The View From a Treehouse of the Mind

[I don't usually post work that has not been published, but this book review got killed at the last minute, after it was too old to sell anywhere else. So...enjoy!]

The View From a Treehouse of the Mind

NOW YOU SEE HIM: A Novel, by Eli Gottlieb.
Harper Collins. 272 pages. $22.95

By Beth Schwartzapfel

Fathers and sons, friends and brothers. The fractured and imperfect love we share is supposed to be the foundation upon which we weather life’s surprises; as it turns out, the love itself might provide the biggest surprise of all: Now you see it. Now you don’t.

These are the issues that Eli Gottleib continues to piece apart with his striking sophomore novel, Now You See Him. Set in a small town in upstate New York, the book is narrated by Nick Framingham, a loving if ineffectual father of two in a crumbling marriage. Nick can’t get past the recent death of his childhood best friend. The larger-than-life way in which Rob died both comforts--it somehow seems a natural end to such an oversized life--and nags.

“His name was Rob Castor,” Nick says, in the book’s opening pages. “Quite possibly, you’ve heard of him. He became a minor cult celebrity in his mid-twenties for writing a book of darkly pitch-perfect stories...Several years later, he murdered Kate Pierce, his writer girlfriend, and then committed suicide...” To Nick, Rob’s death is a question with no answer, and even as the rest of his community moves on, Nick continues to unravel. The loss infects his work, his marriage, his relationship with his parents, and ultimately, his sense of self.

Unexpectedly, Now You See Him turns out to be a mystery novel. Startling revelations late in the story shed new light on each early scene, each character and conversation gaining a weight in retrospect that we couldn’t have anticipated on the first go-round. And while watching Nick plod through his own self-destruction makes the book drag a bit at the outset, everything clicks masterfully into place as the narrative quickens.

It also reveals itself as a book about writing. In the world of "Now You See Him," more often than not, putting words to the page is ultimately destructive, whether for the writer or the subject. It’s not lost on Nick that both the rise and the dramatic fall of Rob Castor’s star are closely tied to his fiction; a writer’s block, which eventually spells Rob’s demise, afflicts him after his debut book is widely acclaimed. The critics and literati, with their pressure and puffery, are partly to blame, and come in for some ribbing: “Rob became well known for writing a book that, for at least one whole season, was the must-have fashion accessory on trains and planes for its ‘lyric anatomizing of the human heart,’” Nick tells us. The book’s villain, if there is one, is an opportunistic “grasping phony” named Mac Sterling, a childhood friend who now writes celebrity profiles for glossy magazines and who lands a “‘juicy contract’ to write the ‘definitive’ book on Rob.” In the aftermath of Rob’s death, the media are relentless, and their presence in the tiny town has a vulgar effect on its usually unassuming residents, who casually conspire to look news-worthy when the camera crews come around: “We were collectively like a hooker angry with the life she leads who is nonetheless rouged and waiting and open for business,” says Nick of his fellow townspeople.

And yet, the language in Now You See Him is painstakingly crafted. Gottlieb was a poet before he was a novelist, and it shows in Nick’s delicate turns of phrase and unexpected metaphor. Rather than seeming overwrought, as it might in the hands of a different narrator, the language with which Nick carefully dismantles his own thoughts is consistent with his character, who is “living in some little treehouse of the mind, spying out on the world and the world can’t see you back.” Where this lyrical self-analysis is ultimately ruinous for Nick, however, it is redemptive and beautiful for us, who can revel in, and learn from, Gottlieb’s wordsmithing and Nick’s uncanny insight into himself and his family, in a way that Nick can’t.

The narrator of Gottlieb’s celebrated first novel, The Boy Who Went Away, was a similarly self-conscious--if less polished--scribe. Although several decades separate Nick from Denny Graubert, the teenage protagonist of The Boy Who Went Away, the two are equally preoccupied with questions of fatherhood, families, love and lust. But where The Boy Who Went Away felt rough around the edges, like an unfinished treatment of these themes, Now You See Him gleams with poise and confidence.

Whether Nick will be redeemed from his downward spiral, whether he will be able to forgive and move on and reopen his long-closed heart to those who love him, remains an open question. But it’s never a question whether telling Nick’s story was an act of love on Gottlieb’s part. The answer is clearly yes.

Providence Journal>Books>An inside look at life in the ghetto

An inside look at life in the ghetto

GANG LEADER FOR A DAY: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Street,
by Sudhir Venkatesh.

Penguin. 302 pages. $25.95.

By Beth Schwartzapfel
February 24, 2008

In the winter of 1989, a young sociology graduate student named Sudhir Venkatesh arrived at Chicago’s Robert Taylor Homes. Armed with a clipboard and a stack of surveys, Venkatesh walked into what was then the nation’s largest housing project and the hub of a booming crack-cocaine trade. Ninety percent of its tens of thousands of inhabitants were on welfare, and local gangs served as both cops and robbers by controlling the flow of drugs, overseeing the local underground economy, and meting out vigilante justice.

Members of a local gang intercepted Venkatesh before he’d knocked on a single door, and, in a scene that’s by turns hilarious and hair-raising, fought amongst themselves about what to do with him. It was touch and go until a young man named J.T. arrived. “[W]hile I couldn’t have known it at this moment, he was about to become the most formidable person in my life, for a long time to come,” writes Venkatesh in his insightful and bittersweet new book, Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets.

J.T., it turns out, was the college-educated leader of a local gang faction. The two men formed an unexpected bond and Venkatesh began shadowing J.T.’s day-to-day operations. Ultimately he spent seven years deeply enmeshed in the life of Robert Taylor and its inhabitants.

The longer he stayed, the more people trusted him, and the more people trusted him, the more inside information he had access to: barbecues and birthday parties; mediation sessions between rival gang leaders, brokered by tenant leaders and local clergy; a dubious get-out-the-vote effort on behalf of Chicago’s political machine; corrupt policemen and unresponsive ambulances; gang mergers and sales strategy meetings; prostitution and crack use and domestic violence and creative ways to fix problems when the Chicago Housing Authority won’t help.

Venkatesh, now a prominent social scientist, built his early career from the data he collected during these years. Gang Leader for a Day is his opportunity to put aside the numbers and tell what happened. What emerges is a textured and complex portrait that is both affectionate and clear-eyed.

