Critics' choices for Christmas From the "Book of Nonsense" to the "Vegetarian Planet," the joys of "Hardboiled America" to "The Bridge on the Drina," our critics urge you to stuff your stockings with good books this Christmas
Castronovo, David
David Castronovo David Castronovo is professor of English at Pace University. His most recent book, a critical study of the American novelist Richard Yates, was written in collaboration with Steven...
...a copiously illustrated, elegant account of many centuries of books, many cultural styles of literacy...
...an expanded version of his classic study of lurid crime paperbacks...
...His most recent book, a critical study of the American novelist Richard Yates, was written in collaboration with Steven Goldleaf...
...How do you think we got the Monte Cristo cigar...
...World War I, according to a game-show host, "was popular in its own day...
...As an Irishman fictionalizing a grim chap ter in English history, Banville explores the betrayals of the Cambridge spies, that notorious group of Englishmen who were recruited by the Soviet Union in the 1930s and thereafter lived under cover at the very center of British power...
...Trow argues that from the 1920s to our era from Walter Winchell and the Luce organization right up to the TV talk shows Americans have been made players in a game of trivia and deception...
...Manguel digs deep into his many quarries, providing the reader with entertaining accounts of everything from the development of libraries to the latest findings about what our eyes do when they negotiate a page...
...His narrator and protagonist is Victor Maskell, a fastidious rogue based on the real life art historian and Keeper of the Queen's Pictures Anthony Blunt...
...After tracing the evolution of the paperback detective novel, O'Brien lyrically evokes the talents of the writers and painters who made the low-budget crime novel an American original...
...Trow's conclusion is that we still have the external past in the form of buildings and political parties, but we are no longer the same nation...
...My final recommendation is Alberto Manguel's A History of Reading (Viking, $26.95, 372 pp...
...I don't know of any contemporary fictional work about England that sets such a complex figure against such a vivid sociopolitical background...
...Trow, a New Yorker contributor and member of an old Eastern family of printers and newspaper men, attempts nothing less than an account of how we have left the old world of real news and solid contexts and entered the outer space of media-driven culture...
...George W.S...
...We no longer get authentic news stories and opinion or even genuine gossip...
...Another book that freights its themes with irony and wit is Geoffrey O'Brien's Hardboiled America (Da Capo, $16.95,197 pp...
...W.," head of the Cour-tauld Institute, and all-around enigma...
...Synthetic talk" rather than real stories, false intimacy rather than objective observation, manufactured context rather than historical background: these are Trow's conflicting cultural formulations...
...Here is a spy who loves Englishness and strangely detests the Soviet Union "the Promised Land we would never reach, and never wanted to reach...
...His skewering of TV and journalistic cliches and his use of telling quotations are memorable features of this brilliant, quirky screed...
...In his own hardboiled, poetic style, O'Brien captures the sense of lurking menace that made American fictional crime a once proud and authentic genre...
...Everything crumbled between the 1930s and the 1960s an empire, an economy, a traditional way of life but most sadly the judgment and honor of some elite people in control of national security...
...is a spy novel of sorts...
...Trow's Within the Context of No Context (Atlantic Monthly Press, $11,119 pp...
...Despite the fact that each is a model of lucidity, they all demand close reading...
...Readers are presented with a tormented Britain in a thirty-year crisis...
...Maskell's book-bred idealism and desire to make a better world combine with a kind of ruthless stoicism and willingness to sacrifice basic decency for some vague future...
...A dime-store Dostoyevsky" is his description of Jim Thompson...
...This Marxist whose cohorts include fictionalized ver-sions of Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean (not to mention a spectacularly sinister version of Graham Greene) is also depicted as a Royalist, sometime friend of "Mrs...
...is about American mass media and the decline of our national sense of living history...
...Hyper-realism was their game, and O'Brien analyzes their spare artistry...
...Manguel, a prolific writer and editor who was born in Argentina and now works in Canada, alerts us to many different reading habits everything from Augustine's watching Ambrose read silently, to the sixteenth-century Venetian printer Aldus Manutius pioneering the small book, to Cuban workers in cigar factories listening to Alexander Dumas...
...These demons of productivity including stars like Chandler and Hammett and later less-recognized figures such as David Goodis and Jim Thompson brought crime thrillers out of the stilted world of butlers and baronesses and into the barrooms and cheap hotels of a real America...
...A history" is Manguel's heroic and totally unpretentious way of telling stories about readers be they Mesopotamian interpreters of birds' footsteps or great writers discovering their predecessors...
...He indicts our media culture for murdering history and adult judgment...
...Without tiresome special pleading for the value of mass entertainment, O'Brien looks at the covers and contents of those pop novels that people devoured between the Crash and the mid-1960s...
...He also has some scathing things to say about what TV and the movies have done since the 1950s to make evil into a trivial commodity...
...We hear his ruminations ("no one really minds a bit of treachery, no one on the inside I mean") and are startled by the way this warped idealist betrayed and deceived his superiors and himself...
...Trow uses a sly prose ( and short epigrammatic paragraphs with newspaper headings) to mock the enemy the programmers and pundits who are interested in "hits" and demographics rather than the honest purveying of information...
...The books I'd like to recommend are notable for three qualities: fine craftsmanship, curious but permanently important themes, and distinctive voices...
...Banville's Maskell the embodiment of Britain's hubris is shown in the period after he has been exposed, disgraced, and stripped of his knighthood and academic honors...
...John Banville's 77k Untouchable (Knopf, $25, 368 pp...
Vol. 124 • December 1997 • No. 21
