Secrets and Lies Early in Heidi Julavits’s “The Mineral Palace,” Bena Jonssen and her baby are sleeping in their car in Dodge, Iowa, when a woman wakes her up and suggests that she roll her windows down so she doesn’t suffocate. The woman seems nice enough, and they chat awhile. Bena gives her a cigarette and some aspirin. The woman gives her a battered charm for her bracelet, but never mentions her name–which turns out to be Bonnie Parker. Bonnie and her boyfriend Clyde are shot to death within 25 pages. Bena fares better, but not much.
“The Mineral Palace” is a marvelous debut novel: harrowing, poetic and tragic enough to satisfy both Faulkner and Oprah. Bena and her husband, a condescending, philandering doctor named Ted, arrive in Pueblo, Colo., in the midst of a drought, as well as the Depression. Bena is convinced that there’s something seriously wrong with their doughy, listless baby, but Ted tells her she’s crazy and to shut up about it. Their marriage may be based on lies but, hell, what isn’t? Bena takes a job writing newspaper columns about Pueblo’s deluded society wives, though she’s more interested in the shady characters on the fringes of town. Soon she’s hanging out in bars and brothels, falling for a seedy cowboy named Red Grissom, excavating all the townspeople’s secrets and facing up to some of her own. Julavits’s prose can be astonishingly dark, and there are times when her plot is too hectic and her many symbols so overripe and heavy that they just about fall off the tree. Still, she’s such a gifted, visceral writer–dust- and hailstorms a specialty–that even her most painful visions can be beautiful to behold.
Showmanship Margaret Atwood’s “The Blind Assassin” is big and ambitious. On one level, it’s a sweeping family saga, set against two world wars and the Depression, that tracks the unraveling lives of Iris and Laura Chase, daughters of a well-to-do button manufacturer. But more than that, it’s a literary high-wire act, with Atwood zipping us back and forth in time and creating two books within the book: Iris’s “memoir” alternates with a mysterious work of fiction that’s both sci-fi and a romance. There are echoes and portents, of course, between these two layers (when a killer who’s blind falls in love with a virgin who’s mute, it’s got to mean something, right?). All very clever, but too clever by half. Atwood’s so intent on showmanship she’s neglected to create great characters. She keeps us hooked by keeping their secrets, but when she finally connects all the dots, here’s what we’re left with: vivid period scenes, a soap-opera plot and people we don’t give two hoots about.
Good Tale Gone Astray Gilbert Bland stole maps, all of them rare, some more than 400 years old, and boy, was he good at it. He wasn’t tricky. That was his genius. For three or four years, until he got caught in 1995, he just walked into rare-book rooms around the country, took out his razor blade and sliced what he wanted out of book after book. By the time he was arrested, he had stolen at least 250 maps worth roughly $500,000.
This story has all the makings of a good if offbeat true-crime saga. Unfortunately, author Miles Harvey wants it to be much more. So he clogs up his narrative with everything he knows about cartography, then muddies things even more with a lot of secondhand psychologizing about boys from broken homes who might grow up to become map thieves. The sad result is a book about maps by a writer with no sense of direction.
At Home and At School Tom Perrotta, the author of “Bad Haircut” and “The Wishbones,” is like an American Nick Hornby: companionable and humane, lighthearted and surprisingly touching. And with his new novel, “Joe College,” he has delivered another sweetheart. Danny, a New Jersey working-class boy at Yale circa 1980, finds himself both enchanted by a schoolmate and dodging calls from a hometown girlfriend. Spring break, and the inevitable crisis, loom.
There may never have been a more unassumingly winning treatment of a young man’s divided loyalties. Danny shares an ease with his old Jersey friends, yet many of them are already going to seed. He values the intellectual rapport he has with his Ivy League chums, yet they’re bafflingly high-strung creatures. And why, these days, does he find himself so often acting like a rat? “I hadn’t been this way before college, I was sure of it,” he reflects. Perrotta has established a slightly befogged comic landscape that’s his alone. Fans of such quirky indie films as “Chasing Amy” and “Dazed and Confused” should feel right at home.
Multinational Jest Its publisher says British novelist David Mitchell’s much-touted debut, “Ghostwritten”–revealing mysterious links among nine strangers in nine countries–“will invite comparison” to David Foster Wallace’s “Infinite Jest.” Bad idea. True, both books tease you with clues to apocalyptic conspiracies; Mitchell even one-ups Wallace with a nonhuman entity inhabiting human “hosts.” But “Infinite Jest” offered intriguing form–those footnotes–and an engaging character, the drug addict Don Gately. “Ghostwritten” reads like a series of predictable pop novels, craftily strung together but staffed by tired old standbys: a womanizing rock musician (London), a zombified cultist (Okinawa), a shy, jazz-loving record-store clerk (Tokyo), a spunkier-than-thou female physicist (Ireland). In fact, it’s her top-secret work on “quantum cognition” that–but let’s not give the whole thing away. For all its post-modern doominess, “Ghostwritten” may remind you of a ’30s movie where, say, a millionaire, a shopgirl and a bum all get hold of the same silk scarf or some damn thing. Gosh! Small world!