Ultimately, life in the Robert Taylor homes is both exactly what you’d expect, and exactly the opposite. It’s filthy, crime-ridden, and subject to the whims of criminals and apathetic bureaucracies. At the same time, it’s a tight-knit community where members look out for one another and do what they must to survive. The problems facing the urban poor don’t have easy answers — just how entrenched those problems are emerges vividly here — but Venkatesh takes a compelling first step by offering up names and faces behind the statistics, showing us just what we as a society stand to lose when we cordon off the projects and ignore the humanity inside them.

Providence Journal>Books>The Ever-Evolving First Amendment

The Ever-Evolving First Amendment

FREEDOM FOR THE THOUGHT THAT WE HATE: A Biography of the First Amendment,

by Anthony Lewis.

Basic Books. 221 pages. $25.

BY BETH SCHWARTZAPFEL
Special to the Journal

During the run-up to a key presidential election, Matthew Lyon wrote a letter to the editor of his local paper. In it, Lyon mocked the sitting president’s “continual grasp for power” and his “ridiculous pomp, foolish adulation and selfish avarice.” Under the watchful eye of a Supreme Court justice, Lyon was convicted of “making odious or contemptible the president and government, and bringing them both into disrepute.” He was sentenced to four months in prison and a $1,000 fine.

This story sounds like one that could not happen in the United States. In fact, Lyon was arrested in his home state of Vermont and convicted under the Sedition Act, in 1798, less than a decade after the Bill of Rights — with its famous assertion that “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press” — was ratified.

In his new book, Freedom for the Thought That We Hate: A Biography of the First Amendment, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and professor Anthony Lewis brings this and other stories to vivid life to demonstrate that the First Amendment was, and continues to be, a moving target.

Tracing the origins of the First Amendment to King Henry VIII, Lewis writes that English censors dispensed “previous restraints” that regularly prevented books and newspapers from being published. Early interpretations of the First Amendment were that it protected Americans only from English-style previous restraints, and, what’s more, applied only to the federal government — not the states (“Congress shall make no law . . .”).

As the country and the Supreme Court evolved, approaches to the First Amendment changed, too. But it wasn’t until the 1920s and ’30s that the Court consistently began enforcing the freedoms of speech and of the press as we know them today.

In engaging and accessible style, Lewis considers the ways in which the Court has weighed freedom of speech and of the press with other rights that Americans hold dear. The right to privacy, for instance, versus the right of the press to publish information about one’s personal life. The right of the press to hold policy-makers and public figures accountable versus the right of those persons to not be misrepresented, at best, libeled at worst. The right of a defendant to an unbiased jury versus the right of a press to report on a case as it unfolds. And, in a timely example that turns out to be as old as the country itself, the right of the citizens to their civil liberties versus the responsibility of the government in times of war and danger.

Lewis takes a stand on some controversial issues, breaking with major journalists’ organizations to oppose a broad shield law protecting journalists from grand jury subpoena, arguing against Supreme Court decisions that identify campaign contributions as protected speech, and asserting — reluctantly, it seems — that “we should be able to punish speech that urges terrorist violence to an audience . . . whose members are ready to act on the urging.”

It’s hard to imagine a book about legal history reading like a page-turner, but this book does. The Supreme Court justices whose decisions have shaped our country emerge as conflicted and principled human beings. The questions that have yet to be settled press impatiently against the book’s pages, reminding us that the First Amendment continues to shift under our feet even as we read.

Ultimately, Freedom for the Thought That We Hate is both a paean to the First Amendment and a recognition of its limitations. In a far-reaching and sophisticated reading of American history, Lewis argues that freedom of speech and freedom of the press are nothing without their practitioners.

“Even in a country with constitutional guarantees of freedom, something more is needed to resist fear and its manipulators,” he writes. “That is courage.” With this compelling book, Lewis demonstrates just that.

FORWARD>Fast Forward>Notes on Hanukkah: A Holiday Collection

Notes on Hanukkah: A Holiday Collection

How to Spell Chanukah… and Other Holiday Dilemmas
Edited by Emily Franklin
*Algonquin Books, 255 pages, $18.95.

By Beth Schwartzapfel
December 5, 2007

It looks like one of those throwaway little “gift books,” like “The Girlfriends Keepsake Book” or “Chicken Soup for the Soul,” that an unassuming shopper might pick up from a display rack while waiting on line at the bookstore. Like these fluffy books, the new holiday anthology “How to Spell Chanukah,” edited by Emily Franklin, contains the requisite series of uplifting moments and life lessons. Lest its diminutive size and blue-and-pink cartoon-lettered cover mislead, however, this is also a book packed with fine writing and provocative storytelling.

The standout pieces are, of course, the ones that are not what you’d expect from a Hanukkah anthology. In particular, “Traditions Break,” a graphic story by cartoonist Eric Orner, is a pitch-perfect tale of a young woman stranded in her dorm during her college’s winter break. By turns lonely and content, wise and naive, 20-year-old Sharon is not yet sure who she is or what she wants. When the story’s over, she still isn’t sure. But since she is narrating from the vantage point of adulthood, we know she will make it through with a few answers — but only a few. Joanna Smith Rakoff’s “Dolls of the World” is the complicated story of a family that manages to hold itself together even as it falls to pieces. It opens with the parents’ move to a retirement community; two lifetimes’ worth of stuff is shed for the occasion. The stuff becomes a portal for memories and things left unsaid, as well as a means for Rakoff and her mother to broach painful subjects that, like the “five-piece service for twelve, which would not have looked out of place at Edith Wharton’s most formal table,” had been collecting dust for far too long. Several of the essays are like prose poems, sermons or elegies: Peter Orner’s “Oak Street, 1981” and Laura Dave’s “Eight Nights” are both small but hauntingly lovely snapshots of moments in time when a child comes to understand something of adulthood. Even the most serious stories, however, are touched with humor, and some are laugh-out-loud funny. Joshua Braff’s “The Blue Team” features, to great comic effect, “sad, davening action figures,” and in “Creature Comfies,” Heeb magazine editor and publisher Joshua Neuman recounts his short-lived career as a stuffed-animal-cum-apparel salesman.

