0
9 JAMES LEE BURKE Marilyn Stasio
Book People
By John Sutherland
I RECALL Noel Annan, the provost of Uni-
versity College London, declaring in the
1970s that the English literature depart-
ment, historically the first such in Eng-
land, was the “very heart” of the school.
Any college president making such a claim
as Annan’s today could await the men in
white coats.
It’s with exhilaration, then, that one hails
Martin Puchner’s book, which asserts not
merely the importance of literature but its
all-importance.
“Literature,” the first page declares,
“since it emerged 4,000 years ago,” has
“shaped the lives of most humans on plan-
et Earth.” We are what we read.
“The Written World” makes this grand
assertion on the basis of a set of theses. Sto-
rytelling is as human as breathing. When
fabulation intersected with writing, stories
reviews a new Dave Robicheaux mystery
12 ‘TEXAS BLOOD’ Tracking ranchers and
outlaws, soldiers and smugglers
14 LANGSTON HUGHES Angela Flournoy
on his debut novel, ‘Not Without Laughter’
MATT AND STAN CHASE
THE WRITTEN WORLD
were empowered to propagate themselves
in society and around the world as civiliza-
The Power of Stories to Shape People, tion-forming “foundational texts.”
History, Civilization Puchner opens, by way of illustration,
By Martin Puchner with Alexander the Great. Under his pillow
Illustrated. 412 pp. Random House. $32. at night he had, alongside his dagger, a
copy of the “Iliad.” His literary GPS, we un-
THE SOCIAL LIFE OF BOOKS derstand. As important as the epic’s origi-
Reading Together in the nally oral story of great conquest was the
Eighteenth-Century Home script it was written in: That too would con-
By Abigail Williams
CONTINUED ON PAGE 20
Illustrated. 351 pp. Yale University Press. $40.
0

T HE WOMEN IN THE C AST LE

The widows of three men killed

LLER
IM E S B E ST SE for attempting to assassinate
NEW YORK T
“A joy to read,
this is a beautiful
important book.”
and
Adolf Hitler form a makeshift
THE —Cynthia D’Aprix
New York Times
Sweeney,
bestselling
family in the wake of World War II . . .
t
author of The Nes

“Moving . . . a plot that surprises

W O M E N and devastates.”

“A masterful epic.”
IN THE
“If you love historical fiction,
this is your must-read book:

C A S T L E It’s captivating, fascinating, and incredibly

faithful to the events as they happened.”

EL
A NOV

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JESSI P. S.
IN SI G
H TS ,
IE W S
IN TE RV ..
....
& M O RE

Visit TheWomenInTheCastle.com for book event listings,

to read an excerpt, and more exclusive content.

2 SUNDAY , JA N UA RY 7 , 2018
0

Book Review JANUARY 7, 2018

The unforgettable thriller
from the New York Times
bestselling author of
All the Missing Girls
21 SEDUCED BY MRS.
Fiction ROBINSON
How ‘The Graduate’
9 Crime
Became the Touchstone of
By Marilyn Stasio
a Generation
By Beverly Gray
11 THE KING IS ALWAYS Reviewed by
ABOVE THE PEOPLE Lisa Schwarzbaum
Stories
By Daniel Alarcón
Reviewed by Laila Lalami
10 PLAYING WITH FIRE
16 THREE FLOORS UP The 1968 Election and the Children’s Books
By Eshkol Nevo Transformation of
Reviewed by American Politics
Ayelet Gundar-Goshen By Lawrence O’Donnell
Reviewed by Jeff Shesol
16 THE FLOATING WORLD
By C. Morgan Babst 12 TEXAS BLOOD NOW IN
Reviewed by Seven Generations Among PAPERBACK
Margaret Wilkerson the Outlaws,
Sexton Ranchers, Indians,
Missionaries, Soldiers,
and Smugglers of the
Borderlands
By Roger D. Hodge 22 Essay
Reviewed by For the Love of Malt Shop
Stephen Harrigan Novels
By Joanne Kaufman
13 ENEMIES AND NEIGHBORS
Arabs and Jews in
Palestine and Israel,
1917-2017
Features Everyone in this town has
17 SOLAR BONES By Ian Black
Reviewed by
8 By the Book
Daniel Mendelsohn
something to hide.
By Mike McCormack
Reviewed by Martin Riker Peter Beinart
“Fans of Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train
14 Essay
26 The Shortlist 15 GHOST EMPIRE The Common Element will blow through this new thriller.”
European Fiction A Journey to the By Angela Flournoy —PUREWOW
Reviewed by Legendary Constantinople
Lisa Russ Spaar By Richard Fidler 18 Essay “Miranda’s eerie suspense thriller
Reading North Korea
ISTANBUL smartly examines the slippery theme
By Nicholas Kristof
A Tale of Three Cities of personal identity.”
Nonfiction By Bettany Hughes
Reviewed by 27 Sketchbook —THE NEW YORK TIMES BO OK REVIEW
1 THE WRITTEN WORLD Lawrence Osborne How to Become
The Power of Stories to a Literary Recluse “Relentlessly paced and deftly plotted.”
Shape People, History, By Grant Snider
19 ANESTHESIA —PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Civilization The Gift of Oblivion and
By Martin Puchner the Mystery of

THE SOCIAL LIFE OF

Consciousness Etc.
By Kate Cole-Adams
BOOKS
4 New & Noteworthy
Reading Together in the
Eighteenth-Century Home
COUNTING BACKWARDS
A Doctor’s Notes on 6 Letters Also in Paperback
By Abigail Williams Anesthesia 23 Best-Seller Lists
Reviewed by By Henry Jay Przybylo
John Sutherland 23 Editors’ Choice
Reviewed by Henry Marsh
24 Inside the List
24 Paperback Row
ALSO AVAILABLE IN EBO OK AND AUDIOBO OK

SimonandSchuster.com
TO SUBSCRIBE to the Book Review by mail, visit nytimes.com/getbookreview or call 1-800-631-2580

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW 3

0

New

“ By unearthing these
fascinating photographs
and sharing the
stories behind them,
the contributors to this
extraordinary project
have created a treasure.
ARIAN WRIGHT EDELMAN
ident, Children’s Defense Fund
UNPUBLISHED BLACK HISTORY FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES ARCHIVES.
Hundreds of stunning images from black history have long been
buried in The New York Times archives. Only a few of them were
published by The Times — until the immensely popular feature
Unpublished, which inspired this extended volume.
THE MAN WHO MADE THE MOVIES By Vanda
Krefft. (Harper, $40.) Krefft has
written the first major biography of
William Fox, the movie mogul whose
life story is the archetypical rags-to-
riches tale — a boy who worked in a
sweatshop on the Lower East Side
eventually creates an entertainment
empire. PHONE By Will Self. (Grove
” Press, $27.) The final novel in Self’s
massive Umbrella Trilogy exploring technology and psycho-
pathology, this book is set in London and Iraq and tells the story
of two men, a psychiatrist losing his own mind and a mysterious
MI-6 agent. MY TWENTIETH CENTURY EVENING AND OTHER SMALL BREAK-
THROUGHS: THE NOBEL LECTURE By Kazuo Ishiguro. (Knopf, $16.95.)
This is the lecture that the most recent Nobel laureate gave in
Sweden in early December, looking at his own evolution as a
writer and his thoughts on what a new generation of authors
must do to keep literature relevant to our lives. IN DAYS TO COME By
Avraham Burg. (Nation Books, $28.) The former speaker of
Israel’s Knesset gives his own take on his country’s history and
the quagmire it now finds itself in as
Zionism and Jewish identity evolve
to meet the new realities of the 21st
century. TELL ME MORE By Kelly Corri-
gan. (Random House, $26.) Corri-
gan unpacks 12 essential phrases,
from “I don’t know” to “I love you,”
that, as she puts it, “turn the wheel
of life.”

“The last time

“Touching.… Comprising images taken for the newspaper but which
never appeared … until the passage of time polished them into
gleaming, marvelous artifacts for our retrospective delectation.”
—TOBI HASLETT, The New York Times Book Review
IN HARDCOVER AND E-BOOK
I read PERSON-
& Noteworthy AL HISTORY by
Katharine
Graham was
in 2015, after almost nine years of working for The Washington
Post, her newspaper. What struck me most then, though, was
her description of her young adulthood in the nation’s capital,
and the ‘legions of young men in Washington who grouped to-
gether to live in houses.’ Katharine Meyer and Philip L. Graham
met at a group-house party in D.C.! I had suffered through so
many myself, and mostly what I got were in-person recitations of
funny things people had said on Twitter. I’m reading her book for
a third time now, after being predictably charmed by the new
movie ‘The Post.’ It is remarkable to watch Meryl Streep, as
Graham, decide to publish the Pentagon Pa-
pers, then read that decision rendered in Gra-
ham’s own words. By the time you reach that
point in the book, she has talked candidly about
pregnancy loss, personal friendships with
several presidents, her husband’s suicide —
and the way she made history in a job she was
never really expected to have. Maybe that
would have been too long a movie, but it’s
worth treating yourself to the source material.”
— RACHEL DRY, EDITOR OF SUNDAY REVIEW,
ON WHAT SHE’S READING.

4 S UNDAY, JA N UARY 7, 2 018

0

T H E RU N AWAY
New York Times bestseller!

NAMED A BEST BOOK

O F T H E Y E A R BY:
Washington Post, Enter tainment
Weekly, People, NPR, Esquire,
The Guardian, Southern
Living, GQ, Paste, Huf fington
Post, Bustle , The Daily Beast,
BuzzFeed , Kirkus, St. Louis
Post- Dispatch, Book of the Month
Club, Goodreads, Barnes &
Noble, iBooks, Audible,
Librar yReads, Amazon
————

“A n U T T E R LY E N G R O S S I N G ,
often heartbreaking, deeply
e m p a t h e t i c ex p e r i e n c e .”
—THE NE W YORK TIMES
BOOK REVIEW

————

“ I f yo u ’r e s t r u g g l i n g w i t h t h e p r es e n t
m o m e n t a n d h ow we g o t h e r e,
T H I S N OV E L W I L L D O W H AT
ANY GOOD PIECE OF FICTION
D O E S : I L L U M I N AT E .”
— N P R ’ S B E S T B O O K S O F 2 017
CELESTENG.COM

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW 5

0
LETTERS
Julie Manet
TO THE EDITOR:
As the translator and editor of
the recent publication “Growing
Up With the Impressionists: The
Diary of Julie Manet,” I am be-
mused, to say the least, by your
review by Nancy Kline (Dec. 10),
which was published online
under the headline “Great Art,
Repugnant Politics.” Julie’s diary,
which she wrote between the
ages of 14 and 20, is a seminal
text on the period. My new trans-
lation, with an introduction and
over 400 footnotes, gives a per-
sonal view of the last years of the
19th century through the eyes of
Berthe Morisot’s daughter.
The Dreyfus Affair material is
essential for many reasons, the
least being to gauge how politi-
cally ambiguous Julie Manet’s
circle was at that time. We also
see how impressionable young
people could be (as they still
are!) regarding their parents’ or
mentors’ views and we are able
to observe how the affair seeped
into the fabric of everyday life
during these troubled years.
JANE ROBERTS
PARIS
OUR BACK PAGES
This week’s cover considers the historical influence of books and literature.
But with so many books, there’s never enough time. In 1984, the Book Re-
view asked a handful of writers, including Jean Strouse and Eudora Welty,
about some of the “great books” they never finished.
Jean Strouse, author of “Alice
James: A Biography.” The book
I’ve often hauled along to
beaches and mountains and
have never managed to make
much headway in is James
Joyce’s “Finnegans Wake.” I
can’t even say something clever
about it now because I haven’t
ever got past page 20. I do re-
member the first time I heard its
name. I was 15. My family lived
in West Los Angeles, and I spent
a lot of time that year browsing
in local bookstores with a friend
who seemed very sophisticated.
In those bookstores I was drawn
as if by pheromone to New Di-
rections paperbacks — they had
about them irresistible inti-
6 SU NDAY, JAN UA RY 7 , 2 018
A Revealing Photograph?
TO THE EDITOR:
Jody Williams’s review of “Annie
Leibovitz: Portraits 2005-2016”
(Dec. 3) neglected to mention a
troubling portrait. This photo-
graph was described in The New
York Times in 2006: “There’s
Donald Trump, seen as the proud
possessor of a fancy car, a pri-
vate jet and a beautiful young
wife also heavy with child.” He
sits in a $600,000 car while his
pregnant wife descends the
stairs in spike heels and a gold
bikini. Does this photo summa-
rize his current political battles?
Is his tax plan just a way to
secure the right of every rich
man to freedom from any taxes
that might impair his ability to
live like the Donald, periodically
trading in the old car, jet and wife
for a newer model?
JANET BUSH HANDY
BEL AIR, MD.
Greeks and Romans
TO THE EDITOR:
Reviewing Emily Wilson’s new
translation of Homer’s “The
Odyssey” (Dec. 10), Gregory
mations of New York coffee-
houses, French cigarettes, bare
mattresses on cold floors and
major depression. One day my
learned friend pulled a volume
called “Finnegans Wake” off the
shelf and asked if I’d read it. I
tried to look knowing as I shook
my head and temporized — “Not
yet” — wondering why he of all
people would be interested in a
fat book about sailing.
Eudora Welty, author of “One
Writer’s Beginnings.” It doesn’t
enter my mind not to finish
reading a book I’ve once started,
whether it’s a classic or any
other kind. I persist and might
do so out of habit alone, but the
act of reading is itself vital to me
Hays appreciates Wilson’s gloss
that the slave women slain by
Telemachus were only doing “the
things the suitors made them do
with them.” Actually, not. Of the
50 such women, only 12 shame-
lessly snapped their fingers at
Penelope and “slept with the
suitors.” It is they who were
singled out for execution, while
the others were exonerated.
WADE RICHARDSON
LADYSMITH, BRITISH COLUMBIA
!
TO THE EDITOR:
Thank you Gregory Hays for
your review of Emily Wilson’s
translation of “The Odyssey” and
thank you Denis Feeney for your
review of David Ferry’s transla-
tion of “The Aeneid” (Dec. 10).
With both books, we have trans-
lators critiquing translators,
which is a big help for old salts
deciding if they want to sign
ship’s papers or for landlubbers
who wonder if they are seawor-
thy. When it comes to the clas-
sics, though, no one needs per-
mission to come aboard. I plan
on signing up for both voyages.
NEAL WHITMAN
PACIFIC GROVE, CALIF.
and carries me along — it sparks
its own hope and curiosity. Cer-
tainly disappointment comes
along in the course of reading
many a book, but this isn’t fatal
— if I may limit this to the read-
ing of fiction. And then I should
add that contemporary fiction
keeps its hold on me till the end
because of my sympathy as a
writer for another writer’s wel-
fare. I once literally threw away
a new novel I’d brought along to
read on a voyage to Europe, but
not without finishing it first. Had
I chucked that novel into the
Atlantic without having read the
whole of it through, I could have
thought, “There but for the grace
of God go I.”
0

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THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW 7

