The 10 Best Books of 2009
By THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
After so many years, and so many lists, you might think the task of choosing the 10 Best Books would get easier. If only. The sublime story collections alone created agonies of indecision. So did the superb literary biographies we read — and deeply admired. But in the end the decisions had to be made.
Not that drawing up the list — or rather, whittling it down — was a wholly painful exercise. One of the pleasures it afforded was the chance to resample the sometimes surprising chemistry of reviewers and authors, particularly when it came to fiction. Jonathan Lethem, whose “Chronic City” made our list, reviewed Lorrie Moore’s novel “A Gate at the Stairs,” which made it too, while Curtis Sittenfeld, whose novel “Prep” was one of the 10 Best in 2005, reviewed Maile Meloy’s story collection “Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It,” a winner this year. Any book review editor will attest that persuading fiction writers to assess other people’s fiction can be a struggle. These were heartening exceptions to the rule. May more novelists review for us in 2010!
This list will appear in print in the Dec. 13 Book Review. —The Editors
http://www.nytimes.com/gift-guide/holid ... /list.html
纽约时报2009十大好书
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BOTH WAYS IS THE ONLY WAY I WANT IT
书名： 《两条路都是我想走的路》
作者： Maile Meloy
出版社：Riverhead Books
In an exceptionally strong year for short fiction, Meloy’s concise yet fine-grained narratives, whether set in Montana, an East Coast boarding school or a 1970s nuclear power plant, shout out with quiet restraint and calm precision. Her flawed characters — ranch hands in love, fathers and daughters — rarely act in their own best interests and often betray those closest to them.
今年短篇小说大行其道，其中Meloy简练但细致的描述，不管其背景是在蒙大拿州，亦或是在东海岸的寄宿学校，还是在70年代的核电站，都用一种静默的抑制和平静的精度在大声呼喊。她书中的那些有缺陷的人物，恋爱中的农场工人、父亲和女儿，似乎行动很少是对自己最有利的，而且常常会背叛自己最亲近的人。
书名： 《两条路都是我想走的路》
作者： Maile Meloy
出版社：Riverhead Books
In an exceptionally strong year for short fiction, Meloy’s concise yet fine-grained narratives, whether set in Montana, an East Coast boarding school or a 1970s nuclear power plant, shout out with quiet restraint and calm precision. Her flawed characters — ranch hands in love, fathers and daughters — rarely act in their own best interests and often betray those closest to them.
今年短篇小说大行其道，其中Meloy简练但细致的描述，不管其背景是在蒙大拿州，亦或是在东海岸的寄宿学校，还是在70年代的核电站，都用一种静默的抑制和平静的精度在大声呼喊。她书中的那些有缺陷的人物，恋爱中的农场工人、父亲和女儿，似乎行动很少是对自己最有利的，而且常常会背叛自己最亲近的人。
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Amazon.com Review
Amazon Best of the Month, July 2009: There is one line in Maile Meloy's newest story collection that completely slayed me. (It's on page 97.) And in fact, there are many moments before and after that line that left me awestruck as I wondered how she was able to capture a feeling--typically one that's very familiar, like the flushing embarrassment of an unexpected advance, or the sudden fury found in a bout of sibling rivalry--and create it anew. The effect is both masterful and ephemeral: all of a sudden, it's as if your own life is reflected back to you. This is what great story writers do, and in the stories that follow--whose characters revel or unravel in their relationships to love and family--Maile Meloy pinpoints the ambivalence running through our most powerful emotions, be it love, jealousy, grief, or loneliness. That she writes with so much truth and wisdom and restraint makes Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It an unexpected pleasure and a worthy outside-the-box pick for your summer reading.
--Anne Bartholomew
http://www.amazon.com/Both-Ways-Only-Wa ... 159448869X
Amazon Best of the Month, July 2009: There is one line in Maile Meloy's newest story collection that completely slayed me. (It's on page 97.) And in fact, there are many moments before and after that line that left me awestruck as I wondered how she was able to capture a feeling--typically one that's very familiar, like the flushing embarrassment of an unexpected advance, or the sudden fury found in a bout of sibling rivalry--and create it anew. The effect is both masterful and ephemeral: all of a sudden, it's as if your own life is reflected back to you. This is what great story writers do, and in the stories that follow--whose characters revel or unravel in their relationships to love and family--Maile Meloy pinpoints the ambivalence running through our most powerful emotions, be it love, jealousy, grief, or loneliness. That she writes with so much truth and wisdom and restraint makes Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It an unexpected pleasure and a worthy outside-the-box pick for your summer reading.
--Anne Bartholomew
http://www.amazon.com/Both-Ways-Only-Wa ... 159448869X
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Amazon Exclusive: Maile Meloy on Arranging Stories
My most recent book, Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It, is a story collection, as was my first. Lately people have been asking me about how you decide which stories to include in a collection, and what order they go in, which was (and still is) a big question of mine.
When I was writing the stories that became my first book, Half in Love, I read great collections to see how it was done: Philip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus; J.D. Salinger’s Nine Stories; Merce Rodereda's My Christina; D.H. Lawrence's England, My England; Hemingway's In Our Time. I wanted to know how the arrangement of eight or ten or twelve stories could create a complete experience that the reader could move through, when the stories weren't linked in any way except for the fact that one writer wrote them, but it was hard to see how I could transfer that information to my own book.
I was taking a class from Ann Patchett then, and she said, about the number of stories in a collection, that Salinger's Nine was like eight hours sleep—a little more was okay, a little less was fine, but it was a good general guideline. About variety, she said that a collection was like a mall: it needed a few big stories with broad horizons, like the big anchor stores, to make a space in which the smaller, quirkier stories could survive.
That made sense, so in putting Half in Love together I took some stories out, and left others in, and set aside two linked ones to start a novel with. I made lists of the titles, and annotated them with codes about what was in each story, some of which were so obscure I can't decipher them now. (One was "adbhj." I have no idea what that means.) The easily breakable codes indicated that the story was in 1st person, or 3rd, or 2nd, and whether the protagonist was male or female, and where the story was set. Then I cut the lists apart and moved the titles around on the kitchen table. I spent a long time trying to keep the first-person stories away from each other, before realizing that I didn't need to, that it wasn't difficult to move from one first-person narrator to another. We're used to hearing different voices telling us things about their lives, and I ended up having four in a row.
I did the same thing for Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It, with the annotated titles on cut-up pieces of sticky notes, so they would stay in place—an improvement on the method. Otherwise, the arranging hadn't gotten any easier. I knew which title went first, and had a sense about which one might go last, but I moved the middle around for days, trying different sequences.
I got out Salinger's Nine again, because it struck me as the Platonic ideal of a story collection, and I thought about it as a template, wondering which story was my "DeDaumier Smith's Blue Period," and which was my "Teddy." But that came to seem futile and silly, and I went back to thinking about my own stories.