Of course, any 21st-century book about being a young, modern Jew will overflow with certain types of stories. And here, young parents, especially those grappling with how to avoid turning Hanukkah into a gluttonous blitz of consumerism for their children, are everywhere. A related genre that makes several appearances is the Jews-who-don’t-celebrate-Christmas vs. Jews-who-do vs. Jews-who-try-not-to-but-can’t-escape-it conundrum. There is a certain amount of navel-gazing in the selections, as well as, for my taste, one too many comments about how fattening latkes are. But even the most solipsistic of the essays features a wonderful moment of revelation at a debauched Seattle Hanukkah party: “Is this what our parents had in mind for us when they chauffeured us to day school, Hebrew school, and bat mitzvah lessons?” Elisa Albert asks in “Week at a Glance.” “Pornographic vegan cupcakes, Shabbos blunts…? I must say that I think so.”

Apropos of this question, as well as the ongoing Hanukkah-Christmas debate, I might add that this book may very well help to foster, in Albert’s words, “a roomful of young Jews claiming that identity in the context of countless other identities.” Why? Well, it makes the perfect stocking stuffer.

Providence Journal>Books>Dissecting the medical life

Dissecting the medical life

BODY OF WORK: Meditations on Mortality from the Human Anatomy Lab, by Christine Montross. Penguin. 295 pages. $24.95.

By Beth Schwartzapfel
July 1, 2007

Unlike perhaps any other profession in this country, doctoring is almost mythical. Doctors are expected to be healers, emotional guides, soothsayers. To their wisdom and knowledge, we literally trust our lives. The grueling years of medical training and the difficulty of admission to medical school have, for many years, accorded medicine the status and insularity of a caste.
The doors to the profession are slowly being wrenched open, however, with ever-increasing numbers of “nontraditional” students donning white coats after years in other fields; lovers of literature and devotees of science will be delighted that a poet has joined those ranks, and, in a painstakingly beautiful memoir, documented the first years of her medical training.

Christine Montross had earned an MFA in poetry and taught school before arriving, at age 28, for her first year at Brown Medical School, where she is now a resident in psychiatry. In Body of Work, she recounts her surprise at the discovery that there was poetry everywhere in anatomy lab, of all places. In a literal sense, the bones and structures and their Latin names are eerily beautiful, tiny poems in themselves — as when Montross describes “reflecting,” or folding back, the muscles in a cadaver’s back:

“The effect is somewhat like opening a triptych, with the muscles swung wide to reveal their undersides and a new layer of musculature, or sometimes bone, underneath. There is always a moment of expectation upon opening, a strange hope of beauty within all that darkness.”
Using the dissection of a human cadaver over the course of a year as the frame, Montross delves into the history of human dissections, explores the ethical questions inherent in her training and her profession, tells intensely personal stories about her process of discovery and her family, and ruminates on life and death and doctoring.

She and her classmates name their cadaver “Eve.” Montross’ relationship to the woman who donated her body for her training is ever-shifting, sometimes fraught, but ultimately one of reverence and deep respect. The imagery of the dissection is beautiful; the ins and outs of the body’s workings are fascinating, and their descriptions filled with wonder and awe.
Equally gripping, however, is Montross’ frank and clear-eyed recounting of her own changing feelings regarding donation and dissection. “She is on the stainless-steel table of her own choosing,” she writes of Eve. “That simple decision allows me to make her into the type of person I would imagine choosing such a thing: educated, opinionated, concerned with the greater good, unsentimental, rational . . . . It makes it easier to think of her as someone not so different from the way I see myself.”

Body of Work traces the colorful history of medical dissection over the centuries, recounting bands of grave-robbers, papal edicts, and grisly anatomical theaters. Traveling to Italy to visit the intact body of Saint Catherine of Bologna and the creepy crypt of Santa Maria della Concezione, in which the bones of 4,000 Capuchin friars have been fashioned into a macabre sort of tableau, Montross grapples with the deep ambivalence surrounding human bodies. Are they human? Are they holy? Does the body of a criminal deserve any less respect than that of an ordinary person? And what, exactly, does that respect entail: burial, cremation, preservation, or something else entirely?

Just as dissecting the dead is intended as a means to healing the living, interspersed with scenes from the anatomy lab are striking moments from Montross’ clinical training. Some of the book’s loveliest and most wrenching moments are here, in the operating room, where a mentally retarded woman lies on a table, or in the ICU, where the crayoned drawings are tacked next to the bed of a ventilated man. “In this sick and mechanized state, he resembles nothing I have ever loved, even distantly,” writes Montross. And yet, “on his headboard, in a childish, crayon scrawl, is a paper sign that, intentionally or not, is unquestionably for me. In capital letters, it reads: MY DADDY IS GOING TO MAKE IT. HE PRMOSED ME HE WOULD.”

Body of Work is a stunning book, a window into a world that, for many of us, is shrouded in mystery. Ultimately, the stories it tells render both the cadavers and the idealistic young doctors who cut into them in the hopes of becoming healers, complicatedly, heart-wrenchingly, beautifully human.

Providence Journal>Books>When life gets hectic, and a little insane

When life gets hectic, and a little insane

THE FOLDED WORLD, by Amity Gaige.
Other Press. 300 pages. $23.95.

By Beth Schwartzapfel
June 24, 2007

From the first, Charlie Shade was charmed, his golden hair an appropriate metaphor for the kind of guy he was. Midwestern, disarming, and utterly earnest, “he loved to be surprised, for such was the immunity to horror that results from a completely happy and cloistered childhood.”

The Folded World is an artfully-rendered portrait of Charlie and his wife, a meditation on love, relationships and responsibility, and an exploration of what exactly constitutes the dividing line between sanity and madness. With this novel, Amity Gaige, a Brown graduate and creative writing teacher at the University of Rhode Island and Mount Holyoke, follows up on her widely acclaimed novel O My Darling, which garnered her a spot on the National Book Foundation’s debut “5 Under 35” list last year.

Longing for a taste of humanity’s gritty underbelly, seeking to feel that he “morally approved of his own life,” Charlie packed his bags after college and moved east to become a social worker. It was in his new home that he met the underachieving and bookish Alice. Daughter of a lonely and superstitious mother, Alice had moved to the city to escape the suffocation of the small working-class seaside town of her childhood. “Some people are born again by God. Charlie and Alice Shade were born again by one another.”

But their relationship, charmed again by the birth of twin daughters, is tested by Charlie’s all-consuming work on a mobile treatment team. His long hours leave Alice, struggling to be a first-time mother to the infant girls, feeling isolated and abandoned.

