Festival of Fiction
I Was Amelia Earhart by Jane Mendelsohn (Knopf, $18)
It's hard to conjure a more tantalizing premise for a novel: suppose that aviatrix Amelia Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, survived their ill-fated 1937 attempt to fly around the world. Because the mystery of their destinies remains unsolved, Jane Mendelsohn's scenario holds as much water as any of the others that have surfaced over the decades (they were captured by the Japanese, the government staged their disappearance, aliens abducted them, etc.) but is decidedly cheerier. She imagines that the pair landed on a small island, where the determined, disciplined Earhart sets about trying to be rescued while the alcoholic Noonan sets about trying to lose himself further. They clash, but occasionally sleep together; then, somewhat suddenly, they fall in love. Much of the second half of the book plays like a sparely written PG-rated romance novel or a workaday fantasy: they make love all night, they feast on seafood and fruit, they sleep all day. Paradise! The result is engaging but hardly believable; throughout the book's 146 pages, Earhart's observations are at once so poetic ("The sky is flesh") and baldly objective ("I have not one self-sacrificing, maternal bone in my unwomanly, muscular body") that Mendelsohn fails to arrive at a concrete persona for her heroine. Though we do learn much along the way about the flyer's unhappiness and the reasons why Earhart and Noonan might have wanted to escape their lives, we don't have faith enough in the writer to take us out of the realm of fantasy and into the land of plausibility. -- Marina Gordon
Getting Over Homer by Mark O'Donnell (Knopf, $21)
Mark O'Donnell's debut novel introduces a main character whose fate is predestined: with a name like "Blue," how happy can he be? Hans Christian "Blue" Monahan peaked at age eleven, with his hit song "(Life Is the Question) Love Is the Answer" and thought he'd hit the depths when he wrote a way-off-Broadway musical version of the Odyssey. But that dalliance with Homer held nothing to his relationship with a real-life Homer, a designer of rich-folk fetes in whom Blue believes he's found love. When the inscrutable Homer dumps Blue, our narrator spirals into a world of doubt and self-pity familiar to all dumpees ("I reluctantly recommend the Heartbreak Diet for those who've had no success losing weight through Utter Bliss"); it seems it was a lot easier getting into Homer than getting over him. Juxtaposed with Blue's depression is the success of his twin brother, Red, who has found shallow but tangible (lots of money, lots of women) rewards in Hollywood; the rest of the Monahan clan later takes center stage when Blue strikes out on a country-wide odyssey to make contact with his far-flung family. O'Donnell deals with some epic themes here--love, family, knowing thyself--and admirably distills them into vivid characters and prose that pops off the page. A Homeric effort, indeed. -- Marina Gordon
Accordion Crimes by E. Annie Proulx (Scribner, $25.00)
E. Annie Proulx's Accordion Crimes begins in Sicily, circa 1890: a poor, hirsute Sicilian crafts a beautiful button accordion, dreaming of eventually owning his own music store in the promised land of "La Merica." The hapless accordion maker emigrates to New Orleans, toting the finished instrument and his son; he is brutally dispatched by an anti-Italian lynch party by page fifty, and the focus shifts to the real hero of our novel: the accordion itself. Passed by hard-luck circumstance from immigrant hand to immigrant hand across the country--from Italians to Germans to Tejanos to Franco-Canadians to Africans to Poles to Irishmen to Basques to Norwegians--the accordion links a series of cleverly interwoven vignettes spanning one hundred years of U.S. history. The instrument bears witness to the hardships, the everyday prejudices, and the macabre deaths and disfiguring accidents (which Proulx delights in regaling in ghastly, dark-comic detail) suffered by its various owners. As their cultural identities--their customs, their languages--become subsumed through the process of assimilation, the accordion and half-remembered snatches of songs from the Old Country provide a last tie to their pasts. Prodigiously researched for historical realism and inventively wrought with the same brand of daring and ingenious wordsmithery that made her previous novel, The Shipping News, a Pulitzer Prize winner, Proulx has pulled off an impressive feat of storytelling. -- Patty Lindley
Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil by Rafael Yglesias (Warner; $24.95)
The title character and narrator of Rafael Yglesias's (Fearless) latest novel is Dr. Rafael Neruda, a psychoanalyst whose own tragic childhood has informed both his choice of profession and his treatment of patients. Written as an extended--at seven hundred pages, very extended--case study, Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil begins with a description of young Rafe's childhood and the event that shattered it, then shifts its focus to the older Rafe's analysis of the neurotic, depressive Gene Kenny. When Gene's world is likewise shattered by tragedy, Dr. Neruda decides to pursue a course of alternate therapy for the two people he considers responsible. Yglesias divides the novel into three sections, and parts one and two (dealing with young Rafe and Gene) are haunting and compelling; only in the final section, "Evil: Diagnosis and Cure," does he lose control of his big subject.
The meaning of Dr. Neruda's transformation from brilliant analyst to renegade therapist is never clear; lay readers will have a hard time judging whether he is making a therapeutic breakthrough or simply losing his mind. -- Jeff Schwager
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