I put a story set in Connecticut third, after two Montana stories, so it was clear that the collection was going to go to other places. And there were two stories that made sense near each other, but needed to be separated, like quarreling siblings. The story about a man whose daughter has been murdered couldn't go early. It had to go somewhere in the middle, at a point when the reader was already in the book. And it seemed good to have a lighter story after it, about a grandmother who comes back from the dead.
Sometimes the arranging felt like lining up the batting order for a baseball game: which story leads off? And sometimes it felt like seating people at a dinner party: boy-girl-boy-girl if possible, and certain stories shouldn't go next to each other, and try to encourage interesting conversation. And sometimes it felt like making a mix tape for someone you love. But mostly it felt like a puzzle with a discoverable solution, and moving the pieces around was part of the pleasure.
http://www.amazon.com/Both-Ways-Only-Wa ... 159448869X
My most recent book, Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It, is a story collection, as was my first. Lately people have been asking me about how you decide which stories to include in a collection, and what order they go in, which was (and still is) a big question of mine.
When I was writing the stories that became my first book, Half in Love, I read great collections to see how it was done: Philip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus; J.D. Salinger’s Nine Stories; Merce Rodereda's My Christina; D.H. Lawrence's England, My England; Hemingway's In Our Time. I wanted to know how the arrangement of eight or ten or twelve stories could create a complete experience that the reader could move through, when the stories weren't linked in any way except for the fact that one writer wrote them, but it was hard to see how I could transfer that information to my own book.
I was taking a class from Ann Patchett then, and she said, about the number of stories in a collection, that Salinger's Nine was like eight hours sleep—a little more was okay, a little less was fine, but it was a good general guideline. About variety, she said that a collection was like a mall: it needed a few big stories with broad horizons, like the big anchor stores, to make a space in which the smaller, quirkier stories could survive.
That made sense, so in putting Half in Love together I took some stories out, and left others in, and set aside two linked ones to start a novel with. I made lists of the titles, and annotated them with codes about what was in each story, some of which were so obscure I can't decipher them now. (One was "adbhj." I have no idea what that means.) The easily breakable codes indicated that the story was in 1st person, or 3rd, or 2nd, and whether the protagonist was male or female, and where the story was set. Then I cut the lists apart and moved the titles around on the kitchen table. I spent a long time trying to keep the first-person stories away from each other, before realizing that I didn't need to, that it wasn't difficult to move from one first-person narrator to another. We're used to hearing different voices telling us things about their lives, and I ended up having four in a row.
I did the same thing for Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It, with the annotated titles on cut-up pieces of sticky notes, so they would stay in place—an improvement on the method. Otherwise, the arranging hadn't gotten any easier. I knew which title went first, and had a sense about which one might go last, but I moved the middle around for days, trying different sequences.
I got out Salinger's Nine again, because it struck me as the Platonic ideal of a story collection, and I thought about it as a template, wondering which story was my "DeDaumier Smith's Blue Period," and which was my "Teddy." But that came to seem futile and silly, and I went back to thinking about my own stories.
I put a story set in Connecticut third, after two Montana stories, so it was clear that the collection was going to go to other places. And there were two stories that made sense near each other, but needed to be separated, like quarreling siblings. The story about a man whose daughter has been murdered couldn't go early. It had to go somewhere in the middle, at a point when the reader was already in the book. And it seemed good to have a lighter story after it, about a grandmother who comes back from the dead.
Sometimes the arranging felt like lining up the batting order for a baseball game: which story leads off? And sometimes it felt like seating people at a dinner party: boy-girl-boy-girl if possible, and certain stories shouldn't go next to each other, and try to encourage interesting conversation. And sometimes it felt like making a mix tape for someone you love. But mostly it felt like a puzzle with a discoverable solution, and moving the pieces around was part of the pleasure.
http://www.amazon.com/Both-Ways-Only-Wa ... 159448869X
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Book Review: BOTH WAYS IS THE ONLY WAY I WANT IT
Irrational Behavior
By CURTIS SITTENFELD
Published: July 8, 2009
Maile Meloy called her first novel “Liars and Saints,” but there was a fair amount of evidence she was being ironic, at least about the saints part. There was also a fair amount of evidence that Meloy sympathized with the sinners, an impression reinforced by the title and contents of her new story collection, “Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It.” Almost all her characters are flawed: lawyers, Montana residents, unfaithful spouses, rich and eccentric older women, young women who are close to their fathers in nice as opposed to creepy ways, and multiple combinations thereof. They are people who act irrationally, against their own best interests — by betraying those they care about, making embarrassing romantic overtures and knowingly setting in motion situations they’d rather avoid — and Meloy’s prose is so clear, calm and intelligent that their behavior becomes eminently understandable.
Beth, a recent law school graduate who appears in the first story, “Travis, B.,” is teaching an adult-¬education class on public-school law in Glendive, a small town on the eastern side of Montana. The problem is that she lives and works a nine-and-a-half-hour drive west, in Missoula. “I’ve never done anything so stupid in my life,” she tells Chet, a ranch worker in the class, about having accepted the teaching position, which she did out of anxiety over her student loans. Twice a week, Beth leaves her Missoula law firm at midday, makes the drive, teaches the class that evening, then turns around and spends the night driving home.
“There are deer on the road, and there’s black ice outside of Three Forks along the river,” she explains to Chet, who has quickly developed a crush on her. “If I make it past there, I get to take a shower and go to work at eight. . . . Then learn more school law tomorrow night, then leave work the next day before lunch and drive back here with my eyes twitching.” The bizarreness of Beth’s situation is matched by its plausibility; a kind of banal, daily desperation animates many of Meloy’s characters, including Chet, who first shows up in Beth’s classroom not as a real student, but as a lonely person who on a random night happens to stumble into the school because it’s one of the few buildings in town with its lights on.
While the American West is clearly close to her heart, Meloy — who is 37, grew up in Montana and now lives in Los Angeles, and has won prizes from The Paris Review and the American Academy of Arts and Letters — bravely plunks down her characters in a wide range of times and places, including a 1970s nu¬clear power plant, an East Coast boarding school and Argentina. All these settings are equally convincing, granted verisimilitude by Meloy’s eye for the casually perfect detail: the knee-to-nose stretch, performed while lying in bed beneath a Charlie Parker poster, that a boarding-school girl learns from her roommate; the party in Buenos Aires where an appearance by the Prince of Wales sends the guests into a frenzy and a woman’s pearl necklace breaks and scatters on the floor. Meloy does her research — either that, or she’s lived many lives — but it never feels as if she included information just because, by God, she spent time unearthing it and now wants to make use of her hard work. Rather, she includes tidbits about, say, the playing cards used in raffles at the nuclear power plant because they’re organic to the stories.