Meanwhile, his job brings him into close orbit with the lives of those who have been set adrift by their own minds into sometimes quirky and sometimes dangerous territory. Appropriate professional boundaries are all but impossible for the naively optimistic Charlie, and as he begins to get into risky situations at work, the story steamrolls to a place where his troubles at work and at home collide.

The character of Charlie is a particularly compelling one. Although Gaige professes no experience as a social worker, the often-awkward (and sometimes wrenching) dance of the care provider who must know people intimately, yet simultaneously keep them at arm’s length — provide “detached concern,” in medicine-speak — is portrayed here to stunning effect. The love between Charlie and Alice is sweet and real without being cloying, and Alice’s relationship with her mother is satisfyingly complicated.

Gaige was a playwright before she was a novelist, and that experience is in evidence with the precision of the language and the pace of the story. But the beauty of her prose and her joy in wordsmithing suggest that The Folded World might just as readily have been written by a poet.

Publishers Weekly>Fiction Reviews>The Used World

The Used World
Haven Kimmel. Free Press, $25 (320p) ISBN 978-0-7432-4778-8

By Beth Schwartzapfel
June 11, 2007

Kimmel (Something Rising (Light and Swift); A Girl Named Zippy) returns to rural Indiana in her expansive third novel. Hazel Hunnicut is the proprietor of Hazel Hunnicut's Used World Emporium, “the station at the end of the line” for myriad antiques and junk in Jonah, Ind. With her passel of cats and distaste for convention, Hazel is eccentric but grudgingly beloved by her two employees: Claudia, a tall and lonely woman ostracized for her androgynous appearance, and Rebekah, who is still recovering from an oppressive Pentecostal upbringing. With a nudge from Hazel and the appearance of an abandoned infant (whose junkie mother, a friend of Hazel's junkie sister, is dead), the two women form a relationship, providing momentum as an unlikely family takes shape and hidden connections between the characters are revealed. The story has many satisfying layers, but melding them requires Kimmel to jump around in time, sometimes to confusing results (among the pasts visited are Rebekah's childhood; Hazel's upbringing and the backstory on her relationship with the locals; and dreamlike visions of a long-ago romance between a black groundskeeper and a white judge's daughter). It's an intriguing puzzle box of a novel with a few edges left unsanded. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly>Fiction reviews>Trudy Hopedale

Trudy Hopedale
Jeffrey Frank. Simon & Schuster, $24 (240p) ISBN 978-1-4165-4924-6

By Beth Schwartzapfel
April 30, 2007

Pettiness, backstabbing, social striving and tit-for-tat favors are “the gasoline in this town”—Washington, D.C.—in the third fast-paced, entertaining Beltway sendup from New Yorker editor Frank (following The Columnist and Bad Publicity). As the Clintons make way for the Bushes in 2000–2001, the novel follows Trudy Hopedale, television host of a certain age and D.C. social mainstay, who is fast fading into political and social obsolescence. Trudy’s husband, Roger, is a retired career Foreign Service man with a shady past who is working on an embarrassing novel, while “handsome and brilliant” vice-presidential biographer Donald Frizzé is suffering from writer’s block. As the gelling Bush administration creates shifting power dynamics and loyalties, readers must read between the lines to gather information from these three very different unreliable narrators, each with secrets and ulterior motives of his or her own. Supporting cast members are one-dimensional, and Trudy can seem too petty even for satire, but Frank’s lively writing and sharp eye for the story’s fourth major character, the “soiled town” that is political Washington, carry the day. (July)

Publishers Weekly>Fiction Reviews>God Is Dead

God Is Dead
Ron Currie Jr. Viking, $23.95 (182p) ISBN 978-0-670-03867-1

By Beth Schwartzapfel
April 16, 2007

A bleak dystopian future is tempered with moments of possibility in story writer Currie's debut novel, in which a sick and wounded Dinka woman arrives at a refugee camp in Darfur, searching for her lost brother. The woman is God, come to Earth in human form to make apologies to the Sudanese, over whose fate He is, "due to an implacable polytheistic bureaucracy, completely powerless." When God is gunned down, news of His death spreads quickly around the globe and provides the jumping-off point for the subsequent short story–like chapters that reveal what happens in a post-God world: suicide rates skyrocket (especially among clergy members), riots and mass looting erupt and the pack of feral dogs that feasted on God's corpse begin "speaking a mishmash of Greek and Hebrew" and inspiring worship among Africans. (Meanwhile, in America, the masses, seeking a deity to fill the void, begin worshipping children.) Looking at humanity through a warped lens allows the various narrators unusual insight; while sometimes overwrought, these observations are often striking, as when an enlightened dog describes the strange new experience of emotion. This novel-in-stories is unsettling and strange, but still easily accessible; despite the ways in which his world has changed, Currie's altered humanity has one foot in ours. (July)

FORWARD>Yiddish Special Section>Publisher Opens Final Chapter

Publisher Opens Final Chapter

By Beth Schwartzapfel
March 2, 2007

Last month’s publication of “The Cross and Other Jewish Stories” by Ukrainian-born Yiddish author Lamed Shapiro marks both a new beginning and the beginning of the end for the New Yiddish Library Series.

“The Cross” is the seventh book of the series, a collaborative effort involving the Fund for the Translation of Jewish Literature, the National Yiddish Book Center and Yale University Press. It is the series’s first publication in five years, and as such is a sign of its rebirth; a half-dozen more books are in the pipeline. But the series has also announced that it will close up shop in the coming year, after those half-dozen books are complete.

The New Yiddish Library Series was established in 1985, with the goal of commissioning new English translations of works of Yiddish literature: novels, novellas and short-story collections. In addition to a new translation, each book has a scholarly critical introduction and a glossary and notes. “There’s a blueprint,” series editor David Roskies told the Forward. “We’re trying to look at all of Yiddish literature and to select that which is the most important and of lasting significance. It’s a matter of covering the major geographical areas, the major writers, the major works.”

The series was the brainchild of scholar and Holocaust historian Lucy Dawidowicz, who in the early 1980s raised a $100,000 endowment to create the Fund for the Translation of Jewish Literature. “The existing translations were haphazard,” fund director Neil Kozodoy, Dawidowicz’s literary executor, told the Forward. “Some were great, some were bad. The average reader had no way to tell which was which.” Dawidowicz died in 1990, and although Kozodoy has overseen a few other projects that utilized the fund’s resources — such as 1995’s English translation of Israeli scholar Jacob Katz’s autobiography “With My Own Eyes” — the New Yiddish Library Series has been its “main project and the main thing [Dawidowicz] wanted to focus on.”

