Reviews

Mickey Pearlman reviews books for the Boston Globe, the Forward, and the Minneapolis Star Tribune

List of Recent Reviews by Mickey Pearlman
Alphabetically (by last name of reviewed author)

Click on links to read full review.
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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Purple Hibiscus, “A Valiant Flowering,” Minn. Star Tribune, 10/19/03.

Steve Almond. The Evil B.B. Chow. Mouth Luv, Minn. Star Tribune, 4/24/2005.

Karen Armstrong. The Spiral Staircase. Climb, Interrupted, Minn. Star Tribune, 5/21/2004.

Michelle Blake (interview) The Tentmaker. “One of the People on Whom Nothing is Lost. An i/v with Michelle Blake, Jbooks.com, 12/2001

Rinker Buck, First Job: A Memoir of Growing Up at Work, “Reminiscences of a Randy Cub Reporter,” Boston Globe, Jan. 12, 2003 .

Kate Young Caley. The House Where the Hardest Things Happened. “After Banishment, a Search for Spiritual Community,” Boston Globe, 7/7/02.

Andrea Cheng, Marika. “Flash Frames,” The Forward, Jan. 17, 2003.

Phyllis Chesler (interview) The New Anti-Semitism: The Current Crisis and What We Must Do About It, “Chesler Takes a Stand,” Jbooks.com, 7/23/03

Umberto Eco. The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana. “Mysterious Flame,” Minn. Star Tribune, 6/12/2005.

Mark Edmundson. Teacher:The One Who Made a Difference. School Master,Boston Globe, 9/1/2002.

Kinky Friedman, Batya Gur & Michael Baron. 3 mystery writers. The Forward. ---------

Joyce Hackett (interview) Disturbance of the Inner Ear, “Losing the Possibility of God,” The Forward, 9/13/2002.

Kent Haruf. Eventide. Haruf's hymn to humanity, Minn. Star Tribune, 5/2/2004.

Ingrid Hill. Ursula, Under. Ursula, Under Mines the riches of ancestry, Minn. StarTribune, 6/6/2004.

Erica Jong. Sappho's Leap (interview) Sappho's Secrets in Her Latest Book, Erica JongChannels the Original Erotic Writer. The Forward, 6/13/03

Sayed Kashua. Dancing Arabs. The Forward, -------.

Sue Monk Kidd. The Mermaid Chair. “Shaky Mermaid Chair likely will sit well with Kidd’s fans,” Minn. Star Tribune. 4/10/2005.

Chris Knudsen & David Kuhn. Committed. “They’re committed.” Minn. Star Tribune,2/13/2005.

Anne Lamott. Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith. “Lamott offers a plan to cope: Keep the faith.” Minn Star Tribune, 4/3/2005.

Lorna Landvik, Angry Housewives Eating Bon Bons, Bonding, books and bonbons, Minn. Star Tribune, 3/9/03.

Aaron Lansky. Outwitting History. “Memoir Review,” Minn. Star Tribune, -----.

Elizabeth Long. Book Clubs: Women and the Uses of Reading in Everyday Life “Women who read too much, and the professors who love them,” Boston Globe, 8/3/2003.

Azar Mafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, “Sampling Forbidden Fiction, Boston Globe, 4/13/2003.

Toni Morrison, Love, :Love’s Twisted Sisters,” Minn. Star Tribune, 11/3/2003.

Walter Mosley. The Man in My Basement. The Man in My Bsement is Mosleys masterpiece. Minn. Star Tribune, 12/28/2003.

Barbara Klein Moss. Little Edens (short stories), The unquenchable search for sanctuary, Boston Globe, 5/9/2004.

Olaf Olaffson, Walking Into the Night, “From far north to a neverland,” Boston Globe, March 7, 2004.

Paul Pearsall. The Last Self-Help Book Youll Ever Need: Repress Your Anger, Think Negatively, Be a Good Blamer, and Throttle Your Inner Child. Minn.Star Tribune, July 3, 2005.

Nina Schuyler. The Painting. “First Novel paints overly detailed picture.” Minn. Star Tribune, 12/5/2004.

Stella Suberman. When It Was Our War, When It Was Our War teaches wartime realities, Minn. Star Tribune, 9/28/2003. lead.

Cynthia Thayer. A Brief Lunacy,  Deceit and disaster Down East, Boston Globe, 5/29/2005.

Lynn Truss. Talk to the Hand, Minn.Star Tribune

Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez. The Dirty Girls Social Club, Minn. Star Tribune, 5/18/2003.

Patricia Volk (interview) Stuffed, “Putting in the Pits: An i/v with Patricia Volk,” Jbooks.com, 10/29/02.

Kate Walbert. Our Kind, a Novel in Stories. 8 women to need to get a life, Minn.Star Tribune, 4/4/2004.

Sarah Willis. The Sound of Us, “Tangled Lines of communication ---and love,” –Minn Star Tribune, June 19, 2005.

'The Evil B.B. Chow' by Steve Almond
Reviewed By Mickey Pearlman, Special To The Star Tribune

Careful readers of current literary fiction will have already noticed the proliferation of short-story collections masquerading as novels. Because two of these were nominated for this year's National Book Award (Joan Silber's "Ideas Of Heaven: A Ring Of Stories" and Kate Walbert's "Our Kind: A Novel In Stories"), where one expects conventional novels to dominate the fiction category, this is a phenomenon worth noting.

In addition to these stories-as-novels, there is a rich selection of new short-story collections connected by a character ("Stop That Girl," by Elizabeth McKensie), religion ("Little Edens," by Barbara Klein Moss), place ("Blackbird House," by Alice Hoffman) or race ("Drinking Coffee Elsewhere," by Z.Z. Packer). And then there's the Canadian mother of them all, Alice Munro, and her most recent "Runaways."

Now Steve Almond of "Candy-freak" fame (the Peanut Chews, Twin Bings, Kit Kat Dark, Goo Goo Clusters of everyone's childhood) offers up "The Evil B.B. Chow and Other Stories," 12 tales often starring various 30ish, slightly twisted manipulators slinking their way through the milestones of contemporary life.

Almond leads off with blind dates and a woman "confounded by the perversity of male logic. Best to dump someone on a high note? Is this the way men think?" As she says, B.B. is "one of those men who conducts his love life like a catch-and-release program." He writes about running into that peripheral friend from college, the one you always knew was kind of nuts: "You wouldn't think less of me if I told you something, would you? ... A cartridge has been placed in my head for surveillance purposes. This was done a number of years ago by a race of superior beings ... Do you know anything about abduction? ... The first [form] ... is purely for research purposes. Cell harvesting, that kind of thing. The second involves implants ... such as the one in my brain."

In one of his funniest stories, a college student announces that she's "not interested in appropriate sex ... I always go for the older guys. I went for a couple of the teachers in high school. Well, one of them was a coach, I guess. It's pretty shocking how easy it is to get them." This character might be speaking for a lot of people who think that "It was sad to watch those dopes in Congress mugging [Bill Clinton] day after day. Thirty years ago, when JFK was [having sex with] whores in bathtubs, nobody made a peep."

This is only a baby step away from Almond's take on popular culture, most wonderfully in a story about Michael Jackson whose title cannot be mentioned here: "This is a black man with all the fame and money in the world, a tremendous talent, who despises the conditions of his birthright. So he sets about trying to reverse all of them. Rather than adult women, he seeks out boys. Rather than accept his masculine Negroid features, he attempts to recreate himself as Elizabeth Taylor from her National Velvet days." I'm assuming here that Almond has a good lawyer, but one thing for sure -- he's got a distinctive, funny and consistent voice.