Though it might seem strange to praise a writer for the things she doesn’t do, what really sets Meloy apart is her restraint. She is impressively concise, disciplined in length and scope. And she’s balanced in her approach to character, neither blinded by love for her creations, nor abusive toward them. In an allusion to the collection’s title, a character wonders near the end, “What kind of fool wanted it only one way?” The person asking this question is a man considering leaving his smart, appealing wife of 30 years for the much younger woman who gave swimming lessons to his now-grown children. Such a man isn’t particularly likable — in fact, the opposite — but it’s a mark of Meloy’s evenhanded character development that you find yourself agreeing with him, thinking, Yeah, what kind of fool? In the end, everyone in these stories retains at least a sliver of humanity, whether it’s an 87-year-old who in her youth cheerfully appeared in movies under the Nazi studio system or a father who wordlessly offers his teenage daughter as sexual enticement to persuade a plaintiff to remain in a lawsuit.
Meloy’s restraint also comes through not in the way she plots stories, which is boldly, but in how she chooses to reveal her plots, delivering shocking twists in as low-key a manner as possible. In “The Girlfriend,” the fact that the protagonist’s daughter was murdered is revealed in an aside. In “Two-Step,” ¬Naomi, a medical resident, talks to her friend Alice about Alice’s suspicion that her husband is having an affair; and though the story is told from Naomi’s perspective, it doesn’t become clear until nearly halfway through that she’s the one with whom the husband is cheating. Meloy drops this bomb understatedly, noting of Naomi that “she had told her husband that she was leaving him, with the understanding that Alice would simultaneously — or at least soon — be told the same thing. It had been a difficult week.”
Thanks to Meloy’s spare, subdued style, the death and infidelity running through these tales don’t take on as grim a tone as you’d expect. Only one story, about the murdered daughter, really makes you want to slit your wrists; and, indeed, a wry humor appears regularly. An Argentine aristocrat observes that another man “was a bore; not even failure could make him interesting.” Or, as one wife tells another, “the whole soul mates idea . . . is really most useful when you’re stealing someone’s husband. It’s not so good when someone might be stealing yours.”
Meloy is also the author of two inter¬connected novels and an earlier collection, “Half in Love.” Personally, I prefer her stories — “Half in Love” is wonderful too — but she’s such a talented and unpredictable writer that I’m officially joining her fan club; whatever she writes next, I’ll gladly read it.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/12/books ... .html?_r=1
Irrational Behavior
By CURTIS SITTENFELD
Published: July 8, 2009
Maile Meloy called her first novel “Liars and Saints,” but there was a fair amount of evidence she was being ironic, at least about the saints part. There was also a fair amount of evidence that Meloy sympathized with the sinners, an impression reinforced by the title and contents of her new story collection, “Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It.” Almost all her characters are flawed: lawyers, Montana residents, unfaithful spouses, rich and eccentric older women, young women who are close to their fathers in nice as opposed to creepy ways, and multiple combinations thereof. They are people who act irrationally, against their own best interests — by betraying those they care about, making embarrassing romantic overtures and knowingly setting in motion situations they’d rather avoid — and Meloy’s prose is so clear, calm and intelligent that their behavior becomes eminently understandable.
Beth, a recent law school graduate who appears in the first story, “Travis, B.,” is teaching an adult-¬education class on public-school law in Glendive, a small town on the eastern side of Montana. The problem is that she lives and works a nine-and-a-half-hour drive west, in Missoula. “I’ve never done anything so stupid in my life,” she tells Chet, a ranch worker in the class, about having accepted the teaching position, which she did out of anxiety over her student loans. Twice a week, Beth leaves her Missoula law firm at midday, makes the drive, teaches the class that evening, then turns around and spends the night driving home.
“There are deer on the road, and there’s black ice outside of Three Forks along the river,” she explains to Chet, who has quickly developed a crush on her. “If I make it past there, I get to take a shower and go to work at eight. . . . Then learn more school law tomorrow night, then leave work the next day before lunch and drive back here with my eyes twitching.” The bizarreness of Beth’s situation is matched by its plausibility; a kind of banal, daily desperation animates many of Meloy’s characters, including Chet, who first shows up in Beth’s classroom not as a real student, but as a lonely person who on a random night happens to stumble into the school because it’s one of the few buildings in town with its lights on.
While the American West is clearly close to her heart, Meloy — who is 37, grew up in Montana and now lives in Los Angeles, and has won prizes from The Paris Review and the American Academy of Arts and Letters — bravely plunks down her characters in a wide range of times and places, including a 1970s nu¬clear power plant, an East Coast boarding school and Argentina. All these settings are equally convincing, granted verisimilitude by Meloy’s eye for the casually perfect detail: the knee-to-nose stretch, performed while lying in bed beneath a Charlie Parker poster, that a boarding-school girl learns from her roommate; the party in Buenos Aires where an appearance by the Prince of Wales sends the guests into a frenzy and a woman’s pearl necklace breaks and scatters on the floor. Meloy does her research — either that, or she’s lived many lives — but it never feels as if she included information just because, by God, she spent time unearthing it and now wants to make use of her hard work. Rather, she includes tidbits about, say, the playing cards used in raffles at the nuclear power plant because they’re organic to the stories.
Though it might seem strange to praise a writer for the things she doesn’t do, what really sets Meloy apart is her restraint. She is impressively concise, disciplined in length and scope. And she’s balanced in her approach to character, neither blinded by love for her creations, nor abusive toward them. In an allusion to the collection’s title, a character wonders near the end, “What kind of fool wanted it only one way?” The person asking this question is a man considering leaving his smart, appealing wife of 30 years for the much younger woman who gave swimming lessons to his now-grown children. Such a man isn’t particularly likable — in fact, the opposite — but it’s a mark of Meloy’s evenhanded character development that you find yourself agreeing with him, thinking, Yeah, what kind of fool? In the end, everyone in these stories retains at least a sliver of humanity, whether it’s an 87-year-old who in her youth cheerfully appeared in movies under the Nazi studio system or a father who wordlessly offers his teenage daughter as sexual enticement to persuade a plaintiff to remain in a lawsuit.
Meloy’s restraint also comes through not in the way she plots stories, which is boldly, but in how she chooses to reveal her plots, delivering shocking twists in as low-key a manner as possible. In “The Girlfriend,” the fact that the protagonist’s daughter was murdered is revealed in an aside. In “Two-Step,” ¬Naomi, a medical resident, talks to her friend Alice about Alice’s suspicion that her husband is having an affair; and though the story is told from Naomi’s perspective, it doesn’t become clear until nearly halfway through that she’s the one with whom the husband is cheating. Meloy drops this bomb understatedly, noting of Naomi that “she had told her husband that she was leaving him, with the understanding that Alice would simultaneously — or at least soon — be told the same thing. It had been a difficult week.”