Schocken Books, a New York-based Jewish publishing house, published the series’s first four volumes, beginning in 1987 with new translations, by Hillel Halkin, of Sholom Aleichem’s “Tevye the Dairyman” and “The Railroad Stories.” Over the next 10 years, “Tevye” was followed by a collection of short stories by Polish writer I.L. Peretz, S. Ansky’s classic “The Dybbuk and Other Writings” and “Tales of Mendele the Book Peddler,” a collection of novellas by Belorussian-born author S.Y. Abramovitsch.

The series went shopping for a new publisher when Schocken — which had been acquired by Random House — “lost interest in the series,” Roskies told the Forward. “They just turned down most of what we were interested in publishing, because it was just too obscure for them.” In 1997 the series moved to Yale University Press, whose publisher, Jonathan Brent, told the Forward, “My interest is in de-kitschifying this literature, helping to break it out of the ghetto in which it has largely found a home.” Obscure though the titles may be, Brent said, “that’s what a university press is all about. A university press specializes in lost causes.”

In 2002, Yale re-released the Peretz and Ansky works (Schocken retained the rights to “Tevye” and “Mendele”) and then published a new Sholom Aleichem volume — “Letters of Menakhem-Mendl and Sheyne-Sheyndl and Motl, the Cantor’s Son” — and a volume of poetry and prose by Galician author Itzik Manger, called “The World According to Itzik.”

Up to this point, Roskies said, the series had been a “one-man show”; Roskies (and before him, his sister, the first series editor, Harvard professor of Yiddish literature Ruth Wisse) was “chief cook and bottle washer,” and the series simply published the titles he thought were interesting or important. But a partnership, formed in 2002, with the National Yiddish Book Center changed all that.

In addition to raising tens of thousands of dollars to contribute to Dawidowicz’s endowment, the book center mandated that Roskies assemble a 10-person international editorial board. “The meetings of our board, a cross between a free weekend at Grossinger’s and a Zionist Congress, were especially fruitful,” Roskies said. The board created a list of seven additional titles, which, together with the six already published, represented America, Poland and Russia (“the three centers of Yiddish writing,” according to Roskies), and served as a map for the future of the series. The new Lamed Shapiro volume marks the first result of that effort. Yale redesigned the cover for Shapiro’s book, and the remaining volumes will, similarly, look more commercial than academic. The next volume will be “Everyday Jews,” a novel that Roskies characterizes as “the Polish ‘Call It Sleep.’” It was originally published in 1935 by Yehoshua Perle, a writer whose work has never before been translated into English.

Ultimately, however, “the readership for the series was not as great as we had hoped,” the book center’s executive vice president, Nancy Sherman, told the Forward. Yale’s Brent confirmed that although a number of colleges and universities, including George Washington University, Brandeis University and the University of Oregon, have included some of the volumes on course syllabi, none of the books has sold more than a few hundred copies. Dawidowicz’s endowment is dwindling, and the series cannot sustain itself without continued funding from the book center. As part of its 25th-anniversary restructuring, the book center decided to discontinue the project.

“We’ll remain committed to translating Yiddish books into English, possibly as individual volumes rather than a series, and we will continue to draw upon the same pool of advisers and scholars,” Sherman said.

The remaining six manuscripts on the list will be submitted to Yale in the coming year, and then the New Yiddish Library Series will be complete.

Roskies said he was disappointed by the decision, but he noted that the 13 volumes will ultimately be “a respectable lifespan for a project like this.”

Brent is also heartened by the courses that have adopted the books: “For an 18-year-old kid to be reading this stuff — that’s fabulous. That means that these works are entering a new generation.”

FORWARD>Fast Forward>Looking for Love in All the Right Books

Looking for Love in All the Right Books

By Beth Schwartzapfel
February 9, 2007

For the involuntarily single and the recently dumped, Valentine’s Day has long been an opportunity to mope, feel sorry for oneself, and lick the wounds that others are salting with their roses and chocolates. However, three of this season’s new books may help keep hope alive. Aimed at the unattached, the single mother and the sexlessly wed, respectively, “Secrets of a Fix-Up Fanatic,” “Single Mom Seeking” and “Mating in Captivity” echo a certain politician’s inspirational (if ultimately unfulfilled) promise: “Help is on the way.”

Susan Shapiro’s “Secrets of a Fix-Up Fanatic: How to Meet & Marry Your Match” (Delta, 2006) is a chatty, readable book full of practical suggestions for those who are looking for their besherts. Her advice boils down to two key tenets: Love yourself first, and then ask someone you know and respect to set you up.

“Single Mom Seeking: Playdates, Blind Dates and Other Dispatches From the Dating World” (Seal Press), by Rachel Sarah, is a memoir of the first few years of a single mom who is actively seeking Mr. Right. Sarah has an infant daughter; her longtime boyfriend, Eric, her baby’s father, disappeared without a trace. Here’s the endearing and steamy, if slightly self-indulgent, story of Sarah finding her way back into the dating world.

In “Mating in Captivity: Reconciling the Erotic and the Domestic” (HarperCollins, 2006), couples and family therapist Esther Perel walks readers through the various causes of, and some strategies to combat, matrimonial bed-death. Using real-life examples from her New York City private practice, Perel hypothesizes that “it is not a lack of closeness but too much closeness that impedes desire… desire is fueled by the unknown.”

Providence Journal>Books>A Mother Deals With Tragedy

A Mother Deals With Tragedy

THE KNITTING CIRCLE, by Ann Hood.
Norton. 346 pages. $24.95.

By Beth Schwartzapfel
January 28, 2007

 Stella had brown hair and a “killer smile,” and was partial to unlikely clothing, such as stripes with polka dots and orange earmuffs indoors. She chose winged creatures — dragonflies and fairies — as her Halloween costumes each year. She was 5 years old when she died, of bacterial meningitis, and left her stricken parents to make sense of their life without her.

In The Knitting Circle, the newest book by Providence novelist Ann Hood, Stella’s mom, protagonist Mary Baxter, finds solace and companionship through knitting. Even as she feels increasingly disconnected from everyone else in her life — her husband, her mother, her kindly, if doofy, boss — she draws close to the six women who are regulars at the Wednesday night Sit and Knit circle. As she learns the various techniques — casting on, casting off, making scarves and socks and hats — she learns, too, the life stories of Scarlet and Lulu, Ellen and Harriet and Alice and Beth. And along the way, she learns that no one, no matter how perfect her life seems, is immune from tragedy.

