you feel faint with exhaustion and guilty in advance for not finding time to finish it, perhaps a slighter volume would appeal...
...and the hilarious memoir of his childhood in Ceylon (never re-ferred to as Sri Lanka), Running in the Family (Vintage, $10,207 pp...
...Dying, ex-posed as a spy and a homosexual at age seventy-two, Victor Maskell attempts to jus-tify his life in a journal ostensibly written for a free-lance woman journalist who wants to write a book about him...
...Tanner, a rugged loner, charts his course through the counterculture as well as the big-time commercialism of the Bay Area...
...Burke's best include A Morning for Flamingos (Avon,1990) and Burning Angel (Hyperion, 1995...
...Maskell explores and attempts to explain the deep contradictions of his life: Irish, yet the knighted Keeper of the King's Pictures...
...And many will quarrel with the mean-spirited caricature of Graham Greene in the character Querell...
...But if you commute by car or have some other occasion to make long drives, I cannot recommend too highly the uncut, expertly (usually) read offerings of Books on Tape (800-626-3333...
...Here and there, however, in the quarterlies and in the academy, I catch the tone of beach house owners in a bad hurricane season: Oprah's blowing us away, again...
...This novel may have gone out of print, but I found copies for sale at the amazing internet bookstore, Amazon Books (http:// www.amazon.com...
...recounts the effort from the 1850s through the great flood of 1927 to tame the Mississippi of its reg-ular and rampant overflow...
...John M. Barry's engrossing history, subtitled, The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America (Simon and Schuster, $27.50,524 pp...
...Margaret Steinfels Margaret O'Brien Steinfels is the editor of Commonweal...
...The novels (about me-dieval Greenland and the slave trade, re-spectively) have very little in common except for their compelling accounts of the way humans think about racial otherness...
...Most of the friendly souls who yearly share their reading lists with us welcome the sight of a paperback fiction best-seller list in which serious literary fiction out-numbers the Grishams and Higgins Clarks...
...The immense pleasure I had last month reading The Correspondence of Shelby Foote & Walker Percy (W.W...
...This year we have watched the spring unfold while listening to David Case read Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time (University of Chicago Press, 4 volumes, $17.95...
...the Irish Tour-ist Board asks in a current promotion...
...He can overwrite, so avoid In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead (Avon, 1993), unless you really get hooked on him...
...The world of collected pieces is in good hands...
...read by tens and maybe hundreds of thousands of people this year...
...Using lies, exaggerations, and false claims, in combination with a compelling personality and what must have been a degree of charm, Bettelheim created for himself an impressive set of credentials and a reputation as both a wise and humane child psychiatrist who had unprecedented success in treating autistic children and an authority on the Holocaust as well as several other sub-jects...
...Shelby Foote and Walker Percy be-came high school friends in Greenville, Mississippi, in the 1930s, and their cor-respondence began in 1948 when both were starting out on their writing careers (Percy tentatively, Foote boldly...
...The table of contents-"Oxford in Our Twenties," "Farewell to Pro-vence," "Little Magazines"-intrigued me more than the chapters of any novel could...
...One volume is set mostly in Craiglockhart War Hospital in Scotland, where psy-chiatrist William Rivers attempts to bring back to life (and ultimately to re-turn to the trenches) the mute or stut-tering, nightmare-ridden, paralyzed, obsessed ghosts of the men (recently boys) who went off to fight a short time before...
...In writing this meticulously re-searched, entirely persuasive biography, Pollak has not only done a service to truth, but he has brought comfort and vindication to the many people who have suffered at Bettelheim's hands...
...It is Rivers's job to restore Sassoon to "sanity" (a state of mind in which he will wish to return to the trenches), set-ting off a struggle within each and be-tween the two that results in an at best ambiguous outcome...
...This at the end of a let-ter that begins: "Good writers are not wise men, nor men with faith...
...But the fact vs...