Thanks to Meloy’s spare, subdued style, the death and infidelity running through these tales don’t take on as grim a tone as you’d expect. Only one story, about the murdered daughter, really makes you want to slit your wrists; and, indeed, a wry humor appears regularly. An Argentine aristocrat observes that another man “was a bore; not even failure could make him interesting.” Or, as one wife tells another, “the whole soul mates idea . . . is really most useful when you’re stealing someone’s husband. It’s not so good when someone might be stealing yours.”
Meloy is also the author of two inter¬connected novels and an earlier collection, “Half in Love.” Personally, I prefer her stories — “Half in Love” is wonderful too — but she’s such a talented and unpredictable writer that I’m officially joining her fan club; whatever she writes next, I’ll gladly read it.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/12/books ... .html?_r=1
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CHRONIC CITY
书名： 《久病之城》
作者： Jonathan Lethem
出版社：Doubleday
第一版：13/10/2009
Lethem’s eighth novel unfolds in an alternative-reality Manhattan. The crowded canvas includes a wantonly destructive escaped tiger (or is it a subway excavator?) prowling the streets, a cruel gray fog engulfing Wall Street, a “war free” edition of The New York Times, a character stranded on the dying International Space Station, strange and valuable vaselike objects called chaldrons, colossal cheeseburgers and some extremely potent marijuana.
Lethem的第八部小说在另一种现实的曼哈顿展开。拥挤的场景中包括一头破坏性的，欢闹的出逃的老虎（或是一台地铁开凿机？）在街上到处游走，一层的惨淡的灰蒙蒙的雾笼罩着华尔街，没有战争报道的《纽约时报》，一个人站在即将报废的国际空间站上进退两难，一种叫做查尔特隆的古怪却价值昂贵的花瓶样的物体，巨大的三明治和效力强劲的大麻。
书名： 《久病之城》
作者： Jonathan Lethem
出版社：Doubleday
第一版：13/10/2009
Lethem’s eighth novel unfolds in an alternative-reality Manhattan. The crowded canvas includes a wantonly destructive escaped tiger (or is it a subway excavator?) prowling the streets, a cruel gray fog engulfing Wall Street, a “war free” edition of The New York Times, a character stranded on the dying International Space Station, strange and valuable vaselike objects called chaldrons, colossal cheeseburgers and some extremely potent marijuana.
Lethem的第八部小说在另一种现实的曼哈顿展开。拥挤的场景中包括一头破坏性的，欢闹的出逃的老虎（或是一台地铁开凿机？）在街上到处游走，一层的惨淡的灰蒙蒙的雾笼罩着华尔街，没有战争报道的《纽约时报》，一个人站在即将报废的国际空间站上进退两难，一种叫做查尔特隆的古怪却价值昂贵的花瓶样的物体，巨大的三明治和效力强劲的大麻。
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Amazon.com Review：
Amazon Best of the Month, October 2009: Jonathan Lethem, the home-grown frontrunner of a generation of Brooklyn writers, crosses the bridge to Manhattan in Chronic City, a smart, unsettling, and meticulously hilarious novel of friendship and real estate among the rich and the rent-controlled.
Lethem's story centers around two unlikely friends, Chase Insteadman, a genial nonentity who was once a child sitcom star and now is best known as the loyal fiancé of a space-stranded astronaut, and Perkus Tooth, a skinny, moody, underemployed cultural critic. Chase and Perkus are free-floating, dope-dependent bohemians in a borough built on ambition, living on its margins but with surprising access to its centers of power, even to the city's billionaire mayor.
Paranoiac Perkus sees urgent plots everywhere--in the font of The New Yorker, in an old VHS copy of Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid--but Chronic City, despite the presence of death, politics, and a mysterious, marauding tiger, is itself light on plot. Eschewing dramatic staples like romance and artistic creation for the more meandering passions of friendship and observation, Chronic City thrives instead on the brilliance of Lethem's ear and eye. Every page is a pleasure of pitch-perfect banter and spot-on cultural satire, cut sharply with the melancholic sense that being able to explain your city doesn't make you any more capable of living in it.
--Tom Nissley
http://www.amazon.com/Chronic-City-Jona ... 0385518633
Amazon Best of the Month, October 2009: Jonathan Lethem, the home-grown frontrunner of a generation of Brooklyn writers, crosses the bridge to Manhattan in Chronic City, a smart, unsettling, and meticulously hilarious novel of friendship and real estate among the rich and the rent-controlled.
Lethem's story centers around two unlikely friends, Chase Insteadman, a genial nonentity who was once a child sitcom star and now is best known as the loyal fiancé of a space-stranded astronaut, and Perkus Tooth, a skinny, moody, underemployed cultural critic. Chase and Perkus are free-floating, dope-dependent bohemians in a borough built on ambition, living on its margins but with surprising access to its centers of power, even to the city's billionaire mayor.
Paranoiac Perkus sees urgent plots everywhere--in the font of The New Yorker, in an old VHS copy of Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid--but Chronic City, despite the presence of death, politics, and a mysterious, marauding tiger, is itself light on plot. Eschewing dramatic staples like romance and artistic creation for the more meandering passions of friendship and observation, Chronic City thrives instead on the brilliance of Lethem's ear and eye. Every page is a pleasure of pitch-perfect banter and spot-on cultural satire, cut sharply with the melancholic sense that being able to explain your city doesn't make you any more capable of living in it.
--Tom Nissley
http://www.amazon.com/Chronic-City-Jona ... 0385518633
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Book Review：CHRONIC CITY
Another World
By GREGORY COWLES
Published: October 22, 2009
By now, Jonathan Lethem is so identified with his native Brooklyn that when he chose Los Angeles as the setting for his last novel — the modest “You Don’t Love Me Yet,” in 2007 — it felt like a vacation or a willful act of misdirection. In fact, though, Lethem’s reputation as a hometown booster rests on the strength of just two books, “Motherless Brooklyn” and “The Fortress of Solitude,” each of which applied a cartographer’s loving attention to the borough. But in four earlier novels and two story collections, Lethem has traipsed all over creation, from Wyoming to the San Francisco Bay Area to the distant Planet of the Archbuilders. Now, in his bravura eighth novel, “Chronic City,” he visits what may be his strangest destination yet: the Upper East Side of Manhattan.