0
By the Book
Give them The Times
of their life. The Ultimate
Birthday Book is the perfect
heirloom gift to be passed
down through generations.
This custom collection of
New York Times front pages
celebrates a loved one’s life
at the turn of every page.
Daniel Mendelsohn
The author, most recently, of ‘An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an
Epic’ doesn’t want anyone to write his life story: ‘I’m a memoirist. I
think it’s fair to say the job is taken.’
What books are on your nightstand?
There’s a bunch, because I’ve always got
books that I’m writing about in addition
to books I’m reading for pleasure. For
pleasure, I’m reading “The Journals of
Denton Welch,” the strangely wonderful
English novelist and artist who died
tragically young in the 1940s. About 10
years ago I read his three autobiographi-
cal novels, which are just not like any-
thing else: There’s a gossamer delicacy
of feeling that teeters on the edge on
feyness, but it’s never precious, because
there’s also a steeliness in the writing, a
detachment in his willingness to confront
real emotional strangeness. I only last
month discovered the journals which,
apart from very moving material about
his life, offers tons of delicious tidbits,
from entire scenes (a hilarious lunch with
Edith Sitwell, who was his champion) to
small moments when the writing itself
stops you in your tracks. At one point he
compares the sound of a harpsichord “to
a large and very beautiful cat unsheath-
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ing its claws, pawing the air, mouthing,
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8 SU NDAY, JAN UA RY 7 , 2 018
For work, I’ve got a bunch of books
about Virgil’s “The Aeneid,” a new trans-
lation of which I’m writing about, and
also the novels and stories of the contem-
porary German writer Jenny Erpenbeck,
which I’m reading in preparation for a
piece about her most recent novel, about
a retired Berlin classics professor who
becomes involved with African refugees.
I’ve loved her previous work, but obvi-
ously this one is going to be of special
interest to me.
Which classic novel did you recently read
for the first time?
Since I’m a nonfiction writer, and always
trying to remind people that nonfiction is
literature, too, I’ll talk about a classic
work of nonfiction, ok? I’d read large
chunks of Edward Gibbon’s “The Decline
and Fall of the Roman Empire” in gradu-
ate school, inevitably, but a few years ago
a friend of mine told me he’d just finished
listening to the whole thing on audiobook,
and I thought, Yup, now’s the time to
tackle the whole thing. So I started listen-
ing to the marvelous recording by
Bernard Mayes and I’m about to finish it
after three years of shortish sessions on
the elliptical machine. Apart from the
history that Gibbon narrates — one that
should be of interest to Americans right
now, I’d say — I’m just knocked over by
the prose: those fabulous, architectural,
Augustan sentences are dazzling. Among
other things, it’s a lesson in how immacu-
late syntax is the best delivery vehicle for
devastating irony.
Which genres are you drawn to and
which do you avoid?
I was long immune to the allure of fan-
tasy literature. Even when I was a kid, I
couldn’t get into “The Lord of the Rings”
and all the rest of it. I’m not sure why,
really. It may be that I got hooked on
history and biography when I was still
very young — ancient Egypt, Greek and
Roman history, Plantagenet history,
Elizabeth I, Mary Queen of Scots — and I
just couldn’t imagine why anyone would
need to invent a whole world or civiliza-
tion when the ones we already have are
so fascinating. But I may be evolving: I
hugely enjoyed reading, and very much
admired, all of the “Game of Thrones”
books, which I tackled a few years ago for
a piece I wrote about the TV series.
Unsurprisingly, a genre I’ve always
loved is historical fiction. There are a lot
of terrible examples out there, but when
it works — when a deep sense of history
(not just the props, but the spirit) is
married to an authentic novelistic sensi-
bility, as they are in the novels of Renault
or Patrick O’Brian or Hilary Mantel, to
name a few of the best — it’s tremen-
dously satisfying. I find it amusing that
this genre is still denigrated by some
critics as being a lesser form of the novel.
I always want to remind them that “War
and Peace” and “Les Misérables” are
historical fiction.
What book might people be surprised to
find on your shelves?
I’ve got piles of books about home décor
and haute couture all around my house.
I’m currently slavering over the catalog
for the Dior exhibition at the Louvre.
What’s the best book you’ve ever re-
ceived as a gift?
“A Titanic Hero,” the biography of Thom-
as Andrews, the shipbuilder who de-
signed the Titanic (and went down with
it). I was a Titanic groupie when I was a
kid — I belonged to the Titanic Enthusi-
asts of America — and one day when I
was around 12 an old family friend who
was visiting presented it to me. It’s
hardly a great work of biography but it’s
always been the first book I pack up
whenever I’ve moved. 0
An expanded version of this interview is
available at nytimes.com/books.
ILLUSTRATION BY JILLIAN TAMAKI
0
CRIME / MARILYN STASIO
Murder in the Bayou
JAMES LEE BURKE is what fellow
writers call a wordsmith. He can
make your eyes water with a
lyrical description of tropical rain
falling on a Louisiana bayou: “I
love the mist hanging in the
trees,” he tells us in ROBICHEAUX
(Simon & Schuster, $27.99), “a hint
of wraiths that would not let
heavy stones weigh them down in
their graves, the raindrops click-
ing on the lily pads, the fish rising
as though in celebration.” But in
the next breath, he’ll offer a com-
prehensive account of an excruci-
ating death by torture: “The guy
who did him took his time.” And
to satisfy our appetite for South-
ern eccentricity, he’ll introduce us
to great characters like Baby
Cakes Babineau and Pookie the
Possum Domingue.
Dave Robicheaux, the narrator
of this robust regional series, is an
Iberia Parish sheriff’s detective
with the melancholy air of a man
who occasionally sees the hollow-
eyed ghosts of the Confederate
dead. Haunted by his own violent
past, Robicheaux keeps trying to
redeem himself through good
works; but when he falls off the
wagon, as he does here in a spec-
tacular way, he thinks he might be
capable of committing murder.
But he’s not in the same class as a
contract killer named Chester
Wimple (“Sometimes people call
me Smiley”).
Like most of Burke’s plots, this
one has roots in Louisiana history,
a gumbo of “misogamy and rac-
ism and homophobia,” not to
mention “demagoguery” and
“self-congratulatory ignorance.”
Mob figures like Fat Tony Nemo
look tough, but they have nothing
on up-and-coming politicians like
Jimmy Nightingale, eager to
follow in the footsteps of his flam-
boyantly crooked predecessors.
Burke has no inclination to ro-
manticize gangsters, no matter
how well groomed: “They were
brutal, stupid to the core, and had
the visceral instincts of medieval
peasants armed with pitchforks.”
Rather, he pays homage to the
fallen dead like Lt. Robert S.
MARILYN STASIO has covered crime
fiction for the Book Review since
1988. Her column appears twice a
month.
Broussard, a Civil War hero
whose sword gets into the hands
of a crime boss. In rescuing this
artifact, Robicheaux bares his
bleeding heart for “La Louisiane,
the love of my life, the home of
Jolie Blon and Evangeline and the
Great Whore of Babylon, the
place for which I would die.”
PABLO AMARGO
! is followed by an angel food cake,
WITTY, STYLISH AND a bit of a
rogue — that’s what people said
about Richard Nash, known as
Beau, the notorious dandy who
transformed the English city of
Bath into “the 18th-century equiv-
alent of Vegas.” The same might
be said of Peter Lovesey, whose
elegant mysteries pay tribute to
the past glories of this beautiful
city. In BEAU DEATH (Soho Crime,
$27.95), a demolition crew un-
earths the remains of a bewigged
gentleman in period dress, setting
off gossip that Nash has been
found — murdered. Detective
Superintendent Peter Diamond
accepts this theory until he dis-
covers the desiccated corpse was
wearing modern-day underwear.
There’s always a whiff of
Restoration comedy about
Lovesey’s cunning plots, which
make a point of featuring shrewd
women like the drolly named
Georgina Dallymore, whose am-
ple comedic gifts make her a
figure fit for a Congreve comedy
and the perfect companion for
Diamond.
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The New York Times Book Review.
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corrupt, from the mayor, Big Bill
Thompson, to the 25,000 soda
shop owners who ran speakeasies
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colorful characters were mobsters
like Al Capone and his rival, Bugs
Moran, so-called because he was
certifiably “buggy, crazy, homicid-
ally violent and not very clever.”
As he did in his first novel, “The
Axeman,” which was set in New
Orleans, Celestin perfectly cap-
tures the jazzy street rhythms of
this proudly pugnacious city and
its peculiar characters. His autho-
rial gaze encompasses everything
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ster’s funeral (with “a casket
costing more than most people’s
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THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW 9
0

A Gathering of Heavyweights
Lawrence O’Donnell retells the story of a pivotal election and sees parallels with today.

By JEFF SHESOL

THE ELECTION OF 1968 decided one thing:

that Richard M. Nixon and not Vice Presi-
dent Hubert H. Humphrey would become
president. It left nearly everything else un-
resolved. The course of the war in Viet-
nam, where more than half a million Amer-

YOU’LL ican servicemen were stationed and more

than 30,000 had been killed; the fate of the
poor in an affluent, but widely unequal, so-
NEVER GUESS ciety; the ideological direction of both ma-
jor political parties; the relationship be-
WHO’S tween the generations and between black
and white Americans — all these questions
COMING UP PLAYING WITH FIRE

NEXT. The 1968 Election and the Transformation

of American Politics
By Lawrence O’Donnell
Illustrated. 484 pp. Penguin Press. $28. Richard Nixon campaigns in Philadelphia in September 1968.

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remained open and raw. An election that
involved, by the cultural critic John Leon-
ard’s accounting, an “immense expendi-
ture . . . of money, bombast, blood and cre-
tinism” ended, in effect, in a draw: a nar-
row victory by the candidate who had dis-
closed the least about his plans and beliefs,
and a nation stuck somewhere along (or
maybe off) the path from the old politics to
the new. How that all happened is not an
unfamiliar story, but it remains, nearly 50
years later, a gripping one.
Lawrence O’Donnell, the host of a poli-
tical talk show on MSNBC, tells that story
with zeal in “Playing With Fire.” O’Donnell
was a high school student in 1968, and well
remembers the feeling among many
young men of draft age that life was “a
short-term game.” The presidential elec-
tion, the young O’Donnell believed, “could
end all that.” Viewers of O’Donnell’s show
will recognize, in “Playing With Fire,” his
faith in the redemptive power of public
service — for all its disappointments and
foolishness. As a former Senate staffer,
O’Donnell takes a practitioner’s delight in
the machinations of politics: He finds, and
manages to convey, excitement in things
like the movement of delegates from one
camp to another. As a former producer and
writer of the television drama “The West
Wing,” he also knows how to pace a story,
and could not have dreamed up a more
compelling cast of characters. On the Dem-
ocratic side, in addition to Humphrey,
there were Senators Robert F. Kennedy
and Eugene McCarthy, as well as Presi-
dent Lyndon B. Johnson, who left the race
in March but then stalked the sidelines,
hoping to be called back in. For the Repub-
licans, a trio of governors — Ronald Rea-
gan, Nelson A. Rockefeller and George
Romney — threatened Nixon’s ascension.
And George Wallace, the segregationist
JEFF SHESOLis the author of “Mutual Con-
tempt: Lyndon Johnson, Robert Kennedy, and
the Feud That Defined a Decade.”
governor of Alabama, ran as an independ-
ent and a spoiler. Never in the past century
have so many heavyweights contended, all
at once, for the White House.
O’Donnell moves briskly and ably
through these candidacies, their collisions
and a dark bacchanal of events that still de-
fies belief: McCarthy’s messianic yet re-
luctant crusade to unseat Johnson; Ken-
nedy’s entry into the race; Johnson’s sud-
den withdrawal, and Kennedy’s assassina-
tion the night he won the California
primary; Wallace’s provocation of “the
common folks” against blacks, elites and
“little pinkos”; the frenzy of police batons
and tear gas at the Democratic convention
in Chicago; and Nixon’s secret flirtation
with treason, his effort to “monkey
wrench” the president’s attempts to start
peace talks, lest a breakthrough in Viet-
nam benefit Humphrey’s campaign. But
“Playing With Fire” is a too-familiar re-
telling. Over the past decade or two, vast
collections of the participants’ papers have
been opened, yet O’Donnell has done virtu-
ally no original research. Instead he relies
heavily on “An American Melodrama,” a
masterpiece of eyewitness history written
in 1969 by three British reporters, and a
handful of other accounts.
O’Donnell’s own observations fre-
quently recall the tossed-off hyperboles of
cable news. “In New Hampshire in 1968,”
he writes, “the expectations game was
born in American politics” — as if McCar-
thy, who made a surprisingly strong show-
ing in that state’s primary, was the first
presidential candidate to gain by outper-
forming predictions. Similarly, in suggest-
ing that the “crowd intensity” at Wallace
rallies exceeded that of any other cam-
paign in American history, O’Donnell over-
looks, among other examples, the frenzy
that followed William Jennings Bryan
across the country in 1896. O’Donnell also
asserts that in the 1950s, when Johnson
was Senate majority leader, “legislating
was child’s play compared to what it be-
came in the 1970s,” an idea belied, in great
detail, by Robert Caro’s books on Johnson.
It is hard, too, to countenance O’Donnell’s
broad claim that in the years after World
War II, people never doubted that the pres-
ident of the United States was the “leader
of the free world.”
This is the voice of the pundit, and in a
work of history it sounds jarring — all the
more so when it’s discussing Donald Trump,
as O’Donnell does repeatedly. In the opening
chapter, he quips that Trump “should leave a
thank-you note at Nelson Rockefeller’s grave
. . . for paving the way in Republican presi-
dential politics for the rich men of Fifth Ave-
nue with complicated marital histories.”
O’Donnell goes on to say that “Reagan was
the Donald Trump of the 1960s”; that Wallace
voters in 1968 “sounded like Trump voters in
2016”; and that Johnson’s crudeness “would
not be outdone until Donald Trump moved
into the White House.” Some of these paral-
lels are legitimate enough, but they interrupt
the narrative and give it, at times, a partisan
casting.
O’Donnell’s program on MSNBC is called
“The Last Word,” and each night he closes
the show with one. His last word in “Playing
With Fire” is surprising: “The peace move-
ment won.” He attributes that victory mainly
to McCarthy, because “no one did more to
stop the killing in Vietnam.” O’Donnell ac-
knowledges that there was a lot more killing
ahead — six years’ worth, after Nixon’s elec-
tion, at a cost of more than 20,000 American
lives, and an even greater number of Viet-
namese. But he is certain that “if Gene Mc-
Carthy had not run for president in 1968, the
draft would not have ended in 1973” and the
United States would not have withdrawn its
troops by 1975. That is a strangely specula-
tive conclusion. It could just as easily be ar-
gued that McCarthy, for all the nobility of his
cause, actually prolonged the war by wid-
ening the divisions among Democrats and
helping to elect Nixon — who, upon taking of-
fice, began to escalate what he called his
“war for peace.” In 1968, America lost. 0