Almond also has plenty to say, and much less cynically, about love and the way "we close our eyes and let our lovers step toward us, through the fading hydrangeas, the impenetrable dusk." His non-melodramatic insights about a man's fragile reckoning with his family is pure joy to a reviewer overdosed on familial sturm und drang: "Belle's starting to grow breasts. Beth says it's the hormones they pump into these chickens. My mother won't stick with the Saint-John's-wort. You take her out, she makes a scene. The salad bar doesn't have gherkins, whatever..."

According to his Web site (www.stevenalmond.com), Almond, who teaches now at Boston College, was raised in Palo Alto, Calif., "The Town Where God Will Retire," and that may explain his quirky consciousness, although I hate to so publicly admit my East Coast bias. The site notes that he "has been writing fiction for the last 8 years." And that "his work can be found in a whole bunch of literary magazines, along with the occasional porn outlet."

Whatever your politics, it should be on your bookshelf as well.

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'The Spiral Staircase' an ethereal climb
Mickey Pearlman, Special to the Star Tribune

Karen Armstrong, who spent seven years as a Roman Catholic nun, is the bestselling British author of 13 books about Christianity, Judaism and Islam. Now, in "The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness," Armstrong has written of her struggles with despair, epilepsy, anorexia, academia, panic attacks, sexuality, suicide, bad jobs and worse psychiatrists. Her fears about an "adult social life" probably explain her choice of a life behind walls at the unripe age of 17, even though her "not especially devout" parents were "horrified by this decision."

One expects this memoir to be both revealing (it is) and instructive (it isn't), and to provide some wisdom in an often unwise world. As in all successful memoirs, the writer's story should energize us to think more deeply about our own choices and travails. But this one doesn't, in spite of Armstrong's ultimate fame. Instead, her "climb out of darkness" seems far more circumstantial than one would expect, like a small portrait of an errant leaf caught in a powerful eddy.

Armstrong emerges as a gawky girl with big teeth -- "ardent, idealistic, untidy, unrealistic, and immature" with few compelling enthusiasms -- who was trained by her teaching order "according to the old system" and experienced "the traditional regime at its worst," i.e. systematically deprived of any intellectual development, attachment to any living person, and continuously diminished as a human being. When she breaks the good sewing machine, she is made to "treadle away" every day for weeks at an old sewing machine that is missing its needle; this incident becomes a metaphor for much of her life.

Even at Oxford, which she attended after leaving the convent, the fate of her doctoral dissertation is decided without a fight. "As soon as I opened the envelope, I knew that it was hopeless . . . my academic career was over. The professor who had been so hostile to the very idea of my thesis had been appointed as my examiner." Having learned well how to be an obedient doormat, she reacted accordingly.

Nothing much changes when Armstrong becomes a teacher in a London private school for girls. (She gets fired because she is often ill, absent and under a psychiatrist's care.) But a better psychiatrist discovers that Armstrong has a form of easily treatable epilepsy, a malady which could (and should) have been addressed during her convent days. Instead, the blackouts were greeted with cold disapproval. " 'You must pull yourself together, Sister,' Mother Frances had concluded, tight-lipped." At her pre-convent high school, "fainting also meant only one thing: hysteria . . . I had once watched my headmistress . . . grab a girl who had fainted during a seemingly interminable church service, seize her under the armpits, haul the inert body down the polished aisle, and dump it outside the chapel door, returning immediately, stony-faced."

Armstrong is most likable when she attends to Jacob, the autistic child of two committed atheists who rent her a room in their chaotic but life-filled home. But the often simplistic-thinking Armstrong still has a lot to learn, thrilled though she may have been with Jacob's father, a former professor, he of the "clever Jewish face." (Let me point out, 58 years after World War II, that there are Chinese, Ethiopian, Swedish and Iraqi Jews, among others, all with decidedly different faces.)

What emerges from Armstrong's third memoir is not what she found after climbing the spiral staircase, but what she lost. As she puts it, "now that I no longer had to take Jacob [who is calmed by the rite] to Mass on Sundays, I did not go myself . . . the word God or Jesus or church filled me with a lassitude akin to nausea. Conventional religion had worn me out and I wanted nothing more to do with it."

Armstrong still lives alone, "almost wholly occupied in writing, thinking and speaking about God and spirituality." She is still reaching "upward," she hopes, "toward the light."

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Flash Frames

Marika, By Andrea Cheng
THE FORWARD
JANUARY 17, 2003

"Marika" is an evocative, intelligent young adult novel about a privileged Jewish girl living in Budapest from 1934 to 1945. Her world is threatened by the Nazis and tainted further by her father's love affair and by the unexpected construction of a wall in her parents' apartment. Now her father lives on one side; she, her brother Andreas and her mother — "layers of lipstick on her lips while everyone else's mother had only a thin line" — remain on the other. As the Nazis advance, her father begins to call her Maria instead of Marika and even urges her to change the name of her rag doll, Maxi, to something "less Jewish... like Zoltan." "These are Jewish names," her uncle explains, "that make us stand out." But celebrating Christmas and procuring baptism papers marked with a new last name relieves no one's anxiety because their neighbors know the family is Jewish. So Marika uses her "best calligraphy" to forge illegal identity certificates, which have been dyed with coffee to age the paper. In July 1944, when the Russians search the apartment where she is being hidden by a gentile friend of her father's, it is these papers that save her. Marika, a querulous child with no saint-like qualities, serves the reader well on this journey, particularly when she quotes her father: "He said he wonders why Jews are called the chosen people when it seems we're always chosen for the wrong things." One of many good questions with no easy answer.

'Teacher' is Mark Edmundson's homage to the man who transformed his classroom and his life

By Mickey Pearlman, 9/1/2002, THE BOSTON GLOBE

Mark Edmundson, a professor of English at the University of Virginia, who also writes for The Nation and Harper's, could have grown up to be a world-class punk, hooked on junky TV shows, drunk from high school football practices on ''what the epic poets like to call battle joy,'' and drugged by a steady diet of intellectual lethargy.

Fortunately for him, on the first day of his senior year in 1969, at Medford High, ''a short, slight man with olive skin ... wearing a skinny tie and a moth-eaten legacy suit with a large paper clip fastened to the left lapel'' walked into his life. Franklin Lears, a young iconoclast from Cambridge, was ''lugging a briefcase loaded down with a small library of books'' but was armed primarily with the superlative teacher's usual weapons: a sense of his own freedom and the ability to listen. Luckily, he was not stuffed with the received and perfect wisdom (his duty to impart), nor did he feel obligated to damn or denigrate the students.

Instead, like the best instructors in any discipline, anywhere, he came prepared to introduce these ideas: possibility, change, courage to walk away from accepted wisdom (what Socrates called doxa) and permission to dismiss ''all received ideas'' that you haven't examined and accepted for yourself. Lears was even gutsy enough to suggest that a process called thinking was a) fun, b) useful, and c) not for sissies; even football players could learn to do it. And he was willing to wait, until the idea that there were ideas took hold.

Along with ''The Autobiography of Malcolm X,'' Hermann Hesse's ''Siddhartha,'' novels by Ken Kesey, and poetry by Allen Ginsberg, Lears brought to Medford High ''the spirit of Socrates - the homely Athenian, who never accepted anything on faith, questioned all matters under the sun, took no crap, ever, and knew how to laugh.'' Naturally, says Edmundson, ''in the beginning, at least, when his ways were just taking hold - he made us miserable.''

