TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/061989/06198900.057

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 9.8 KB | 211 lines

                                                                                BOOKS, Page 65

Summer Reading


Mysterious or comic, historical or touching, a seasonal sampler
of fine fiction


    BICYCLE DAYS
    by John Burnham Schwartz Summit;
    253 pages; $18.95

    Absent father. Melancholy mom. Squall-free adolescence
followed by the ritual college degree. But with no draft to face
-- no obligations at all, really -- how is a bright, sensitive,
well-off young fellow to grow up? Honoring tradition, Alec Stern
decides to go abroad to try out maturity. His destination:
Tokyo. Bicycle Days, a first novel by a 24-year-old Harvard
graduate, is the wry, rueful story of Alec's efforts to cope
with his job at a computer outfit and with a vexing foreign
culture. Through his adoptive family, the friendship of an old
fisherman and a troubling affair with an older woman, he
succeeds in learning some humbling lessons. Of course that means
turning west, to face life at home. Like his hero, Schwartz
avails himself of no shortcuts. Innocent of slickness or
lit-crit smarts, his novel has authority and a refreshing flinty
charm.


    NO RESTING PLACE
    by William Humphrey
    Delacorte; 249 pages; $18.95

    By the 1830s, the prosperous Cherokee farmers of North
Carolina and Georgia had leaders educated in white universities
and a written constitution recognized by the U.S. But they stood
in the way of white expansion, so they were driven from their
homes and herded along what came to be called the Trail of Tears
to the Oklahoma territory. There, Humphrey's tale has it, the
survivors were forced once more to migrate. The weight of such
history would seem almost too oppressive for fiction to handle.
But Humphrey skillfully balances the misery with the detachment
of ancient family legend. The tale descends from a boy named
Amos Ferguson, blue-eyed, a doctor's son, and a Cherokee. He
survives the migration but, to save himself, lives out his life
as a white Texan, the foster son of his father's murderer.
Humphrey frames his story with intelligence and compassion, and
the result is superb.


    THE FLOATING WORLD
    by Cynthia Kadohata
    Viking; 196 pages; $17.95

    The Japanese word ukiyo -- "the floating world" -- suggests
the narrow bridges of Hiroshige or the frozen waves of Hokusai.
In Kadohata's novel of the '60s, a Japanese American redefines
ukiyo as the Western U.S., a place of "gas station attendants,
restaurants, and jobs we depended on, the motel towns floating
in the middle of fields and mountains." Kadohata has a painter's
eye, and her narrator's scroll is filled with scrupulously
detailed portraits -- of her tyrannical grandmother, of herself
and her lovers and, memorably, of unassimilated migrant workers,
like "animals migrating across a field . . . moving from the
hard life just past to the life, maybe harder, to come."


    THE HOUSE OF STAIRS
    by Barbara Vine
    Harmony Books; 277 pages; $18.95

    When the prolific Ruth Rendell, who was already the best
mystery writer in the English-speaking world, launched a second
byline, Barbara Vine, she "actually stepped her writing up a
level," in the envious phrase of fellow novelist Simon Brett.
Plenty of peers agreed. The first Vine offering, A Dark-Adapted
Eye, won a 1986 Edgar award as the best mystery published in
the U.S. The second, A Fatal Inversion, in 1987 won Britain's
equivalent, the Gold Dagger. With the third, The House of
Stairs, a pattern emerges: each Vine book centers on women, each
focuses on the aftermath of a crime committed among intimates,
and each i-s more interested in inner mysteries of guilt and
dread than a hunt for clues and suspects. The books also share
Rendell's trademark candor about sexual obsession as a
terrifying force of nature. In Stairs, an aunt and a niece fall
urgently in love with, respectively, a young man and his alleged
sister, with murder in some ways the least of the ensuing
betrayals. Of all the horrors depicted, none,
characteristically, is quite so frightening as the vulnerability
of love.


    STARS OF THE NEW CURFEW
    by Ben Okri
    Viking; 194 pages; $17.95

    He saw floating items of sacrifice: loaves of bread in
polythene wrappings, gourds of food, Coca-Cola cans. When he
looked at the canoes again they had changed into the shapes of
swollen dead animals. He saw outdated currencies on the
riverbank." This is the Nigeria of Stars of the New Curfew, a
violently shifting land of oppressors and victims. It would take
a prodigious talent to convey the surrealism of daily life
there. It would take, in fact, Ben Okri, a London-based Nigerian
who illuminates his native country in a series of brilliant,
angry tales. A skyscraper throws its shadow on impoverished
huts. Hopeless men smoke marijuana "from the governor's secret
farms." The head of state burbles "about austerity, about
tightening the national belt, and about a great future. He
sounded very lonely, as though he were talking in a vast and
empty room." The room is Africa, immense and sad but not empty
-- not so long as there is a writer like Okri to convey its
tragedy in his unique and grieving works.