10 SU N DAY , JA N UA RY 7 , 2 018 PHOTOGRAPH FROM CSU ARCHIVES/EVERETT COLLECTION

0
Displaced Persons
In these stories, young men in new situations find out who they really are.
By LAILA LALAMI
IN 1978, a year before the Iranian revolution
overthrew the shah and an Islamic repub-
lic was declared, the artist Ardeshir Mo-
hassess drew a cartoon showing a king in a
turban and sash hanging from the gallows,
as a crowd beneath him presents itself to
the viewer’s eye. “The king is always
above the people,” the caption read. Even
in death, the artist seemed to say, the
rulers are different from you and me — we
may survive them, but all of us remain an
indistinguishable mass while their author-
ity guarantees they will be remembered,
and later recorded in our history books.
This cartoon so resonated with Daniel
Alarcón that he used its caption as a title
THE KING IS ALWAYS ABOVE THE PEOPLE
Stories
By Daniel Alarcón
240 pp. Riverhead Books. $27.
for a short story, which also gives its name
to his new collection, “The King Is Always
Above the People.” Nearly all the stories in
this slim, affecting book are set in “the cap-
ital” or the “old city” of an unnamed coun-
try, at a time when power has shifted from
dictatorship to fragile democracy. The pro-
tagonists are young men, suddenly forced
to face a separation or a divorce, an abu-
sive father or the unpleasant task of set-
tling an estate left behind by a distant un-
cle. But whatever happens to them, it will
involve a displacement. Only through the
experience of displacement, whether vol-
untary or involuntary, do they come to
truly know their intimate selves.
In “The Provincials,” Nelson travels
with his father, Manuel, to the family’s an-
cestral village to help settle a great-uncle’s
estate. Everywhere they go, Nelson’s fa-
ther is greeted like a prodigal son. What a
smart student he was! How courageous
his politics! How bold his decision to move
to the capital! At the end of the visit,
Manuel and Nelson go into a small restau-
rant, where they are greeted with the same
generic enthusiasm. But as the evening
progresses and drinks are consumed,
tongues become untied. Why didn’t
Manuel ever return to help others in his vil-
lage? Did he forget that his teachers col-
lected money for his studies in the capital?
Has he even bothered to teach Nelson
about this place? “We feel abandoned,”
Manuel’s former teacher says. “Disre-
spected. You left us. Now your son is talk-
ing down to us.”
These reactions will feel familiar to im-
migrants, exiles and refugees — all those
who nurse what Salman Rushdie once
called “a dream of glorious return.” In this
story, however, Alarcón peels away the
many layers of deceit that accompany ev-
LAILA LALAMIis the author, most recently, of
“The Moor’s Account.”
PHOTOGRAPH BY HUGO ROJO
ery return home. When their hosts confuse
Nelson for his brother, who immigrated to
California, Manuel and Nelson decide to
play along. For Nelson, this is a chance to
do some acting — he recently graduated
from the conservatory — but for everyone
else at the table, believing their guest to be
visiting from America, it is only a reminder
that they have been left behind. The story
lays bare how much immigration is a game
of pretense. The immigrant pretends to be
happy and prosperous in his adoptive coun-
try, the locals pretend they’re proud of him
Daniel Alarcón
and pleased with his success. As he leaves
the restaurant, Nelson realizes why his
hosts were so irascible, so resentful. “We’d
reminded them of their provincialism.”
Alarcón has explored displacement in
various forms throughout his career. His
first book, “War by Candlelight,” was pub-
lished in 2005, and it, too, is a collection of
short stories. Of those carefully con-
structed and well-polished pieces, several
of which appeared in prestigious maga-
zines, the one that has stayed the longest
with me is the gem “Third Avenue Sui-
cide,” about a young man who has to erase
himself from the apartment he shares with
his girlfriend whenever her conservative
mother visits. Two novels followed, “Lost
City Radio” and “At Night We Walk in Cir-
cles.” Both are set in unnamed countries in
Latin America, and both feature charac-
ters struggling to reconnect with loved
ones from whom they were separated by
political turmoil. A few years ago, Alarcón
began producing the podcast “Radio Am-
bulante,” to tell stories of and by Spanish-
speaking people from around the world.
And he’s written essays and reportage for
Harper’s Magazine, Granta and The New
York Times Magazine. This is, in short, a
writer with range, one who is willing to
take risks with form and is deeply curious
about the world.
Several of the stories in “The King Is Al-
ways Above the People” are stylistically
daring. “The Thousands,” which describes
how a community comes together to build
itself a town from scraps salvaged from the
city, is told from the first-person-plural
point of view. “The Ballad of Rocky
Rontal,” about an abused boy who becomes
a gang member, is narrated entirely in the
subjunctive mood. (I was surprised to dis-
cover that Alarcón previously approached
this subject in another form — in the indic-
ative mood and as nonfiction — as a profile
of an actual gang member for The Califor-
nia Sunday Magazine.) “Abraham Lincoln Independent publishers and
Has Been Shot” features Honest Abe as a authors of not-so-independent
romantic interest, “a good man, a compe- means receive special
tent lover, a dignified leader with a tender discounted advertising rates
heart.” These stories are intriguing, but I every Sunday in The New York
found myself gravitating more to the long- Times Book Review.
er, fuller stories that come later in the book.
At the titular intersection of “República
and Grau,” the streetlights are timed, al- For more information,
lowing for three minutes of begging for please contact Mark Hiler
coins among idling cars, followed by an- at (212) 556-8452.
other three minutes of waiting. The beg-
gars are a blind man and a 10-year-old boy, Reach an influential audience
the boy hired from his father for this spe- for less.
cific purpose. In this story, too, there is pre-
tense. As soon as the pair of beggars arrive
at the intersection, “the blind man’s smile N D AY , N O V E M B E R 9 , 2 0 0 8
disappeared, and his jaw went slack,” leav-
ing the child in the role of caretaker. The
boy’s father is unhappy with his cut and
makes him keep track of the coins. Mean-
while, the blind man is scheming to get
more money out of their act. The truth,
when it arrives, destroys the pretense with
a shocking display of violence.
Alarcón is at his finest when he couples
narrative experimentation with deliberate
pacing and imaginative empathy. In “The
Bridge,” a young man faces two daunting
tasks: settle the estate of his uncle and
break the news of the death to his father,
who is currently held in a mental hospital.
Reading this story is like walking down a
hallway filled with mirrors — the young
man and his father are both lawyers, the un-
cle and his wife are both interpreters, their
house has just one pair of each utensil — so
that I half-expected a turn to magical real-
ism. (In a playful nod to that expectation,
the character who sets off the main action is
called Gregorio Rabassa, surely a play on
the name of Gregory Rabassa, the late,
great translator of Gabriel García Márquez
and Julio Cortázar.) But there are no old
men with enormous wings here, or women
who have been transformed into talking
spiders. The main character will instead
have to journey to another part of town, a
neighborhood so remote from his, and so
heavy with police presence, that it has
earned the nickname “Gaza.”
A recurring theme in “The King Is Al-
ways Above the People” is the need to ex-
plore how leaving home, and returning to
it, changes you irremediably. Alarcón man-
ages to offer a fresh look at migration, the
oldest story of all. “The place you are
born,” he writes, “is simply the first place
you flee.” 0
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW 11
0
Badlands
Roger D. Hodge traces seven generations of his family through some of Texas’ least forgiving terrain.
By STEPHEN HARRIGAN
ROGER D. HODGE IS A Brooklyn resident,
former editor in chief of Harper’s Maga-
zine and the author of a book about Barack
Obama’s failure to live up to liberal ideals
— not a bad disguise for a crypto-Texan.
“People still express surprise when I tell
them where I’m from,” he confides early in
“Texas Blood,” a fervent pastiche of memo-
ry and reportage and history, “for Texas to
New Yorkers and other lifelong Eastern
TEXAS BLOOD
Seven Generations Among the Outlaws,
Ranchers, Indians, Missionaries, Soldiers,
and Smugglers of the Borderlands
By Roger D. Hodge
Illustrated. 353 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $28.95.
city dwellers is a terrifying land of racism
and violence and retrograde politics.”
Yes but. As Hodge discovered after he
left Texas at 18, it’s hard to shake loose from
a place where “the aura of a potent mythol-
ogy lies heavily upon the land.” Or, as Mac
Davis concluded in his cautionary song
about the folly of trying to escape the Lone
Star State, “Happiness is Lubbock, Texas,
growing nearer and dearer.”
Hodge’s ancestral West Texas territory
is a family ranch 300 miles due south from
Lubbock, along the remote Devils River
near its junction with the Pecos and the Rio
Grande at the Mexican border. As the
4,000-year-old pictographs still visible
along its steep canyon walls attest, it is sat-
urated in history.
Part of that history was made by
Hodge’s ancestors. He is a seventh-gener-
ation Texan from a state in which phrases
like “seventh-generation Texan” are hum-
ble-brag gold. His great-grandfather had
the distinction of surviving the Galveston
hurricane of 1900, the worst natural disas-
ter (perhaps as many as 8,000 dead) in the
history of the United States. A great-grand-
uncle operated a ranch at the base of the
Window, a gap in the mountain ramparts of
the Big Bend country that is a beloved
hunk of geology to scenery-starved Tex-
ans.
Hodge begins his book with an atmos-
pheric prelude (“The boy wears a cowboy
hat and boots, his jeans tucked in. He car-
ries a gun, and a knife, and sometimes a
sword”) that to my ear echoes the opening
of Cormac McCarthy’s “Blood Meridian”
(“See the child. He is pale and thin, he
wears a thin and ragged linen shirt. He
stokes the scullery fire”). Lest you suspect
me of overexplication, Hodge himself
takes time out, a little past the midway
point of his book, for a 14-page appreciation
of McCarthy’s fiction, particularly his
STEPHEN HARRIGAN is the author of 10 books of
fiction and nonfiction, including “The Gates of
the Alamo.” He is at work on a history of
Texas.
12 SUN DAY , JA N UA RY 7 , 2 018
Ranch hands herding cattle in South Texas, 1970.
Texas-set novel “No Country for Old Men.”
Caution: Writing about Cormac McCarthy
while simultaneously writing about the im-
memorial violence of the Texas border-
lands can lead to sentences like this:
“And everywhere are the ruins of those
ancient and not so ancient peoples who
were slaughtered in those places and
whose lives left no articulate testament to
bear witness to the joys and hopes and
dreams and sorrows that they shared be-
fore pale riders the color of dust swooped
down and spilled their blood onto the
thirsty ground.”
If Hodge is susceptible every now and
then to the hypnotic Bible rhythms of Mc-
Carthy’s language, for the most part he
writes with an earnest, stripped-down
clarity. He’s smart, observant and skepti-
cal. He has no interest in adding another
volume to the library shelves of rousing
Texas hoohah. “As I reread the conven-
tional histories,” he writes, “I remained
dissatisfied by their generalizations and
hoary meditations on Texas ‘character.’
Much of it struck me as self-congratula-
tory nationalistic rubbish. I read those fat
tomes mostly for the footnotes, the infinite
forking paths of primary sources and ar-
chives.” Even “Lone Star,” T. R. Fehren-
bach’s venerable history of the state (so
massive and self-confident its first words
are “In the beginning”), makes Hodge a lit-
tle queasy, because “such epic histories
sweep high above the hard ground of lived
experience.”
Hard ground and lived experience are
what “Texas Blood” is all about. Hodge
reminisces about his own background as a
young ranch hand — loading livestock into
trailers, rounding up sheep on muleback,
crossing the Rio Grande to Ciudad Acuña
every weekend for flaming tequila shots at
Conventional Texas histories,
Hodge says, are ‘self-congratulatory
nationalistic rubbish.’
famous watering holes like Ma Crosby’s.
He traces the history of the region through
the Jumano and Apache Indians who had
at one time or another considered them-
selves in possession of it. He writes about
Spanish explorers like Cabeza de Vaca and
notorious scalp hunters like the Irish-born
James Kirker, or the former Texas Ranger
John Joel Glanton, who went on to assume
toxic literary immortality as a character in
“Blood Meridian.”
In other chapters Hodge follows the trail
of his long-ago Texas-bound ancestors
through Missouri and Kansas, hangs out
with the Border Patrol in the Rio Grande
Valley, explores the ancient rock art along
the Pecos, and takes part in a pilgrimage to
the top of Mount Cristo Rey across the New
Mexico border from El Paso, where Indian
dancers known as matachines perform a
centuries-old dance depicting Hernán
Cortés’s conquest of Mexico, “the ancient
drama of conquest, love, betrayal and con-
version.”
All of this is often riveting, but it can be
frustrating too, because “Texas Blood” is
more a box of parts than a smoothly crest-
ing narrative. Most of it has already ap-
peared as articles and essays in publica-
tions like Harper’s, Popular Science, Texas
Monthly and The Sewanee Review. The au-
thor does his best to discharge an overall
impression of randomness in a kind of
process statement early in the book, advis-
ing us that he will be “always moving
aslant, both physically and metaphorically,
cutting against the currents of institu-
tional, governmental and industrial mo-
mentum with side trips and excursions,
historical and literary and personal inter-
ludes, as well as digressions and dalliances
with a broad cast of characters.”
Point taken, I guess. I’m not really com-
plaining, and even if I were — as Hodge
slyly reminds us in his assessment of Cor-
mac McCarthy’s work — “book reviews
leave little trace in the strata of literary his-
tory.”
Even for readers who prefer the sensa-
tion of moving ahead to moving aslant,
“Texas Blood” is a rich journey. Whether
he’s writing about modern-day drug smug-
gling (“Cube-shaped spaces in the middle
of a pallet of cilantro might not necessarily
be packages of dope, but the odds are
good”) or the itineraries of 16th-century
Spanish entradas, Hodge is always deep in
the buffalo grass. His reporting is vig-
orous. As a citizen historian, he has a reli-
able eye for important scholarship: Pekka
Hämäläinen on Comanches, Carolyn Boyd
on pictographs. As he promises, he hews
close to primary sources, such as Frede-
rick Law Olmsted’s lively 1860 travel nar-
rative, “A Journey Through Texas,” or the
often-heartbreaking crossing-the-plains
diaries of women like Ruth Shackelford
(“Little Annie died this morning just be-
fore daylight. She died very hard”).
Best of all, Hodge is haunted. He never
gets mystical, but neither is he ever out of
touch with the shimmering, mysterious
history of the land he’s writing about, or
the unfathomable allure it had for ancient
peoples and his own pioneer family. “Why
would anyone attempt to settle in this un-
forgiving landscape?” he asks. “What
were they searching for that was found
here, in the devil’s own country, alongside
his namesake river?” 0
PHOTOGRAPH BY JIM SUGAR/CORBIS
0
Animosities Without End
A new history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict sees no solution in sight.
By PETER BEINART
Do we need another history of the Israeli-
Palestinian conflict? Most Americans,
even those who care about the subject,
would probably say no. For one thing, most
Americans already know what they think.
Israel/Palestine is the foreign policy
equivalent of abortion. The debate is vi-
cious but predictable, and in the American
political mainstream its contours haven’t
changed much in a quarter-century. In the
Trump era, moreover, Americans don’t
care as much. Conservatives pay less at-
tention to the security of Israel’s
borders and more to the security of
America’s. Liberals are too wor-
ried about the survival of democra-
ENEMIES AND NEIGHBORS
Arabs and Jews in Palestine and
Israel, 1917-2017
By Ian Black
Illustrated. 606 pp. Atlantic Monthly
Press. $30.
cy in the United States to focus on
its survival in the Jewish state.
Given these realities, even an Is-
rael/Palestine book with a mind-
bending thesis would struggle to
command attention. And Ian
Black’s new history of the conflict,
“Enemies and Neighbors: Arabs
and Jews in Palestine and Israel,
1917-2017,” isn’t mind-bending. Its
central theme is that Zionism and
Palestinian nationalism were ir-
reconcilable from the start, but
that ordinary Jews and Palestin-
ians have interacted in creative
ways nonetheless. If you find that
argument plausible, it’s most likely
because you’ve heard it before.
But if “Enemies and Neighbors” Palestinians surrender to Israeli soldiers in the occupied territory of the West Bank in June 1967.
breaks no conceptual ground, it
has other merits. It’s a good read.
Black, a longtime correspondent and edi-
tor for The Guardian of London, has a gift
for summary. He synopsizes events in
sharp, fast paragraphs filled with vivid de-
tail. And by largely avoiding the interna-
tional politics of the conflict, he keeps a
tight focus on events on the ground. In de-
scribing the communal violence that broke
out in 1929, for instance, he notes that Ar-
abs from the village of Qaluniya attacked
their Jewish neighbors in Motza, killing ev-
ery member of the Maklef family except 9-
year-old Mordechai. He survived by jump-
ing out a window and went on to become
the Israeli Defense Forces’ second chief of
staff.
Black also shows how certain dynamics
recurred again and again across the dec-
ades. He notices that from the early days of
Zionist immigration, Jews relied on Pales-
PETER BEINART is a contributing editor for The
Atlantic and a columnist at The Forward.
PHOTOGRAPH BY PIERRE GUILLAUD/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES
tinian labor to help build the state that Pal-
estinians opposed. In 1889, he notes,
Zichron Yaakov, an early agricultural set-
tlement comprising 200 Jews, employed
1,200 Arab laborers. Almost a century later,
after Israel took control of the West Bank
and Gaza Strip in the Six Day War, an Is-
raeli sociologist noted that “at night the
campus” of Tel Aviv University “is like a
big dormitory for Palestinian workers.” In
the 1990s, after Benjamin Netanyahu’s
government responded to Palestinian ter-
rorism by restricting movement from the
occupied territories into Israel proper, a
Palestinian complained that “most of the
people in our village want to be connected
to Israel [and to] have the opportunity to
work in Israel.” Zionism’s need for Pales-
tinian labor, and the willingness of many
Palestinians to provide it, fits comfortably
into neither the Zionist nor Palestinian na-
tionalist narrative. But Black weaves it
into his.
And Black notices that from the begin-
ning, Zionists tried to bypass the Palestin-
ians by dealing with other Arab leaders,
who were less hostile to Jewish ambitions.
In 1919, Emir Faisal, who wanted Zionist
support for his bid to lead the newly inde-
pendent Syria, signed an agreement with
Chaim Weizmann endorsing further Jew-
ish immigration to Palestine. After its take-
over of the West Bank, Israel promoted
pro-Jordanian Palestinian politicians,
whom it considered more conciliatory than
the newly created Palestine Liberation Or-
ganization. In the late 1990s, Ehud Barak
infuriated Yasir Arafat by prioritizing ne-
gotiations over the Golan Heights with the
Syrian dictator Hafez Assad. These days,
Netanyahu often implies that an Israeli
rapprochement with the Sunni gulf states
— built around their common hostility to
Iran — would force Palestinians to curb
their nationalist demands. Such wishful
thinking, Black shows, has a long history.
He savors moments when the ideolog-
ical mask lifts, and Jews and Palestinians
see each other not merely as threats, but
also as human beings. He tells the story of
the future prime minister Golda Meir, dur-
Again and again Ian Black shows
how Palestinian leaders harmed
their own cause.
ing Israel’s war of independence, touring
neighborhoods of Haifa from which Arabs
had recently fled and being reminded of
abandoned Jewish towns in Europe. Upon
reaching a desolate apartment block, she
encountered an elderly Palestinian wom-
an, who began sobbing. Meir broke into
tears too. Still, Israel did not permit Haifa’s
Arab refugees to return.
Similarly, Black recounts an astonishing
1956 eulogy by Moshe Dayan, then the
chief of staff for the Israel Defense Forces,
for a young kibbutz member murdered by
Palestinian fighters near Gaza. “Let us not
blame the murderers today,” Dayan said.
“Why should we complain about their
burning hatred for us? For eight years” —
since Israel’s war of independence — “they
have been sitting in the refugee camps in
Gaza, watching us transforming the lands
and the villages where they and their fa-
thers dwelt, into our property.” Dayan was
not suggesting that Israel give those lands
back. To the contrary, he told the bereaved
kibbutzniks that “we have no choice but to
fight.” But in contrast to many current Is-
raeli and American Jewish leaders who
claim that only cultural pathology explains
Palestinian hostility to Zionism, Black
shows that some former Israeli leaders un-
derstood — and even empathized with —
the Palestinian opposition that they
nonetheless sought to quash.
Black does not romanticize Pal-
estinian nationalism. Again and
again, he shows how Palestinian
leaders harmed their own cause.
He tweaks them for boycotting the
legislative council elections that
Britain — then Palestine’s manda-
tory power — held in 1923, while the
Zionists participated. He con-
demns the Mufti of Jerusalem for
rejecting a 1939 British White Pa-
per that went a significant way to-
ward meeting Palestinian de-
mands. And he reports that in the
mid-1990s, when Arafat ran the
newly created Palestinian Author-
ity, a ton of cement in Gaza cost $74.
Of that, $17 went to the P.A. and an-
other $17 went to Arafat’s personal
account — at a bank in Tel Aviv.
BUT BLACK ALSO punctures the
view, often endorsed by American
pundits and politicians, that Pales-
tinians bear virtually all the blame
for the failure of recent efforts to
create a Palestinian state. He hews
to a view common among academ-
ics: that even when Israeli and Pal-
estinian leaders both supported the
two-state solution, they meant dra-
matically different things by it.
Even the most moderate Palestinian lead-
ers meant a sovereign state on (or ex-
tremely near) the 1967 lines, with a capital
in East Jerusalem and the right (which
might not be fully exercised) of Palestinian
refugee return. Even the most generous Is-
raeli leaders meant a less-than-sovereign
state without full control of Palestinian
East Jerusalem, minimal, if any, refugee
return and Israeli settlement annexations
that, the Palestinians claimed, turned their
prospective state into Swiss cheese.
In the Netanyahu era, this gulf has only
widened. Black notes — and doesn’t dis-
pute — “the growing belief that a two-state
solution” is now “defunct.” But he’s also
skeptical of proposals for one secular bina-
tional state. He offers no vision for
progress and no expressions of hope. The
book ends with the words: “No end to their
conflict was in sight.” No wonder Ameri-
cans, who are depressed enough about
their own country, are turning away. 0
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW 13
0
Essay / The Common Element / By Angela Flournoy
In his first novel, as in all of his work, Langston Hughes honored the lives of poor black families.
FOR A WRITER like Langston Hughes, who made a name
for himself as a poet before the age of 21, his debut novel,
“Not Without Laughter,” feels like an effort to stake out a
bigger claim on his abilities, to create artistic and the-
matic breathing room. Arna Bontemps, celebrated poet
and friend to Hughes, described “Not Without Laughter”
as the novel Hughes had to write, coming on the heels of
two well-received poetry collections, “The Weary Blues”
(1926) and “Fine Clothes to the Jew” (1927). Hughes
published these collections while a student at Lincoln
University, and he released “Not Without Laughter” in
1930, shortly after graduating. “By the date of his first
book of prose Hughes had become for many a symbol of
the black renaissance,” Bontemps writes. The stakes
were high, then, for the young man born in Joplin, Mo.
He had to deliver.
“Not Without Laughter” crystallizes some of the
themes in Hughes’s early poetry and examines in detail
subjects he would return to throughout his career,
among them the experiences of working-class blacks,
the importance of black music to black life, the beauty of
black language and the trap of respectability. It begins as
a tale of family life, following the Williamses — the ma-
