A Ship Made of Paper

Scott Spencer

Best known for the novel Endless Love, which inspired a silly movie and an exquisite pop song, Spencer is a much better writer than his pop-culture associations would indicate. In this new novel, Daniel Emerson is a trial lawyer whose life has been threatened by a gang of thugs in retaliation for his unsuccessful defense of their cohort. Daniel, who is white but has always had an affinity for African-American culture, suddenly finds himself living in fear of African-Americans (his client, and his client’s menacing friends, are black). He leaves his thriving practice in Manhattan to return to the small upstate New York town he grew up in. Back in his mostly white hometown, he promptly falls head over heels in love with Iris Davenport, a married African-American woman. Daniel is living with his girlfriend and her daughter and seeing his standoffish parents occasionally – not quite a father, not quite a husband, not quite an orphan, as his girlfriend observes – and he’s also a hopeless romantic. He seems to think he’s found the love of his life in this impossible relationship with Iris, and whether it’s really her he wants, or what she represents to him, in the end doesn’t really matter. Daniel’s sappy heart and jerky knee on the subject of race are counterbalanced by his smart, no-nonsense girlfriend and by Iris’s husband, a banker simmering with carefully controlled rage. One appalling thing after another happens, making the book hard to put down, and not easy to forget.

Heart, You Bully, You Punk

Leah Hager Cohen

I.J. Esker is a math teacher at the tony Prospect School in Park Slope. When one of her favorite students, Ann, mysteriously falls off the bleachers, Esker, as she calls herself, offers to tutor the girl at home. As she grows closer to Ann, whose mother left the family to pursue her acting career, Esker is also drawn to Ann’s father, Wally, a kind and warm restaurateur. But Esker is haunted by a ghost from her past and the shell she’s built around herself has calcified: this novel is Remains of the Day with a young female math teacher in the role of the butler. Cohen paints an unusually complex picture of a teenager: Ann’s blend of confidence and instability are intriguing and realistic; she is a fully realized character, not a plot device to further an adult romance. Cohen also deftly captures the details of Esker’s solitary life: she spends her evenings reading on the couch, the pot of ramen that rests on her stomach warming her like a cat. This beautiful and sad little book also has one of the best titles in recent memory, from a poem by Marie Ponsot.

Postville : A Clash of Cultures in Heartland America

Stephen Bloom

Bloom and his wife left San Francisco for Iowa City in the early 1990s, and as much as they loved the blue sky, green cornfields and neighborly spirit, they felt uncomfortable and conspicuously different as Jews. When Bloom hears that outside Postville, a small rural Iowa town, a group of Hasidim from Brooklyn have opened a kosher slaughterhouse and revived the local economy, he begins making regular trips there. At first the Jews were welcomed as an economic windfall, but gradually their insularity began to grate on the locals. As Bloom gets to know those on either side of the conflict, he finds his comfort with the Jews eroding when they flout all of the conventions and even the laws of rural Iowan life; for example, they refuse to pay their bills on any schedule but their own. The ire this provokes from the locals is laced with anti-Semitism; having known no other Jews, they think this tight-knit group who scorns outsiders is representative of all Jews. Bloom is further surprised to hear the Jews themselves flaunting some of the stereotypes of Jews; they aren’t interested in winning over the locals, and the divide between the two groups seems therefore impenetrable. When the town proposes a referendum to annex the slaughterhouse land and thus bring the Hasidim under tighter control, the Hasidim threaten to pack up and leave. The book is constructed around the tension of the anticipated vote, and threaded through with Bloom’s own conflicts – his desire to belong in his new community, his desire to raise his son as a Jew, his allegiance to the Jews, and his genuine fondness and respect for the Iowans. He learns that a much-adored town doctor, Doc Wolf, who delivered hundreds of babies, was a Jew, which shocked some of his neighbors upon his death, and from the man’s example begins to formulate a way to be Jewish in Iowa: to love where he comes from, and to be a good neighbor where he lives.

Kissing in Manhattan: Stories

David Schickler

It’s always a treat when one of Schickler’s stories appears in the New Yorker, a welcome reprieve from yet another of John Updike’s so-skillfully-crafted-it-could-lull-you-to-sleep ruminations on adulterous upper-middle-class New Englanders. Schickler has a gift for the absurd that reflects everyday life in a funhouse mirror. In this, his first collection of stories, he writes about young urbanites who teeter on the edge of darkness but are rescued by their own pluck and luck and a little bit of goofiness. A mature-beyond-her-years young woman takes her high school teacher by surprise. A lawyer seduces, and uses, the girl he doesn’t want but can get, and gets his comeuppance from the girl he really wants. A couple on their honeymoon initiates a secret ritual that sustains their marriage. Every character has a connection to the same fictional apartment building in New York City; if anything, that’s what this book is about. It’s an old, solid, gorgeous Upper West Side building – the kind they don’t make anymore – with flawless plumbing, an intimidating doorman, and a magical elevator.

