TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/061989/06198900.057

Text File | 1990-09-22 | 10KB | 197 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.