Let an early scene stand in for the astonishing whole. The narrator — a former child star named Chase Insteadman, who lives off the residuals from an insipid 1980s sitcom — is getting to know his new friend Perkus Tooth at a Second Avenue burger joint. Perkus is a cultural critic with a recognizably New York sort of résumé: he achieved underground success with a series of broadside rants pasted around the city, then went mainstream with a column in Rolling Stone before fading back into dissolute obscurity. Yet he has never abandoned his wide-ranging obsessions, which echo Lethem’s own: film, literature, music, media. Now, in a booth at Jackson Hole, he holds forth to the affable, vacuous Chase in a stoned seminar that even in summary takes three pages to relate, jumping from Greil Marcus to Chet Baker to Marlon Brando to the insidious effects of The New Yorker’s choice of typeface. It’s a wonderfully slippery list of references, at once dense and daft, as if Susan Sontag had written alternate lyrics to the R.E.M. song “It’s the End of the World as We Know It.” Werner Herzog, Monte Hellman, Norman Mailer, Frederick Exley! Birthday party, cheesecake, jelly bean, boom!
“Can we have discussed so much the very first time?” Chase wonders. “The New Yorker, at least. Giuliani’s auctioning of 42nd Street to Disney. Mailer on NASA as a bureaucracy stifling dreams. J. Edgar Hoover in the Mafia’s thrall, hyping Reds, instilling self-patrolling fear in the American mind. In the midst of these variations the theme was always ingeniously and excitingly retrieved.”
If you don’t recognize that last sentence (I didn’t), Lethem helpfully confesses in his acknowledgments that he has lifted it whole from “Humboldt’s Gift.” It’s a nifty tribute to another novel about a fraught tutor-protégé relationship, and an unsurprising flourish from Lethem, who once composed an entire essay about artistic appropriation by using sentences pilfered from other sources. But don’t read too much into it. With its broad brush strokes and bright primary colors, “Chronic City” owes less to Bellow (a scrupulous realist, after all) than to antic postmodern fabulists like Pynchon and Rushdie and DeLillo — or, as Lethem also puts it in the acknowledgments, to “everywhere else forever and ever amen.”
Lethem’s Manhattan is an alternate-¬reality Manhattan, an exaggerated version where an escaped tiger is rumored to be roaming the Upper East Side and Times readers can opt for a “war-free” edition dominated by fluffy human-¬interest ¬stories. Instead of terrorist attacks, an enervating gray fog has descended on the financial district and remained there for years, hovering mysteriously. (Mysterious to the novel’s characters, anyway; investigators may want to subpoena DeLillo’s airborne toxic event.) Lethem has been at this long enough that the style has become recognizably his own: knowing and exuberant, with beautiful drunken sentences that somehow manage to walk a straight line.
Here’s Chase, newly recovered from the flu, describing his first post-fever dalliance with his ghostwriter girlfriend, Oona: “That night we started in the fluorescent glare of Perkus’s hallway, like teenagers escaping a party, hands invading outfits, knees interlaced, sagging to the wall until our breathing got too slow and regular and we contained ourselves, shoved out through that subset of Brandy’s smokers drunk enough not to realize they were freezing, then teetered together, hips eagerly jostling, to my apartment.”
And here he is again, arriving with Perkus at the site of a building collapse that may have been triggered by the tiger, “milling in that human amoeba of gawkers as it was brushed back from the scene by policemen and emergency medical workers, though at its outer edge the collective creature grew grotesquely huge, and throbbed, livid and possibly dangerous, faces lit from underneath by sparkling red-and-yellow flares that had been laid like sticks of dynamite at the feet of barricades.”
In Lethem’s earliest work the tricks and extravagances and gymnastic prose sometimes seemed arch or mannered — merely clever — but they have grown steadily more confident, and here they serve the higher purpose of flinging Manhattan onto the page in all its manic energy. When style and subject merge, tics recede into invisibility.
The turbocharged plot of “Chronic City” is too intricate and seamless, and also too odd, to summarize easily. It involves migraines and hiccups and a luxury residence for dogs, and Perkus’s quest for unattainable vaselike objects, called chaldrons, that hold an almost mystical appeal. Stripped to essentials, though, the story centers on the friendship between Chase and Perkus, and on their travels through Manhattan’s social strata: a party at the billionaire mayor’s mansion, a film project at a highbrow production company, all those hours at Jackson Hole.
Chase is in demand at dinner parties not only because of his days as a child actor but also because of a more recent claim to celebrity — his fiancée, the astronaut Janice Trumbull, is stranded on the International Space Station, from which she sends him long love letters that are excerpted in the war-free Times. This space opera is, to tell the truth, kind of a drag on the narrative, but it does create a useful love triangle: Chase needs to hide his affair with Oona lest he disappoint his adoring public. There are other characters too, representing variations on the theme of idealism and corruption, but never mind them. This is really a buddy novel, no less than “The Fortress of Solitude” was. Chase and Perkus are nominally adults, older than Dylan and Mingus in “Fortress,” but they’re just as adolescent. They eat messy burgers; they watch cult movies; they smoke potent weed and indulge in the kind of paranoid conspiratorial philosophizing that can be tedious in real life but thrilling in dorm rooms and fiction (where, after all, somebody else really is pulling the strings). And, improbably enough, we want it to last forever — or at least long enough for Chase and Perkus to save each other.
That won’t happen, of course. Chase is too ditzy and Perkus too damaged for their friendship to survive unscathed. But if they can’t be rescued, they can and do help each other; Chase, especially, starts to wake up and cast aside his blank torpor. (I do mean blank: in one of the book’s less subtle moments, a waitress misremembers his name as “Chase Unperson,” sending Perkus into a fit of giggles.) “Chronic City” is a dancing showgirl of a novel, yet beneath the gaudy makeup it’s also the girl next door: a traditional bildungsroman with a strong moral compass. Under Perkus’s tutelage, Chase moves from placid compliance toward engagement and self-¬determination; the actor learns to take action, not just direction.
“The Fortress of Solitude” was a great novel, but also a chaotic sprawl — it addressed gentrification and race relations and comic books and disco and the prison system and more, on and endlessly on. “Chronic City” is more contained, less greedy in its grasp, and it is even better. It limits itself to a single big theme — but then, it’s the biggest there is: the pursuit of truth. Lethem once wrote, in an essay about John Ford’s movie “The Searchers,” that an actor “can be placed under examination as icon of a set of neurotic symptoms . . . and yet still operate as a creature of free will and moral relevance, a character whose choices matter.” This is Perkus’s lesson for Chase. Even in an alternate reality — even in a fiction — passion and significance are everywhere if you know where to look.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/25/books ... les-t.html
Another World
By GREGORY COWLES
Published: October 22, 2009
By now, Jonathan Lethem is so identified with his native Brooklyn that when he chose Los Angeles as the setting for his last novel — the modest “You Don’t Love Me Yet,” in 2007 — it felt like a vacation or a willful act of misdirection. In fact, though, Lethem’s reputation as a hometown booster rests on the strength of just two books, “Motherless Brooklyn” and “The Fortress of Solitude,” each of which applied a cartographer’s loving attention to the borough. But in four earlier novels and two story collections, Lethem has traipsed all over creation, from Wyoming to the San Francisco Bay Area to the distant Planet of the Archbuilders. Now, in his bravura eighth novel, “Chronic City,” he visits what may be his strangest destination yet: the Upper East Side of Manhattan.