Edmundson leaves no doubt that in Medford, where even the brightest students knew very little about the world or themselves, Lears was about as welcome as Bill Clinton at a Moral Majority rally. But his advanced placement history class, ''the most god-awfully unhip concatenation of people yet assembled in one small room in the West in the fall of l969,'' where Lears talked Freud, God, sex, and had as guest lecturers SDS members and proto-Black Panthers from Harvard, became a place where kids actually showed up, even skipped other classes to attend.

Besides Lears, Edmundson acknowledges some of the other teachers in his life: Brian Rourke, the linebacker coach, who informed Edmundson that he was ''utterly without ability and that the only reason, the only reason in the world, I wasn't going to be cut was that I `hustled like a [expletive]' on the field and was an example to the `lazy [expletives]' with which the team, that year, was rife.'' And there was Mace Johnson, Edmundson's history teacherbackfield coach, the former Marine devoted to grass drills who ''had little capacity for the ambiguous or the equivocal,'' the very mind-sets that Lears was promoting in his classroom, since you can't learn anything if you already know everything. Comic relief was provided by the French teacher, Miss Finkelman, with her ''yelping dyed-blond hair ... bulging eyes, de Gaulle's Gallic honker.''

His most notable teacher - if only as an example to rebel against - was his father, a quality-control engineer at Raytheon and, like all fathers, ''every young man's primary teacher, like it or not.'' Edmundson senior ''manifested many feelings - grief, fear, anxiety, even sometimes relative pleasure - in the form of anger.'' His principal shared experience with the author consisted of occasionally watching Johnny Carson dressed up as Carnak the Magnificent.

This was the best part of Edmundson's father's day, and it provided another decided contrast to Lears, who neither owned a television nor watched one. Whether Edmundson realized then that he was in the process of trading one father for another, or one set of values for an alternative model, his readers are. And the encoded messages about changing social classes (largely through the process of education) - and what you give up and what you gain - have rarely been written about so cogently. Edmundson's grandmother was a chambermaid at Radcliffe; he is a distinguished professor at the University of Virginia. In short, this is a book about a lot more than teachers and students.

However, for any reader who has been, or is currently, either a teacher or a student - that is to say, everyone - this is a book to be savored. Edmundson has done exactly what a memoir writer should do: He has re-created a slice of his own life and presented it in such evocative and intelligent prose that it serves as impetus for an examination of the reader's own experiences: What changed me? Who changed me?

Edmundson has also provided us with one of the most acute observations I have ever read about good teaching: ''Good teachers have many motivations, but I suspect that loneliness is often one of them. You need a small group, a circle, to talk to; unable to find it in the larger world, you try to create it in the smaller sphere of a classroom.'' And for this kind of loneliness to translate into effectiveness (at least in my 25 years of experience in various classrooms), the Franklin Learses of the world also have to wrestle with other teachers and the administration, who would usually prefer a blow-by-blow description of the exact subject matter you are supposedly imparting. You can only explain so many times without foaming at the mouth or storming out of another faculty meeting that if you can teach a student to think, he or she can learn anything. (See Socrates et al.)

Thank goodness that Lears showed up, that because of him Edmundson attended the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and Bennington, and did his graduate work at Yale (he even studied French literary theory with Paul de Man, no doubt less influential in his life than Miss Finkelman) and that Lears turned this ''high school thug'' into the author of ''Teacher.''

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'Eventide' a hymn to family and friendship
Mickey Pearlman, Special to the Star Tribune

Kent Haruf is one of those rare writers who reminds you, thankfully, that you've been using up too many brain cells trying to understand genetic codification, outsourcing ramification, Social Security privatization, acid rain distillation, health insurance amortization and low-carb-diet-choice combination.

Ten pages in, you realize that you should go back to thinking about the absolute necessity of family, the vigorous gift of loyalty, the soul-soothing balm of friendship and the simple (but not simplistic) realities of kinship, courage, sympathy and sorrow.

For those who have read "Plainsong" (and if you haven't, go to it!), characters like the rustic unmarried brothers, Harold and Raymond McPheron; the teacher, Tom Guthrie, and his sons, Ike and Bobby, and the once-homeless Victoria Roubideaux, and her baby daughter, Katie, "a black-haired, round-cheeked girl," will reappear as the relatives you hope will show up for Thanksgiving.

Holt, Colo., where there "was not even the sound of wind outside for them to hear," an undistinguished ranching and farming community in "a flat treeless country," will re-emerge as a place where nothing except love, death, compassion and malice happens; in other words: everything. That includes child abuse, alcoholism, tragic accidents, lousy parenting, vicious scum who beat up women and the abandonment of children.

In other words, you don't have to leave wherever you are to experience anything. Everything happens everywhere.

Now, in "Eventide," the lives of these superlative characters, especially the brothers, are complicated by tragedy and redeemed by the curative powers of community. When Haruf quotes that old Henry Lyte hymn from 1847 as his introductory epigraph, you know that the often formless aridity of postmodernism will not encroach here:

Abide with me: fast falls the eventide;

The darkness deepens; Lord, with me abide.

When other helpers fail, and comforts flee,

Help of the helpless, O abide with me.

Yes, there is chaos and the detritus energized by an inexplicable event (because Haruf knows how to tell a 2004-era story, and ranches and farms are often dangerous places ), but, in the end, it is disconnection and anomie that fall victim to random and purposeful acts of kindness.

Victoria (notice the name), who in "Plainsong" shows up at the McPheron ranch pregnant and friendless, finds a young man, Del Gutierrez, about whom Raymond McPheron says, "I just mean you might want to keep this one. He's okay with me. I kind of like him." With the help of a new character, Rose Tyler, a firmly middle-aged and kind social worker, Raymond also discovers that he is a sexual man ("you're awful good for old man like me") who also needs that connection, and that his lovable cows are just not enough company.

"Oh, my," she said. "Aren't you a nice man. Aren't we going to have us some fun together.

"I'm having a pretty good time already," Raymond said.

"Are you?"

"Yes, ma'am. I am."

"There's more," she said.

(Note to Britney Spears, et al.: This is sexy.)

Like the lives he chronicles, Haruf's prose moves relentlessly forward, catching in his images the fierceness and sweetness of experience. Like the wind, it travels "without obstruction across the wide fields of winter wheat and across the ancient native pastures and the graveled county roads, carrying with it a pale dust as the dark approach[es] and the nighttime gather[s] round."

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'Ursula Under' mines the riches of ancestry
Mickey Pearlman, Special to the Star Tribune

You might want to stock up on memory-enhancing snacks before you open this 475-page first novel, so you can keep straight all the ancestors of Ursula Wong of the "dark Asian eyes," "café-au-lait complexion" and "a thick blond braid down her back that seems frankly too much hair for a two-and-a-half-year-old to have had time to grow." She lives in Michigan and is the daughter of Annie, a Finnish-American librarian, and Justin, a Chinese-American installer of vinyl siding and gutters. And, despite the title, she's just one of the characters who will go under -- in her case down an abandoned mine shaft.

Since much is made initially of the Wongs' decrepit mobile home on the edge of nowhere, and since Ursula is dubbed by supertrashy neighbors as "half-breed trailer trash," we expect the novel to be about the usual economic/class conflicts in contemporary America. It isn't. Instead it is a wild ride into the stories of one family's ancestry -- including Ursula's Finnish great-great-grandfather, a mine worker who goes under in a cave-in at age 29.