...I thoroughly enjoyed perusing The Poetry of fane Austen and the Austen Family (University of Iowa Press, $12.95,124 pp...
...Seamus Deane's Reading in the Dark (Knopf, $23,272 pp...
...Over this Southwest amber landscape of scrub and cactus, of red-gold hills and dark plateaus, the light and air played like some great antiphonal chant...
...And even Commonweal published a piece titled "The Holy Work of Bruno Bettelheim," going so far as to extend his wisdom and expertise even beyond the limits he claimed for him-self, to include "poverty and inequali-ty in America...
...That the novel is a model of stylish composition should not come as a sur-prise, since Banville is a seasoned novel-ist and the literary editor of the Irish Times...
...James Duffy James Duffy is a writer and retired lawyer living in New York City...
...The descriptions of life with his ne'er-do-well, drunken father and hapless mother, and of the family's poverty so grim and deep that it is hard even to imagine, are breathtaking...
...Of that and the good-ness of God, and of the merriness of liv-ing quite anonymously in the suburbs, drinking well, cooking out, attending Mass at the usual silo-and-barn, the goodness of Brunswick bowling al-leys...
...a warm and often amusing ac-count of a night course in the Italian lan-guage at a rundown Dublin school...
...Iyer picks three distinct genres-poetry, fiction, essays-and finds in each a modern practitioner- Derek Walcott, Michael Ondaatje, and Richard Rodriguez-who has demon-strated "the ability to season high clas-sical forms with a lyrical beauty drawn from the streets and beaches of their homes...
...As all such family secrets eventually do, this one becomes known to all with shatter-ing consequences for the boy narrator and his relatives...
...The plot is a mar-vel, adroitly intertwining the lives of the characters in ways both funny and sad, and the final episode, a class trip to Rome, is a joyride...
...Lawrence Block's "burglar" series re-volves around the careers of Bernie Rhodenbarr, who operates a second-hand Greenwich Village bookstore by day and burglarizes Upper East Side apartments by night...
...Catching up" by overcoming the partialities of youth is one criterion for summer reading...
...Robichaux often teams with Cletus Purcel, a free spirit for whom violence comes naturally, to fight the good fight...
...He is a leading voice in the new school of travel writing that no longer simply de-scribes a place but helps to explain it...
...With emotional guidance from his les-bian companion, Carolyn Kaiser, a Vil-lage pet groomer, Bernie manages to extricate himself from these accusations, usually by splitting the loot with the corrupt but well-intentioned cop, Ray Kirschmann, and thereby bringing the guilty to justice...
...I could see it...
...I could even see Kit Carson's house, today a museum main-tained by his Masonic order...
...Binchy manipulates an enormous cast- the highly diverse participants in the course and their relatives and friends- with clever ingenuity...
...Detective Robichaux tries to keep himself and his family altogether, but given his violent, alcoholic back-ground and his need to protect his wife, Bootsie, and adopted daughter, that's hard...
...The poet Wilfred Owen is another of Rivers's patients...
...He accused Jews of "ghetto think-ing," conniving in their own destruction through their passive submission to the Nazis who imprisoned them...
...One of his patients is the poet Siegfried Sassoon, who was declared "mentally unsound" when he publicly refused to continue serving as a British officer...
...Another kind of truth-telling is to be found in Pat Barker's remarkable trilo-gy about World War I (Regeneration, Plume, $11.95,251 pp...
...In that spirit, I proffer the follow-ing suggestions...
...and Barry Unsworth's Sacred Hunger (Norton, $12.95,629 pp...
...In case you have not already done so, do read Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes this summer...
...Or has this reader, anyway, finally learned to read without the reward of something clear-ly and definitively happening...
...And no collection could better demonstrate what we stand to lose through this de-mise...
...I still remember my librarian friend coming to the tennis court one late sum-mer afternoon in 1975 and handling with a jeweler's delicacy a newly arrived copy of Cyril Connolly's The Evening Co-lonnade...
