Lydia Millet writes strange, provocative, disturbing novels that illuminate recesses of the human psyche most people would rather not have revealed. At the same time, her work is horrifically funny, profoundly satirical yet committed and compassionate. Such previous novels by Millet as “George Bush: Dark Prince of Love,” “My Happy Life” and “Oh Pure and Radiant Heart,” will remind readers of Melville’s full-dark mode of “Bartleby the Scrivener” and “Billy Budd”; of Kafka’s short stories like “A Country Doctor” and “A Hunger Artist”; and Nathanael West’s bitter, incisive little novels, “Miss Lonelyhearts” and “The Day of the Locust,” all works that deal in different ways with isolation, alienation and loneliness, with complicated desires and quenched passions, with the weary workings of humanity worn down to an essential, terrifying nub, the locus where choices are extremely limited and profoundly inevitable.

With “How the Dead Dream” (Counterpoint, $24), Millet delivers a novel that strips a character of all pretense, custom, habit and certitude, even of personality, to leave an entity that moves blindly forward in a world of blunt instinct. Even as a boy, the novel’s central figure, T., loves money, examining the faces of the Founding Fathers depicted on currency to understand their characters: he admires Andrew Jackson because it seems as if “no passing insult could compel him to emote.” This slightly curious locution mirrors T’s own sense of formality and detachment; he requires neither friends nor praise, only the satisfaction and protection that success and money bring. Though a genius at business, he lives modestly, alone, but in the grip of a vision:

Currency infused all things, from the small to the monolithic. And to be a statesman the first thing needed was not morals, public service, or the power of rhetoric; the first thing needed was money. Because finally there was always a single answer. As there was only one intelligence residing in a self, as trees grew upward toward the sun, as women lived outward and men walked in insulation to the end of their lives: when all was said and done, from place to place and country to country, forget the subtleties of right and wrong, the struggle toward affinity. In the lurch and flux, in all the variation and the same, it was only money that could set a person free.

Yet contingencies arise, cracking T’s world of purpose and discipline. First, driving from Los Angeles to Las Vegas, T. hits a coyote; getting out of his car, stunned, confused, he sits with her as she dies: “the fullness, the terrible sympathy.” T.’s father unaccountably leaves his mother; she moves in with her son and gradually becomes obsessed, then eccentric, then demented. Improbably, T. acquires a girlfriend — “it was her self-possession that got him” — but there is a flaw in her heart, an unpredictable nick of the sort that doctors only know is there after a person inexplicably dies. Now T. begins to realize: “Authority was not all.”

Read the rest of this entry »

A work of fiction half-populated by historic figures can be frustrating, fascinating, or both. E.L. Doctorow’s 1975 novel “Ragtime,” for instance, gave  Harry Houdini a fictional role, and must have driven a generation of readers to libraries — this was two decades before Google — to learn the sordid real-life tale of the architect Stanford White, his lover Evelyn Nesbit and her jealous husband Harry Thaw.
>It can be entertaining or it can be irritating to separate the things that really happened from the things the author invented.
Among the characters in Salman Rushdie’s new novel are Niccolò Machiavelli and his secretary Agostino Vespucci; as well as Akbar the Great, ruler of the Mughal Empire from 1556 to 1605, and his wife Jodhabai, whose existence and identity is debated.
This is the time “before the real and unreal were segregated forever,” and in “The Enchantress of Florence” (Random House, $26), Rushdie makes Jodhabai a creation of Akbar; the emperor  has many wives, but he turns to his imagination to find  the perfect woman. But Jodhabai is not the title enchantress.
The story of that woman, an extraordinary beauty and powerful sorceress, brings a handsome blond traveler to Sikri, Akbar’s stately pleasure dome in the Mughal empire of India. Read the rest of this entry »

Julie Hecht’s collection of stories, “Do The Windows Open?” made my list of the best books I read in 1997. Here’s what I wrote in my end-of-the-year wrap-up:

If ever a book displayed impeccable tone, it’s Julie Hecht’s winsome, wry and steely “Do the Windows Open?” (Random House, $21). The nameless narrator of this group of connected short stories embodies a curious combination of fragile resilience and crisp, endearing wit. The world, demanding choices and implying judgments, is too much with her. Set mainly in East Hampton and Nantucket and heavily imbued with what the rest of us think of as Manhattanesque angst, the stories are, however, neither arch nor tedious; Hecht invests her narrator with such perfect self-effacement, delicacy and quirky intelligence that we trust her, if not love her, almost at first sight. Whether she’s trying to photograph an egotistical doctor with his dog or launching a quest to replace glasses frames from an optometrist she suspects of being a Nazi sympathizer, our narrator treads, in her sensible but pretty shoes, the touchy territory of hope and bruised innocence.