Of course, this repeated image of going under, of disappearance, stands for more than the accidents that skew every family's story or for the residue of sudden tragedy, pre and post 9/11, that anyone but a zombie recognizes. On a larger canvas, going under becomes a metaphor for survival itself -- for the ineluctable miracle -- despite the pitfalls of time and culture -- of someone who links us back into history and forward into possibility. You will be reminded by this novel once again that we are all links in a multi-knotted chain, products of fate and chance, with lives complicated by the predilections of ancestors of whom we are usually unaware.

In Hill's view, at least, events are transformed but repeated: icy blue eyes show up in many generations, several characters (like Annie and a Chinese ancestor of her husband's) have "useless legs." As Hill notes in the story of Kyllikki, a "deaf-and-dumb" merchant's daughter, the "surface of Lake Koylio [in southern Finland] in the morning light looks nearly identical to the waters of Portage Lake, outside the Super 8 Motel in Houghton, Michigan, with the hills rising beyond it, the morning of Ursula's accident, almost 13 centuries later."

Hill, who has 12 children (including two sets of twins) and a doctorate, must have slogged through every book in the library and absorbed all the contents thereof. Enough at least to create Olavi, the caravan master's lieutenant, who sells bolts of exotic brocades on his travels from southeast Finland through China, Spain, Constantinople, Baghdad, Bukhara and Samarkand to Ch'ang-an, where they are "now 85 mere miles from the burial places of both the splendiferous emperor" and a "short, quirky, unknown failed alchemist, ancestor of little Ursula Wong on her father's Chinese side, as Olavi will be ancestor to Ursula on her mother's side."

She describes Ming Yao (Brilliant Peach), who procures the sperm of the French Jesuit Rene Josserand, "a stoppered jar of vital fluid, carried between estates by a buzz-pated . . . idiot" named Bald Silly, and from which emanates a son. Perhaps best of all is the chapter titled "A Foundling at the Court," a tripled Moses/Miriam story, albeit with girl babies. Here Hill uses multiple fairy tale motifs (switched babies, cloistered females, multiples of seven, magical animals). All of these chapters are braided together by frequent incursions from Justin's parents, Mindy Ji and Joe Cimmer (Tsimmer), "a Polish American harmonica player," 13 centuries removed from Wladyslaw IV Sigismund Vasa.

All of this is clearer in the reading than in the re-telling, something I urge you to do. Just eat something first. Something filling. And get comfortable.

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Sappho's Secrets
In Her Latest Book, Erica Jong Channels the Original Erotic Writer
By MICKEY PEARLMAN

Sappho, who dates from the 7th century BCE, is considered by many scholars to be one of the world's greatest love poets, the woman who "gave us the metaphors for passion — 'I burn for you' [and] 'love is a fire' —lines which people have been recycling for 2,600 years, without knowing who wrote them," said novelist Erica Jong. According to Jong, her entire career has been about "trying to create female heroines, to fill the gap, [to make up for] the absence and the erasing of women's lives." "All of my books," she said, "are about getting rid of the erasures."

This year, on the 30th anniversary of the publication of "Fear of Flying," American literary icon Erica Jong will present readers with her ninth novel, "Sappho's Leap" (W.W. Norton, May 2003).

As she explained in a recent interview with the Forward at her Upper East Side apartment, Jong "re-fell in love with Sappho's fragments" seven years ago, and has spent much of her time since then thinking and writing about the ancient poet from the island of Lesbos. Her primary motivation was the insight that "Sappho's concerns are our concerns: love, and passion for a daughter," and she wanted to find out "what women from the ancient world have to say to us today." As a self-labeled "defrocked graduate student," Jong did the requisite research for the historical novel but found almost nothing that could be pinned down as fact. "What we do know is that her father was Scamandronymus," who was, as she wrote in the novel, "a distant myth, always coming and going surrounded by men with bronze-tipped spears"; her daughter was named Cleis (as was her mother); and she was married off to a repellent man named Cercylas — a name which might very well have been one of Sappho's practical jokes, said Jong, since it roughly translates as "a prick from the Isle of Man."

Even the story of Sappho's supposed suicide — a leap off of the Leucasian cliffs — was probably apocryphal, she said, "an attempt to diminish her, to humble her, and in effect to say, 'See, she had talent and still couldn't cope.'"

By imagining the life of Sappho, Jong said, she was "trying to give people the courage to take risks with their lives.... [When women] read great literature, and women are not in it, except as sirens, they feel they don't have a spiritual place; they are just caretakers." Jong avoided this perception in "Sappho's Leap" by echoing the events in Homer's "Odyssey" "from a woman's point of view." At the exact midpoint of the novel, for instance, Sappho goes to the underworld and meets her father, similar to how Odysseus meets his mother in the "Odyssey." But she also addresses Sappho's dilemma: "How do you survive, love, handle the responsibilities of motherhood, and try at the same time to be an artist?" She will address similar questions in her next novel, which she said will be "more autobiographical, and about getting older and dealing with aging parents."

Although "Sappho's Leap" is certainly not "The Shaker Book of Plainsong," it is more than a sexual romp. "Writing about sex in 2003 is not new," said Jong. "In 'Fear of Flying,' I was trying to break open Pandora's box. That box has been opened, but the losing of women's heroes has continued. What I was concerned with here is passion, and whether it makes us weaker or stronger, and that's the point of this book."

Despite a harried schedule, Jong said she will always make time for new work by the following writers: John Updike, "because he's not afraid to take risks, to venture in and out"; Doris Lessing, "because she has an adventurous mind, and I love that"; Philip Roth, "because he infuriates you, and he's a writer with a ravishing large talent and an arrested, truncated emotional development"; Anita Brookner, "for the beauty of her language"; and Wislawa Szymborska, who won the 1996 Nobel Prize for "View with a Grain of Sand."

"All of these writers," said Jong, "tell me why it is better to be a woman than a man."

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Book review: 'Angry Housewives Eating Bon-bons' by Lorna Landvik
Mickey Pearlman,

If you live in Minnesota and don't belong to at least one book club, there's a good chance you'll be deported to Iowa.

Lorna Landvik apparently knows this, because "Angry Housewives Eating Bon-bons," the latest novel about female gathering holes by the author of "Patty Jane's House of Curl," traces the convolutions (unending) and the evolutions (limited) of the five members of a book club on Freesia Court in a small town near Minneapolis. It's a place devoid of Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Asians, Latinos and Hmong, with a few good gay men and one biracial baby standing in for the rest of us.

Landvik, whose kind and generous heart shines through here, does include the beautiful abused woman, Merit, who merits more than her doctor husband, son of an abuser; the big-breasted sexpot, Audrey, who wears low-cut blouses even during Minnesota winters and becomes a Unitarian minister (sure!), and Slip, the left-wing, arm-wrestling activist from New Jersey at whose hospital bed the novel opens.

Then there's Kari, the widowed wisewoman who adopts and raises her niece's biracial daughter, and Faith, the daughter of a drunk and a took-a-hike father and the mother of fraternal twins -- her daughter assertive and feisty, her son sensitive and nonathletic. (You see where this is going.)

Landvik repeatedly makes the same point actress Kim Cattrall of "Sex and the City" did at the Golden Globe Awards: Men, children and parents are temporary, but women friends are forever. The bigger secrets in this group -- that Merit is getting the lutefisk beaten out of her on a regular basis and that Faith's family history is about as believable as a Bigfoot sighting -- take about eight years to be unveiled.