...In this spirit, let me suggest the following series...
...It seems to fall into the category: Rich people have problems too...
...In books like Video Night in Kath-mandu and The Lady and the Monk, Iyer has carved a niche as an astute analyst of the subtle and increasingly frequent interchange between East and West...
...I want to know more...
...Old Mortality, which can be found in Penguin and Oxford ($11.95,616 pp...
...Two other authors come to mind...
...I'm not with the excited me-teorologists on this one, but content to wobble out on the sea wall in a slicker, shouting into the wind: Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon (NAL/Dutton, $5.99,337 pp...
...In short, the perfect frame of mind for a day at the beach...
...People in high places and, espe-cially, a gullible and indulgent press bought wholesale all that Bettelheim claimed for himself...
...The reader is unlikely to come to a sat-isfying judgment of Maskell, as Banville presents him...
...For me a lot of their appeal has to do with their intimate portrayal of extreme conditions: of cli-mate and geography, of devastating physical disability, and of the rigors and suspense demanded by the sapper's art and science (The English Patient), and the breathtaking dangers undergone by workers who are building a bridge {In the Skin of a Lion...
...is a fictional memoir of a spy for the Russians modeled, except for his Irishness, on Sir Anthony Blunt...
...It's going to be a great book...
...he writes...
...Timothy D. Bates Nothing makes a better summer read than murder mysteries...
...This sum-mer I will take up what I set aside last winter, Shadows on the Rock...
...brings a poet's lyrical gifts to the task of capturing a closer historical pe-riod, of the Troubles in Northern Ire-land...
...Burke, a writing instructor at Wichita State, grew up in New Orleans and describes its texture, diversity, and sleaziness with intensity and love...
...The Mississippi River Valley along with its tributaries drains 41 percent of the United States, encompassing thirty-one states as far apart as New York, North Carolina, Idaho, and New Mexico...
...Fail-ure," he says at one point, "is a sort of funeral, and a person fleeing a collapsed marriage is both the corpse and the mourner...
...The busy heroes and heroines of Charles Dickens and Jane Austen were far more appealing and readable...
...Tropical Classical has the traditional lit-erary collection's miscellany-pulling in travel articles, profiles, book reviews, es-says...
...I especially relished the riddles...
...Mysteries tend toward the quick read and provide the studied diversion neces-sary to fill empty nights at the vacation cottage...
...And, most important, they offer the consistent illusion-needed for a re-assuring vacation-that rationality and perseverance can overcome life's mys-teries, particularly death...
...Are You Ready to Step Out of Yourself...
...Perhaps because it superficially resembles a recent Irish-authored Book-er winner, Roddy Doyle's Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha (in both books a little boy dis-covers imperfectly concealed truths about his family), the committee honored an altogether less impressive book, Graham Swift's Last Orders (Random House, $12,294 pp...
...was surely heightened by the knowledge that it was one of the last of its kind...
...The Eye in the Door, $10.95, 280 pp...
...These loosely-linked stories recount, the author has explained, things that could have hap-pened to him, though they also cover a lot that did: the Peace Corps work in Africa, the teaching in Singapore, the travel books, the midlife divorce...
...Both conjure up long-gone worlds in their vivid evocation of the de-tails and materials of everyday life: a slave ship, a red dress, a carved spoon...
...the Ford Foundation gave him a very large grant without checking his credentials or the results of his "re-search...
...In con-trast to my teen-age disdain for what seemed a desiccated travelogue, I found the story deeply moving and oddly in-spiring...
...Stephen Greenleaf: Greenleaf is in limited print these days but worth the search...
...This novel is worth buying in hardcover, if you can't find it in a library...
...Such a blast is just what Richard Pollak pro-vides in The Creation of Dr...
...si-multaneously a confidant of the royal fam-ily and a Russian spy...
...John Banville's The Untouchable (Knopf, $25,368 pp...