Five years ago, Hood herself lost a daughter, Grace, at age 5, to a rare form of strep, and Hood, too, found comfort in knitting during her darkest hours. So it is not surprising that her portrait of Mary’s grief is so real and so raw. The unpredictable arc of it — how Mary rallies for a time, and then slides backwards into her loss, how she avoids Stella’s room for the first few months, and then insists on sleeping in Stella’s bed every day — gives Mary’s grief a three-dimensional humanity that a less familiar portraitist might have missed.

Mary herself is a compelling and multifaceted character, one who emerges from the years of her mourning with unexpected revelations and a tentative sort of hope. The other characters, however, are disappointingly monotone in comparison. The particulars of each woman’s tragedy are unique, but the fact of their tragedies becomes predictable, such that as each woman’s history unfolds, it almost becomes a guessing game — a sort of “name her heartbreak” for the reader. The characters ultimately collapse into the sum of their personal misfortunes, rather than taking shape as new people who are wiser and stronger, albeit sadder, than they were before — as Mary eventually does. One revelation toward the end is particularly disappointing; it’s as if this character, who had been satisfyingly elusive and hard to pin down, didn’t have a place in the book unless she, too, had a terribly heartbreaking story to redeem her in the end.

The prose of The Knitting Circle is clear, even as Mary’s perspective is clouded by heartbreak, and the pace of the story is just right. And little Stella, with her Macarena and pasta with butter, is both present and absent throughout.

Brown Alumni Magazine>Arts & Culture>His True Loves

His True Loves
Jonathan Karp ’86 left his job as editor-in-chief of Random House to launch his own imprint and stage his first play, about a timid bookstore clerk faced with saving the world.

How to Save the World and Find True Love in 90 Minutes, book and lyrics by Jonathan Karp, at the New World Stages, New York City.

By Beth Schwartzapfel
Jan/Feb 2007

It’s Friday afternoon, and playwright Jonathan Karp is seated in an otherwise empty theater at the New World Stages, an off-Broadway complex in midtown Manhattan. Rehearsing on Stage 5, actress Anika Larsen calls out, “Does anyone remember that line?” Karp thinks for a minute and begins, “Get your sniveling…”

Larsen smiles with recognition and finishes the line in unison with him, “… ferret-face out of my bookstore!” They both laugh.

Karp describes his new musical comedy, How to Save the World and Find True Love in 90 Minutes, as the story of “a timid bookstore clerk who realizes that he’s the only person who can prevent a global catastrophe from occurring.”

It’s Karp’s first play, and the New World Stages production marks its first full run. Karp and composer Seth Weinstein began collaborating on the play in 1999, and in 2004 it was produced at the New York Musical Theatre Festival and the New York International Fringe Festival, where it filled the house and got great reviews. Karp jokes that six years from inception to production is “right on time,” noting that the average “incubation period” for a musical is five to seven years. Another reason for the delay, however, might be Karp’s day job: until this summer, he was editor-in-chief of the book publisher Random House.

After leaving Random House, Karp announced in July the launch of Twelve, a Warner Books imprint for which he now serves as editor-in-chief, publisher, and vice president. True to its name, Twelve will publish only a dozen books a year—a far cry from the fifty or one hundred that a typical imprint puts out. “As an editor, as a publisher, it’s possible to love twelve books a year without being promiscuous,” Karp quips. “I can be serially monogamous to twelve books a year.” Such a small number allows him to handpick the books and allocate enough resources into promoting each of them. Twelve’s debut lineup is eclectic and populated by such heavy hitters as Christopher Hitchens, John McCain, and the late Robert Altman. The first book, Christopher Buckley’s Boomsday, will be on sale in April.

Karp doesn’t take vacations and works on weekends. He admits that when he goes into a Starbucks and sees people reading magazines in the middle of the day, he is sometimes “overcome by a sense of longing.” But otherwise, he insists, “I’m not one of those people who only sleeps three hours a night. I have a normal life.” His “normal life” includes a toddler, Lucy, whom he is coparenting with his best friend, Deborah Malmud ’86.

Karp, forty-two, says he was stagestruck from an early age. While growing up in suburban New Jersey, he attended Broadway shows like Pippin and They’re Playing Our Song with his parents. At Brown, he was editor of the Brown Daily Herald but he abandoned a budding journalism career after the Miami Herald sent him to cover a garbage dump fire. He moved to New York City to pursue his two loves: books and theater. Random House hired him as an editorial assistant in 1989, and he worked his way up. “I fell so in love with publishing,” he said, “that it’s taken me all this time to get the theater part of [my life] realized.”

Next up, Karp says, is a musical “about a guy who discovers that he can make people fall in love whenever he sings love songs that he hates.” Heart Throb, on which he is also collaborating with composer Weinstein, will have its first staged reading at New York’s York Theater in the next year or so.

Meanwhile, on Stage 5, actor Michael McEachran is rehearsing a line about mind-reading. He puffs up his chest and deadpans, “My penis. You were thinking about my penis.” In his seat, Karp chuckles.

Karp likes to quote Bernard Malamud who, when asked for the key to good writing, is said to have answered: story, story, story. “I’ve taken that to heart in everything I do,” Karp says. “Whether I’m editing a book or writing a musical, I really care that the story be told in the best possible way.”

Brown Alumni Magazine>Arts & Culture>Hey, Britannica!

Hey, Britannica!
You’ve heard of a fiction anthology. Now here comes a fiction encyclopedia. What’s the difference?

The Encyclopedia Project,edited by Tisa Bryant ’04 MFA, Kate Schatz ’05 MFA, and Miranda Mellis ’04 MFA(Encyclomedia); available at www.encyclopediaproject.org.

By Beth Schwartzapfel
September/October 2006

Fiction grad students Tisa Bryant, Kate Schatz, and Miranda Mellis began their envelope-pushing five-volume Encyclopedia Project with a question: What occurs under the sign of fiction? “That question gives us a lot of room to play,” says Bryant. “Everything occurs under the sign of fiction.” While entries in a fiction anthology might be limited to works of fiction, the encyclopedia’s first volume, published this summer, also includes essays, stories, photographs, and e-mails. There’s a short play titled You Just Have These Moments (An Existential Celebrity Melodrama). Not the sort of stuff you’d expect to find in an encyclopedia. But then, this is not your average encyclopedia.