These discoveries would have taken about eight sessions, at most, in any of the book clubs with which I have been associated over the past 10 years. Of course, we do a lot less baking and decorating on book-club night, and there's not a lemon bar, butterscotch pie or "I Must Be Dreaming Cheesecake" in sight.

Each chapter in Landvik's novel begins with a name of one character, the title of the book she has chosen for that evening, the date and the reason for that choice. (Faith, March 1974, "The Heart is a Lonely Hunter," by Carson McCullers, because "I think it's one of the most beautiful titles in the history of books.") The books include Marabel Morgan's "The Total Woman" (lots of Saran Wrap that night) and "Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask)," for which the dessert is "long spears of bananas nestled between peach halves" plus pineapple rings and bratwurst. (Go, Lorna!)

Landvik also includes such amazing selections as Rebecca West's "The Fountain Overflows." This device evokes the societal changes over the four decades in which the club meets, and it's worth the price of the book.

Landvik knows that book clubs are about a lot more than reading. Mine, for instance, walks the Revlon 5K every year, wearing purple T-shirts emblazoned with "Book Club Babes" in remembrance of members and friends lost to, or threatened by, cancer. Like all women across the supposedly impenetrable borders of race, religion, age and ethnicity, we are bound by our feminine potential for intimacy and support.

Reading Landvik's novel -- if you are, indeed, one of the unfortunate few who is not in a book club -- will energize you to remedy that condition. For that contribution alone, Landvik may now have another bon-bon.

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'The Man in My Basement' is Mosley's masterpiece
December 28, 2003
The Minneapolis Star Tribune

Reviewed by Mickey Pearlman

Book reviewers spend an inordinate amount of time reading galleys of books that will be published several months in the future. They arrive, courtesy of the publishers, along with the usual puffery from adjective-endowed publicists. Unless you are in a deep coma or have forgotten all those books you read as an English major long ago, most of these seem not to have been touched by a living editor's hands, at least one who is not on the phone bidding for the next bestseller or arguing with the marketing department about budgets and book tours. Certainly they are not editing, and one wonders, to be fair, whether there is anything worth editing in many of these novels.

So it is a genuine pleasure to get your hands on any book written by Walter Mosley, a man who knows how to tell a story, how to create a character, and who has you hooked from page 1. "The Man in My Basement" is no exception.

The novel begins when someone in a dark-green suit, appearing to be an Ur-WASP from Connecticut (with a name to match: Anniston Bennet), arrives on the doorstep of Charles Blakey "in a secluded colored neighborhood" on Long Island.

The stranger offers Blakey -- an undistinguished drifter-through-life, small-time embezzler and familiar no-account -- a little less than 50 grand for the use of his basement for "a couple of months." Blakey's house, "about 3 stories high and about 200 years old," has been in his family for seven generations, but since the current inhabitant is often drunk, behind on the mortgage, out of work and devoid of ambition, it is just short of being owned by the bank.

Suffice it to say that Bennet moves in and that Mosley makes it altogether believable that a white man could walk up to the door of a black man in Sag Harbor and that this deal could be struck. And, for various reasons, Blakey at this pointno longer needs the money.

More important, "The Man in My Basement" evokes Camus' "The Stranger," including the gratuitous murder on which that novel turns. Like Camus, Mosley creates a character who is separated from the values that society -- in order to function and with much evidence to the contrary -- takes for granted. Like Camus, he raises the existential question, "How do you identify evil and good in an absurd universe?"

A good book club could spend a month discussing how a Warden (the name given by Bennet to Blakey), or any person holding the key, becomes imprisoned along with his prisoner. (Abraham Lincoln on this in 1858: "As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master.")

They could continue with discussions about the corrupting nature of power, and why atrocities happen so frequently in Third World countries. (Possibly, Mosley seems to suggest, because few people pay attention for more than 10 minutes or really care. See Rwanda et al.)

What happens in Bennet's cage in the basement will remain undisclosed here, but it is enough to say that Mosley is writing about the possibility of atonement where treachery, murder and, yes, worse, are involved. Anniston Bennet, a guilt-ridden mercenary with a huge, uncircumcised penis (and you can draw your own conclusions about why the author includes this detail) is pitted for 256 pages against a not particularly likeable man who functions here as the innocent whose life is changed by another man's sins. The book club could then argue about how much any of us is responsible for another person's actions or, as current lingo goes, NOT.

Famous for his Easy Rawlins mysteries, for "Devil in a Blue Dress" and "RL's Dream," this time out Walter Mosley has written an uncomfortable, demanding masterpiece.

Mickey Pearlman of Cliffside Park, N.J., is the author of "What to Read: The Essential Guide for Reading Group Members and Other Book Lovers."

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The unquenchable search for sanctuary
By Mickey Pearlman | May 9, 2004 | THE BOSTON GLOBE

Little Edens
By Barbara Klein Moss
Norton, 332 pp., $23.95

Two years after 9/11, the idea of Eden seems both fantastical and infinitely remote. Which of us can think of paradise, utopia, or innocence in a time bathed in sorrow, anger, and confusion? But the heart has its reasons, and in spite of the daily barrage of rampant materialism (here come the Christmas catalogs!), foulmouthed rap music, so-called TV reality shows, and images of giant trees going up in smoke in the American West, a significant portion of the reading public remains mired, not surprisingly, in longing -- for the idyllic and the edenic. As Barbara Klein Moss correctly notes, those little Edens are ''not only the physical spaces that people seek, but the inner lives they nurture and protect, and the creations that issue from those lives."

The visceral and unquenchable desire for a little bit of paradise never wanes. Choose your exemplar; we are all on intimate terms with a serpent.

Moss, who describes herself as a late bloomer who entered the Warren Wilson writing program at 52, understands the complexities of desire, the kind responsible for our expulsion from paradise and our longing to re-create it. Each of the eight stories in this debut collection, ''Little Edens," describes the tension between our inner and outer worlds, between the imagined Eden and the re-created substitute. In ''Rug Weaver" (selected for ''Best American Short Stories 2001"), for example, an Iranian rug dealer transforms his prison cell by mentally weaving an elaborate rug. In doing so he creates order and beauty, two components of Eden before the fall. He ''had been allowed space to create a paradise, to draw it out of its hiddenness and into the world." Moss, who lived in San Diego in 1993 (''which seemed like another planet") after post-college days in Boston and, with her husband, at a small boarding school in New Hampshire, uses that material in her first California story, ''Little Edens." They lived in a subdivision called Barcelona, and she ''was fascinated by the rootlessness of the place, so different from what I'd known in New England: the effacement of the past, the transient population. Everyone . . . seemed to have been born somewhere else, and to tell a different tale about why they had come to this quasi-paradise." The main character in ''The Palm Tree of Dilys Cathcart," a gentile piano teacher who has a musical affair with Krakauer, a Jewish butcher with a sick wife, was actually ''a refined-looking Englishwoman in a flowered dress and sneakers" observed ''deep in conversation with a Hispanic woman." ''Unforgettable" is too weak an adjective to describe this story, about how Cathcart and Krakauer ''had teetered on the brink of ecstasy. And they had never touched. Not once."

In ''The Consolations of Art," Kriensky, a recent widower, advertises for a home-care worker but, as his daughter Arlene says, unconsciously alluding both to the end of Eden and to the Holocaust, you ''let trouble in the door and it fills the house like poison gas." The other stories are of the same quality. In ''Interpreters," Thomas, an obsessed furniture maker, tries to remodel his extraneous, no-name wife, who learns from him that ''the world had fallen not just once, as she'd been taught in Sunday school, but piece by piece, again and again." The truth embedded here is almost flagrant, almost makes you gasp, and then you remember that this is a piece of wisdom you wish you did not have.