Now Hecht has published a second (and eagerly awaited by her coterie, which includes — included — me) collection of stories titled “Happy Trails to You” (Simon & Schuster, $24) and I am sorry to report that the book, far from exhibiting the impeccable wry, winsome, steely tone of its predecessor, is — and I never thought that I would write these words in a million years — petulant, aggrieved and wearisome. Quel disappointment!

The stories in “Do the Windows Open?” were gently satiric, verbally adroit yet oblique, resilient yet fragile, a constant weaving of optimism, pessimism and cluelessness. The stories in “Happy Trails to You,” on the other hand, have exchanged subtlety for complaint and quixotic punctiliousness for anger. The world is still too much with our still nameless narrator, but now she takes the situations she encounters personally and crankily. America in the late 20th and early 21st centuries has become a different place from what it was when she was a child — quelle surprise! — and the blunt disgruntlement that fills these stories is depressing and narratively inept. Eleven years ago, the narrator’s nervous and neurotic nature seemed quirky and charming, almost a victorious function of her intelligence and privacy; now it seems querulous and ungracious and crippling.

She corrects people’s grammar in public. She explains things to people who don’t want things explained. She deplores “the horrible new century,” “this era of bad behavior” and “the new junk world of America,” and she remembers “an era of history and life that was so much more fun than the present one” and “the past decades of store service and just plain civility in America.” She points out “more evidence of the lack of education in the new, decadent, lazy generation” and “the new generation that knows only the music of the past couple of decades.” In two stories, she calls George Bush the “Alfred E. Neuman president.” In two stories she (being a vigilant vegetarian) mentions reading that a rabbi can ritually cleanse a stove upon which meat has been cooked.

Read the rest of this entry »

 ”The Age of American Unreason”By Susan Jacoby

2008, Pantheon, $26

Hardback, 356 pages

My first encounter with the term “intellectual history” came within the past three years.

I was searching through the online faculty directories at area universities, trying to determine the specialties of various history professors, so I could get their expert opinions on a wide array of current events and places — from Appalachian poverty to Zambian politics, as it were.

I looked at Rhodes College’s Web page for Prof. Lynn Zastoupil. Under “Areas of Expertise,” it listed “European Intellectual History.”

“Cool,” I thought. “That would be a fun area to work in. Imagine researching, writing and teaching that all day.”

I have an uncanny ability to find the least remunerative fields fascinating and fun. The newspaper business, for example.

A century ago, I’d have been jumping into the buggy whip and horse-drawn wagon business with a great deal of enthusiasm.

So, Susan Jacoby’s latest book provides an unwelcome, sobering two-by-four upside the head for anyone who might think that the life of the mind is something the American public is ready to embrace on a large scale — after seven years under a president who can’t properly pronounce the word “nuclear.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Well, let’s just dump out the entire wheelbarrow of book-reviewing cliches: “Wildly inventive.” “Rich with detail.” Verbally dazzling.” “Wise and insightful.” “Poignant and moving.” “You’ll laugh your guts out.”

These are the numb yet cogent terms that continually revolved in my mind — like airliners stacked in a holding pattern around a control tower — as I read “Dear American Airlines” (Houghton Mifflin, $22), the first novel by Jonathan Miles, cocktail columnist for The New York Times and book columnist for Men’s Journal, appropriate avocations for the author of a novel drenched in alcohol and bookishness. “Dear American Airlines” is, actually, rich and wild and dazzling and insightful and fall-on-the-floor funny and sad and tender, a first-person confession, mea culpa, erstwhile suicide note and epic letter of complaint to the airline in question for trapping its writer, Benjamin R. Ford, on the way to the wedding of the daughter he has not seen since she was a baby, at Chicago’s O’Hare airport. Once he starts writing, fueled by anger, frustration, loneliness and cigarettes, he can’t stop.

 Bennie Ford is a failed poet — “back when I was scramming delicious fellowships,” he says, “for the third-rate poems I was writing” — a failed lover and father, a failed person. “God, Bennie, that’s so like you,” says Stella, the long -absent mother of the long-neglected daughter. “Offering up the impossible. The stupid ideal.” Bennie views these impossibilities and ideals, likely gleaned from his suicidal, “artistic” southern belle mother, with a mixture of romanticism and cynicism, hates himself for not living up to any standard of responsibility and decency, his own or anyone else’s. He makes a resplendent addition to the legion of smart, sensitive, observant, egotistical, rueful, raging, self-destructive and well-intentioned drunkards — i.e., American men — with which American fiction is rife.

Read the rest of this entry »

   “Indiana Jones and the Sky Pirates”