Let an early scene stand in for the astonishing whole. The narrator — a former child star named Chase Insteadman, who lives off the residuals from an insipid 1980s sitcom — is getting to know his new friend Perkus Tooth at a Second Avenue burger joint. Perkus is a cultural critic with a recognizably New York sort of résumé: he achieved underground success with a series of broadside rants pasted around the city, then went mainstream with a column in Rolling Stone before fading back into dissolute obscurity. Yet he has never abandoned his wide-ranging obsessions, which echo Lethem’s own: film, literature, music, media. Now, in a booth at Jackson Hole, he holds forth to the affable, vacuous Chase in a stoned seminar that even in summary takes three pages to relate, jumping from Greil Marcus to Chet Baker to Marlon Brando to the insidious effects of The New Yorker’s choice of typeface. It’s a wonderfully slippery list of references, at once dense and daft, as if Susan Sontag had written alternate lyrics to the R.E.M. song “It’s the End of the World as We Know It.” Werner Herzog, Monte Hellman, Norman Mailer, Frederick Exley! Birthday party, cheesecake, jelly bean, boom!
“Can we have discussed so much the very first time?” Chase wonders. “The New Yorker, at least. Giuliani’s auctioning of 42nd Street to Disney. Mailer on NASA as a bureaucracy stifling dreams. J. Edgar Hoover in the Mafia’s thrall, hyping Reds, instilling self-patrolling fear in the American mind. In the midst of these variations the theme was always ingeniously and excitingly retrieved.”
If you don’t recognize that last sentence (I didn’t), Lethem helpfully confesses in his acknowledgments that he has lifted it whole from “Humboldt’s Gift.” It’s a nifty tribute to another novel about a fraught tutor-protégé relationship, and an unsurprising flourish from Lethem, who once composed an entire essay about artistic appropriation by using sentences pilfered from other sources. But don’t read too much into it. With its broad brush strokes and bright primary colors, “Chronic City” owes less to Bellow (a scrupulous realist, after all) than to antic postmodern fabulists like Pynchon and Rushdie and DeLillo — or, as Lethem also puts it in the acknowledgments, to “everywhere else forever and ever amen.”
Lethem’s Manhattan is an alternate-¬reality Manhattan, an exaggerated version where an escaped tiger is rumored to be roaming the Upper East Side and Times readers can opt for a “war-free” edition dominated by fluffy human-¬interest ¬stories. Instead of terrorist attacks, an enervating gray fog has descended on the financial district and remained there for years, hovering mysteriously. (Mysterious to the novel’s characters, anyway; investigators may want to subpoena DeLillo’s airborne toxic event.) Lethem has been at this long enough that the style has become recognizably his own: knowing and exuberant, with beautiful drunken sentences that somehow manage to walk a straight line.
Here’s Chase, newly recovered from the flu, describing his first post-fever dalliance with his ghostwriter girlfriend, Oona: “That night we started in the fluorescent glare of Perkus’s hallway, like teenagers escaping a party, hands invading outfits, knees interlaced, sagging to the wall until our breathing got too slow and regular and we contained ourselves, shoved out through that subset of Brandy’s smokers drunk enough not to realize they were freezing, then teetered together, hips eagerly jostling, to my apartment.”
And here he is again, arriving with Perkus at the site of a building collapse that may have been triggered by the tiger, “milling in that human amoeba of gawkers as it was brushed back from the scene by policemen and emergency medical workers, though at its outer edge the collective creature grew grotesquely huge, and throbbed, livid and possibly dangerous, faces lit from underneath by sparkling red-and-yellow flares that had been laid like sticks of dynamite at the feet of barricades.”
In Lethem’s earliest work the tricks and extravagances and gymnastic prose sometimes seemed arch or mannered — merely clever — but they have grown steadily more confident, and here they serve the higher purpose of flinging Manhattan onto the page in all its manic energy. When style and subject merge, tics recede into invisibility.
The turbocharged plot of “Chronic City” is too intricate and seamless, and also too odd, to summarize easily. It involves migraines and hiccups and a luxury residence for dogs, and Perkus’s quest for unattainable vaselike objects, called chaldrons, that hold an almost mystical appeal. Stripped to essentials, though, the story centers on the friendship between Chase and Perkus, and on their travels through Manhattan’s social strata: a party at the billionaire mayor’s mansion, a film project at a highbrow production company, all those hours at Jackson Hole.
Chase is in demand at dinner parties not only because of his days as a child actor but also because of a more recent claim to celebrity — his fiancée, the astronaut Janice Trumbull, is stranded on the International Space Station, from which she sends him long love letters that are excerpted in the war-free Times. This space opera is, to tell the truth, kind of a drag on the narrative, but it does create a useful love triangle: Chase needs to hide his affair with Oona lest he disappoint his adoring public. There are other characters too, representing variations on the theme of idealism and corruption, but never mind them. This is really a buddy novel, no less than “The Fortress of Solitude” was. Chase and Perkus are nominally adults, older than Dylan and Mingus in “Fortress,” but they’re just as adolescent. They eat messy burgers; they watch cult movies; they smoke potent weed and indulge in the kind of paranoid conspiratorial philosophizing that can be tedious in real life but thrilling in dorm rooms and fiction (where, after all, somebody else really is pulling the strings). And, improbably enough, we want it to last forever — or at least long enough for Chase and Perkus to save each other.
That won’t happen, of course. Chase is too ditzy and Perkus too damaged for their friendship to survive unscathed. But if they can’t be rescued, they can and do help each other; Chase, especially, starts to wake up and cast aside his blank torpor. (I do mean blank: in one of the book’s less subtle moments, a waitress misremembers his name as “Chase Unperson,” sending Perkus into a fit of giggles.) “Chronic City” is a dancing showgirl of a novel, yet beneath the gaudy makeup it’s also the girl next door: a traditional bildungsroman with a strong moral compass. Under Perkus’s tutelage, Chase moves from placid compliance toward engagement and self-¬determination; the actor learns to take action, not just direction.