The encyclopedists like the multiple meanings of the word sign—a zodiac sign, a semiotic sign, or a mathematical sign. But when they envision the entries in their encyclopedia, they think quite literally. “If there was an empty lot, and there was a sign that said Fiction, what people would be in it?” asks Schatz. Bryant continues, “And if we asked all these people to come play in the empty lot, what would they bring to play with?”

Volume I—A through E—is a handsome hardcover art book whose 336 pages begin with “Accent” and end with “Extant.” In between are entries on “Amnesia,” “Chronopathy,” “Cross-dressing,” “Doppelganger,” and “Essay.” The entry about novelist Kathy Acker is an elaborate pictogram. “Dahlia,” by the California-based writer Jaime Cortez, is a short personal essay that weaves together visual art, encyclopedia-style facts (“the American Dahlia Society recognizes fifteen dahlia colors”), and personal reminiscences about childhood and family. Each entry is followed by cross-references to other entries; “California,” for instance, consists entirely of cross-references. Traditionally, says Bryant, fiction is understood to be about “making things up.” The Encyclopedia Project asks what is meant by “made up”—the project “includes the possibility of what is mis- or differently remembered,” Mellis says, and proposes that “fiction as such can sometimes tell the truth more than the truth.”

The project was born while Bryant, Schatz, and Mellis were fiction students in Brown’s MFA program. Gail Scott, a Montreal-based novelist and essayist who was then a writer-in-residence at Brown, urged her students to think about the fact that “there is an entire field of work and thought that is about poetry—about critically thinking about poetics—and there really isn’t a similar thing for fiction,” says Schatz. Scott challenged them to “put some grant money where our mouths are,” says Schatz, and start a publication.

They knew from the start they didn’t want to produce a literary journal. Rather, they wanted their project’s form to speak to the ideas in it. An encyclopedia, with its weighty goal of containing and cataloging all the world’s knowledge, gave them the opportunity to poke fun at the impossibility of the task, and cross-referencing let them make unlikely connections. Through fund-raisers, private donations, advance sales, and grants from the Graduate School and the Creative Arts Council, the three raised $12,000 to print 1,500 copies of Volume I through their own press, Encyclomedia. They priced the books low, at $25, to make them accessible, and have sold almost forty copies, sight unseen, from their Web site alone. They plan to roll any profits back into the project, and hope the next four volumes will pay for themselves.

The encyclopedists plan to publish a volume a year, reaching Volume V (V through Z) in year five. “F through K is crazy,” says Schatz. It includes hot-button “Fallujah” and “Katrina,” as well as such timeless literary concerns as justice, fiction and form, and feminism. If Volume II is anything like Volume I, however, entries will also teach us how to play “snapper comet” or “Make a Dadaist poem.” That is to say, they’ll be playing in an empty lot, and you’ll be invited.

Providence Journal>Books>Translating an Exile's Experience

Translating an Exile's Experience

MY FATHER'S NOTEBOOK, by Kader Abdolah. HarperCollins. 328 pages. $24.95.

By Beth Schwartzapfel
May 21, 2006

My Father's Notebook is, first and foremost, a book about translation. Ishmael, the novel's Iranian narrator, is the son of a deaf-mute carpet mender named Aga Akbar. Ishmael spends his childhood as his father's shadow and mouthpiece, deciphering the older man's rudimentary gestures and translating them into words.

Now, years later, Ishmael is a political exile living in Holland. Long after his father's death, he appoints himself Akbar's translator again. His father never learned to read or write, but he did invent a cuneiform alphabet, modeled after an ancient inscription near the village where he grew up. Ishmael has his father's tattered journal, and is attempting to translate the cuneiform scrawl into Dutch, his new tongue.

Kader Abdolah, himself an Iranian-born political exile living in Holland, has published three previous novels; this is the first to be translated into English.

From Persian to cuneiform, from cuneiform to Dutch, and now from Dutch to English, the circumstances of Akbar's life and the longings in his heart are sifted through many languages before they reach us, the readers. Abdolah does a remarkable job conveying that sense of frustrating distance, that vagueness born of too many layers of telling and re-telling, of longing for something whose outlines are sketched, but whose details are barely understood.

But sometimes vagueness is just plain vague. And even after finishing the novel, I still wondered what parts of the story were translations of the notebook, what parts were Ishmael's memory, and what were stories told to Ishmael by friends and neighbors.

Feelings were beautifully conveyed, but the events of the narrative were hard to follow and not well-knit into the backdrop of Iranian history. The result is moving, dreamlike stories interspersed with overly didactic history lessons and confusing turns.

Aga Akbar grew up in a village at the base of Saffron Mountain. At the top of this mountain are two holy sites. One is the cave into which is carved the cuneiform inscription which forms the basis of Akbar's script. The other is a naturally formed well, inside which Shi'ites believe that the Messiah sits reading, waiting patiently to emerge.

My Father's Notebook is most moving each time the narrative returns to Saffron Mountain, as it does many times. These scenes are beautifully rendered and effective in describing the wider world through the simple lens of life in the village.

Unlike Ishmael's confusing palimpsest of city and university, political activism and new Dutch identity, Saffron Mountain -- Akbar's home, Ishmael's beloved homeland -- needs no translating. It speaks for itself.

Providence Journal>Books>Revisiting the Days of the Boston Strangler

Revisiting the Days of the Boston Strangler

A DEATH IN BELMONT, by Sebastian Junger. Norton. 267 pages. $23.95.

By Beth Schwartzapfel
May 14, 2006

The year was 1963; police were desperately trying to hunt down the serial killer known as the Boston Strangler. Meanwhile, Sebastian Junger was a toddler in the quiet Boston suburb of Belmont, where a man named Albert DeSalvo was working on the Junger family's home. When an elderly woman named Bessie Goldberg was found raped and strangled in Belmont, the police hastily arrested a black man named Roy Smith, who had cleaned the Goldbergs' house that day. Years later, DeSalvo himself confessed to being the Boston strangler but insisted he did not kill Bessie Goldberg. Ultimately, both Smith and DeSalvo spent the remainder of their lives in jail, but the crucial questions remain unanswered. Who killed Bessie Goldberg? Who was the Boston Strangler? Is justice possible when human beings are so fallible?

