Autumn: Time to put the saltwater-stained bestsellers in a yard sale and settle down with more nutritious reading. Here are five suggestions of brand-new and upcoming books.
Dates from hell
Despite dire warnings of the post-literate millennium, writers keep writing and publishers keep publishing. Some publishers actually still gamble on literary fiction. Even more surprising, publishers keep placing modest bets on the horse least likely to place: short story collections. They do it even when the collection is the author’s first book, as in the case of Stacey Richter’s hilarious and frequently heartbreaking collection My Date with Satan (Scribner, $22, in stores now). Richter is a serious writer who rants in a carefully constructed comic voice through these 13 fast-moving tales, mostly of twentysomethings in trouble.
Here’s a typical quotation, from the title story, in which the satanic date beseeches the narrator: “Hey, please, come on, I love you. I’d be on my knees if I weren’t tied up. I’d kiss your feet. I mean, I really love you. So tell me your real name? I’m begging!” The savvy and painfully observant 10-year-old narrator of “A Prodigy of Longing” tells how his father fell for a woman who thinks that she is a descendant of Cro-Magnon women who were impregnated by aliens from outer space. In “Goal 666,” the Scandinavian satanic heavy metal band Lords of Sludge has troubles. The narrator admits, “I’ve always wanted desperately to be bad. I’ve always wanted to be extremely evil, full of hatred.” Unfortunately he isn’t, and it’s hurting the band.
John Leonard, former editor of the New York Times Book Review and literary co-editor of The Nation, is a curmudgeon-at-large. He is a Quixotic moralist who refuses to honor sacred cows or applaud the emperor’s nonexistent clothes, as he proves again in his new collection, When the Kissing Had to Stop (New Press, $25). He is also a ferocious reader who says of Bret Easton Ellis’ gory pornography, “I read this so you won’t have to,” and nicely ties in slice-and-dice fiction with Lorena Bobbitt. In “Knee Deep in the Alien Corn,” he hilariously critiques UFO nonsense via the X-Files movie. He gets around.
Leonard has an ear for the perfect anecdote that sums up the ironies of millennial America: Toni Morrison is hosting a European intellectual making her first visit to Manhattan since the late ’50s. As they ride down Fifth Avenue one evening the visitor admits she had no idea there were so many prostitutes in New York. Puzzled, Morrison looks around at the people near doorways and finally says, “Those aren’t prostitutes. Those are smokers.”
James Gleick is one of the foremost science writers of our time. He helped turn an arcane theory into a household word with his book Chaos: Making a New Science, and he’s also the author of the popular biography of Richard Feynman, Genius. His new book is Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything (Pantheon, $24, in stores now).
The subtitle says it all. Gleick devotes a chapter each to such notions as real time, Internet time, time “saving,” and multitasking (“We have always multitasked—inability to walk and chew gum is a time-honored cause for derision—but never so intensely or so self-consciously as now.”) Gleick looks at claims about products that will “save” us time and also looks at why we, who supposedly have so much leisure, are as time-obsessed as Proust. He quotes a man who complains that 10 years ago he was delighted to receive a transatlantic e-mail in only 15 minutes but who now drums his fingers if a 100K file takes more than 20 seconds.
Gleick refuses to either cry doom or sing hosannas about technology and the speeding-up of life. He remains level-headed. About the instantaneous telephone poll that clogged phone lines during Bush’s 1992 State of the Union address, Gleick writes with his usual perception and gift for metaphor: “Forming an opinion is one process. Extracting it is another. Fielding a ground ball is one process. Throwing it to first is another. Sometimes we do best to let one process mature before the next begins.”
Scheduled for October is The Best American Movie Writing 1999 (St. Martin’s, $14.95 paperback), the second volume of the new annual series. This year’s guest editor is Peter Bogdanovich—both the director of The Last Picture Show and Paper Moon and a devoted film scholar, whose books include last year’s excellent Who the Devil Made It, a collection of interviews with directors from Fritz Lang to Alfred Hitchcock.
This year, in 26 essays from venues as diverse as the magazine Time and a book titled Sexual Politics and Narrative Film, a spectrum of writers analyze recent and classic films. Steven Spielberg explains why he wanted to make Saving Private Ryan. Gore Vidal tells how Frank Capra had visions of directing The Best Man as an artificially sweetened embarrassment until Vidal replaced him with Franklin Schaffner, who went on to create a classic political film. William Zinsser recounts his experiences as an extra in Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories. Rex Reed delivers a funny and loving tribute to Kay Thompson, the actress, singer, and creator of the children’s books about Eloise. And the list goes on.
Ruth Rendell has few rivals to her frequent designation as the reigning queen of mystery writing. She has won every award the field offers, including the Grand Master. Yet Rendell doesn’t rest on her laurels. Apparently she doesn’t rest at all. Her new book, Harm Done (Crown, $24, scheduled for November), weighs in at 350 delicious pages and has magnum opus written all over it. Literate, sympathetic, and modest, Chief Inspector Reginald Wexford seems an anomaly among the hard-boiled cynics that populate his genre. But the problems he faces are as contemporary as our daily headlines. This time out he faces both the townspeople’s response to a child molester’s release and his knowledge that a woman is being savagely abused by her husband but refuses to testify against him.
Over the years, since she began writing about Wexford in the 1960s, Rendell’s novels have become ever more perceptive and convincing. In Harm Done she conveys the complex relationships of the characters and the texture of daily life with greater mastery than ever before—without ever forgetting that she is writing a mystery novel, which is supposed to be, above all, a page-turning suspenseful entertainment.
