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18 November 2006 Brian Morton Morton,
with his gimlet eye and gentle touch, will always be one of my favorite
writers. Reading his novels is like
having my mind read. Here three story lines entwined in one family each have
their own weight, centering on intellectual theft, an intercultural
relationship, illness, betrayal, and death. As usual, Morton deftly sets the
scenes, nails the interpersonal dynamics, and delivers pages brimming with
literary gossip, political analysis, and perfectly captured everyday speech.
His Adam Weller is a scoundrel, yet human enough to make a reader squirm with
recognition. Morton’s strength
is his acknowledgment of ambivalence, which doesn’t lend itself to a
satisfying resolution to the conflicts he sets up. But he’s taking some
risks in his fourth novel, while still delivering his subtly brilliant
observations; with this writer, the delight is in the details. The
Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir Bill Bryson The 1950s
had segregation, McCarthyism, uncomfortable undergarments, and an astounding
disregard for personal safety or health as the country plummeted headlong
into a love affair with technology without pausing to think things through.
Turns out it wasn’t such a good idea to x-ray children’s feet
every time they needed new shoes. But
the era’s infatuation with the future was also terribly charming,
whether it shows up in breathtaking world’s fairs or such misguided ideas
as mail delivery by missile. One feels a protective affection for mid-century
Midwesterners—Bryson certainly does, even as he’s poking fun at
them He’s absolutely right to
mourn the permanent loss of uniqueness in American cities; before the arrival
of chain stores, every town had something nothing else had, even if it was
something silly like a carousel for delivering groceries from store to car.
This was an era when buildings were made with care, people hadn’t yet
been tricked into working longer hours to afford all of their labor-saving
luxuries, and technology was opening up dazzling possibilities but not everything had become a profit-making
venture. Much has been written about
these cultural shifts elsewhere, of course, and this book is more about the
childhood experience, anyway: long stretches of boredom that lead to
experiments like seeing what the world looks like viewed through lime Jell-O,
winter mornings spent doing nothing but taking boots on and off. Bryson,
never one to let the truth stand in the way of a good story,
is as funny as ever here. Daniel Gilbert If
you like Malcolm
Gladwell and Freakonomics, and don’t
mind a snarky tone to your psychology, you’ll
gobble up this book about us wacky humans and why we do what we do. Gilbert's
focus is happiness, particularly how we imagine we'll feel in the future and
how it isn't the way we really will feel.
He has a lot of tricks up his sleeve, most all of them on par with
those children's games that ask over and over “What does s-p-o-t
spell?" and then "What do you do at a green light?"
—tripping you up because your brain is working exactly the way it has
evolved to, and exactly the way that serves you best in 99.9% of the
situations you encounter. He concludes that we should trust our own instincts
less: that if we want to know what will make us happy we should look at what
makes everyone else happy—we're not as unique as we think. Of course, part of being human is that we
can't accept this advice. And why would we do what people tell us to if it
turns out—as he asserts—that horrible experiences and huge
mistakes, even self-created disasters, often change a life for the better?
It’s kind of comforting to know that maybe we can't screw up too
badly. Like Gladwell,
Gilbert leaves his readers with at least as many questions as he
answers. But his habit of explaining
every idea thoroughly, and then explaining it again, goes a long way toward
make this an easy and fun read. Betty Smith I
know I read this book about an early 20th century
second-generation American girl when I was about that girl’s age, but
when I read it again not a word was familiar. I can only conclude that its
rightful storage space in my brain is occupied by all of the words to the
“Diff’rent Strokes” theme song
and the transcript to the commercial for Connect Four. Smith’s famous staple of
middle-school reading lists is sweet and sincere enough for a child, but with
a sharply honest streak. Francie, the heroine,
isn’t above selfishness, cruelty, or revenge, and Smith doesn’t
shy away from the sad or the ugly—she takes a dim view of human
nature. Though it’s a bit heavy
on the editorializing, the precious period details of a bygone time (the book
itself is already six decades old), and delightful—but not
sugarcoated—family anecdotes make this coming of age story enjoyable
for an adult. The Triumph of Love over Experience: A Memoir of Remarriage Wendy Swallow As
with her first book Breaking Apart: A
Memoir of Divorce, the reader doesn’t have to share any of
Swallow’s experiences to be drawn into her story. This time around, after finally hitting her
stride as a single mom of two teenaged boys and becoming convinced she missed
her one chance at a happy marriage, she meets a sweetly earnest single
father, with two boys almost the same ages as her own, and they set about
combining houses, pets, holidays, custody schedules, and four teenagers who
have to become stepbrothers when they wouldn’t even necessarily be
friends. Swallow’s outlook is
ever rosy, even in a crisis, which befits her basically comfortable life as a
journalist with a cadre of female friends ever ready to dispense pithy wisdom
in witty sound bites over brunch. This book is more about stepfamilies than
her marriage; there’s little heft, good or bad, to her and
Charlie’s relationship, at least as she tells it. We have to take it on
faith that all of the wrangling is worth it. Mark Haddon I was fully
prepared to be disappointed by this second novel by the best-selling author
of The Curious
Incident of the Dog in Night Time,
and was pleasantly surprised. Again,
the main character, this time a middle-aged British man, is set apart from
the world, though not by autism but by stodginess and morbid worrying.
He’s convinced he’s dying of a horrible disease, his daughter is
marrying a guy she’s not even sure she likes, his wife is having an
affair and his first reaction is to ignore it, hoping it will go away, and
his son (an underemployed real estate agent who loses his boyfriend but gets
all the best lines) is a mystery to him.
Even though the comedy loses its grip and becomes mania by the time
the looming wedding finally arrives, this is worth picking up. |
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