triarch, Aunt Hager; her daughters, Harriet, Annjee and
Tempy; and Annjee’s husband, Jimboy — in the small
Kansas town of Stanton. After establishing the conflicts
and desires of the adults, the narrative becomes a bild-
ungsroman. Here it finds its true purpose: chronicling
the upbringing of Sandy, the son of Jimboy and Annjee,
as he struggles to forge an identity outside of the boxes
the white and black worlds have put him in, and seeks
stability within his increasingly unstable home.
Each family member provides an example of how Sandy
might navigate his world. Sandy’s father is a blues man, a
guitar picker with an itch for traveling, who leaves his wife
and his son for months on end. Sandy’s mother works long
hours as a domestic for an exacting white woman and
comes home so exhausted and lovesick that she doesn’t
have much attention to spare for her young son. Soon
enough she leaves Stanton for good, determined to stay by
Jimboy’s side and find happiness in their reunion.
Hager is Sandy’s primary caretaker, and it is her grand-
son in whom she invests all her hopes for her family: “I’s
gwine raise one chile right yet, if de Lawd lets me live —
just one chile right!” In an unkind light Hager can be read
as a Mammy, a former slave who chose to stay by her mis-
tress’s side for several years after emancipation rather than
“scatter like buckshot,” as most freed people did, and who
now washes the clothes of white people and tends to their
illnesses when called. Hughes takes care to flesh out
Hager’s motivations, which prove more complicated than
unblinking servitude. Hager finds solace in forgiveness, in
assuming the best in people too ignorant to reciprocate. Her
benevolence provides existential armor. Hate “closes up de
sweet door to life an’ makes ever’thing small an’ mean an’
dirty,” Hager insists. Her beliefs stand in stark contrast to
those of many other Negroes, including her own children.
Hager’s youngest daughter, Harriet, is beautiful, with
a voice made to sing the blues. She gives her mother and
Annjee’s way of life a chance — working at a country
ANGELA FLOURNOY’S novel, “The Turner House,” was a National
Book Award finalist in 2015. This essay is adapted from her
introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of “Not Without
Laughter,” by Langston Hughes, which will be published this
month.
14 SU NDAY, JA N UA RY 7, 2 018
club where old white men make passes at her — but
ultimately opts out, hoping to escape Stanton altogether.
She runs away with the carnival, then returns and dab-
bles in sex work before finally getting a break as a sing-
er. Her story begins as one of classic teenage rebellion
but ends as an example of fierce determination.
In his famous essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial
Mountain,” Hughes expresses fondness for “the low-
down folks, the so-called common element.” Poor Afri-
can-Americans made up a majority of the black popula-
tion but were rarely depicted as fully realized characters
in the serious literature of the day. “They furnish a
wealth of colorful, distinctive material for any artist
Langston Hughes
because they still hold their own individuality in the face
of American standardizations,” Hughes writes. A writer
who extols a group based on any demographic denomi-
nator runs the risk of flattening his characters, but in the
face of popular novels about middle- and upper-class
black experiences, such as those by his contemporary
Jessie Redmon Fauset, Hughes’s call for nuanced consid-
eration of working-class black people was noteworthy.
The early 20th century was also a period when “color
mania” was part of day-to-day black life, with lighter
skin seen as correlating with increased romantic
prospects and upward mobility. Hughes’s focus on char-
acters with darker skin — something we are reminded of
throughout — seems like a conscious statement against
assimilation and conformity.
In reviewing Hughes’s first autobiography, “The Big
Sea” (1940), Richard Wright recalls Hughes’s early poet-
ry being greeted with shock by black readers. “Since
then the realistic position assumed by Hughes has be-
come the dominant outlook,” Wright observes. Indeed
what stays with the reader longer than the plot of “Not
Without Laughter” is the frequent, unexpected uses of
imagery and language that make the characters and
their lives feel real. Sandy recalls Aunt Hager, a woman
who frowns on secular dancing — even in her own yard
— whirling round and round at a revival in religious
ecstasy. During conversations between black characters,
the word “nigger” rolls off their tongues often — some-
times pejoratively, sometimes humorously, but more
often as a general descriptor — and it’s a testament to
Hughes’s ear for black language that we are never in
doubt about the tone. This focus on rendering realisti-
cally how black folks behave among themselves,
whether or not it would be considered proper in other
contexts, is one of the novel’s greatest achievements.
Like his one-time collaborator and contemporary Zora
Neale Hurston, Hughes takes an anthropological ap-
proach to setting and character. The town of Stanton is
similar to Lawrence, the small Kansas town where
Hughes grew up with his maternal grandmother while
his father worked in Mexico and his mother lived in
Topeka. It was the sort of place where blacks and whites
might live in close proximity, but where a black boy
would avoid walking by his white neighbor’s lawn for
fear of having insults — or worse — hurled at him.
Hughes, like Sandy, grew up with a largely absent father
and an interest in books. Already a budding public figure
by the time of the novel’s release, Hughes likely saw his
own life pulling him farther and farther from the small-
town Midwestern world that raised him. Reading “Not
Without Laughter,” one senses that Hughes was desper-
ate to record all of his early memories, from the “sooty
gray-green light” that turns to blackness before a tor-
nado, to the possum, peach preserves and yams at a
humble Thanksgiving dinner.
Sandy is an ideal protagonist for a novel so interested in
place and culture — an observant boy able to find the ex-
traordinary in the ordinary. He listens intently during warm
nights on the porch with Aunt Hager. He overhears grown
black folks parsing the psychology of whites who want to
keep blacks nearby — nursing their children, preparing
their meals — but always beneath them, and withholds his
own judgment, wise enough to know he doesn’t know
enough. As a teenager Sandy sweeps up at a neighborhood
barbershop, “filled with loud man-talk and smoke and
laughter,” and gets a crude sexual education from the con-
versations of customers and barbers, as well as lessons in
playing the dozens — “the protective art of turning back a
joke.” He inhabits this new space the same way he inhabits
every other one, simultaneously attuned to its peculiarities
and set apart.
A poet who writes fiction can imbue his prose with con-
siderable magic. For Hughes, this comes from the lyrics
and rhythms of jazz and blues. “Not Without Laughter”
includes lyrics to songs that are mournful, bawdy, vengeful
and downright silly. They underscore the importance
Hughes felt they played in black life. One gets the sense
that Sandy’s upbringing has been shaped as much by these
songs as by Aunt Hager’s teachings. As the novel pro-
gresses, Sandy’s thoughts are rendered in musical streams
of consciousness, turning from anticipation to curiosity to
anger to desire. The result is a realistic portrayal of the
rhythms of a young man’s inner life: Sandy lies in bed at
night and riffs on his own past and future.
“Not Without Laughter” is a debut in the best of ways: It
covers uncharted territory, it compels its readers to see
part of the world anew, and it prizes exploration over pat
conclusion. Hughes accesses the universal — how all of us
love and dream and laugh and cry — by staying faithful to
the particulars of his characters and their way of life. With
this book the young poet from Joplin, Mo., manages to
deliver something more valuable than simply an admirable
debut — he gives his readers a guide for careful considera-
tion of the lives of everyday black people. Such a guide is
still useful today. Perhaps more than ever. 0
PHOTOGRAPH FROM BETTMANN
0
At the Crossroads of History
In Istanbul, East meets West and the past is always present.
By LAWRENCE OSBORNE
WHEN THE BRITISH WRITER Patrick Leigh
Fermor set out to traverse Europe on foot
in 1933, his fantasy was to see only one city:
“The chief destination was never in a mo-
ment’s doubt. The levitating skyline of
Constantinople pricked its sheaves of thin
cylinders and its hemispheres out of the
sea-mist.” It was a vision partially derived
from Yeats and Pierre Loti, the “holy city”
with its “gong-tormented sea” and its
memories of many a “drowsy Emperor”
entertained by mechanical golden birds —
a fantasy not unlike the one that drove the
Vikings to the Bosphorus in A.D. 860, spell-
GHOST EMPIRE
A Journey to the Legendary Constantinople
By Richard Fidler
Illustrated. 492 pp. Pegasus. $29.95.
ISTANBUL
A Tale of Three Cities
By Bettany Hughes
Illustrated. 800 pp. Da Capo Press. $40.
bound by the idea of the metropolis they
called Miklagard, or the Rus of Kiev to
choose Christianity in the 10th century.
That is, in any case, the Western vision;
the Islamic vision was equally mystical:
“Verily you shall conquer Constantinople,”
the Prophet said.
Compressed into one urban site, the lay-
ers of Istanbul’s pagan, Christian and Is-
lamic pasts present endless narrative pos-
sibilities that historians can form into
sweeping, commercially enticing sagas.
Two new, purposefully encyclopedic,
books do precisely that. Richard Fidler’s
“Ghost Empire: A Journey to the Legend-
ary Constantinople” and Bettany Hughes’s
“Istanbul: A Tale of Three Cities” follow —
if we are to stay within the limits of writing
in English — in the footsteps of the brilliant
John Freely’s “Istanbul: The Imperial
City” and Philip Mansel’s “Constantino-
ple: City of the World’s Desire, 1453-1924.”
But the two books are very different both in
structure and tone.
Fidler, a well-known Australian radio
broadcaster, uses the conceit of exploring
Istanbul with his young son as a narrative
prop. Hughes, equally well known in Brit-
ain for her popular historical documenta-
ries, gives us an even heftier opus written
with a classicist’s linguistic precision. Both
books tell the same story of the same city
populated by the same cast of characters.
Except that they don’t.
Hughes’s book begins with the prehis-
toric substrata, delving with curiously
gripping detail into layers of settlement ar-
chaeologists have only recently un-
earthed. She begins with the discovery of
the world’s oldest wooden coffin, under the
LAWRENCE OSBORNE’S latest novel is “Hunters
in the Dark.”
PHOTOGRAPH BY FINE ART IMAGES/HERITAGE IMAGES, VIA GETTY IMAGES
The sultan’s procession in Istanbul, circa 1736.
Yenikapi metro station, containing an
8,000-year-old woman whose fellow vil-
lagers even left their footprints in the an-
cient mud. And so, right from the start, we
are confronted with a vastly larger sense of
time than that in which the city is usually
conceived. Moreover, Hughes also estab-
lishes just how deep the Greek roots of the
settlement called Byzantion went, and how
heterogenous the Hellenic frontier town of
the seventh century B.C. probably was.
She has a fine feel for the complexities and
shadings of that distant past.
One of the strangest and most haunting
objects in 21st-century Istanbul is the
twisted bronze monument called the Ser-
pent Column, a fifth-century B.C. monu-
ment to the Greeks’ victory over the
Persians. Still standing inside the shat-
tered remains of the hippodrome, broken
and yet superbly elegant, it was commis-
sioned by the Spartan general Pausanius
and moved to its present location by Con-
stantine himself in A.D. 324. “One cannot
help but feel,” Hughes writes, “that Pausa-
nius would be secretly pleased to know
that this monument — a rather etiolated
creature now — is one of the few remaining
classical antiquities to survive back in
modern Istanbul in the public space next to
the Blue Mosque, today a favorite lunch-
break stop for tourists and young Istanbul-
lus.” It’s like a root from a vanished forest
that has accidentally survived.
In contrast, Fidler begins his story more
conventionally, with the Romans and, to be
more precise, with his son, Joe, in Rome’s
Capitoline Museum, admiring the colossal
head of Constantine, the man who made
Constantinople both the capital of the Ro-
man Empire and a Christian metropolis.
While Hughes’s tone is both scholarly and
rich in visual detail, Fidler entertains us
with novelistic vignettes and cut-and-
paste erudition, though he wobbles a little
here and there. In a timeline that precedes
the main narrative we are informed, for ex-
ample, that the city was “renamed Istan-
bul” in 1453. In fact, the Ottomans kept the
name Kostantiniyye in official usage until
the dissolution of their empire in 1923, and
the two names were used in parallel fash-
ion by court officials. “Istanbul,” in any
case, comes from the common Greek ex-
pression “eis tin polin,” “into the city,” and
was a word used by both Turks and Greeks
long before Mehmet’s conquest. As always
with this great hybrid city, the continuities
have as much force as the momentous
changes. That said, Fidler displays great
charm in the telling of his tale, spicing it
with delicious gossip.
Take the story of Nicephoros II Phokas,
the ruthless mid-10th-century emperor
who turned the tide of Byzantine military
fortunes with a series of brilliant victories
against Arab armies, culminating in the re-
conquest of Cyprus and Aleppo. In the
summer of 968, the Lombard bishop Luit-
prand of Cremona visited Constantinople
to negotiate a marriage contract between
the family of Nicephoros and the future
Otto II, king of Italy. Tensions between
East and West were running high.
Nicephoros treated the bishop shabbily,
and Luitprand returned the favor with
some unfavorable immortalizations. “He is
a monstrosity of a man,” Luitprand wrote,
“fat-headed and with tiny mole’s eyes. A
short, broad, thick beard disfigures him,
half going gray and disgraced by a neck
scarcely an inch long, which is pig-like by
reason of the big close bristles on his
beard. In color he is like an Ethiopian and,
as the poet says, ‘you would not want to
meet him in the dark.’ ”
Interestingly, this tale doesn’t appear in
Hughes’s account. Instead, she goes from a
discussion of the Viking presence in the 11th
century to a lovely depiction of everyday life
inside the walls of the city in that period and
from thence to a consideration of the rich and
productive cultural rivalry between the
Christian empire and the caliphate, an over-
looked period of synthesis and mutual imita-
tion. She draws our attention to the “poly-
chrome” mosaic of the Near East and the po-
lyphony of the great Greek-speaking Roman
city that lay at its heart, and rightly so. Much
that we now consider “Western” had its roots
in that mosaic.
Hughes argues that in this period — just
before the Battle of Manzikert in 1071 her-
alded the arrival of a new enemy, the Turks
— the two religions and empires had found
a way of coexisting: “The men and women
of Constantinople knew, from firsthand ex-
perience, of the conviction within the vast
Muslim empire that thickly rimmed their
lands. Hot-headed, unilateral aggression
would only result in jihad. Constantinople,
the City of God, was an entity that needed
guarding, not squandering, that had to rely
on displays of diplomacy and strength
rather than on direct aggression.”
Yet surely the rivalry had itself been
made more potent by the military suc-
cesses of Nicephoros at precisely this time
and the recalibrating of influence his “di-
rect aggression” had achieved. After all,
the reconquest of the largely Greek city of
Aleppo in 962 was no small matter; it was a
demoralizing catastrophe for the Ham-
danid regime on the Arab side. And the pig-
like emperor ridiculed by Luitprand was so
violent and austere in his military methods
that he was known as “The Pale Death of
the Saracens.”
Of course, historians always omit some
things and include others that seem more
important to them, and so it should be. Nei-
ther Hughes nor Fidler ignores the violent
arrival in Byzantine lands of the Seljuk sul-
tan Alp Arslan in the late 11th century (Fi-
dler notes that his mustache was so long it
had to be tied behind his head to keep it
from flying into his eyes during battle) and
with him the beginning of Christian Con-
stantinople’s long decline.
Like the Ottoman sultans who would
succeed him, Arslan filled his court with
mathematicians and literati, including the
Persian poet Omar Khayyam, and in the
end the eventual transformation of the
Christian city into a Muslim one entailed
less disruption and destruction than is
commonly imagined. The Istanbul of Sulei-
man was every bit as imperial and cos-
mopolitan as that of Justinian, and it’s a
virtue of both books that they’re able to de-
pict this transformation subtly while at the
same time showing how intricate and im-
probable Istanbul’s history has been. The
effect is rather like stumbling across the
Serpent Column late at night after carous-
ing in Istanbul’s 21st-century nightclubs: a
melancholic sense of historical vertigo. 0
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW 15
0
Neighbors
Linked novellas about life in an Israeli apartment building.
By AYELET GUNDAR-GOSHEN
A FATHER SUSPECTS that his 8-year-old
was molested by the elderly neighbor who
sometimes babysits for her. He tries to un-
cover the truth only to find himself drawn
sexually toward the neighbor’s teenage
granddaughter. This mesmerizing story is
told by the father himself, the first of three
THREE FLOORS UP
By Eshkol Nevo
283 pp. Other Press. Paper, $16.95.
linked novellas in Eshkol Nevo’s “Three
Floors Up.”
Confessions are deceiving. The narrator
promises to tell us “everything.” But what
exactly is “everything”? Is it all that hap-
pened? Or what we tell ourselves to justify
what happened?
The next two novellas are set on the next
two floors in the same building. Hani, the
protagonist of the second story, calls this
Tel Aviv suburb “Bourgeoisville.” Hani is a
woman dried out by motherhood. Her kids
are at the center of her life, yet they sap her
vitality. Hani’s brother-in-law storms into
this domestic desert, seeking refuge from
AYELET GUNDAR-GOSHEN is the author of “Wak-
ing Lions.”
My City in Ruins
A debut novel about New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.
By MARGARET WILKERSON SEXTON
FOLLOWING A GRIM hurricane season, C.
Morgan Babst’s powerful debut novel,
“The Floating World,” revives our memory
of what seemed at the time like the mother
of all storms.
The novel follows the members of a New
Orleans family immediately after Hurri-
THE FLOATING WORLD
By C. Morgan Babst
370 pp. Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. $26.95.
cane Katrina, alternating among their per-
spectives. There is Tess, a white doctor
who comes from money, and her husband,
Joe, a Creole artist. They have two grown
daughters, the distressed Cora and the
willful Del. Cora is the only one to stay for
the storm; Del is away in New York and the
others evacuate. Though Tess will eventu-
ally come to her daughter’s aid, and Del
MARGARET WILKERSON SEXTON’S first novel, “A
Kind of Freedom,” was published in August.
16 SUN DAY, JA N UA RY 7 , 2 018
creditors. On this second floor, as on all the
floors of the novel, a line is crossed.
The sexual tension between Hani and
her guest will make the walls sweat, but
the real tension is between the young
mother and the oppressive ideals of “moth-
erhood.” Parenthood is a sacred value in Is-
rael, where fertility treatments are fully
covered by the state. Even today, an Israeli
woman’s needs are supposed to kneel
down before her commitment to her chil-
dren.
Nevo breaks this taboo, and when a ta-
boo is broken, guilt awakens. Trying to es-
cape guilt, his characters photoshop the
truth. What first seems like an honest con-
fession turns out to be a brilliant act of self-
deception. The confessors tell us their se-
crets, but choose to remain blind to the real
secret — not what they did, but why they
did it.
Hani’s attraction to Eviatar, the brother-
in-law, can be seen as a betrayal of her hus-
band, but it is also an abandonment of the
sacred duty of motherhood. It could be that
the father suspecting a sexual assault
against his daughter is actually projecting
his own hidden violent libido. There’s a po-
litical dimension to this psychology: We Is-
raelis often have a “siege mentality” in
which we are the victim of evil neighbors,
defending ourselves from external threat.
will return, Cora sees something in the 25
days she’s without her family that leaves
her even more frazzled than before.
Unlike Jesmyn Ward’s powerful Katrina
novel, the National Book Award-winning
“Salvage the Bones,” most of this story takes
place after landfall. And with visions of the
storm sneaking into even the most discord-
ant scenes, inescapable loss permeates each
page. At one point, the perfection of a Toll-
house cookie in the imperfect city brings
tears to Tess’s eyes. At another, Del gets a
“feeling in her chest like water straining
against a door” when her friend-turned-
lover says I love you. Sometimes — espe-
cially in Tess’s, Del’s and Joe’s sections — the
sense of loss becomes almost oppressive. In
reality the storm’s impact was unrelenting,
no doubt, but Babst is most effective at con-
veying the emotional weight of the tragedy
when she presents it alongside vibrant char-
acters and story lines.
One of the most vibrant is the family pa-
triarch, Vincent, whom Babst brings to life
in a portrayal that’s impressively unre-
strained, even Faulknerian. Because of his
memory limitations, we see his whole life
SALLY DENG
The aggressiveness of the in-group is pro-
jected onto the outside world, along with
all moral responsibility for the conflict. Did
Nevo intend his building to be a metaphor?
Reading these striking stories, one won-
ders about the Israelis who lock their doors
against external evil, but never stop to
stream forward as if in the present tense,
outside of the storm’s temporal confines.
We taste the stuffed crab and pocket pies
he ate on a street the city has since re-
placed with an interstate he doesn’t re-
member. We feel the comfort of his
mother’s rocking chair, the relief
of his dog come back to assure
him everything will be O.K.
Babst also shines in her
depiction of Cora. The book’s
short middle section ingen-
iously tracks back to before
the storm, and Cora glim-
mers on the page: a fragile,
naïve yet thoughtful woman
reminiscent of Laura in “The
C. Morgan Babst
Glass Menagerie.”
Any novel of the South has to
grapple with race at least implicitly, and
“The Floating World” doesn’t shy from the
subject. Cora is romantically involved with
Troy, an African-American restaurant
worker whose sister, Reyna, is mentally ill.
Though Joe identifies as Creole, and Cora
and Del are biracial, they are economically
privileged. So it was wise on Babst’s part to means, to miss New Orleans? 0
question their own morality.
After meeting the id on the first floor, and
the ego on the second, we face the super-
ego on the third. A retired judge leaves
voice messages on her dead husband’s an-
swering machine, confessing that she has
reconnected with their estranged son.
While listening to this woman, you start to
wonder whether the criminal is indeed the
son, who caused a deadly accident, or the
mother, who is incapable of loving her child
when he fails to live up to her standards.
Though quite radical in his exploration
of parenthood, Nevo is rather conservative
on the question of which character de-
serves punishment and which achieves
atonement. I somehow wished it were the
other way around. And yet, this book and
its conflicted apartment dwellers stayed
with me long after I finished reading.
“You can never tell what goes on with
people behind their reinforced metal
doors,” says Arnon, the father on the first
floor. Freud argues that you can’t even tell
what’s going on behind your own locked
door, or inside your own head. Freud’s
name is spoken, in a rare explanatory line.
But luckily, for the most part, the story
speaks for itself. The characters whisper
confessions to us; we decide whether to
judge or to forgive their sins — which are,
of course, variations of our own. 0
introduce the poorer Troy and Reyna to a
book about Katrina — a storm that touched
so many poor African-American lives, after
all. Unfortunately, Reyna rarely rises above
stereotype, either sentimentalized by Cora
or demonized by Troy. And her fate is
too often and too superficially
linked to Cora’s story, without
recognizing her independent
significance as a mother of
two, or just as a complex
character. She feels like a
missed opportunity to pay au-
thentic attention to the plight
of the people who arguably saw
the worst of the storm.
Still anyone who has expe-
rienced loss will be hard hit
by Babst’s expert descrip-
tions: “the innards of sofas strewn across
lawns,” “the littered brown no-man’s-land
that had once been grass,” details that
seem infused with the city’s soul. When Del
and her lover dance to Kermit Ruffins in
the Quarter, a reader might even feel an
urge to sing along: Do you know what it
PHOTOGRAPH BY CRAIG MULCAHY
0