...He used his reputation and au-thority to strike out at large groups of people, causing serious harm and an-guish...
...I could not leave Rising Tides at home...
...I could see the arch-bishop, Jean Marie Latour...
...McCone, a single woman trying to make it in a man's world, works to do good for her clients in the face of the need to generate legal fees...
...With that geography lesson, Barry begins a history, which encompasses the moral, social, intellectual, economic, and technological struggles that the United States faced from before the Civil War until after World War I. He does this by focusing on the effort to preserve the richest farm land in the world from the rampaging waters of the river that had created that very farm land...
...I began early this spring the autobiography of Katherine Graham, Personal History (Knopf, $29.95,625 pp...
...When I was young, I detested the novels of Henry James much of nothing going on...
...but the rest of this history is worth recalling, for we continue to live with its consequences...
...they did not dally in landscapes either psychic or scenic...
...Also catch The Burglar Who Traded Ted Williams (Dutton, 1994), in which Bernie combines his knowledge of thievery, baseball cards, and high finance to ensure the bookstore's financial survival...
...But he more than fills the stage-lecturing his friend, advis-ing him (especially on whom to read, mainly Proust), boasting shamelessly: "I've begun my book...
...Society at large rarely proves to be much help...
...Green-leaf's best include Book Case (William Morrow & Co., 1991) and Death Bed (The Dial Press, 1980...
...The Booker Prize committee really missed the boat on this short-listed novel, Deane's first full-length work of fiction...
...The book opens with biographical sketches of James Buchanan Eads and Andrew Atkinson Humphreys who con-tested the very definition of control...
...The meditations and apergus fly across four decades until the last letter from Percy, in 1989, and the address from Foote at his memorial service...
...He accused a public gathering of Jewish students of causing anti-Semitism by their refusal to assim-ilate...
...Over the last year, I have gone on to one of Cather's novellas, The Professor's House, set on an unspecified Great Lake, woodsy, leafy green in the summer, white and cold in the winter, in a uni-versity town where little seems to hap-pen except that the life of a middle-aged man is subtly but utterly transformed by his-well, doing nothing...
...B (Simon & Schuster, $28, 478 pp...
...The first half of the book is all Foote, because he did not begin saving Percy's letters until 1970...
...It would take consid-erable space to do real justice to these complicated books...
...The Ghost Road, Plume, $11.95,277 pp...
...Learning about his zany family gives the reader some background, if not an explanation of, Ondaatje's almost maniacal intensi-ty and his fascination with exotic places and professions...
...Thomas Swick A collection of pieces gives me the same pleasurable rush of expectation that an all-you-can-eat buffet must give a glutton...
...Despite lagging behind on Graham's very long volume, I own up to carting around and reading from cover to cover a volume almost as large...
...the fawn-col-ored mules, Contento and Angelica...
...In these days of seemingly relative val-ues and constant uncertainty, this last illusion can prove difficult to perpetu-ate, but the best mystery writers some-how pull it off...
...Bettelheim was not an innocuous force...
...It was Dostoevsky's doubt that made him great...
...The class is taught by a wonderfully sketched eccentric, Nora O'Donoghue, who has returned after twenty-six years spent in Sicily and is known simply as Signora...
...We all know what happened to Hoover...
...Their labor was precious, but not their lives or their dignity...
...Their blacks-only policy of sharecrop-ping, which they considered enlight-ened, was shown during the 1927 flood to be simply another form of forced servitude...
...fiction debate becomes irrevelant in the face of Theroux's writing...
...Back home, I tried Death Comes for the Archbishop yet again...
...Complex, subtle, shock-ing, Barker's novels portray this hideous war through the effects it had on a set of fascinating characters, some actual, historic people and some fictional...
...Deane, hereto-fore known as a poet, critic, and editor, now resides in Dublin, though he spends part of each year teaching Irish studies at the University of Notre Dame...