''Camping In," one of those stories whose every sentence prepares you for disaster, turns out instead to be the plaintive tale of Mercedes (''Accent on the first syllable. As in 'Lord, have mercedes on me' "), another seriously unloved and unnoticed child running rampant through contemporary American literature and back to Hawthorne's ''Rappaccini's Daughter." This teenager, an almost silent waif whose dust cloth becomes a weapon, is hired to clean and baby-sit; instead she refashions someone else's house and possessions to make the nest she needs. In ''The Palm Tree of Dilys Cathcart," the Jewish mysticism called kabala, and its principles of duality and wholeness, emerge.

Every reviewer of short stories mentions the long history of how difficult they are to sell if, in fact, the writer can find a publisher in the first place. We've been told ad nauseam that readers prefer the novel, the longer form. But language, insight, and talent are the real issues. And in the case of Moss, I'd read her proverbial laundry list if she cares to send it. That, a good cup of coffee, and some peace and quiet would be my own little Eden.

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The one-step program
Reviewed By Mickey Pearlman, Special To The Star Tribune

Listen, I'm from New Jersey, where the state motto probably should be "Get Over Yourself" and a "self-help" program means, "Get a job and stop bitching to me," or, better yet, "Get two jobs -- one of which you can actually declare on your income tax."

Despite this, there are still those moments when I am dying to tell assorted kvetchers to do me a big favor and suppress their "inner child" or their outer unloved grown-up, and to maybe swallow some of their other assorted pain and suffering (unless of course it's a real emergency), because I already have a headache and I'm trying to concentrate on three guys on base and a cretin with a .190 batting average at the plate.

So imagine my unabated delight when a copy of Paul Pearsall's "The Last Self-Help Book You'll Ever Need: Repress Your Anger, Think Negatively, Be a Good Blamer, and Throttle Your Inner Child" arrived. Pearsall, a legit neuropsychologist and clinical professor at the University of Hawaii -- and a man only too ready to tell Dr. Phil to take a hike -- tells us that the "platitudes of self-empowerment" are bogus (although he used to dish this "wisdom" himself).

He points out that it just might be a good idea, for a change, to "stop expressing yourself" and instead to "shut up and listen." Oh, my joyous heart! He even, God bless him, makes a case that "finding the right person to blame is essential for mental health" and suggests that we can all stop trying to have the patience and fortitude of Mother Teresa because, as we say in the Garden State, it ain't happenin', so get over it.

Of course, Pearsall uses what your mother would call "better language," but points out anyway that self-help bromides are now an industry, that "everyone from politicians and professors to teachers and talk-show hosts parrots the platitudes of self-empowerment" as if they were facts of life and that he is nauseous from "getting in touch with your feelings,"living in denial,"codependency,"learning to love yourself,"quality time," being "who you are" and -- make your own list.

As an antidote, my favorite Pearsallian news is that it's OK, even preferable, to love others before oneself, that "no one, including you, is love-worthy if she or he does not behave lovingly," that "love is something you earn, not something you deserve," and that all of the usual "McMorals" are "tenets about life that go down easily" but are as about as good for you as the fries.

Pearsall, like anyone who has entered nongalactic space in the last 10 years, knows that the 20,000 published self-help tomes have taken over the bookstore like creeping kudzu in gardens below the Mason-Dixon line. But what really motivated the writing of this book was his battle 16 years ago with stage-four lymphoma. Loving friends loaded down his hospital bed with so many self-help books and empowerment tapes that the bed's mechanism no longer worked.

After wading through this advice, Pearsall became increasingly depressed, disempowered and helpless, since he felt forced to hide his fear and depend solely on hope, optimism and horse manure.

(Just as an aside, I remember when my best friend was dying of stage-four breast cancer. As she said, "I need one person to whom I can rave and rant and be angry as hell and who will not show up at the hospital with any visible signs of positive thinking, tapes of funny movies, or self-help books about 'accepting the moment.' You're elected." She was from Jersey, too.)

But the best, best, best part is when Pearsall dumps on the "olics" -- sexoholics, shopoholics, etc. -- and actually suggests that "the best way to deal with something you're doing that you shouldn't be doing" is to skip Steps 2 through 12 and use "the one-step program: Stop it!" (Is there any way to make this required reading across this victim-centered nation?)

All I can say about Pearsall's work is that I read three to five books a week and I rarely think, "Hmm, I wish I'd written that one." But this guy was reading my mind; his bill is in the mail, and if you've been watching "The Sopranos," as an example of state pride, you know that in Jersey we collect. And not just on the Turnpike.

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When it Was Our War' teaches wartime realities
Mickey Pearlman
Special to the Star Tribune
Published September 28, 2003

Note to all aspiring memoirists: Your mother, your accountant and your psychiatrist want to know if you are sitting around watching the game, catching some zzzs, or doodling away your writing time in a similar fashion. If so, they want to remind you that Stella Suberman wrote "The Jew Store" (which, by the way, sold a gazillion copies to book-club members) when she was 76 and has now finished her newest, "When It Was Our War: A Soldier's Wife in World War II," at age 80.

So get off the couch.

Suberman, who wrote vividly about her life until age 11 as a member of the only Jewish family in a small Tennessee town, writes here about her teenage years in the late 1930s, growing wiser in Miami Beach, then a so-called paradise where many hotels posted these warnings: "No Jews Allowed" or "Always a View, Never A Jew." At 19 she wed the handsome Jack (to whom, after 60 years, she is still married), and quickly became an officer's wife, one of many "who got caught up in a whirlwind and, while she was finding her way about in it, did a lot of growing up."

For four years, she followed her bombardier husband to bases in California, Arizona and Kansas until he was shipped overseas, "flying with fuel and bombs from India to A-7 (an advance base for bombing Japan)," which had been "established outside Chengdu, in western China." Its runways "were built . . . by hundreds of Chinese laborers in family groups of men, women and children, who split and pounded rocks with hammers and chisels."

Like anyone who travels with a sense of innocence in America -- 60 plus years ago or now -- Suberman found some rocks of her own to chisel: She was graced with the chance to examine her own paternalistic attitudes about black people, and changed irrevocably by encounters with the slime one usually finds under the rocks.

A memorable example: Mrs. Gillis, her potential landlady, looked carefully for Suberman's lump, the one she was sure existed on the necks of all Jews everywhere.

(During my own sojourn as one of two Jews at a prep school in Virginia, a classmate with the surname of Abdalla, late of New Iberia, La., stationed herself implacably outside my dormitory door, insisting that I show her my "tail." She knew, "positively, that all Jews had one.")

Suberman also experienced the friendship of Jerry Bulla, an Air Force cadet who was passing as Hawaiian because Mexicans, according to Bulla, were looked on as "inferior beings, shiftless and lazy." At one point the Subermans lived in a court of six identical small cottages in Tucson near Capt. Hoffenhauer, the PX officer, and Mrs. Hoffenhauer, who was always careful to make clear that Hoffenhauer was a German name and had a neon sign on her forehead that flashed, "We are not Jewish."