Ten Little Indians: stories

Sherman Alexie

Alexie at his best presents a short story like a carefully prepared meal – the first taste is part of the pleasure, the other part is the anticipation of enjoying the rest of it. Sometimes he seems to lose his way, as in the story about a man who uses a sex toy as a talisman to cure his sick child, but I didn’t skip any of the nine stories (why not ten, Sherman? It would be so neat). In each of these stories about present-day American Indians (usually Spokane) he packs his usual one-two punch: the pain of what the white man has done to the Indian will endure for generations, and the Indian, for his part, is often a drunk and a scammer. Alexie can be funny and tender, and is never dull.

The English Disease

Joseph Skibell

Disappointing all around, beginning with the fact that it’s double-spaced! What’s the story with this new publishing trend? They’re publishing 40,000 words with a small trim size and mostly white pages and calling them “novels.” We weren’t fooling our middle school teachers with wide margins on our book reports, and they’re not fooling us now. I’m surprised they didn’t go a step further and use Schoolgirl font with bubble letters and circles over the i’s. Pity the poor reader who settles into the couch with what she thinks is a novel and quickly realizes the book will be over before she even needs a bathroom break. As for the content of this one, it’s a couple of short stories stapled together: one about a man who reluctantly marries and has a child, decides he must divorce his wife because she isn’t Jewish, and then makes fun of her when she converts; the other about his trip to Poland with an annoying colleague - sort of a lazier version of Francine Prose’s Guided Tours of Hell. I have to say, though, Skibell’s book made me laugh out loud more than once. And it’s not like it took up much of my time.

Ambulance Girl: How I Saved Myself by Becoming an EMT

Jane Stern

Prolific Foodie Stern (co-author, with her husband Michael, of several books) decides at mid-life during a bout with depression that she wants to be an EMT, despite being extremely out of shape and having no skills or interest in medical care or even knowing the names of her local streets. She perseveres and passes the training with flying colors, and we’re treated to a couple of heartwarming anecdotes about how the woman with common sense did more than the doctors with their fancy degrees could. But then she backslides into sitting on the couch in her bathrobe watching daytime television, her marriage on the rocks - until September 11 comes along to remind her of What’s Really Important, and everything is OK again. This is a good example of how someone who’s well connected can get a book deal even if they have nothing of interest to say.

2 June 2003

Summer Blonde

Adrian Tomine

If when you think “comics” you think of Bazooka Joe, check out Adrian Tomine. In this collection of four pieces first published in his Optic Nerve series, each story is as emotionally subtle and messy as the drawings are clean and precise. Tomine specializes in the internal lives of the socially maladroit: teenagers simultaneously disgusted and fascinated by the popular crowd, and the adults they grow into – people who suspect that they aren’t as happy as everyone else because they’re too smart, but who are still resentful about it. His endings never tie up neatly, and his characters are ambiguous – often lacking in good judgment, sometimes cruel, yet usually sympathetic – that is, not one is a cartoon figure.

The Quality of Life Report

Meghan Daum

The pleasure of a novel usually lies in its extended character development, rumination on detail and exploration of great themes. In that sense, this is no novel, yet it has pleasures of its own. Lucinda Trout is Smith-educated and in her late twenties, suffering the indignity of barely making ends meet as a reporter on thongs and other fluff topics for a morning TV show in New York City. When she is sent to a small Midwestern city to interview methamphetamine addicts (“No fat people on camera!” shrieks her boss) she decides to act on the hunch that most New Yorkers have – that there’s a Better Life, and Real People, in the heartland – and gets her employer to finance her “quality of life reports” as she spends a year paying three-figure rent and breathing clean air in Prairie City. Trouble ensues, but it’s not the plot that’s interesting, as Daum’s strength is the quick sketch. She skates on the surface of her story, nailing the lesbian social workers, the women’s book group, and the ponytailed middle-aged television guy in a few deft strokes. It’s a bit curious, and a bit disappointing, that a novel that seems to want to grapple with the big issues of what makes life worth living and how to be a good person is ultimately so unreflective. Lucinda never seems to stop and think about what she’s doing, but Daum is such a crack social satirist, as shown in her essays, that I didn’t mind going along for the ride.

The Idiot Girl’s Action Adventure Club: True Tales from a Magnificent and Clumsy Life

Laurie Notaro

The recent popularity of Bridget Jones and her many imitators has shown that women can be funny and make fools of themselves, which I think is progress. But let’s face it, their adventures are pretty tame, their preoccupations with their looks and marriage a little tiresome. Enter Laurie Notaro, like a breath of stale bar air. She slobbers in her sleep and forgets to wear deodorant. She gets drunk and hits on the wrong gender. When she arrives for jury duty she’s mistaken for a homeless person. So she won’t have to live with her parents, she applies for a job and is interviewed by a man whom she kicked in the shins when she thought he was trying to steal her Jack Daniels. True, she’s no Jonathan Ames; the truly wild stuff will probably always be left to the boys. But she made me laugh, as did her second book, Autobiography of a Fat Bride – it’s a little mellower, as she has a marriage and a mortgage, but still a good time.

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