“The Fortress of Solitude” was a great novel, but also a chaotic sprawl — it addressed gentrification and race relations and comic books and disco and the prison system and more, on and endlessly on. “Chronic City” is more contained, less greedy in its grasp, and it is even better. It limits itself to a single big theme — but then, it’s the biggest there is: the pursuit of truth. Lethem once wrote, in an essay about John Ford’s movie “The Searchers,” that an actor “can be placed under examination as icon of a set of neurotic symptoms . . . and yet still operate as a creature of free will and moral relevance, a character whose choices matter.” This is Perkus’s lesson for Chase. Even in an alternate reality — even in a fiction — passion and significance are everywhere if you know where to look.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/25/books ... les-t.html
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*小周
- Posts: 2822
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A GATE AT THE STAIRS
书名： 《楼梯口的那扇门》
作者 : Lorrie Moore
出版社 : Knopf
Moore’s captivating novel, her first in more than a decade, is set in 2001 and narrated by a Wisconsin college student who hungers for worldly experience and finds it when she takes a job baby-sitting for a bohemian couple who are trying to adopt a mixed-race child. Meanwhile, she drifts into a love affair with an enigmatic classmate and feels the pressing claims of her own family, above all her affectless younger brother, who enlists in the military after 9/11.
Moore的一本引人入胜的小说，这是她10多年来的第一部作品。故事背景在2001年，由威斯康星的一名大学生之口娓娓讲出。故事讲的是农村孩子塔茜考上了大学，学校里的图书、电影、讲座和关于巴赫、巴尔干化、细菌战的讨论让她感到振奋。学期结束后，她非常想增加世界经验，并最终在一份兼职工作种找到了：一对波希米亚夫妇想收养一个混血的孩子，塔茜就做兼职保姆。同时她和一位谜一般神秘的同伴同学坠入爱河，受到了来自自己家庭的压力。她冷酷的弟弟在911后参了军。
http://www.amazon.com/Gate-at-Stairs-Lo ... 0375409289
书名： 《楼梯口的那扇门》
作者 : Lorrie Moore
出版社 : Knopf
Moore’s captivating novel, her first in more than a decade, is set in 2001 and narrated by a Wisconsin college student who hungers for worldly experience and finds it when she takes a job baby-sitting for a bohemian couple who are trying to adopt a mixed-race child. Meanwhile, she drifts into a love affair with an enigmatic classmate and feels the pressing claims of her own family, above all her affectless younger brother, who enlists in the military after 9/11.
Moore的一本引人入胜的小说，这是她10多年来的第一部作品。故事背景在2001年，由威斯康星的一名大学生之口娓娓讲出。故事讲的是农村孩子塔茜考上了大学，学校里的图书、电影、讲座和关于巴赫、巴尔干化、细菌战的讨论让她感到振奋。学期结束后，她非常想增加世界经验，并最终在一份兼职工作种找到了：一对波希米亚夫妇想收养一个混血的孩子，塔茜就做兼职保姆。同时她和一位谜一般神秘的同伴同学坠入爱河，受到了来自自己家庭的压力。她冷酷的弟弟在911后参了军。
http://www.amazon.com/Gate-at-Stairs-Lo ... 0375409289
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*小周
- Posts: 2822
- Joined: 24-07-09 Fri 11:44 am
- Location: 农林园
Book Review: A GATE AT THE STAIRS
First Time for Taxis, Lo Mein and Loss
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
Published: August 27, 2009
The title of Lorrie Moore’s heartbreaking new novel, “A Gate at the Stairs,” comes from a song that her heroine, a college student and sometime musician, writes:
Did you take off for Heaven
and leave me behind?
Darlin’, I’d join you
if you didn’t mind.
I’d climb up that staircase
past lions and bears,
but it’s locked
at the foot of the stairs.
Never mind the corny lyrics. And never mind the narrative stumbles this novel takes along the way to its searing conclusion: Ms. Moore has written her most powerful book yet, a book that gives us an indelible portrait of a young woman coming of age in the Midwest in the year after 9/11 and her initiation into the adult world of loss and grief. It is a novel that illustrates just how far Ms. Moore has come in the last two and half decades from her keenly observed but jokey 1985 collection of stories, “Self-Help,” which showcased her gifts as a writer but also underscored her — and her characters’ — emotional reticence, their reluctance to open themselves to deeply felt experiences.
Although the characters in “A Gate at the Stairs” also have an annoying tendency to play coy little word games and make lame little jokes — it’s a kind of nervous tic that enables them to detach themselves from threatening situations — Ms. Moore grapples in these pages with the precariousness of life and the irretrievable losses that accumulate over the years.
Like Alice McDermott’s “Charming Billy” and “At Weddings and Wakes,” this novel explores, with enormous emotional precision, the limitations and insufficiencies of love, and the loneliness that haunts even the most doting of families. While very funny at times, it is concerned at heart with the consequences of carelessness — of failing to pay attention to, or fight for, those one loves — and the random, out-of-the-blue events that can abruptly torpedo or transform a life.
The narrator of “Stairs” is one Tassie Keltjin, who is looking back on her 20th year. Having grown up on a small Midwestern farm, Tassie has never taken a taxi or an airplane, never eaten Chinese food, never seen a man wear jeans with a tie. Though her brother, Robert, who is desultorily thinking of joining the military, looks up to her as a focused, sure-footed college girl, she thinks of herself as lost, as lacking the ambitions of friends (“marriage, children, law school”) and lacking an internal gyroscope that might lend ballast to her plans.
Enrollment at a small, liberal-minded Midwestern college (where political correctness is de rigueur, and students can take courses in things like wine tasting, war-movie soundtracks and Pilates) has made Tassie feel as if she’d been led out of a cave into “a brilliant city life of books and films and witty friends.”
School has set her brain “on fire with Chaucer, Sylvia Plath, Simone de Beauvoir,” and life in the university town of Troy has exposed her to the sophisticated ideas and ridiculous chatter of academic elites, who talk about things like animal rights and “the holocaust of chickens,” and who describe education as an essentially “white” and “female” enterprise.
It’s Tassie’s part-time job as a nanny for a middle-aged couple, however, that will irrevocably alter her apprehension of the world. Sarah Brink runs a fancy restaurant called Le Petit Moulin, and her husband, Edward, is a cancer researcher. They have moved to Troy from the East and have just submitted adoption papers for a 2-year-old, mixed-race girl they have named Mary-Emma.
Tassie bonds with the little girl almost immediately, and when neighbors see them together, they often assume that she is the child’s unwed mother. Soon Tassie’s days have settled into a pleasant rhythm of classes, afternoon walks and play sessions with Mary-Emma, and evening dates with a handsome classmate named Reynaldo, who says he is from Brazil.
Neither Reynaldo nor Sarah and Edward turn out to be who they say they are: revelations that Ms. Moore does a clumsy job of orchestrating (and in the case of Reynaldo, an absurd job of suggesting who he really is). In the hands of most writers such fumbles would instantly derail their story lines, but Ms. Moore is so deft at showing the fallout these discoveries have on her heroine that the reader speeds easily over the narrative bumps.