No Longer and Not Yet

An Irishman reflects on the fractured contemporary world and remembers the life he left behind.

By MARTIN RIKER

MODERNISM WAS ABOUT many things, but

largely it was about fragmentation. The
world had cracked, and artists had noticed.
Virginia Woolf showed what a mess our
minds are, Gertrude Stein wrote portraits
through a Cubist kaleidoscope, and T. S. El-
iot shored fragments against his ruins.
Perhaps most famous of all was a certain
Irishman with the chutzpah to rewrite the
“Odyssey,” turning Odysseus into a mid-
dle-aged Jewish cuckold roaming all day
through the linguistic detritus of Dublin,
his mind a patchwork of scraps. He doesn’t
even finish his own story, but is cut off by

SOLAR BONES
By Mike McCormack
217 pp. Soho Press. $25.

his wife Molly’s torrential interior mono-

logue, surely literature’s defining instance
of “stream of consciousness” and a glori-
ously fragmented finale to a novel so
mashed up and wonderful and horrifying it
would be loved and loathed all the way
down to the present moment, modernism’s
most infamous book.
So when I tell you that a contemporary
Irishman has just written a novel with min-
imal punctuation, recording the stream of
consciousness of a man sitting for a few
hours at his kitchen table in western Ire-
land, you might be forgiven for assuming
that we are back at the feet of James Joyce,
brought here by a modernist apostle, and
that you’d do well to wait for the annotated
edition. But Mike McCormack’s “Solar
Bones” (winner of the Goldsmiths Prize
and longlisted for the Man Booker) is a
wonderfully original, distinctly contempo-
rary book, with a debt to modernism but up
to something all its own.
On Nov. 2, All Souls’ Day (when Catho-
lics pray for the souls in purgatory), the
civil engineer Marcus Conway finds him-
self in his kitchen feeling inexplicably dis-
oriented, as if suddenly untethered from
the world. In fact he is dead, a ghost, but he
does not realize it. He hears the noontime
Angelus bell from across the parish, re-
members that his children have grown and
moved on, and wonders how he is going to
pass the four hours until his wife, Mairead,
gets home from work. Finding newspapers
on the table, he falls into a pedantic revelry
on current events (he is not really a ped-
ant, more a perennial worrier) that spills
into thoughts of his life, then stories from
his past, one cascading into another. The
roughly 200 pages that follow draw togeth-
er memories of family and work struggles,
local and national politics, public works
projects, medical crises, art, travel — in
short, a life — all of it delivered in lucid,
lyrical prose, with line breaks that rarely
MARTIN RIKER’Sfirst novel, “Samuel Johnson’s
Eternal Return,” will be published in 2018.
disrupt but act more like breaths, as if spo-
ken by a friend across the table.
A memory of Marcus’s father disassem-
bling a tractor might turn existential: “as I
recoiled at the thought that something so
complex and highly achieved as this trac-
tor engine could prove so vulnerable, so
easily collapsed and taken apart by this
single tool and so frightened was I by this
fact it would be years afterwards before I
could acknowledge the engineering ele-
gance of it . . . and
“this may have been my first moment of
anxious worry about the world, the first in-
stance of my mind spiraling beyond the im-
mediate environs of
“hearth, home and parish, towards
“the wider world beyond
“way beyond.”
Or a memory of existential awareness
(upon receiving his daughter’s birth cer-
tificate) might suddenly turn mundane:
“there was a metaphysical reality to her
now — she had stepped into that political
index which held a space for her in the
state’s mindfulness . . . this document
which did not tag or enumerate her but
freed her into her own political space, our
citizen daughter who
“are we ever going to leave this car park
or are you going to sit all day gawping at
that certificate
“Mairead called from the back seat.”
McCormack is a pleasure to read on ev-
erything from King Crimson — “music for
engineers, all those dissonant chords laid
down at right angles” — to picking out eye-
glasses — “each made me look foolish in
one way or another, too comic or too odd or
too obviously chasing something I no long-
er possessed” — but it’s the connections
that the book keeps coming back to, the
way one story relates to another, the whole
greater than its parts.
Sticklers for verisimilitude might rightly
point out that nobody really “thinks” in
such articulate well-cadenced paragraphs
(Molly Bloom’s mind is a rat’s nest by com-
parison), but the coherence McCormack
has opted for is more than stylistic. In
some ways, it’s what the whole book is
about. More than once Marcus counts him-
self “one of those men who had always
structured his days around radio news bul-
letins,” and his struggle against a fractured
worldview fed by media saturation is the
novel’s most compelling and recurring
theme. The stories he dwells on longest in-
volve a water contamination catastrophe
that makes Mairead very ill (“history and
politics were now a severe intestinal dis-
order, spliced into the figure of my wife
who sweated along the pale length of her
body”) and a case of political graft sabotag-
ing a public construction project he’d over-
seen as an engineer. Meanwhile, his own
“childhood ability to get ahead of myself
and reason to apocalyptic ends” he sees re-
invented in his son, Darragh, as a “kind of
apocalyptic riffing,” the media-age glib-
ness of the young. It’s in this context that a
memory of something as innocuous as a
video chat with Darragh (who was bum-
ming around Australia, calling intermit-
tently in the middle of the night) leads
Marcus to imagine the world’s end: “stand-
ing hollow-eyed in the middle of some des-
olation with the wind whistling through
your skull, just before the world collapses
“mountains, rivers and lakes
DADU SHIN
“acres, roods and perches
“into oblivion, drawn down into that fis-
sure in creation where everything is con-
sumed in the raging tides and swells of
non-being, the physical world gone down
in flames
“mountains, rivers and lakes
“and pulling with it also all those human
rhythms that bind us together and draw
the world into a community, those daily
“rites, rhythms and rituals.”
McCormack’s sense of Armageddon is at
once familiarly contemporary and bless-
edly contentious. Marcus’s gloominess is
tempered by his own self-skepticism and
struggle, but the true counterpoint is an
agnostic sort of spirituality that accumu-
lates over the course of the novel, a sense
of the connectedness of humanity, the
world in all its parts, “that harmonic order,”
as Marcus imagines, “which underlay ev-
eryone and everything.” It is this same
sense of order he identifies earlier, “up-
holding the world like solar bones, that rar-
efied amalgam of time and light whose ex-
tension through every minute of the day is
visible from the moment I get up in the
morning and stand at the kitchen window
with a mug of tea in my hand, watching the
first cars of the day passing on the road.”
For all its apparent stylistic complexity,
“Solar Bones” is a beautifully simple book.
Death has not solved Marcus’s worldly
problems, only offered a shift of scope, and
this is what McCormack’s novel offers as
well. Where modernism took a world that
appeared to be whole and showed it to be
broken, “Solar Bones” takes a world that
can’t stop talking about how broken it is,
and suggests it might possibly be whole. 0