    SORT OF RICH
    by James Wilcox
    Harper & Row; 278 pages; $17.95

    Life in her wealthy new husband's Louisiana home isn't
turning out the way Gretchen Dambar wants. But it isn't her
fault -- or so the infuriating heroine of Wilcox's fourth novel
wants to think. In fact, nothing is as she would have it. She
is stung that no one in the bayou is impressed by her favorite
cousin, one of New York City's most eligible bachelors. Her
husband, so good in bed, has such bad taste in furniture. She
says she doesn't care about money, but she does. Willing
everything otherwise, Gretchen begins to see plots all around
her and stumbles through a tragicomedy of errors before a
capriciously cast-off confidante, as well as the very inanity
of her dilemmas, shakes some sense into her. Sort of Rich is an
exceedingly well-crafted tale of blind spots and self-delusions,
alternately hilarious and sobering, in which dogs are seen as
cats, friends as foes, strangers as lovers.


    TALKING GOD
    by Tony Hillerman
    Harper & Row; 239 pages; $17.95

    Tony Hillerman's thrillers are usually painstaking, almost
anthropological efforts to plunge into the folkways and
mind-sets of Native Americans, primarily Navajos. The crimes and
solutions nearly always center on the clash of cultures, indeed
of metaphysics, in the sparsely populated badlands of the
Southwest. But Hillerman's latest is something of a departure.
Much of Talking God takes place in official Washington; its
characters include a quirky contract killer seemingly borrowed
from Elmore Leonard; and the underlying politics focuses as much
on Pinochet's Chile as on the grievances of tribes whose
ancestral graves are plundered for museum displays. But the
deftly manipulated plot reunites Hillerman's detectives, Joe
Leaphorn and Jim Chee, lovelorn men who bury grief in stubborn
pursuit of moral order. Their tracking skills and non-Anglo
reasoning still prove vital to averting further crime. In place
of breathtaking evocations of light and landscape, Hillerman
touchingly portrays the outdoorsmen's dislocation amid subways,
crowds and unneighborly indifference.


    THE OXFORD BOOK OF IRISH SHORT STORIES
    Edited by William Trevor Oxford;
    567 pages; $24.95

    Readers usually get their first impression of anthologies
from high school or college English classes; the assigned texts
are there to be studied, not enjoyed. But of course many
collections can be read with pleasure, as this one engagingly
demonstrates. William Trevor, the distinguished Irish novelist
and short story writer, understands his compatriots' love of
tale telling, the anecdotal impulse that flourishes among people
who savor the spoken word. In his brief, informative
introduction, he notes, "English fiction writers tend to state
that their short stories are leavings from their novels. In
Ireland I have heard it put the other way around."

    The 46 stories Trevor selects stretch from the distant past
to the here and now, although the emphasis falls decidedly on
20th century works. Thus some brief tales translated from the
original Gaelic lead to a succession of pieces by well-known
names (Oliver Goldsmith, Maria Edgeworth, Oscar Wilde) and then
to such acknowledged modern masterpieces as James Joyce's The
Dead and Frank O'Connor's The Majesty of the Law. The familiar
mixes easily with material less so: William Carleton's eerie The
Death of a Devotee, Bernard Mac Laverty's grim Life Drawing. All
this diversity is held together by a common trait, an
irresistible claim on attention, the written equivalent of a tug
at the lapel or a hand on the shoulder. This book can be picked
up and put down many times, but hardly ever in the middle of a
story.


    THE WAITING ROOM
    by Mary Morris
    Doubleday; 273 pages; $17.95

    Zoe Coleman, her mother and grandmother have filled time's
crevices with waiting -- for a man to return, a new life to
begin or an old one to end, for love to be reborn. The time is
1972, and a crisis has brought Zoe to her Wisconsin hometown.
Avoiding the draft, her brother had fled to Canada; now he is
a drug addict in a local mental hospital. Through him Zoe
reawakens from the arid existence of the once loved; recapturing
a tender moment they shared as children brings redemption. She
learns that "love isn't something you wait for. It's something
you do." The novel has echoes of faddish self-help themes, but
by interweaving the stories and dreams of three willful women,
Morris offers a comforting truth about families. We build our
memories inside the memories of others, and what they remember
can take root in us as well.