The lessons for Tassie, it turns out, have less to do with trust and betrayal than with the unforeseen costs of emotional inattention and romantic infatuation. She learns how bereavement can render one “passive, translucent and demolished”; how the accumulation of bad luck can strafe a person “to the thinness of a nightgown”; how love — for a man, a child, a sibling — fails to offer insulation from the calamities of everyday life.
If Ms. Moore, who started out as a short-story writer, demonstrates some difficulty here in steering the big plot machinery of a novel, she is able to compensate for this by thoroughly immersing the reader in her characters’ daily existences.
With affection and a keen sense of the absurd, she gives us bright, digital snapshots of flyover country where nearly every small town has a local Dairy Queen, where customers wait in lines, even in winter, and where the “whimsy and fuss” of homeowners’ Christmas decorations — “penguins, palm trees, geese and candy canes all lighted up as if they were long-lost friends at a gathering” — provide a seasonal diversion for neighbors.
She gives us an indelible portrait of Tassie’s family farm, where her mother has set up mirrors behind the flowerbeds to multiply the foxgloves and nightshade and phlox, and where her father has her don a hawk costume and run in front of his thresher to scare wildlife from its hiding places. (“Nobody wanted sliced mice in their salads,” she wryly observes, “at least not this decade.”)
And most memorably, in this haunting novel Ms. Moore gives us stark, melancholy glimpses into her characters’ hearts, mapping their fears and disappointments, their hidden yearnings and their more evanescent efforts to hold on to their dreams in the face of unfurling misfortune.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/28/books/28book.html
First Time for Taxis, Lo Mein and Loss
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
Published: August 27, 2009
The title of Lorrie Moore’s heartbreaking new novel, “A Gate at the Stairs,” comes from a song that her heroine, a college student and sometime musician, writes:
Did you take off for Heaven
and leave me behind?
Darlin’, I’d join you
if you didn’t mind.
I’d climb up that staircase
past lions and bears,
but it’s locked
at the foot of the stairs.
Never mind the corny lyrics. And never mind the narrative stumbles this novel takes along the way to its searing conclusion: Ms. Moore has written her most powerful book yet, a book that gives us an indelible portrait of a young woman coming of age in the Midwest in the year after 9/11 and her initiation into the adult world of loss and grief. It is a novel that illustrates just how far Ms. Moore has come in the last two and half decades from her keenly observed but jokey 1985 collection of stories, “Self-Help,” which showcased her gifts as a writer but also underscored her — and her characters’ — emotional reticence, their reluctance to open themselves to deeply felt experiences.
Although the characters in “A Gate at the Stairs” also have an annoying tendency to play coy little word games and make lame little jokes — it’s a kind of nervous tic that enables them to detach themselves from threatening situations — Ms. Moore grapples in these pages with the precariousness of life and the irretrievable losses that accumulate over the years.
Like Alice McDermott’s “Charming Billy” and “At Weddings and Wakes,” this novel explores, with enormous emotional precision, the limitations and insufficiencies of love, and the loneliness that haunts even the most doting of families. While very funny at times, it is concerned at heart with the consequences of carelessness — of failing to pay attention to, or fight for, those one loves — and the random, out-of-the-blue events that can abruptly torpedo or transform a life.
The narrator of “Stairs” is one Tassie Keltjin, who is looking back on her 20th year. Having grown up on a small Midwestern farm, Tassie has never taken a taxi or an airplane, never eaten Chinese food, never seen a man wear jeans with a tie. Though her brother, Robert, who is desultorily thinking of joining the military, looks up to her as a focused, sure-footed college girl, she thinks of herself as lost, as lacking the ambitions of friends (“marriage, children, law school”) and lacking an internal gyroscope that might lend ballast to her plans.
Enrollment at a small, liberal-minded Midwestern college (where political correctness is de rigueur, and students can take courses in things like wine tasting, war-movie soundtracks and Pilates) has made Tassie feel as if she’d been led out of a cave into “a brilliant city life of books and films and witty friends.”
School has set her brain “on fire with Chaucer, Sylvia Plath, Simone de Beauvoir,” and life in the university town of Troy has exposed her to the sophisticated ideas and ridiculous chatter of academic elites, who talk about things like animal rights and “the holocaust of chickens,” and who describe education as an essentially “white” and “female” enterprise.
It’s Tassie’s part-time job as a nanny for a middle-aged couple, however, that will irrevocably alter her apprehension of the world. Sarah Brink runs a fancy restaurant called Le Petit Moulin, and her husband, Edward, is a cancer researcher. They have moved to Troy from the East and have just submitted adoption papers for a 2-year-old, mixed-race girl they have named Mary-Emma.
Tassie bonds with the little girl almost immediately, and when neighbors see them together, they often assume that she is the child’s unwed mother. Soon Tassie’s days have settled into a pleasant rhythm of classes, afternoon walks and play sessions with Mary-Emma, and evening dates with a handsome classmate named Reynaldo, who says he is from Brazil.
Neither Reynaldo nor Sarah and Edward turn out to be who they say they are: revelations that Ms. Moore does a clumsy job of orchestrating (and in the case of Reynaldo, an absurd job of suggesting who he really is). In the hands of most writers such fumbles would instantly derail their story lines, but Ms. Moore is so deft at showing the fallout these discoveries have on her heroine that the reader speeds easily over the narrative bumps.
The lessons for Tassie, it turns out, have less to do with trust and betrayal than with the unforeseen costs of emotional inattention and romantic infatuation. She learns how bereavement can render one “passive, translucent and demolished”; how the accumulation of bad luck can strafe a person “to the thinness of a nightgown”; how love — for a man, a child, a sibling — fails to offer insulation from the calamities of everyday life.
If Ms. Moore, who started out as a short-story writer, demonstrates some difficulty here in steering the big plot machinery of a novel, she is able to compensate for this by thoroughly immersing the reader in her characters’ daily existences.
With affection and a keen sense of the absurd, she gives us bright, digital snapshots of flyover country where nearly every small town has a local Dairy Queen, where customers wait in lines, even in winter, and where the “whimsy and fuss” of homeowners’ Christmas decorations — “penguins, palm trees, geese and candy canes all lighted up as if they were long-lost friends at a gathering” — provide a seasonal diversion for neighbors.
She gives us an indelible portrait of Tassie’s family farm, where her mother has set up mirrors behind the flowerbeds to multiply the foxgloves and nightshade and phlox, and where her father has her don a hawk costume and run in front of his thresher to scare wildlife from its hiding places. (“Nobody wanted sliced mice in their salads,” she wryly observes, “at least not this decade.”)
And most memorably, in this haunting novel Ms. Moore gives us stark, melancholy glimpses into her characters’ hearts, mapping their fears and disappointments, their hidden yearnings and their more evanescent efforts to hold on to their dreams in the face of unfurling misfortune.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/28/books/28book.html