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW 17

0
Essay / Reading North Korea / By Nicholas Kristof
Books about one of the most closed countries on earth.
NORTH KOREA MAY BE the most secretive and totalitar-
ian country in the world, as well as the wackiest. As a
result, it inspires some of the best fiction and nonfiction,
so the upside of the risk of nuclear war is an excuse to
dip into literature that offers glimpses of this other world
— and some insights into how to deal with it.
Thousands of North Koreans have fled their homeland
since the famine of the late 1990s, and many are writing
memoirs recounting their daily lives and extraordinary
escapes. A leading example is IN ORDER TO LIVE: A North
Korean Girl’s Journey to Freedom (Penguin, paper, $17) by
Yeonmi Park, with Maryanne Vollers. Park is a young
woman whose father was a cigarette smuggler and black
market trader. As a girl, she believed in the regime (as
did her mother), for life was steeped in propaganda and
anti-Americanism. Even in her math class, “a
typical problem would go like this: ‘If you kill
one American bastard and your comrade kills
two, how many dead American bastards do
you have?’”
What opened Park’s eyes was in part a
pirated copy of the film “Titanic.” The govern-
ment tries hard to ban any foreign television,
internet or even music, and North Korean
radios, which don’t have dials, can receive only
local stations. But the black market fills the
gap, with handymen who will tweak your radio
to get Chinese stations, and with illegal thumb
drives full of South Korean soap operas.
I’m among those who argue that we in the
West should do more to support this kind of
smuggling, because it’s a way to sow dissatis-
faction. Indeed, what moved Park was the love
story in “Titanic”: “I was amazed that Leon-
ardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet were willing
to die for love, not just for the regime, as we
were. The idea that people could choose their North Koreans pose before the statues of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il.
own destinies fascinated me. This pirated
Hollywood movie gave me my first small taste
of freedom.”
In the end, Park’s father was arrested for smuggling,
and the family’s life collapsed. Park and her sister went
hungry and had to drop out of school, and she survived
eating insects and wild plants.
So at age 13, Park and her mother crossed illegally into
China — and immediately into the hands of human traf-
fickers who were as scary as the North Korean secret
police. They raped her mother and eventually Park as
well, and both struggled in the netherworld in which
North Koreans are stuck in China — because the Chi-
nese authorities regularly detain them and send them
home to face prison camp. Park and her mother were
lucky, finally managing to sneak into Mongolia and then
on to South Korea.
Another powerful memoir is THE GIRL WITH SEVEN
NAMES: A North Korean Defector’s Story (William Collins, paper,
$15.99) by Hyeonseo Lee, with David John. She is from
Hyesan, the same town as Park. It’s an area on the Chi-
nese border where smuggling is rampant, where people
know a bit about the outside world and where disaffec-
tion, consequently, is greater than average.
Still, Lee’s home, like every home, had portraits of the
country’s first two leaders, Kim Il-sung and his son, Kim
Jong-il, on the wall. (The grandson now in power, Kim
NICHOLAS KRISTOF is an Op-Ed columnist for The Times.
18 SUN DAY, JA N UA RY 7 , 2018
Jong-un, hasn’t yet made his portrait ubiquitous.) Lee
begins her story recounting how her father dashed into the
family home as it was burning to rescue not family valu-
ables but rather the portraits of the first leaders. There’s an
entire genre of heroic propaganda stories in North Korea of
people risking their lives to save such portraits.
Like other kids, Lee grew up in an environment of
formal reverence for the Kim dynasty. At supper she
would say a kind of grace — to “Respected Father
Leader Kim Il-sung” — before picking up her chopsticks.
“Everything we learned about Americans was nega-
tive,” she writes. “In cartoons, they were snarling jack-
als. In the propaganda posters they were as thin as
sticks with hook noses and blond hair. We were told they
smelled bad. They had turned South Korea into a ‘hell on
earth’ and were maintaining a puppet government there.
The teachers never missed an opportunity to remind us
of their villainy.
“ ‘If you meet a Yankee bastard on the street and he
offers you candy, do not take it!’ one teacher warned us,
wagging a finger in the air. ‘If you do, he’ll claim North
Korean children are beggars. Be on your guard if he asks
you anything, even the most innocent questions.’”
Hmm. No wonder my attempts at interviewing North
Korean kids have never been very fruitful.
Lee escaped to China at age 17 and started a new life
in Shanghai but remained in touch with her family. One
day her mom called from North Korea. “I’ve got a few
kilos of ice,” or crystal meth, she said, and she asked for
Lee’s help in selling it in China. “In her world, the law
was upside down,” Lee says, explaining how corruption
and cynicism had shredded the social fabric of North
Korea. “People had to break the law to live.”
It’s fair to wonder how accurate these books are, for
there’s some incentive when selling a memoir to embel-
lish adventures. I don’t know, and in the case of “In
Order to Live,” skeptics have noted inconsistencies in
the stories and raised legitimate questions.
So how did North Korea come to be the most bizarre
country in the world? For the history, one can’t do better
than Bradley K. Martin’s magisterial UNDER THE LOVING
CARE OF THE FATHERLY LEADER: North Korea and the Kim Dy-
nasty (St. Martin’s Griffin, paper, $29.99).
Martin recounts
how a minor anti-Japanese guerrilla leader named Kim
Il-sung came to be installed by the Russians as leader of
the half of the Korean peninsula they controlled after
World War II. Martin discovers that Kim’s father was a
Christian and a church organist, and Kim himself at-
tended church for a time. That didn’t last, and Kim later
banned pretty much all religion — though he became
something of a god himself, quite a trick for an atheist.
But do North Koreans really believe in this “religion”?
Judging from defectors I’ve interviewed and much of
the literature on North Korea, many do — especially
older people, farmers and those farther from the North
Korean border. That’s partly a tribute to the country’s
shameless propaganda, which B.R. Myers explores in his
interesting book, THE CLEANEST RACE: How North
Koreans See Themselves — And Why It Matters
(Melville House, paper, $16). He notes that North
Korea produced a poster showing a Christian
missionary murdering a Korean child and
calling for “revenge against the Yankee vam-
pires” — at the same time that the United
States was the country’s single largest donor
of humanitarian aid. Myers argues that North
Koreans have focused on what he calls “race-
based paranoid nationalism,” including bizarre
ideas about how Koreans are “the cleanest
race” — hence the title — bullied and perse-
cuted by outsiders.
For a more sympathetic view of North Korea’s
emergence, check out various books by Bruce
Cumings, a University of Chicago historian, like
KOREA’S PLACE IN THE SUN: A Modern History (W.W.
Norton, paper, $19.95). Cumings argues that North
Korea is to some degree a genuine expression of
Korean nationalism. I think Cumings is nuts
when he says, “it is Americans who bear the
lion’s share of the responsibility” for the division
of the Korean peninsula. But his work is worth
reading — unless you have high blood pressure, in which
case consult a physician first.
Whatever the uncertainties about the accuracy of
recent North Korean memoirs, it’s absolutely clear that
some stories about North Korea are fabricated — be-
cause they’re fiction. Today’s political crisis with Pyong-
yang is a great excuse to read Adam Johnson’s THE OR-
PHAN MASTER’S SON, Random House, paper, $17), which won
the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2013. Johnson tells the
story of a military man turned prisoner turned celebrity
turned villain, dealing for a while with utterly confused
American visitors — an account so implausible and
bizarre that it’s a perfect narrative for North Korea.
The other fiction that I’d recommend is the Inspector
O series by James Church, the pseudonym of a well-
respected Western intelligence expert on North Korea.
Inspector O is a North Korean police officer who investi-
gates murders, a bank robbery and various other of-
fenses, periodically dealing with foreigners and turning
down chances to defect.
Inspector O is a complex, nuanced figure who under-
stands that the regime he serves is corrupt, brutal and
mendacious, but he remains loyal. That’s because he is a
deeply patriotic and nationalistic Korean, and he resents
the patronizing scorn of bullying Westerners. I think
many North Korean officials today are an echo of the
conflicted nationalist Inspector O. 0
PHOTOGRAPH BY ED JONES/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES
0
You’re Getting Sleepy
Two authors delve into the mystery of anesthesia.
By HENRY MARSH
A FEW YEARS AGO I suffered a retinal de-
tachment that required fairly urgent surgi-
cal treatment. The surgeon came to see me
on the morning of the operation and said
that I could choose between local and gen-
eral anesthesia. The thought of having
three large needles stuck into my eyeball,
and the vitreous humor then being sucked
out while I was awake, did not appeal. I
thought of the lines from “King Lear,” spo-
ken by Cornwall as he cuts out Glouce-
ster’s eyes: “Out, vile jelly!” To my sur-
ANESTHESIA
The Gift of Oblivion and the Mystery of
Consciousness
By Kate Cole-Adams
400 pp. Counterpoint. $28.
COUNTING BACKWARDS
A Doctor’s Notes on Anesthesia
By Henry Jay Przybylo
240 pp. W.W. Norton & Company. $25.95.
geon’s obvious relief I opted for a general
anesthetic — it is much less stressful to op-
erate on unconscious than conscious pa-
tients, especially if they are your profes-
sional colleagues. There was a certain
irony to this as my neurosurgical practice
largely involved removing brain tumors
from my own patients while they were
awake, under local anesthetic.
At this point an anesthesiologist burst
into the room — he must have been listen-
ing at the keyhole, awaiting my decision.
He rapidly assessed my fitness for anes-
thesia and 30 minutes later he was putting
a needle into the back of my hand and in-
jecting the drug propofol. I was asleep, as
doctors say — although the state of being
anesthetized has nothing in common with
sleep — within a matter of seconds.
Anesthesiologists (anesthetists in the
British idiom) are the unsung heroes and
heroines of modern medicine. It would be
impossible without them. Their duty is to
keep us unconscious and pain free, while
the more conspicuously heroic surgeons
do their work. Patients, therefore, see very
little of them and probably do not realize
that during surgery their lives depend
much more on the skills of the anesthesiol-
ogist than on the surgeon’s.
As the anesthesiologist Henry Jay Przy-
bylo explains in “Counting Backwards,”
the word “anesthesia” means “without
feeling,” but a modern general anesthetic
is about much more than just rendering a
patient unconscious. It also involves anal-
gesia, the prevention of pain; anxiolysis,
the relief of anxiety; and amnesia, the
obliteration of memory. The latter is neces-
sary because it is by no means certain that
patients are fully unconscious when anes-
HENRY MARSH is the author, most recently, of
“Admissions: Life as a Brain Surgeon.”
thetized — a problem explored at length in
Kate Cole-Adams’s book “Anesthesia.”
Despite the central role that anesthetic
drugs play in medicine, very little about
how they work is known for certain.
Equally remarkable is the fact that ether,
the first agent to be used as a general anes-
thetic, was shown by Paracelsus in the 16th
century to put chickens to sleep. He wrote
that it “quiets all suffering without any
harm and relieves all pain . . . ” It remains
mysterious as to why 300 years were to
pass before it came to be used as a general
anesthetic. Some would point to Kuhn’s sci-
entific paradigms and argue that medicine
wasn’t ready for such a shift in thinking,
others that it reflects the entirely unscien-
tific nature of premodern medicine and the
blinkered self-confidence of doctors. There
are, of course, many similar examples in
the history of medicine — perhaps the
most egregious being the failure of the
medical profession to exploit Leeuwen-
hoek’s invention in the 17th century of the
microscope and his discovery of microbial
life, as discussed in David Wootton’s book
“Bad Medicine.”
Several American doctors began to use
ether as a general anesthetic in the 1840s.
There were bitter disputes about who
could claim to be the first, but what is clear
is that ether was rapidly taken up by the
medical profession. It is interesting to note
that it was also widely used as a recrea-
tional drug in countries like Ireland and
Poland, where it was used as an alternative
to alcohol.
CHRISTOPHER SILAS NEAL
It is by no means certain that all of
your brain is ‘asleep’ when you are
anesthetized.
Ether is no longer used in general anes-
thesia, and has been replaced by different
“volatile” agents — such as sevoflurane
and isoflurane. The way in which these vol-
atile anesthetic agents dissolve in oil led to
the theory that they worked by interfering
with the lipoprotein membranes of nerve
cells, implying that all the brain’s neurons
were inactivated by the drugs and that the
unconsciousness of general anesthesia
was complete. This theory is no longer be-
lieved and instead there is near-complete
uncertainty as to how the agents do work.
More recent research on injectable anes-
thetic drugs like propofol suggests that
they interfere selectively with certain neu-
rotransmitters and with the interaction be-
tween the cerebral cortex (where thought
and perception resides) and the deep part
of the cerebral hemispheres known as the
thalamus, which acts as some kind of gate-
way between the cerebral cortex and the
rest of the brain. In other words, it is by no
means certain that all of your brain is
“asleep” when you are anesthetized.
THE POSSIBILITY OF “awareness under an-
esthesia” is obviously of deep concern to
both anesthesiologists and patients and is
reminiscent of the fear in previous ages of
being buried alive after being mistakenly
assumed dead. Awareness became a clini-
cal problem in the 1940s with the introduc-
tion of the paralyzing drug curare. Until
then, if an anesthetic was inadequate, the
patient would start to wake up and to
move. With curare this cannot happen and
it is possible for patients to be awake and,
since they are entirely paralyzed, for the
anesthesiologist to be unaware of it.
Awareness undoubtedly can occur un-
der anesthesia although there is much ar-
gument as to how often. A 2014 survey in
the United Kingdom of three million cases
of anesthesia suggested an incidence of 1 in
19,000 with not all the episodes causing dis-
tress. This survey relied on patients volun-
teering their memory of being aware, so it
is possible that some chose not to report
the experience and that the true incidence
might be higher. The issue is further com-
plicated by the possibility of implicit or
“unconscious” memory as opposed to con-
scious or “explicit” memory. The “explicit”
memories would be the horror stories of
patients wide-awake but unable to move
while being operated on, usually as a result
of medical error. It seems that the paraly-
sis is even more distressing than the pain
and can lead to long-term psychiatric
harm and PTSD. Implicit, unconscious
memories of being awake under anesthe-
sia are much harder to uncover.
Cole-Adams makes much of these sorts
of hidden memories in her book, and of var-
ious experiments with hypnotizing pa-
tients before and after anesthesia to find
them, but as she admits, the evidence is
confused and contradictory. Nevertheless,
some anesthesiologists are careful in what
they say in front of anesthetized patients in
case the patient is able to later recall what
they overheard. This is quite unlike sur-
geons who, on the whole, are disinhibited
extroverts when operating.
A good experience of anesthesia should
be as routine and dull as a commercial air-
plane ride, with the added feature that the
patient should have no memory of it. Both
anesthesia and flight have become dra-
matically safer in recent decades and there
is much in common between flying an air-
craft and anesthetizing a patient — un-
eventful most of the time but occasionally
terrifying and very occasionally fatal. The
Patient Safety movement of recent years
has been largely driven by anesthesiolo-
gists and analogies to aviation safety,
which perhaps apply less well to surgery.
It is difficult to write an exciting book
about modern anesthesia but Przybylo is
thoughtful and workmanlike in his produc-
tion, as he is, it is quite clear, when adminis-
tering his anesthetics. Consciousness is an
entirely subjective phenomenon and, per-
haps inevitably given its subtitle, you will
learn as much, if not more, about Cole-Ad-
ams’s own anxieties and preoccupations as
you will about anesthesia in her book. The
effect, as she streams her consciousness
over many pages, can in itself be some-
what anesthetic. 0
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW 19
0
Book People
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1
quer worlds. This review is printed in a
variant of it.
The narrative gallops on
Mesopotamia, Nineveh, clay tablets, cune-
iform and Gilgamesh. Puchner explains it
all with brio. By Page 50 Ashurbanipal is a
name the reader will feel able to drop
knowingly into any conversation on liter-
ary matters.
In chronological procession there follow
Buddha, Confucius (a notably
brilliant chapter), “The Tale of
Genji” (hooray, at last, for the
woman author), the Mayas (a
dark episode), the Gospels, Gu-
tenberg, Muhammad, Luther,
Cervantes, Goethe, Benjamin
Franklin, Thomas Jefferson,
Marx and Engels, the African
epic of Sunjata — on, on and on
to Derek Walcott (“new nations
need stories to tell them who
they are,” writes Puchner) and
Harry Potter (“repetitive,”
alas).
The invention and spread of
paper gave literature wings. So
too did print and in our day, the
web. Looking at his screen,
Puchner wonders what founda-
tional texts will flicker down to
us.
There is a joyous personality
in this book. Puchner gives
more of himself to the reader
than most literary historians.
As a child, he confides, he was
entranced by the “Arabian
Nights” — only cliff-hanging
bedtime stories to her husband
can save Scheherazade from The Anna-Amalia library in Leipzig in 2001, before a fire that destroyed up to 30,000 priceless books in 2004.
being a one-night queen and
next morning’s bridal corpse.
But who originated this bundle
of tales? The question nags at Puchner. He
has a dream that he describes at length.
What does the dream tell him? Stop look-
ing. Searching is futile.
Puchner describes himself, modestly, as
a “teacher” (so, of course, did Confucius).
In fact he occupies an endowed chair at
Harvard. But he doesn’t sit on it. Fieldwork
for “The Written World” takes him to every
continent, digging inexhaustibly into cul-
tures for their foundational and sacred
stories. Martin Puchner’s score on Rate-
MyProfessors.com must be sky-high. I
suspect he is as enlightening at the lectern
as on the page. But is he right? One thinks
uneasily of other foundational texts —
“Mein Kampf,” Mao’s “Little Red Book,”
“The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” —
that have exercised anything but a civiliz-
ing force. It would be nice to discuss such
things with this brilliant scholar. Or duti-
JOHN SUTHERLAND’S next book, “The Brexit
Guide to (Really) English Literature,” will be
published in the spring.
20 SUN DAY , JA N UA RY 7 , 2018
fully listen — like Confucius’s pupils.
Abigail Williams works on a smaller
scale than Puchner, although she too con-
to cerns herself with how books condition
readers and their society. Her preferred
method is the illustrative vignette. It
makes for a lively survey. Her book, “The
Social Life of Books,” appears as part of a
series covering the history and culture of
the so-called “long 18th century” in Eng-
land. Her principal interest is the middle-
class home — “a semipublic reception
space” as she calls it, in a rare lapse into
jargon.
She is enlightening, to take one example,
when it comes to light, on how domestic
candlepower (at a period when wax can-
dles were expensive, and tallow candles
nasally offensive) framed the 18th-century
reading experience.
Samuel Johnson, one recalls, a fero-
ciously unsociable reader, and blind as a
bat, was constantly in danger of singeing
his wig against his candle. Like the single,
often feeble source of visual light, the fire
in a room on a cold night created an inti-
mate circle, as eager for bodily warmth as
entertainment or instruction. As Schopen-
hauer said, even porcupines cluster to-
gether when it’s chilly.
The period saw a fruitful connection be-
tween the literate bourgeoisie (then a mi-
nority but growing in social power) and
their reading matter. Books remained,
however, prohibitively expensive and
scarce. Library and cheap reprint systems
had yet to evolve.
Those factors created a drive toward
what Williams calls, with her favorite epi-
thet, “sociable” consumption. Books were
necessarily read aloud to a group. The sin-
gle copies were typically acquired in quires
(sheets) and bound by their owners (in-
variably male) defining them as personal
property, something certified by a pomp-
ous “ex libris” bookplate. Books had an
aura of hierarchy and patriarchy: the par-
In the 18th century, reading was
‘sociable,’ in the living room with
the whole family by the fire.
son in his pulpit, the politician at the dis-
patch box, the professor on the podium, pa-
terfamilias in his armchair.
Codes of secular decency were promul-
gated by Joseph Addison in his universally
popular “tea table” essays: short and in
themselves decent enough for an eve-
ning’s listening by mixed male, female and
younger audiences. Shakespeare was rig-
orously clipped, so as not to bring blushes
to maiden cheeks.
As any audiotape demonstrates, reading
aloud is slow. “Epitomes” and “extract”
volumes — especially of verse — were pop-
ular. Walter Scott, as a child, was famous
for his thrilling infant recitations to groups
of admiring adults. As the twig was bent, so
PHOTOGRAPH BY JENS-ULRICH KOCH/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES
the tree was formed. The Wizard of the
North never stopped thrilling.
Sociable reading encouraged a premium
on elocution. Sociable reading improved
the English tongue. And the English pen.
Correspondence became more fluent and
stylistic over the century. There were vir-
tuosos in the form, like Horace Walpole.
(Williams’s book is in a series named after
Walpole.) The manuscript diary and per-
sonal, commonplace book flourished.
Williams has read dozens of
them to make her points.
Sociable literacy took a varie-
ty of household forms.
Women embroidered poetic
maxims into samplers while lis-
tening. Recipe books in the
kitchen improved the food on
the table. Pages from the alma-
nac hung on the kitchen wall re-
minded the mistress of the
household of holy days and holi-
days. “Servants’ libraries” en-
deavored to instill moral stand-
ards in the lower classes. The
drawing room globe was the
most instructional furniture in
the house — invaluable during
a reading aloud of “Robinson
Crusoe.” In its little, domestic
world, writing civilized the mid-
dle-class home.
Williams avoids Jane Austen,
on the reasonable ground that a
lot has already been done on
her. The author of “Pride and
Prejudice” wrote privately, cov-
ering up her manuscript if any-
one came near. She read her fin-
ished work to a family audi-
ence. What would one not give
to be among them?
The rise of the novel tilted the
practice of reading toward pri-
vate and speedier consumption — but not
entirely. Samuel Richardson clearly ex-
pected his books to be sometimes read out
loud slowly — in a male voice, often, even
though the woman’s letter was his narra-
tive vehicle. Bedroom reading is, Williams
reminds us, very different from reading in
the drawing room, or on public transport
(the stage coach, at this period).
Williams’s book is welcome because her
research and insights make us conscious
of how we, today, use books. Does one,
reading Salman Rushdie, “hear” him? Or
do the words flash voicelessly to the brain?
We habitually inscribe books with our
names, to make them ours, a faint simu-
lacrum of the 18th-century bookplate and
private library. Our own “sociable” reading
takes the form of the best seller, which mil-
lions of us read at roughly the same time
with similar response.
Williams, in short, is to be congratulated
on a book, like Puchner’s, that makes us
think, while reading, about what reading
is. 0
0
Our Generation
Looking back at a classic American movie, half a century later.
By LISA SCHWARZBAUM
ASIDE FROM THE JOYFULLY cocky title of a
classic 1965 song by the Who, the phrase
“my generation” is not generally used by
anyone of my generation — or anyone else
either. While those living it make their own
discoveries, mistakes and art, genera-
tional descriptions are almost always the
work of elders (“the younger generation”),
youngers (“our parents’ generation”) or
marketers (Silent, Greatest, Boomer,
Pepsi) attempting to commodify the un-
SEDUCED BY MRS. ROBINSON
How ‘The Graduate’ Became the
Touchstone of a Generation
By Beverly Gray
Illustrated. 282 pp. Algonquin Books of Chapel
Hill. $24.95.
stoppable cultural changes that accompa-
ny the forward movement of time.
But here comes “Seduced by Mrs. Rob-
inson: How ‘The Graduate’ Became the
Touchstone of a Generation,” in which the
Santa Monica-based entertainment writer
Beverly Gray doubles down on the decla-
ration embedded in her book’s subtitle by
inserting herself throughout the pages as a
leading touchstone toucher: By “a genera-
tion,” she really means “my generation.”
And to prove it, the author, who has previ-
ously published books about the filmmak-
ers Roger Corman and Ron Howard, pops
up in first person throughout an otherwise
average recounting of the making of “The
Graduate” and its reception to say, “I was
there.”
At first, I couldn’t figure out why Gray
kept chiming in. (“How well I remember!”
she volunteers, describing thoroughly
well-documented changes in the 1960s Cal-
ifornia educational system.) After all, last
month marked the 50th anniversary of the
movie’s release, and that is reason enough
to throw “The Graduate” a poolside cock-
tail party on its own merits. Why strain so
hard to lay a personal generational narra-
tive on a Hollywood history far more inter-
esting than Gray or me or you or most any
individual reader who was or wasn’t
around in 1967 to help make the movie the
surprise hit it was?
(Why, too, does the author devote the
whole middle section of her book to what is
essentially a scene-by-scene recap, from
opening logo to closing moments? Those
who are interested in “Seduced by Mrs.
Robinson” have presumably seen the mov-
ie, and those who have not seen the movie
will not be enlightened by Gray’s chatty
narration for the visually impaired.)
A half-century has passed since the be-
wildered college graduate Benjamin Brad-
dock, played with star-making originality
LISA SCHWARZBAUM, a former critic at Enter-
tainment Weekly, is a freelance journalist.
PHOTOGRAPHS, CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: UNITED ARTISTS; EMBASSY PICTURES/GETTY IMAGES; BETTMANN
Anne Bancroft and Dustin Hoffman in “The Graduate.” Katharine Ross as Elaine.
by a then largely unknown Dustin Hoff-
man, floated, directionless, in his parents’
glassy Beverly Hills pool, and was told (by
someone of his Parents’ Generation) that
the future lay in “plastics.” It has been a
half-century since Anne Bancroft smol-
dered as the seductive Mrs. Robinson, an
unhappy woman who was the opposite of
bewildered — an adult mature enough to
know she was trapped in the hell of plastic
marital conventions. It has been 50 years
since Hoffman, Bancroft and the incandes-
cently creative team of the director Mike
Nichols and the screenwriter Buck Henry
took Charles Webb’s small 1963 novel of do-
mestic discontents and turned it into a
movie that epitomized huge shifts in both
popular culture and Hollywood commerce.
Then again, all this has been recounted
before, with nuanced and perceptive syn-
thesis, by Mark Harris in his popular 2008 A famous still photo from the film, also used on the cover of the original soundtrack album.
history, “Pictures at a Revolution: Five
Movies and the Birth of the New Holly-
wood,” now a classic of cultural reporting interview took place in 2015.)
and analysis. (Gray refers to Harris, a ‘The Graduate’ epitomized huge Gray says in her acknowledgments that
friend of mine, more than once.) And, for a shifts in both popular culture and her book “rose like a phoenix from the
fine magazine-length version, a reader can Hollywood commerce. ashes of a previous project.” Was it shelved
call up Sam Kashner’s 2008 Vanity Fair after “Pictures at a Revolution” and the
piece “Here’s to You, Mr. Nichols: The Vanity Fair history of “The Graduate”
Making of ‘The Graduate.’” waiting their chance to schmooze with the came out in 2008, making her version a
“Seduced by Mrs. Robinson” is a puz- star.” Recent allegations of sexual har- making-of too many? Is it out now by the
zling project. It is also a compilation of an assment by Hoffman may dim a reader’s luck of a marketed golden anniversary?
awful lot of distracting clichés. The famous envy at the opportunity for schmoozing. This formerly youthful moviegoer would
camera shot of Hoffman framed by the Do not take this as a nose-thumb so like to know. In the meantime, she recom-
crook of Bancroft’s stockinged leg is a mo- much as a brow-furrow. The author’s inter- mends looking up the provocative re-re-
ment “that lives on in film history.” The view with Hoffman took place in 2008 — view written by Roger Ebert in 1997 to
voices of the movie’s fans “still echo and here we come to a clue to understand- mark the movie’s 30th anniversary. The
through the years.” Gray cites notebook ing the book’s tortured structure, its movie critic, who died in 2013, was in his
entries the producer Lawrence Turman pained search for an angle: Most of the re- youthful-enough 20s in 1967 when he de-
made “when the project was merely a search seems to have taken place a decade clared “The Graduate” “the funniest
gleam in his eye.” She explains that “The ago. The majority of Gray’s direct report- American comedy of the year.” Three dec-
Graduate” appealed to “high-spirited ing comes from two long interviews with ades later, he saw that Hoffman’s Ben-
young rebels who delighted in thumbing Turman, now 91, who, as a Hollywood jamin was an “insufferable creep,” and that
their noses at the status quo.” She inter- novice, was canny enough to obtain the Bancroft’s Mrs. Robinson — “sardonic, sa-
views Hoffman “at a film industry gather- rights to Webb’s novel. The first of those in- tirical and articulate” — was “the only per-
ing, held at an upscale Beverly Hills Mexi- terviews took place in 2007. Turman pub- son in the movie you would want to have a
can eatery,” where “he proved surprisingly lished his own book, “So You Want to Be a conversation with.”
approachable, despite the throngs of fans Producer,” in 2005. (The second Turman Ebert was talkin’ ’bout my generation. 0
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW 21
0

Children’s Books / For the Love of Malt Shop Novels / By Joanne Kaufman

IN SEVENTH-GRADE ENGLISH CLASS we were required to

keep lists of the books we read for pleasure, with brief
reviews — an adjective or two — then post them on a
wall by the door. I was a bookworm, and eager to please.
I quickly notched “Gone With the Wind” (“great”), “Jane
Eyre” (“so good”), and “Wild December,” a fictionalized
account of the Brontës (“really interesting”).
Then I paused. I was about to add my favorite of the
bunch: “A Date for Diane,” by Betty Cavanna. Could I
admit publicly that I adored it? I could not. “Dumb!” I
wrote. My first literary lie.
The book and its sequels, “Diane’s New Love” and
“Toujours Diane,” were known, I would later learn, as
malt shop novels. Written from the 1940s to the
mid-1960s, they tracked a teenage protagonist as she
navigated the obstacle course of first love. (And if part of
a series, second love.)
The authors had their specialties. Cavanna tended to
write about not-quite-pretty girls with artistic ambitions
or interests like aviation or competitive skiing. Anne
Emery sometimes worked that same earnest side of the
street, notably in her four-novel account of Dinny Gor-
don, a budding classicist. Lenora Mattingly Weber was
known for a 14-book cycle about a close-knit Irish Catho-
lic family, the Malones, with a focus on its youngest
member, Beany.
Occasionally, the books tackled substantive matters:
economic inequality, alcoholism, racism and anti- THE NEW YORK TIMES