But Suberman seems most happily affected by the Air Force wife most different from herself: Peg O'Connor, the redheaded, fair-skinned Boston "Irish Catholic lass of your imagination" who "prayed every time she felt a prayer might be useful, invoking 'Jesus' and 'God' and 'Mary' often," especially during Suberman's learning-to-cook encounter with a pot roast. Peg "felt moved to invoke a whole roster of holy figures. 'Holy Mother of the Lord Jesus and St. Peter, you've drowned the poor creature . . . I'll have to give it artificial respiration.' "

And she tells the tale, as she did in "The Jew Store," with a novelist's awareness of detail and voice. Without preaching about the glory of war, Suberman teaches the reader about gas and food rationing, wartime train travel, blackouts and about the emotional cost of waiting -- for letters, for good news, for resolution.

She knows what every successful chronicler of experience must learn: Keep your eyes open because you can't make up stuff this good! And if you pay attention, get it down and stay honest, you don't have to.

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Deceit and disaster Down East
By Mickey Pearlman | May 29, 2005

Far be it for this reviewer to succumb ignominiously to stereotypes (like who doesn't?), but I must admit my surprise at Cynthia Thayer's newest novel, ''A Brief Lunacy." Who expected this rural Maine writer (raised in Nova Scotia), who owns and manages an organic farm in Gouldsboro and usually writes tender stories (''Strong for Potatoes" and ''A Certain Slant of Light"), to surprise us with a real, old-time thriller? But she has, in fact, produced a story of madness, perverse sex, Gypsies, strangers in the night, late-middle-age romance, and lots of encoded and actual violence. I guess I forgot that Stephen King lives in Maine too; is it the water?

Fundamental to this novel is the question of secrets, and it's no secret to Thayer or anyone else who has ever thought about it that each of us has them. What's more intellectually intriguing is why we cling to them so voraciously and seem often willing to protect them by superimposing additional secrets on the tenuously buried original. The mind map, for all of us, looks like one of those convoluted M. C. Escher drawings of birds and fish that meld into each other while retaining some semblance of their original form. But it is the emotional cost of hiding those secrets and the expenditure of mental energy on that attempt that underscore Thayer's message in this novel.

Here the secret-keeper is Carl, a retired surgeon, albeit with hands ''more suited to moving hay bales," who is living in an art-filled house in the woods with Jessie, his longtime wife, a retired high school history teacher. Both parents are mourning and missing their mentally ill daughter, Sylvie, who, according to Carl, ''lies somewhere underneath all the layers of craziness" and is hospitalized in a ''loony bin," somewhere in New England. Carl is a non-Jewish Holocaust survivor and, without disclosing too much of the plot, linked to the always roaming Gypsies of Europe, also a historically despised and hunted people, who cling to each other for safety and succor. (Not for nothing, as the Irish say, Thayer dedicates the book to ''the memory of the thousands of Roma, taken in the night from the Gypsy camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau to the gas chambers on August 2, 1944.") Like the Jews, the Gypsies were, and are, often isolated and endlessly at risk.

As Thayer notes in an autobiographical press handout, ''Everyone in [my] Nova Scotia hometown kept secrets," especially her own family. Her ''parents kept secrets for the same reason Carl . . . keeps them. Sometimes shame. Or memories too painful to mention. It was easier for my mother to talk about how important it is to place the fork on the left than to reveal that her father chose to jump off Niagara Falls, leaving his wife and five daughters destitute. It was more comfortable for my father to discuss whether Finnegans Wake was the greatest novel ever written than to admit that he'd slept with most of the gay tenors and baritones in Paris. . . . Only when he became an old man did I discover that because of his fluent German he liberated a concentration camp and spent two years in a house-to-house canvass of the German people about their knowledge of the atrocities."

The novel also addresses (although in a more subliminal fashion) not only the issue of children immured in mental illness but the feelings of grief, loss, and responsibility among those of us who love them. In fact, Jessie and Carl open the door (literally) to an imperfect stranger precisely because the emotional doors to their daughter have been so formidably closed. The terror without is brought within by this well-drawn character, their daughter's severely disturbed boyfriend, Jonah, an ''angry," ''enraged," ''weird," and hateful being. As Carl muses in an after-the-fact epiphany, ''Is it too late to throw him out?" Much too late.

Thayer is also dealing here with how we cope with the disasters caused by other people's choices (9/11, the invasion of Iraq, the AIDS epidemic, and global warming, to name a few) and those calamities resulting from our own decisions. Reality suggests that we can't cope successfully in many cases. As Carl laments, ''I'm a doctor . . . but that doesn't mean I'm God, now, does it? . . . I've never been able to fix Sylvie" although ''you'd think with all my medical training I'd be able to fix anything if I tried hard enough, and God knows with my daughter I've tried everything. Sometimes she's right there, but more often than not she is somewhere else where sane people can't go. . . . I read somewhere that many psychotics describe an identical crazy world and voices that use the same words. How could people who don't even know one another come up with the same crazy place?" He tells Jessie, ''I don't know the answers to these things. Do you think I always know what to do?"

We've all been there.

''A Brief Lunacy" is not a perfect book. I could quarrel with some of Thayer's choices concerning plot, tone, and character. But what a treat it is to read a novel by someone who makes no secret of her interest in a deeper and often darker understanding of the world, a place where, as she knows, a brief lunacy can, and probably will, befall us all. You don't need the apocalyptic destruction of a tsunami or the degradation spawned by the Nazis to hear those unspoken words in Jessie's mouth: ''What after this? What do we do after this?"

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Nonfiction review: 'Talk to the Hand' by Lynne Truss
Mickey Pearlman, Special To The Star Tribune

Having survived a long-ago American childhood in the segregated South of the 1950s, I still hear this litany in my head: "Modulate your voice,"Say thank you" and so on. So I've always believed that, like Lynne Truss of "Eats, Shoots & Leaves" fame, I had a special investment in manners. And I welcomed the chance to read "Talk to the Hand: The Utter Bloody Rudeness of the World Today, or Six Good Reasons to Stay Home and Bolt the Door."

Having done so, and if I didn't have such good manners, I'd be forced to say that this is claptrap thrown together with very little thought or understanding of what manners really are. Nor does it betray any insight into a hugely diverse America, where actual life differs from what transpires in Truss' hometown of Brighton, England, or on publicity junkets to the not-so-good ol' U.S.A.

Truss talks a funny game -- between rants against automated switchboards, pick-your-own strawberry stands, cell phones, the use of the "eff word,"insane levels of self-absorption" and popular culture (defined here as TV and reality shows). She even throws in a few words of praise for Charles Dickens' dismissal of America in 1840, although what this has to do with the 200 million-plus people who live here now I don't know, except that it's easier to quote than to think. But it would, of course, be bad manners to say that -- or that this book seems like an obvious attempt to cash in on the 3 million purchasers of book No. 1. Apparently, blatant materialism doesn't offend Truss.

I'll give her this. I did not particularly enjoy my commuter seatmate's day-by-day description via cell phone of her past week's sexual activity (although Thursday's was, I admit, pretty intriguing). And I suppose I could have lived without another cell-phone addict's information on the condom sizes of various boyfriends (on Amtrak between New York City and Baltimore), but hey. And I do agree wholeheartedly that "the way people behave towards each other, even in minor things, is a measure of their value as human beings." Truss even quotes Henry James: "Three things in human life are important. The first is be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind."

So perhaps Truss should also recall that perfect strangers carried other perfect strangers down 30 flights of stairs on 9/11 as the buildings were crumbling and burning. (No doubt similar heroics happened in Britain when the trains were bombed.) And that while the government "may" (see paragraph on kindness) not know what it is doing, We The People are not confused, and after Katrina (as only one example), from coast to coast, citizens of every religion, race and affiliation packed up clothing, emptied the stores of school supplies, signed up at the Red Cross, left their jobs and went to comfort the mourners, put clean sheets on the bed in the spare room, forgot their differences and remembered what kindness and good manners really mean. Maybe she forgot that the New York City firehouses after 9/11 had so much homemade lasagna and so many brownies left at the front doors each day that they had to post "Stop bringing it!" signs. Truss, however, insists that "the very term ! 'public-spirited' is so outmoded that it actually took me a couple of days to remember it."