...The books are vivid- even spellbinding...
...His is a perpetually interest-ing voice...
...Guess I wasn't reading yet...
...good writing proceeds from doubt...
...In this season of book-rec-ommending, the titanic power of Oprah Winfrey has rendered some high-brow taste makers a mite peevish...
...Eads, a self-taught civil engineer, and Humphreys, head of the Army Corps of Engineers, had sharply contrasting ideas about controlling the river...
...Although a first novel, the book was short-listed for the Booker Prize in England last year...
...If Oprah reminds us that "serious" lit-erary fiction can be fun and stimulating enough to be read eagerly by large num-bers of Americans, she also endorses books that are readable and engross-ing...
...In a letter to the editor of Common-weal, November 23,1927, Cather gives a brief account of how she came to write the story...
...The University of Chicago, which sponsored his famous school, never established an oversight committee or questioned his claims of success...
...In July, I intend to pick it up again and read right through...
...Simply catching up is another...
...They also tend not to weigh much, allowing them to fit easily in back packs...
...Marcia Mueller: Her heroine, Sharon McCone, begins her career investigating for the All Souls' Legal Collective in San Francisco...
...A recovering alcoholic and Vietnam vet, Robichaux seeks to protect his rural en-clave from the corruption and commer-cialism of the Big Easy...
...For this quirky and light series, start with The Burglar Who Thought He Was Bogart (Dutton, 1995), in which Bernie becomes entangled with a Balkan monarchist conspiracy while attending a Bogart retrospective...
...Hit us again, Oprah...
...But it differs slightly in that many of its pieces share a theme, which is the happy intermingling in contemporary literature of two seemingly disparate worlds: the sensual tropics and the more cerebral, or at least more structured, northern climes...
...Quadruple-quintuple-more like...
...My husband and I have long been devoted to listening to books on tape as we drive the three hours to and from our country cottage...
...Frank McCourt's memoir of his boy-hood, has already been reviewed in these pages [November 8,1996...
...He got himself elected president on the publicity of seeming to offer a well-ordered relief plan to hundreds of thousands of peo-ple turned out from homes and land by the flood...
...in several scenes we see him with Sassoon, working and reworking a rough draft into a finished poem...
...I could see the intense blue sky broken by a steady telegraphic flow of clouds...
...My husband urges me to tell you to hang in there for the first thirty pages or so-Scott's great war story and study of the character of religious enthusiasm doesn't falter once the action starts...
...There is little about family here, or current events, or life itself out-side of art, though Percy tells of a book he's planning (Love in the Ruins) that deals "with the decline and fall of the U.S., the country rent almost hopeless-ly between the rural knotheaded right and the godless alienated left, worse than the Civil War...
...cities before the Great Depression, which destroyed itself morally, eco-nomically, and politically by unnecessar-ily dynamiting the levee of a neighboring Louisiana parish during the 1927 flood, and then reneging on promises of resti-tution...
...If you would answer yes, but lack either the time or the wherewithal to venture overseas this summer, I can recommend three novels and a memoir by Irish or Irish-American writers that may enable you to step out of yourself, even though you never leave your backyard hammock...
...is also an account of coming of age, this time in Derry, Northern Ireland, in the forties and fifties...
...If you especially enjoy historical fic-tion, I would also recommend two more recent novels, Jane Smiley's The Green-landers (Fawcett,- $14,608 pp...
...These books amply demonstrate the current robust health of Irish letters (a condition also attested to by new works recently published or about to be pub-lished by Roddy Doyle, Colm Toibin, and Edna O'Brien, among others...
...paperbacks, or in a used bookstore, makes a great place to start...
...married and the father of two, but also an active homo-sexual...
...Percy is, not surprisingly, more sub-dued, but just as preoccupied with what he describes in one letter as this "strange business...