Semitism. More often — and here I’m thinking of

Rosamund du Jardin — the protagonists had to cope
only with what they viewed as an unreasonable number
of freckles and an unreasonable curfew.
“These novels captured the culture of a particular time
in postwar America,” said Richard Robinson, the chief
executive of Scholastic, whose book clubs had titles from
the Cavanna, du Jardin and Emery oeuvres. “They pro-
jected an optimistic view of life, of how you fit in, how
you got along with your peers and related to boys.”
Siblings may have hogged the bathroom or the tele-
phone, parents may have refused to negotiate when it
came to allowances, dates on school nights and a new
dress for the prom, but families in these books were
enviably high-functioning.
I became an 11-year-old whiz on the topic of chiffon
scarves, peplums, pancake makeup and the dating ritu-
als of bobby-sox wearers (granted, a strange preoccupa-
tion in the late 1960s). They went to double features and
sock hops, then climbed into somebody’s jalopy to meet
the gang for a milk shake at Joe’s Grill or McKnight’s
Drugstore. I was transfixed and I was insatiable. While
my mother toured J. L. Hudson, a Detroit department
store, I skittered over to a rack of paperbacks, most with
a pastel image of a girl in a skirt on the cover and a
square of plaid on the spine.
It’s true that the titles ran together. There was “Fif-
teen,” by the inimitable Beverly Cleary; “Going on Six-
teen,” by Cavanna; “Sweet Sixteen,” by Emery; and
“Practically Seventeen,” by Rosamond du Jardin.
It is also true that the plots were formulaic, and that
the authors, while concerned with their characters’
moral development, weren’t much for psychological
complexity.
But as a bespectacled preadolescent with early onset
acne, I found these books an endless source of reassur-
ance and hope. You could be plain and scholarly, like
Dinny Gordon, and still have boys eager to go out with
you. You could be self-doubting like Jane Purdy, the
JOANNE KAUFMAN writes for The Times, The Wall Street Journal
and other publications.
‘These books are like fairy tales. The girl has a
problem at the beginning and it gets resolved by
the end.’
protagonist of “Fifteen,” and, nevertheless, end up wear-
ing the ID bracelet of cute green-eyed Stan.
My recall of plot details (Stan worked for a dog food
delivery service; on an early date with Jane they went to
a Chinese restaurant in San Francisco) is encyclopedic.
My recall of character names (Beany Malone’s siblings
were Johnny, Mary Fred and Elizabeth) is embarrassing.
I wish I could remember “Middlemarch” with similar
clarity.
I was 21 when my parents sold the family house, and I
tossed Beany and Dinny, Tobey and Midge. Years later,
feeling slightly wistful, I began to regret my decision. But
the books, long out of print, were going for $100 or more.
I recently found a kindred spirit in Joy Canfield, a
psychologist and academic publisher. In the late 1990s,
she began searching for the Beany Malone series, and
was poleaxed by the high prices. It occurred to her that
perhaps she wasn’t the only one who wanted to revisit
the Ragged Robin drive-in.
Playing on that hunch, Canfield began contacting the
authors’ families and executors for permission to re-issue
the novels with the original cover art.
She founded Image Cascade in 1999, republishing 14
paperback titles that first year. By 2009 there were 160.
With sales of several thousand copies a year, Canfield, 56,
hopes to continue expanding the roster. “I love these
books, I absolutely love them,” she said.
Her buyers? “There is definitely a group of moms and
grandmas who are buying the books for their daughters
and granddaughters,” Canfield said, “but the majority of
our customers are middle-aged women who read the
books in their youth and are buying copies so they can
reread them.”
They include Janet Travis, who read “Fifteen” and
“Sister of the Bride” as a teenager. A few years ago,
after a hunt in a used-book store yielded a copy of “Sen-
ior Year,” one of five novels about the sisters Jean and
Sally Burnaby by Emery, she ordered the rest of the
series from Image Cascade.
“Current teen fiction is far more complicated and
nuanced,” said Travis, 50, who lives in Pittsfield, Mass.,
and is the managing editor of a publishing company.
“These books are like fairy tales. The girl has a problem
at the beginning and it gets resolved by the end.”
If others want to laugh at Travis for reading novels
intended for long-ago teenagers, let them. They see a
silly love story. She sees a sociology text. “I get to learn
about the clothes and the cars of the ’40s and ’50s and
about how a bedroom was decorated,” she said. “I read
etiquette books from that period and there’s some inter-
section. It’s seeing how a teenage girl would speak to
her mother or her teacher. These books are a glimpse
into a world that isn’t there anymore.”
Rosemary Parker, 66, discovered malt shop novels in
the fifth grade. Cavanna, du Jardin, Emery — she read
them all, but she had a particular affinity for the Beany
Malone books. The local library had three; she checked
them out over and over.
“Beany was part of a big bustling family and every
book had a problem to be addressed,” said Parker, a
retired newspaper reporter who lives in Otsego, Mich.
“There were anxieties about dating and how to treat
friends and tucking in a shirt so a stain didn’t show.
“It all rang so true to me and still does.”
A glass-fronted bookcase at the top of Parker’s stair-
way holds a complete set of Beany Malone books in
hardcover, the fruits of a long search. Some were library
discards, some were found on the internet.
Her five children and her friends know the rules:
You’re welcome to read the books but they don’t leave
the house. Ever. “And I’ve also told my kids, ‘When I die
don’t throw them in the Goodwill cart,’” Parker said.
“‘They’re hardcover. Put them on eBay. They may be
valuable.’”
No. Priceless. 0

22 SU NDAY, JA N UA RY 7 , 2 018
0

BestSellers
For the complete best-seller lists, visit
nytimes.com/best-sellers

SALES PERIOD OF DECEMBER 17-23

COMBINED PRINT AND E-BOOK BEST SELLERS

WEEKS
THIS
WEEK
LAST
WEEK Fiction WEEKS
ON LIST
THIS
WEEK
LAST
WEEK Nonfiction ON LIST

1 2 ORIGIN, by Dan Brown. (Doubleday) A symbology professor goes on a perilous quest

with a beautiful museum director.
12
1 4 GRANT, by Ron Chernow. (Penguin Press) A biography of the Union general of the Civil
War and two-term president of the United States.
11

2 1 THE ROOSTER BAR, by John Grisham. (Doubleday) Three students at a sleazy for-profit
law school hope to expose the student-loan banker who runs it.
9
2 1 LEONARDO DA VINCI, by Walter Isaacson. (Simon & Schuster) A biography of the
Italian Renaissance polymath which connects his work in various disciplines.
10

3 3 THE SUN AND HER FLOWERS, by Rupi Kaur. (Andrews McMeel) A new collection of
poetry from the author of “Milk and Honey.”
12
3 3 PROMISE ME, DAD, by Joe Biden. (Flatiron Books) The former vice president recalls
his toughest year in office, as his son battled brain cancer.
6

4 5 THE PEOPLE VS. ALEX CROSS, by James Patterson. (Little, Brown) Detective Cross
takes on a case even though he has been suspended from the department and taken to
5
4 2 OBAMA, by Pete Souza. (Little, Brown) More than 300 pictures of the former president
by his White House photographer, with behind-the-scenes stories.
7

federal court to stand trial on murder charges.

5 6 ASTROPHYSICS FOR PEOPLE IN A HURRY, by Neil deGrasse Tyson. (Norton) A 33

5 7 MILK AND HONEY, by Rupi Kaur. (Andrews McMeel) Poetic approaches to surviving
adversity and loss.
45 straightforward, easy-to-understand introduction to the laws that govern the universe.

6 9 KILLING ENGLAND, by Bill O’Reilly and Martin Dugard. (Holt) Major events and battles 14

6 4 DARKER, by E. L. James. (Vintage) Christian Grey’s tormented and difficult pursuit of

Anastasia Steele is told from his perspective.
4 during the Revolutionary War are told from several perspectives.

7 5 ANDREW JACKSON AND THE MIRACLE OF NEW ORLEANS, by Brian Kilmeade and 9

7 6 THE MIDNIGHT LINE, by Lee Child. (Delacorte) Jack Reacher tracks down the owner of
a pawned West Point class ring and stumbles upon a large criminal enterprise.
7 Don Yaeger. (Sentinel) Major General Jackson takes on the British in Louisiana.

8 7 BOBBY KENNEDY, by Chris Matthews. (Simon & Schuster) The New York senator’s 8

8 10 ARTEMIS, by Andy Weir. (Crown) A small-time smuggler living in a lunar colony

schemes to pay off an old debt by pulling off a challenging heist.
6 journey from his formative years to his tragic run for president.

9 10 KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON, by David Grann. (Doubleday) The story of a murder 28

9 8 YEAR ONE, by Nora Roberts. (St. Martin’s) When a pandemic strikes and the world
spins into chaos, several travelers head west to find a new life.
3 spree in 1920s Oklahoma that targeted Osage Indians, whose lands contained oil.

10 8 LET TRUMP BE TRUMP, by Corey R. Lewandowski and David N. Bossie. (Center Street) 3

10 11 READY PLAYER ONE, by Ernest Cline. (Broadway) It’s 2044, life on a resource-
depleted Earth has grown increasingly grim, and the key to a vast fortune is hidden in a
6 Insider accounts of the Republican presidential campaign and its outcome by two of its
advisers.
virtual-reality world.
11 12 WHAT HAPPENED, by Hillary Rodham Clinton. (Simon & Schuster) An inside look at 15

11 12 LITTLE FIRES EVERYWHERE, by Celeste Ng. (Penguin Press) An artist upends a quiet
town outside Cleveland.
9 her campaign and how she recovered in its aftermath.

12 14 ENDURANCE, by Scott Kelly. (Knopf) A memoir by the retired astronaut and former 9

12 9 END GAME, by David Baldacci. (Grand Central) Jessica Reel and Will Robie fight a
dangerous adversary in Colorado.
6 commander of the International Space Station.

13 11 THE LAST BLACK UNICORN, by Tiffany Haddish. (Gallery) The comedian recounts 3

13 13 TOM CLANCY POWER AND EMPIRE, by Marc Cameron. (Putnam) President Jack
Ryan seeks to identify the hidden forces escalating the tensions between China and the
4 growing up in South Central Los Angeles, exacting revenge on an ex-boyfriend and
finding success after a period of homelessness.
United States.
14 13 SISTERS FIRST, by Jenna Bush Hager and Barbara Pierce Bush. (Grand Central) How 9

14 SLEEPING BEAUTIES, by Stephen King and Owen King. (Scribner) Women who fall
asleep become shrouded in mysterious cocoons while the men battle one another.
5 the twin daughters of former president George W. Bush grew up in the public eye.

15 WE WERE EIGHT YEARS IN POWER, by Ta-Nehisi Coates. (One World) A series of 7

15 14 HARDCORE TWENTY-FOUR, by Janet Evanovich. (Putnam) When a homeless man is

murdered, the bounty hunter Stephanie Plum searches for the killer.
6 essays that cover each year of the Obama administration, the writer’s own journey and
the echoes of American history in modern times.

A dagger (†) indicates that some bookstores report receiving bulk orders. ONLINE: E-BOOKS AND EXPANDED RANKINGS : For more lists, more titles, more rankings and a full explanation of our methodology, visit www.nytimes.com/best-sellers.

Editors’ Choice / Staff Picks From the Book Review

..............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................

GHOSTS OF THE TSUNAMI: Death and Life in Japan’s PALE RIDER: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the THE ENDS OF THE WORLD: Volcanic Apocalypses,
Disaster Zone, by Richard Lloyd Parry. (Farrar, Straus & World, by Laura Spinney. (PublicAffairs, $28.) The Spanish flu Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand
Giroux, $27.) A British journalist, long resident in tends to be overshadowed by World War I in our cultural memo- Earth’s Past Mass Extinctions, by Peter Brannen.
Tokyo, probes the emotional and spiritual effects of ry, but Spinney, a novelist and science writer, draws on medical (Ecco, $27.99.) Earth has undergone five major mass
the catastrophe that killed thousands of men, women mysteries and haunting vignettes to give the pandemic its due. extinctions and Brannen tells us about all the destruc-
and children in 2011. tion in great detail.
THE GREAT QUAKE: How the Biggest Earthquake in
THE DOOMSDAY MACHINE: Confessions of a Nuclear War Plan- North America Changed Our Understanding of the DISCOVERING THE MAMMOTH: A Tale of Giants, Unicorns, Ivory,
ner, by Daniel Ellsberg. (Bloomsbury, $30.) When the Cold War Planet, by Henry Fountain. (Crown, $28.) In 1964, and the Birth of a New Science, by John J. McKay. (Pegasus
ended in 1991, nuclear weapons vanished from the minds of most Alaska experienced an earthquake so powerful that, Books, $27.95.) McKay examines our long fascination with the
Americans. But Ellsberg, the former Defense Department ana- in one town, the resulting tidal wave swept away a mysterious, extinct pachyderms that once roamed the earth.
lyst who leaked the Pentagon Papers, sounds an impassioned third of the residents. Fountain avidly explains both
INHERITORS OF THE EARTH: How Nature Is Thriving in an Age of
alarm, warning that the dangers of nuclear conflict remain. the science and the human toll.
Extinction, by Chris D. Thomas. (PublicAffairs, $28.) Perhaps our
MEGAFIRE: The Race to Extinguish a Deadly Epidemic of Flame, WINTER OF ICE AND IRON, by Rachel Neumeier. (Saga, $29.99.) The “ecological despair,” as Thomas puts it, is overblown; he argues
by Michael Kodas. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $28.) An account of plot of Neumeier’s epic fantasy of magic and political intrigue we are seeing a sixth evolution rather than a sixth extinction.
the misguided history and dire results of America’s wildfire feels familiar, but her writing has a spare, haunting quality that
management policy that also captures the Sisyphean struggles of makes up for it. The characters hook; this is more satisfying The full reviews of these and other recent books are on the
the men and women who battle blazes for a living. comfort food than most. web: nytimes.com/books

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW 23

0

Inside the List PRINT | HARDCOVER BEST SELLERS SALES PERIOD OF DECEMBER 17-23
G R E GO RY COWLES

....................................................
THIS LAST WEEKS THIS LAST WEEKS
WEEK WEEK Fiction ON LIST WEEK WEEK Nonfiction ON LIST

Crime Spree: In 2017, no novel spent

more time on the hardcover fiction list
1 1 THE ROOSTER BAR, by John Grisham. (Doubleday) Three
students at a sleazy for-profit law school hope to expose
9
1 3 GRANT, by Ron Chernow. (Penguin Press) A biography of
the Union general of the Civil War and two-term president.
11

than “A Gentleman in Moscow,” Amor the student-loan banker who runs it.
Towles’s elegant tale of a Russian count 2 1 LEONARDO DA VINCI, by Walter Isaacson. (Simon & 10

confined for decades to house arrest at
the Metropol Hotel for
writing a poem that
2 2 ORIGIN, by Dan Brown. (Doubleday) A symbology professor
goes on a perilous quest with a beautiful museum director.
12 Schuster) A biography of the Italian Renaissance polymath
which connects his work in various disciplines.
3 3 THE PEOPLE VS. ALEX CROSS, by James Patterson.
(Little, Brown) Detective Cross takes on a case even
5
3 2 OBAMA, by Pete Souza. (Little, Brown) More than 300
pictures of the former president by his White House
7

displeased the Bolshe-

though he has been suspended from the department and photographer, with behind-the-scenes stories.
viks. Towles’s novel taken to federal court to stand trial on murder charges.
(his second, after
4 4 PROMISE ME, DAD, by Joe Biden. (Flatiron Books) The 6
“Rules of Civility”)
initially hit the list in
4 5 ARTEMIS, by Andy Weir. (Crown) A small-time smuggler
living in a lunar colony schemes to pay off an old debt by
6 former vice president recalls his toughest year in office.

‘On vaca- the fall of 2016, along-

pulling off a challenging heist. 5 7 ASTROPHYSICS FOR PEOPLE IN A HURRY, by Neil
deGrasse Tyson. (Norton) A straightforward, easy-to-
34

side new titles from

tions, I treat Carl Hiaasen, Jonathan
5 4 THE MIDNIGHT LINE, by Lee Child. (Delacorte) Jack
Reacher tracks down the owner of a pawned West Point
7 understand introduction to the universe.

myself to Safran Foer and James

reading mas- Lee Burke, among
class ring and stumbles upon a large criminal enterprise. 6 9 KILLING ENGLAND, by Bill O’Reilly and Martin Dugard.
(Holt) Major events and battles during the Revolutionary
14

terworks of other eminences — and 6 6 YEAR ONE, by Nora Roberts. (St. Martin’s) When a
pandemic strikes and the world spins into chaos, several
3 War are told from several perspectives.

crime fiction.’ then, like its protago-
nist, it just sort of hun-
kered down for the long haul. As the
travelers head west to find a new life. 7 5 ANDREW JACKSON AND THE MIRACLE OF NEW 9
ORLEANS, by Brian Kilmeade and Don Yaeger. (Sentinel)
7 9 TOM CLANCY POWER AND EMPIRE, by Marc Cameron.
(Putnam) President Jack Ryan seeks to identify the hidden
4 Major General Jackson takes on the British in Louisiana.

calendar turns on a new year, “A Gentle-

man in Moscow” has been a best seller
forces escalating international tensions. 8 6 BOBBY KENNEDY, by Chris Matthews. (Simon & Schuster)
The New York senator’s journey from his formative years to
8

for 46 weeks.
Obviously, people are reading Towles.
But what is Towles reading? I asked him
8 7 END GAME, by David Baldacci. (Grand Central) Jessica Reel
and Will Robie fight a dangerous adversary in Colorado.
6 his tragic run for president.
9 11 WHAT HAPPENED, by Hillary Rodham Clinton. (Simon & 15

by email over the holidays, and he sin-
gled out vintage mysteries. “On vaca-
tions, I treat myself to reading master-
9 10 SLEEPING BEAUTIES, by Stephen King and Owen King.
(Scribner) Women who fall asleep become shrouded in
13 Schuster) An inside look at her campaign and how she
recovered in its aftermath.
mysterious cocoons while the men battle one another.
10 8 LET TRUMP BE TRUMP, by Corey R. Lewandowski and 3

works of crime fiction,” he said. “My job 10
has been made easier by the Library of
America, the nonprofit organization that 11
8 LITTLE FIRES EVERYWHERE, by Celeste Ng. (Penguin
Press) An artist upends a quiet town outside Cleveland.
14 David N. Bossie. (Center Street) Insider accounts of the
Republican presidential campaign and its outcome. (†)
11 UNCOMMON TYPE, by Tom Hanks. (Knopf) Seventeen
short stories, each incorporating a typewriter, by the
10
11 10 KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON, by David Grann.
(Doubleday) The story of a murder spree in 1920s
27

publishes the best in American writing. Academy Award-winning actor. Oklahoma that targeted Osage Indians.
Over the last 20 years, L.O.A. has pub-
lished the collected novels of Raymond 12 12 HARDCORE TWENTY-FOUR, by Janet Evanovich. (Putnam) 6
12 13 ENDURANCE, by Scott Kelly. (Knopf) A memoir by the 10
Chandler, Ross Macdonald and Elmore When a homeless man is murdered, the bounty hunter former commander of the International Space Station.
Stephanie Plum searches for the killer.
Leonard, all available in box sets. Read-
ing these three authors chronologically 13 12 SISTERS FIRST, by Jenna Bush Hager and Barbara Pierce 9

not only serves as a tutorial on American
noir, it provides a nuanced portrayal of
Los Angeles from the 1940s to the 1990s in
13 14 A COLUMN OF FIRE, by Ken Follett. (Viking) A pair of
lovers find themselves on opposite sides of a conflict while
15 Bush. (Grand Central) How the twin daughters of former
president George W. Bush grew up in the public eye.
Queen Elizabeth fights to maintain her throne.
14 WE WERE EIGHT YEARS IN POWER, by Ta-Nehisi Coates. 10

which we can bear witness to the evolu-
tion of the city’s glamour, its seediness
and its sins — all from the comfort of our
14 13 TWO KINDS OF TRUTH, by Michael Connelly. (Little,
Brown) While he investigates the murder of two
8 (One World) A series of essays that cover each year of the
Obama administration and the writer’s own journey.
pharmacists, an old case comes back to haunt Harry Bosch.
15 THE MAGNOLIA STORY, by Chip Gaines and Joanna Gaines 30

armchair.” 15 MANHATTAN BEACH, by Jennifer Egan. (Scribner) The

first female diver at the Brooklyn Naval Yard during World
6 with Mark Dagostino. (W Publishing/Thomas Nelson) The
couple, who star in the HGTV show “Fixer Upper,” offer a
War II tries to understand why her father disappeared. look at their lives together.
Haunted: Jesmyn Ward’s “Sing, Un-
An asterisk (*) indicates that a book’s sales are barely distinguishable from those of the book above. A dagger (†) indicates that some bookstores report receiving bulk orders.
buried, Sing,” which won a National Book
Award in November and was one of the
Book Review’s 10 Best Books of 2017, also
hit the hardcover fiction list this year.
Paperback Row / BY JOUMANA KHATIB