Huh?

As a user and lover of public transportation who is not cocooned in her private automobile, I readily admit that cell-phone conversations in Spanish, Korean, Russian and Japanese -- all happening simultaneously -- can be annoying on trains, buses, planes and subways, where I frequently am. However, I am equally cheered, on departing the bus, when an unrehearsed "thank you" is delivered every night to a tired bus driver by those very same people, often in recently learned English. (This happens every morning after delivery to the city, as well. Everyone is cheerier then.) Oh, and did I mention the kid at the bagel store (use your own example of this story; everyone has one) who dropped dead while shoveling snow, and the anonymous neighbors who stuffed enough money into the giant mayonnaise jar to send his body home to his mother in Salvador? Is that what Truss meant when she said that "manners are about ... imagining being the other person"?

Maybe (although I don't want to be rude here) Ms. Truss should stop bemoaning the demise of Grovers Corner and instead celebrate the efforts of most people to live together in a complicated, changing, often dangerous world. With apologies to Shakespeare, her ancestor, that would be the kindest cut of all.

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'The Dirty Girls Social Club' by Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez
Reviewed by Mickey Pearlman
Special to the Star Tribune

Lauren Fernandez is one of six Latina Boston University alumnae who meet every six months to barbeque the fat in "The Dirty Girls Social Club." The apparent alter ego of author and former journalist Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez, Lauren sums up this latest chick-lit romp when she says:

"At twenty-eight, I'm the youngest (and only Hispanic) columnist the paper has ever had, but I don't want to brag or anything. Eddie Olmos might as well just take a big old crap in his East L.A. outhouse, you know what I'm sayin'? The chicks be here, Eddie, so move your tired old zoot suit over."

Sucia means "dirty girl." "Buena Sucia," Lauren says, "is actually pretty offensive to most Spanish-speaking people, akin to 'big smelly 'ho.' So Buena Sucia Social Club is, how do you say, irreverent. Right? And obnoxious."

But Valdes-Rodriguez wants us to know that non-Hispanics think a sucia is "something beautiful and curvy and foreign, something really super Latina, you know, like the mysterious name of a tortured-looking, bloody-haired Catholic saint, or a treasured recipe from a short, fat, wrinkled old abuelita who works erotic magic with chocolate."

(Note to reader: This reviewer, at least, has spent no previous time thinking about what a sucia is.)

In any case, Valdes-Rodriguez is working hard in this first novel to dispense with the usual stereotypes. So her literary menu starts with Lauren, who describes herself as "half white trash, born and raised in New Orleans. My mom's people are bayou swamp monsters with oil under their fingernails and a rusty olive-green washing machine in front of the double-wide." Her friends include Sara (abused, in denial, Cuban-Jewish mother of twin boys, complete with McMansion) and Amber (morphing into Cuicatl, self-made Aztec-Mexica priestess musician, who eats only raw food and of course ends up No. 1 on the charts after a mere 10-year struggle). There's Elizabeth (beautiful, Colombian, black Latina, but uh-oh, she's a lesbian in love with a poet named Selwyn Womyngold), and Rebecca (makes big bucks as the creator of the magazine Ella and ends up with a gorgeous Nigerian millionaire with a great tush). Finally, there's Usnavys (pronounced "Ooos-NAH-vees. Ay, mi'ja, I'm serious") wh! ose Puerto Rican mother got the name from the side of a ship. "US Navy, girl. I am not joking. That's what Usnavys is named after, although she tries to front like the name comes from a distant relative . . . that it's Taino or something."

Usnavys makes J. Lo look like a non-materialist, but, reader, don't worry. As with all the sucias, everything turns out todo bueno, perfecto, estupendo.

And after finishing this book, I now know every piece of dirt about the internecine struggles of Chicanas, Latinas, Miami Cubans, New Jersey Cubans, black and white and brown Hispanics, Mexicans, Puerto Ricans (on the mainland and on the island), Colombians and more. (Everyone hates everyone and they live happily ever after.) And this author is a lot more entertaining than any anthropology professor you've ever met.

A word to aspiring writers: Don't despair. The publishing market can probably absorb some good dish about six Jews from Brandeis, five colleens out of Notre Dame, seven Asians late of Southern Cal and eight Italians via St. John's. For now, Terry McMillan has my permission to loll on the beach, slather on the suntan oil, and wait for the rest of us to exhale.

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School Master

'Our Kind' gets caught in its own limbo
Mickey Pearlman, Special to the Star Tribune

Kate Walbert's first novel, "The Gardens of Kyoto" (2001), garnered a lot of positive attention. Her newest effort, "Our Kind," one of many books about a group of women ("The Joy Luck Club," "How to Make an American Quilt," "Angry Housewives Eating BonBons," "The Dirty Girls Social Club," "Divine Secrets of the YaYa Sisterhood," etc.), presents the reader with two problems: How do you break through her often mannered prose in order to access the content? And (the all-too-familiar response to a novel) do we care about these characters?

For beginners, we are entangled inside the inner musings of eight women who, after coming of age in the 1950s, "were led down the primrose lane, then abandoned near the carp pond." Now divorced and long free from diapers and carpools, their days are spent protesting the slaughter of the country club's fairway geese, staging an intervention for the town "deity," (an aging Realtor hunk named "Him," as in, "Still, we love Him"), and making middle-of-the-night phone calls to former lovers. They seem to have learned almost nothing about the emotional lives of women (and I suppose that's the point), to have few if any insights about why so many of their children ran adrift of happiness, or to have replaced their former lives with anything appreciably better, unless you count endless smoking, drinking, gossiping, shopping and slogging through amorphous fogs of sorrow.

No doubt Walbert wants us to experience the cultural limbo in which these women now wander (and wandered earlier), and her language reflects that on almost every page: "We moved blindly through the dark of that, feeling just feet ahead of us; we were sopped in formula, desperate in our good intention."

Unfortunately for Walbert, this group will appear to most readers like cheese haters in Wisconsin, a kind of peculiar anthropological subset, including, as it does, artistic Esther, wheelchair-bound Bambi, alcoholic Canoe, ditzy Judy, frigid Gay, and the newly lesbian Suzie, among others. (The 60-plus-year-old women of my not-limited acquaintance -- all involved in their book clubs, second careers, exercise programs, multiple hobbies and traveling -- seem far more representative, but, hey, I've spent very little time at country clubs.)

No doubt that Walbert, as her publisher suggests, is attempting to "paint a portrait not of one individual character, but of a . . . class, a generation." And no reviewer should fault her for her vision of the group she has selected, no matter how much one might wish for evolution, for the belief that age promotes some modicum of wisdom.

Whatever the vision, Walbert's language is lilting and lyrical: "Nor are we anything other than who our daughters will become . . . But . . . there's nothing to be done, we could tell them; because death comes to all the living; because they think us heartless and we are, somewhat, our hearts worn down by the slow drumming of our blood."

Let us hope, in the newness of the 21st century, that when mature women of the next few decades look back to their earlier lives, they see something finer and richer than "yellowing pearls on a taut string: valued once but now too fussy." Fully faceted and sparkling diamonds would suit me just fine.

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---Robert Dzik