Critics' choices for Christmas
Henneberger, Melinda
BOOKS Critics' choices for Christinas Melinda Henneberger A contributing editor at Newsweek, Melinda Henneberger covers politics, and writes a weekly column on faith and social issues for...
...BOOKS Critics' choices for Christinas Melinda Henneberger A contributing editor at Newsweek, Melinda Henneberger covers politics, and writes a weekly column on faith and social issues for Newsweek.com...
...You cannot not read this scary book...
...Annie Proulx's That Old Ace in the Hole (Scribner, $13, 288 pp...
...Every time I hear he has another book coming out, I know I'm in for a whole new world of hurt, even as I'm logging on to Amazon to pre-order...
...But when I picked up the book, on a whim recently, to read on a trip to the high plains, I found that Proulx's descriptive powers had in no way been wasted on its inelegant hero, Bob Dollar, or on a landscape so often described as merely flat: The great prairie dog cities of the short-grass plains which once covered hundreds of square miles were gone, but some old-fashioned red-tails continued to hunt as their ancestors, in flat-shouldered soar, turning methodically in the air above the prairie, yellow eyes watching for the shiver of grass...
...And I get how the moral dilemma of a hyperliterate un-derachiever who takes a job as an undercover scout for hog farms in the Texas panhandle may not be everyone's cup of coffee...
...which imagines a world in which Nazi sympathizer Charles A. Lindbergh was elected president in 1940, really worthy of all the worshipful reviews...
...I received it as a gift, and even then might not have read it but for the fact that I had spent some time in the Origo family's palazzo in Rome when a friend was living there...
...She describes her daily struggles-hiding deserters and feeding combatants from all sides-through a thoroughly practical rather than partisan lens...
...Perhaps when they get home, to Yorkshire farms and Midland towns, they at least will speak well of the Italians...
...In that sense, too, it's a perfect read for the season...
...Thank goodness, the author makes clear in a postscript, that this fictional work has nothing whatsoever to do with our current situation...
...I cannot stand Philip Roth...
...Everywhere they have become a part of the family...
...A female red-tail lifted into the air...
...They played with the children, helped the housewife with the chores, shared their rations-and bon citti (good boys) is the general affectionate verdict...
...It was the break she had been waiting for...
...While you may wonder how anyone in her situation could have remained so completely apolitical, her almost preternatural remove is the power of this book, which reminds us how little sense war ever makes in real time: September 28,1943: Meanwhile the Germans went to the door of that very house and while the Englishmen were still lingering upstairs asked the old farmer's wife in the yard whether she had seen any Americani...
...No, certainly not...
...By the time the stubbornly, heroically decent father of the character named Philip Roth sets off for Kentucky to rescue a former Newark neighbor who has been orphaned in anti-Semitic rioting, you, too, may be semihysterical, picturing tanks circling the White House as Dick Cheney explains why, for reasons of national security, the election results have been voided pending further notice...
...describes life on a remote Tuscan farm as a kind of surreal parade...
...Proulx is never sentimental, yet takes such a kindly attitude toward all of her odd, wind-burned characters-and the land itself is one- that you can't but feel some kinship with every last miscreant among them...
...They might have put me in prison...
...Of the half-dozen books I read on holiday this summer, this was the one that has stayed with me...
...Nonsense-what would they do with an old woman like me...
...It's not between Charles A. Lindbergh and Franklin Delano Roosevelt...
...she replied, in so convincingly blank a tone that the Germans, without bothering to search the house, went away again...
...Iris Origo's War in Val D'Orcia: An Italian War Diary 1943-1944 (David R. Godine, $14.95, 256 pp...
...Origo was an Anglo-American woman raised outside Florence and married to a prominent Italian landowner...
...This memoir, originally published in 1947, is hard to find, though it can be purchased online at www.godine.com...
...he not only rips your insides out but makes you laugh in mid-vivisection...
...Bob] didn't notice the prairie dog that raced out of the roadside weeds into his path and the tires bumped slightly as he hit it...
...was not particularly well received when it was published two years ago...
...In Lindbergh's America, the gov-ernment's "Just Folks" program (de-scribed by the new Office of American Absorption as "a volunteer work program introducing city youth to the traditional ways of heartland life") ships young Jews off to Kentucky tobacco farms-with the blessing of Rabbi Lionel Bengelsdorf, a man perfectly willing to "kosher Lindbergh for the goyim" in return for frequent invitations to take tea with the First Lady...
...Is his latest, The Plot Against America (Houghton Mifflin, $26,400 pp...
...Your choice is simple...
...It's between Lindbergh and war...
...Many more had taken up modern ways and sat atop convenient poles and posts waiting for vehicles to clip rabbits and prairie dogs....The ancestors of the place hovered over the bits and pieces of their finished lives...
...So all the prisoners have got away...
...Here is Lindy's whole campaign speech: "My intention in running for the presidency is to preserve American democracy by preventing America from taking part in another world war...
...Amerkan...
...In every farm there is a deep regret at their going...
...I could do without all the hype, too...
...As you've heard, it's about how easily democracy can be undone by a complacent faith in our own goodness and in a president who tells us what we want to hear in really short sentences...
...When Antonio asked her about it afterwards, he saw that she did not even realize that her lie had been dangerous...
...That part you can skip...
...On their side, too, there was an equal liking...
...There are children's birthday parties in the garden as warplanes buzz overhead, weeping German soldiers who want only to be sung to, and long-awaited Allied troops who, when they finally arrive, help themselves to the local women...
...Anyway, they asked for Americani, and we've only got In-glesi here...
...Unfortunately, yes...
Vol. 131 • December 2004 • No. 21