When I asked Ward what books she had

enjoyed lately, she praised Peter Ho
Davies’s 2016 novel “The Fortunes” as
“riveting and luminous.” Davies, she said,
“follows several characters through
America’s past: Ah Ling, a railroad bar-
on’s valet, Anna May Wong, the first
Chinese-American Hollywood star, Vin-
cent Wong, who was killed in a hate
crime in Detroit in the 1970s, and John, a
biracial writer traveling to China to
adopt. All of them are so vividly rendered
the reader is awash in each character’s
American experience. Vincent Wong’s
section feels especially immediate, and I
will never forget the image of his friend
holding Vincent’s pulpy head in his lap
after he’s been beaten by two white men,
will never forget his skull feeling ‘like
rotten fruit.’ Like the best books, this one
haunts the reader well after the end.” 0
THE PERFECT NANNY, by Leila Slimani. Translated
by Sam Taylor. (Penguin, $16.) A bourgeois Pari-
sian family and its caretaker depend on one
another in insidious ways, with a tragic, and
violent, outcome. This domestic thriller touches
on racial and economic tensions, women’s
ambitions and souring family dynamics. Sli-
mani won the Prix Goncourt, France’s most
prestigious literary prize, for the novel in 2016.
SOUTH AND WEST: From a
Notebook, by Joan Didion.
(Vintage, $15.) Didion’s obser-
vations from a road trip with
her husband through the South
— including Louisiana, Missis-
sippi, and Alabama — were for
an assignment (never finished)
that her editors called “The Mind of the White
South.” In this slim volume, composed of writ-
ings from the 1970s, she contrasted California’s
resolute gaze to the future with the South’s
fixation on the past.
THE DRY, by Jane Harper. (Flatiron, $15.99) In
this debut novel, Federal Agent Aaron Falk
returns home to Australia’s parched farmlands
for the first time in years. The circumstances
are grisly — Falk’s best friend shot his wife
and child before killing himself — and the
surroundings are desperate; Falk’s visit takes
on a new urgency as he investigates his
friend’s death while guarding a childhood
secret.
YOURS IN TRUTH: A Personal Portrait of Ben
Bradlee, Legendary Editor of The Washing-
ton Post, by Jeff Himmelman. (Random House,
$18.) As the editor at the helm of The Post
during a transformative era, a friend to the
Kennedy family and a linchpin of Washington
social circles, Bradlee attained a near-mytho-
logical status. Himmelman, who was Bob
Woodward’s assistant and later a friend of
Bradlee’s, investigates his life, including a look
at the editor’s relationship with the Post pub-
lisher Katharine Graham.
THE HEARTS OF MEN, by Nickolas Butler. (Ecco/
HarperCollins, $16.99) Starting at a Wisconsin
Boy Scout camp in 1962, an unlikely and
fraught friendship unfolds over six decades.
The story — which our reviewer, Darin
Strauss, called a “gut-punch of a novel” — is
propelled along by moral choice and conse-
quence, and holds up “the Scouts, or rather the
few who live up to the Scout’s code, as para-
gons of what we’ve lost.”
LETTERS TO A YOUNG
MUSLIM, by Omar Saif
Ghobash. (Picador, $16.)
The author, the Emirati
ambassador to France,
addresses his sons, urging
them toward a worldview that synthesizes
faith and logic. As our reviewer, Kareem Ab-
dul-Jabbar, put it: Ghobash “encourages the
reader to accept a modern, enlightened path
that embraces diversity, not just within Islam
but among all religions.”

24 S UNDAY, JA N UA RY 7, 2018
0

CHILDREN’S BEST SELLERS SALES PERIOD OF DECEMBER 17-23

THIS
WEEK Middle Grade Hardcover WEEKS
ON LIST
THIS
WEEK Young Adult Hardcover WEEKS
ON LIST

1 WONDER, by R. J. Palacio. (Knopf) A boy with a

facial deformity starts school. (Ages 8 to 12)
124
1 TURTLES ALL THE WAY DOWN, by John Green.
(Dutton) Aza and Daisy investigate a mystery with
11

a reward of $100,000. (Ages 14 to 17)

2 AUGGIE & ME, by R. J. Palacio. (Knopf) A 56
collection of three stories from the “Wonder”
series. (Ages 8 to 12)
2 THE HATE U GIVE, by Angie Thomas. (Balzer &
Bray) A 16-year-old girl sees a police officer kill
43

her friend. (Ages 14 and up)

3 GOOD NIGHT STORIES FOR REBEL GIRLS, by Elena 26
Favilli and Francesca Cavallo. (Timbuktu Labs) The
lives of 100 influential women. (Ages 7 and up)
3 ONE OF US IS LYING, by Karen M. McManus.
(Delacorte) For five students, a detour into
26

detention ends in murder. (Ages 14 and up)

4 MINECRAFT: THE ISLAND, by Max Brooks. (Del 21
Rey) A lone castaway faces dangers in a strange
new world. (Ages 8 to 12)
4 THE BOOK OF DUST: LA BELLE SAUVAGE, by
Philip Pullman. (Knopf) The first volume of a
10

trilogy that starts before the beginning of “His Dark

5 GOOD NIGHT STORIES FOR REBEL GIRLS 2, by
Elena Favilli and Francesca Cavallo. (Timbuktu
1 Materials.” (Ages 14 and up)

Labs) One hundred more bedtime stories inspired

by extraordinary women. (Ages 5 to 8)
5 RENEGADES, by Marissa Meyer. (Feiwel and
Friends) The Renegades and the Anarchists clash
7

for control of Gatlon City. (Ages 12 to 17)

6 THE MAGIC MISFITS, by Neil Patrick Harris. 5
(Little, Brown) Carter and a band of magicians
team up to take on B. B. Bosso’s crooked carnies.
6 WONDER WOMAN: WARBRINGER, by Leigh
Bardugo. (Random House) Diana and Alia fight to
15

(Ages 8 to 12) save both of their worlds. (Ages 12 to 17)

7 WOMEN IN SCIENCE, by Rachel Ignotofsky.

(Ten Speed) Fifty women who have transformed
50
7 WARCROSS, by Marie Lu. (Putnam) A New York
bounty hunter is hired to track down a hacker in
14

science and technology. (Ages 8 to 12) Tokyo. (Ages 12 to 17)

8 WISHTREE, by Katherine Applegate. Illustrated by

Charles Santoso. (Feiwel and Friends) An oak tree
13
8 FIERCE, by Aly Raisman with Blythe Lawrence.
(Little, Brown) The Olympic gold medalist in
6

on which people leave their wishes, is threatened gymnastics tells her story of rising above life’s
to be cut down. (Ages 8 to 12) challenges. (Ages 12 to 18)

9 THE GIRL WHO DRANK THE MOON, by Kelly

Barnhill. (Algonquin) A sacrificial girl is saved by a
37
9 THE LANGUAGE OF THORNS, by Leigh Bardugo.
Illustrated by Sara Kipin. (Imprint) A collection of
12

good witch. (Ages 10 to 14) otherworldly fairy tales. (Ages 12 to 17)

10 THE DARK PROPHECY, by Rick Riordan. (Disney-

Hyperion) Lester, a.k.a. Apollo, summons the help
31
10 FAR FROM THE TREE, by Robin Benway.
(HarperTeen) Three siblings separated in infancy
3

of demigods to restore an Oracle. (Ages 9 to 12) find each other as teenagers. (Ages 13 to 17) A new book club from
PBS NewsHour and
THIS WEEKS THIS
WEEK Picture Books ON LIST WEEK Series WEEKS
ON LIST
The New York Times.
1 THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS, by Clement C.
Moore. Various illustrators. (Various publishers)
77
1 DIARY OF A WIMPY KID, written and illustrated by
Jeff Kinney. (Amulet) The travails and challenges
458
Find reading worth talking
Not a creature was stirring. (All ages) of adolescence. (Ages 9 to 12) about — join the club.
nytimes.com/nowreadthis
2 THROUGH YOUR EYES, by Ainsley Earhardt.
Illustrated by Ji-Hyuk Kim. (Aladdin) A mother
4
2 HARRY POTTER, by J. K. Rowling. (Scholastic) A
wizard hones his conjuring skills in the service of
457

learns life lessons from her daughter. (Ages 4 to 8) fighting evil. (Ages 10 and up)

3 DRAGONS LOVE TACOS, by Adam Rubin.

Illustrated by Daniel Salmieri. (Dial) What to serve
200
3 DOG MAN, by Dav Pilkey. (Scholastic) A dog’s
head is combined with a policeman’s body to
17

your dragon-guests. (Ages 3 to 5) create this hybrid supercop hound. (Ages 7 to 9)

4 HERE WE ARE, by Oliver Jeffers. (Philomel) A guide

for new arrivals to the planet Earth. (Ages 3 to 7)
6
4 DORK DIARIES, by Rachel Renée Russell. (Simon
& Schuster) Nikki Maxwell navigates the halls of
231
Join us every month, as
middle school. (Ages 9 to 13) we choose a book to read
5 SHE PERSISTED, by Chelsea Clinton. Illustrated 30 together as a nation. Tune
by Alexandra Boiger. (Philomel) Bringing to life 13
American women who changed the world. (Ages
5 CAPTAIN UNDERPANTS, written and illustrated by
Dav Pilkey. (Scholastic) Boys and their principal
98
in to PBS NewsHour to
4 to 8) fight evil. (Ages 7 to 10) watch an interview with
the authors.
6 HOW TO CATCH AN ELF, by Adam Wallace.
Illustrated by Andy Elkerton. (Sourcebooks
7
6 MAGNUS CHASE AND THE GODS OF ASGARD,
by Rick Riordan. (Disney-Hyperion) Magnus
12

Follow Now Read This

Jabberwocky) A tiny narrator dodges traps while Chase and his crew must overcome mythological
making the Christmas rounds. (Ages 3 to 6) challenges. (Ages 10 to 14) Book Club on Facebook to
share your thoughts and
7 THE WONDERFUL THINGS YOU WILL BE,
by Emily Winfield Martin. (Random House) A
113
7 PERCY JACKSON & THE OLYMPIANS, by
Rick Riordan. (Disney-Hyperion) A boy battles
459 submit questions.
celebration of future possibilities. (Ages 3 to 7) mythological monsters. (Ages 9 to 12)

8 EVERYTHING IS MAMA, by Jimmy Fallon.

Illustrated by Miguel Ordóñez. (Feiwel and Friends)
11
8 WHO WAS/IS . . . ?, by Jim Gigliotti and
others; various illustrators. (Penguin Workshop)
33

To baby animals learning new words, Mama is Biographies unlock legendary lives. (Ages 8 to 11)
everything. (Ages 1 to 3)
9 THE BAD GUYS, by Aaron Blabey. (Scholastic) 1

9 ROSIE REVERE, ENGINEER, by Andrea Beaty.

Illustrated by David Roberts. (Abrams) A young
121 Tough animals in suits take on some real villains.
(Ages 7 to 10)
inventor learns to fail better. (Ages 4 to 8)
10 MISS PEREGRINE’S PECULIAR CHILDREN, by 95

10 WE’RE ALL WONDERS, by R. J. Palacio. (Knopf)

The protagonist from the novel “Wonder” stars in
18 Ransom Riggs. (Quirk/Penguin) Time travelers
try to save their beloved headmistress. (Ages 14
his own picture book. (Ages 4 to 8) and up)

Picture book rankings include hardcover sales only. Series includes all print and e-book sales.
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW 25
0
The Shortlist / European Fiction / By Lisa Russ Spaar
HOW TO BEHAVE IN A CROWD
By Camille Bordas
319 pp. Tim Duggan. $26.
Isidore Mazal, known as
Dory, the 11-year-old protago-
nist of Bordas’s novel, is the
youngest of an eccentric
genius-cluster of brothers
and sisters. He perceives
himself to be strikingly dull
compared with his precocious family
members, some of whom are writing
dissertations while others are composing
experimental music and planning to be
distinguished in ways yet to be deter-
mined. The clan of six is both close-knit
and dissociated by the privacy of their
individual obsessions. Together, their
collective erudition and oddness isolate
them from their small French town,
which is still intrigued by their precocity.
But as a series of losses throws into
sharp, sometimes devastating, light the
limits and loneliness of the life of the
mind, it is Dory — observant, feeling,
open to others and to new experiences —
who becomes, as his brother observes in
an ethnographic treatise on their unique
“family system,” “the one the other sub-
jects turn to for comfort and hope.”
“How to Behave in a Crowd,” Bordas’s
third novel and her first written in Eng-
lish, joins the league of novels about
adolescence persuasively told by adoles-
cent narrators. “Who would care for a
novel about us?” asks one of Dory’s sib-
lings. The answer is: everyone.
LISA RUSS SPAAR is a poet and an English professor at the University of Virginia. Her fifth collection, “Orexia,” was published in February.
26 SUNDAY , JA N UA RY 7 , 2 018
YIZA
By Michael Köhlmeier
Translated by Ruth Martin
111 pp. Haus Publishing. Paper, $15.95.
The reader never feels safe
in the world of this short
novel, first published in
Germany in 2016 as “Das
Mädchen mit dem Finger-
hut” (“The Girl With the
Thimble”). In an unnamed
country, a trio of homeless children of
unspecified nationalities negotiates the
vicissitudes of their imperiled circum-
stance with a mix of innocence, preter-
natural canniness and an empathy that
transcends the limits of language. Like
many tragedies and fairy tales (“Oedipus
Rex,” “Jane Eyre,” “Hansel and Gretel”),
Köhlmeier’s dark gem of a story takes its
English title from its protagonist, Yiza, a
6-year-old girl who escapes with two
older boys from a home for migrant chil-
dren. Yet this is no typical fall-from-
power-through-hubris narrative or fabu-
list cautionary tale. Yiza, we learn, is not
even a real name, and for a while the only
vocabulary the three have in common is
the names by which they call themselves.
The mendicant world they wander
through — stalked by starvation, illness,
prejudice and evil — is all too real to
anyone attuned to the predicament of
displaced children. The engine of this
simply told but important text (narrated
in a stripped-down vocabulary, as though
Köhlmeier and Martin have selected only
words that can be easily translated into
any language) is the resiliency of the
children themselves. Despite privation
and a lack of means to express to each
other the staggering uncertainty of their
situation, they nonetheless exchange
talismanic gifts (the thimble) and are
capable of loyalty and protectiveness that
evince a humanity greater than any
shown to them by society.
LEA
By Pascal Mercier
Translated by Shaun Whiteside
292 pp. Grove. $25.
Two middle-aged Swiss men
— Martijn van Vliet and
Adrian Herzog — meet by
chance outside a Provence
cafe. Herzog, a retired sur-
geon, is in town to visit his
daughter; for van Vliet, the
trip is part of an endgame pilgrimage in
the wake of sad events involving his dead
wife and his mercurial, extraordinarily
talented daughter, Lea, a renowned vio-
linist who is eventually hospitalized in
the same asylum in St.-Rémy that once
sheltered Vincent van Gogh.
As the two men travel together back to
Bern, Herzog is at first an unwilling
audience for van Vliet’s long-delayed
confession. But as that tale of grief, fraud,
guilt and madness unfolds, the distinc-
tions between the two men’s identities
become blurred. Herzog finds ways to
protract their return in order to allow van
Vliet time to narrate fully his story, a
chronicle that begins, unsettlingly, to not
just reverberate with but actually become
Herzog’s own. Through perspectival
shifts, pronominal slippage and shout-
outs to cinema, poetry and of course
music, Mercier allows the duo’s fears and
displaced ambitions to turn into one
another in revelatory, oneiric and, ulti-
mately, disturbing ways.
Who are we? What might it be like to
be someone else? In “Lea,” these themes
implicate the reader as well: “It is always
cruel when other people’s eyes rest on
us,” van Vliet says, “even if those looks
are benevolent. They turn us into actors.
We can no longer be ourselves.”
UNCERTAIN GLORY
By Joan Sales
Translated by Peter Bush
457 pp. New York Review Books. Paper,
$18.95.
In light of Catalonia’s current
push for independence from
Spain, the Catalan novelist
Sales’s “Uncertain Glory” —
originally published in 1956
— could not be timelier.
Longings for separate na-
tionhood have roiled the area for genera-
tions, and in this new translation Bush
offers a fresh look at the region through
the context of the Spanish Civil War, a
conflict English readers may best know
in literature through writers like Ernest
Hemingway and Muriel Rukeyser.
Sales’s symphonic novel — full of philo-
sophical, religious and literary medita-
tions — revolves around four principal
players: Lluís, a Catalan soldier stationed
at the Aragonese front; his louche child-
hood friend-turned-traitor; his anarchist
lover; and Cruells, a would-be priest.
Much of the novel is presented in anec-
dotal diary entries, epistles and para-
phrased episodes; the quotidian and the
political continually exchange their para-
doxes. On the one hand, the characters
know that “war is the bit on the side that
poisons your blood forever; anything else
pales in comparison”; on the other, an
opened letter might “exhale the cool
clean scent of freshly mown grass.” In the
book’s final scene of defeat and retreat, a
Catalan girl whose home has just been
bombed shames a band of her own starv-
ing countrymen who are attempting to
plunder her pantry: “You’re such cow-
ards and hopeless fighters,” she taunts
them, “and on top of that will you steal
from us? What’s more, in land you should
think of as your own?” Cruells, who is
among their number, writes about the
incident in his journal. “That night,” he
recalls, “we marched on empty stom-
achs.”
ILLUSTRATION BY JOHN GALL
0

Sketchbook / By Grant Snider

GRANT SNIDER is a cartoonist and illustrator, and the author, most recently, of “The Shape of Ideas.”
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW 27
0

The Pentagon Papers as Published

in The New York Times
“The most significant leaks
of classified material in
American history.”
—The Washington Post

This Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times

series on America’s involvement in Vietnam
riveted a divided nation. As a standard for
freedom of the press, and the backdrop
for Steven Spielberg’s new film, “The Post,”
it remains as timely as ever.

$17.99 Paperback
Available everywhere books are sold in stores and online.
Racehorse Publishing
an imprint of Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.

28 S UN DAY , JA N UA RY 7 , 2 018