...The unrelated pieces are no less in-teresting-travel essays ranging from Ethiopia to New York (a city, Iyer notes rightly, which one always recollects in black and white) and lengthy profiles, including the most enlightening one I've read of the brilliant and reticent trav-el writer Norman Lewis...
...Nolly Finn A strong blast of truth is a bracing antidote to the swamp of evasion, decep-tion, euphemism, and self-serving double talk we find ourselves immersed in so often these days...
...Begin with Trophies and Dead Things (The Mystery Press, 1990...
...His at-tacks on mothers were famous, partic-ularly mothers of autistic children, whom he likened to SS guards and de-vouring witches...
...Eventually I learned to read and even admire James, but never Cather...
...There is the story of New Orleans, among the richest and most powerful U.S...
...Forget the movie- it may or it may not be good, but it's something else entirely...
...A few summers ago, I spent some time in Taos, New Mexico, one of Cather's landscapes...
...Eads was more right than wrong, and Humphreys more wrong than right, but the Corps' institutional longevity and political weight came to dictate a levees-only policy that magnified the damage of each succeeding flood, as Eads had pre-dicted...
...see the glowing light of dawn and dusk...
...To cap off a summer of reading either historical fiction, or novels about fami-ly secrets, you might enjoy a book that fits both categories, and which happens to be one of the funniest novels I have read in a long time: Louis de Bernieres's Corelli's Mandolin (Vintage, $13,437 pp...
...And the sadness you feel over the end of this friendship lingers longer than if it had been a construct of fiction...
...I feel ten inches taller than Shakespeare...
...Latour's ceaseless effort to bring the church to life...
...Only the Amazon basin is significantly larger...
...If you caught "Ivanhoe" on TV recent-ly, you may have felt an impulse to re-new your acquaintance with Walter Scott...
...His daring risks with language are distinc-tively original, though I was reminded of both James Joyce and Tom Wolfe...
...There between the covers of a sin-gle volume awaited the elegant work-ings of a well-traveled mind...
...To appreciate Cather's achievement, must the reader know the landscape in which she set Archbishop Latour and his soulmate, Father Valliant...
...Too big to carry along on planes, trains, or subways, the book settled to the bot-tom of a pile by the bed as my attention strayed...
...You can buy these wry, leisurely accounts of literary, artistic, political, and high-society life in prewar London and read them in the usual way...
...A lighter read is Maeve Binchy's best-selling Evening Class (Delacorte, $24.95, 420 pp...
...his penetrating examination of the life and work of Bruno Bettelheim, one of the major liars of recent times...
...It is a mystery to me why publishers hold the form in such low es-teem...
...Though it isn't strictly speaking a his-torical novel, Seamus Deane's wonder-ful Reading in the Dark (Knopf, $23,245 pp...
...Did I call it a double life...
...It has been a national best seller (often in first place on the nonfiction list) and has won both a National Book Critics Award and a Pulitzer Prize...
...The theme is not poverty, but a secret of the family of the unnamed nar-rator involving the death or murder of his uncle Eddie, who may or may not have been a heroic IRA fighter...
...but also its pre-decessor, In the Skin of a Lion (Vintage, $12,244 pp...
...And along with much, much more, there was the man who made political hay of the flood, Herbert Hoover...
...I've had fun reading Michael On-daatje, not just The English Patient (Vintage, $12, 305 pp...
...Set mostly on an imaginary is-land off the coast of South Carolina and Georgia (but belonging to neither state), Mama Day tells the story of the descen-dents of Sapphira Wade, a slave woman and sorceress...
...Robert Coles turned him into "a hero for our time" in the pages of the New Republic...
...All of these con-flicted heroes lead unusual and some-times tortured lives, which often force them to take violent action to protect their clients and sense of honor...
...The same unfortunately cannot be said for another of my favorite literary forms, collected letters (though it will be interesting to see who will publish the first e-mail correspondence, and who will bother to read it...
Vol. 124 • June 1997 • No. 12
