Critics' choices for Christmas
Marget, Madeline
Madeline Marget Madeline Marget, the author of Life's Blood (Simon & Schuster), is working on a novel. When Kathryn Harrison's memoir The Kiss (Harper-Collins, $11, 207 pp.) was published in...
...In Russo's creation, redemption is but a short step away...
...Yet it conveys more hope...
...Fascinating characters and settings, enhanced by layers of literature and experience, kept me reading late into the night...
...Like Harrison's darker work, Richard Russo's utterly likable Pulitzer Prize-winning comic novel Empire Falls (Vintage Books, $14.95,483 pp...
...Reviews described it as the story of a young woman's sexual relationship with her father...
...is acute and compact...
...Intricate, clear, and eloquent, The Kiss is about villainy and love, terrible sorrow and wrong...
...He is also in love with his assignment: mapping Alaska's terrain and weather patterns...
...It also delivers tender, well-developed portraits of Harrison's mother and grandparents, people who loved her and whom she loves in memory-in all their frailty and imperfections...
...This year I discovered I had made the mistake of judging a book by its coverage...
...In a muddy, fly-infested, nearly barbaric but beautiful Anchorage, Bigelow, a newly arrived geographer, is preoccupied with seeing, losing, and then again finding a silent Aleut woman...
...out of print, published 1983...
...Using sex as the instrument of his anger and hatred, he seduced Kathryn's mother again and held Kathryn herself in thrall...
...The Kiss tells a frightening story...
...it sounded self-exploitive to me...
...was published in 1997,1 didn't want to read it...
...I can't tell whether he's a genuine atheist or simply believes in a God who's lost His grasp of the details...
...He's pretty fearless where God is concerned," says the hero Miles Roby about his apparently conscienceless father...
...She is married, and a mother...
...Believer, intellectual, skeptic: the ever-complex Graham Greene is the best of friends.friends...
...What is most impressive," Allain comments, "is the genuine strength of his sympathies...
...The results are sometimes affecting and consistently funny-often hilariously so...
...Writing in the present tense, Harrison acknowledges the damage done, but lets the reader see that she has not simply survived but prevailed...
...Miles grew up there, as did his dieting, adulterous, about-to-be-ex-wife Janice...
...Everything that moves interests me," Greene comments, "whether an individual or a nation...
...Though it can serve as a social and psychological document (students of the church's sexual-abuse scandal, take note), it is much more than a collection of facts and interpretation...
...Now, almost against Miles's will, his beloved daughter Tick is growing up there as well...
...Kathryn's father was banished, later became a minister, remarried, and had other children...
...shows the writer's love for his characters...
...It is a series of interviews-really a collaboration-with the French journalist Marie-Franqoise Allain, the daughter of Greene's murdered friend...
...As Greene aficionados know, he could keep twenty ideas in his head at once, and this capacity is amply in evidence in these interviews...
...Achieving peace of any kind is a much trickier matter in Ian McEwan's Atonement (Doubleday, $26, 351 pp...
...and the Whitings, the town's rich folks...
...My incentive comes from The Other Man: Conversations with Graham Greene (Simon and Schuster, 176 pp...
...She escaped only after her mother's death, when her father's drive to possess them both finally dissipated...
...Greene's humor, deep emotional understanding, and spiritual insight-like everything else about him-were unembarrassed and wide-ranging...
...At the top of my reading stack is just about everything written by Graham Greene, including all his books I've read before...
...Everyone knows one another's business, runs into one another often, and friction is a constant...
...Their "affair" (not a romance but a torment) began when Kathryn was twenty...
...It is a tragedy...
...Like The Kiss, Harrison's most recent novel, The Seal Wife (Random House, $23.95, 225 pp...
...I plan to read it again soon...
...Harrison's parents married at eighteen, when her mother became pregnant...
...The Seal Wife captures not only life in a frozen frontier town but also the magnificence of the greater world-both its physical and personal manifestations...
...Allain is a well-informed interlocutor and analyst, and her subject is willing and expansive...
...He can turn cowardice into bravery, failure into nobility, claptrap into a moving statement once he has reached 'the dangerous edge where belief wavers.' It is the human factor that Greene hunts like rare game...
...They divorced shortly after Kathryn's birth, and her mother's financially and emotionally powerful parents took over...
...Like Harrison's Anchorage, Empire Falls, Maine, is a bleak and unpromising place in which to make a living at the local grill, but it's home...
...But even at a distance, he remained a demanding, critical force who exercised a compelling influence on his first wife and their child...
...Empire Falls, like Miles himself, is fully goodhearted...
Vol. 129 • December 2002 • No. 21