With his new book, A Death in Belmont, a now grown-up Junger tells the story of those gruesome years, and in so doing, grapples with these questions. Junger, whose first book, A Perfect Storm, won him international recognition, is an exacting, thorough journalist. In A Death in Belmont, he has expertly sifted through the reams of information related to the period to stitch together a gripping story.

Junger takes great care to introduce us to the characters, painting each with a compassionate and detailed brush. We get to know Roy Smith as intimately as we would the character of any novel -- meeting his family, following him through his youth in Mississippi and his young adulthood as a drifter and petty criminal. Even more moving is the portrait of the times in which Smith grew up. Junger's portrayal of the deep South in the 1920s and '30s is a wrenching reminder of what poverty and racism can do to a person's soul, and what can happen to a society when such harshness is inflicted on thousands upon thousands. Although Smith's story is the most carefully detailed, we also meet DeSalvo himself, as well as each of the Strangler's victims, members of the Boston police, and Junger's own mother, among others; even the owner of a Boston bar frequented by Smith gets a colorful and lively few pages.

In these post-James Frey times, nonfiction is subject to increasing scrutiny, and some have taken Junger to task for his approach. Bessie Goldberg's daughter, Leah, publicly accused Junger of painting Smith too sympathetically. Alan Dershowitz, reviewing the book in The New York Times, said, "nonfiction must be about actual truth, not about how coincidences could lead to a deeper truth." However, A Death in Belmont is more than just a journalist's list of facts. It is a work of art, an essay on the very elusiveness of truth. Without the artistry, without Junger's crafting the arc of a story and drawing conclusions -- admittedly tentative and inherently uncertain conclusions -- no reader would bother reading its 320 pages. Rather than trying to gloss over his doubt, Junger makes it the crux of his gripping story, thus turning it into something larger and more timeless than a simple re-telling of 40-year-old events. It's a gruesome tale; the faint of heart will need to skip the lengthy portions describing the grisly murders. However, A Death in Belmont is a powerful story -- both because of, and despite, its being "nonfiction."

Providence Journal>Books>Shattered Family Finds the Courage to Go On

Shattered Family Finds the Courage to Go On

TORCH, by Charyl Strayed. Houghton Mifflin. 322 pages. $24.

By Beth Schwartzapfel
April 16, 2006

Teresa Rae Wood is the kind of woman about whom her fellow rural Minnesotans say, "it takes all kinds." She hosts a show called Modern Pioneers on her local public radio station, signing off with the same words every week: "Work hard. Do good. Be incredible."

Even as they fit right into their hardscrabble, working-class home in Coltrap County, Teresa and her kids are different. They're vegetarians. They don't own a television. Teresa doesn't believe in marriage, but she does believe in love, and she knew what it was when she fell for Bruce.

He was a perfect fit, and the four of them - Teresa, Bruce, and Teresa's kids, Claire and Joshua -- make a happy, if unconventional, family. Until Teresa gets sick. "Can. Sir. They had to say it slowly, dissected, or not at all." Teresa is 38 years old when, seven weeks after she is diagnosed, she dies.

Torch, by first-time novelist Cheryl Strayed, tells the story of Teresa's family as they suffer with the hand they've been dealt. It's a beautiful book, expansive in its treatment of tragedy and grief, but equally attentive to all of the most telling details. The language is lovely, offering delicious, compelling imagery without being heavy-handed.

Each member of the family responds to Teresa's death differently. Like tiny planets of grief, they revolve around each other but never touch. Even in one another's presence, each feels as if he is drifting alone, unmoored in the vastness of loss.

Strayed's depiction of these dynamics is heartbreakingly real; as a reader you almost want to shield your eyes from what you know is coming, or to holler at the characters, or hug them.

Joshua, a teenager just months from graduation, begins to self-destruct, selling drugs and dropping out of high school. Claire embarks on an unlikely affair with an older man, breaks up her own relationship, and drops out of college while trying desperately to hold herself and her family together. And once Bruce realizes he lacks the courage to kill himself, he remarries so quickly that he estranges himself from Claire and Joshua -- and by so doing, deprives them not only of a mother, but of a father, too.

Through it all, Teresa's presence is everywhere: literally, as when the radio station plays re-runs of Modern Pioneers, and figuratively, as the memory of her spunk and her courage propels her loved ones onwards and upwards, out of their grief and back into the world and all its exquisite adventures.

Providence Journal>Books>Biography of a restless brother

Biography of a restless brother
Ken Dornstein works through his feelings about his older brother, killed in the Pan Am flight 103 crash

THE BOY WHO FELL OUT OF THE SKY: A True Story, by Ken Dornstein. Random House. 304 pages. $23.95.

By Beth Schwartzapfel
April 9, 2006

David Dornstein is larger-than-life, an incessant reader and scribbler and arguer of all things literary and aesthetic, a self-styled modern-day Dharma bum. He sleeps on the floor with ramparts of books walling him in, and works odd jobs around New York City to support his Art. He starts stories, hundreds of them, and though he can't sit still long enough to finish any but a handful, he envisions himself as the next Great Novelist of his generation.

He sits in coffee shops for days at a time, smoking, pontificating, and writing in his notebooks. He writes his hopes, his frustrations, letters to his family and friends and Norman Mailer, even notes and suggestions to potential biographers, whom he just knows will read them once he is catapulted to fame by a tragic early death. He just barely graduates from Brown, where he makes an art of lengthy manifestoes on why he hasn't completed his assignments, and then takes off to travel.

He was in seat 40K on Pan Am flight 103 when it exploded six miles above Lockerbie, Scotland, on Dec. 21, 1988.

The 25-year-old could not have known that his predictions of an early death would turn out to be right, nor that a biographer would indeed comb through his notebooks -- least of all that the biographer would be his little brother, Ken.

The Boy Who Fell Out of the Sky is Ken's story as much as it is David's. It is a moving portrait, both of a restless and brilliant young man who died before achieving his potential, and of his crushed younger brother, who was also robbed of his potential by David's murder.

Ken is a reluctant biographer, but David is even larger in death than he was in life; in the 10 years after the bombing, Ken returns again and again to the notebooks, hunting for some secret that might release him from the crushing weight of David's shadow.

He begins a project that he calls the Dave Archives, in which he tracks down all of his brother's former friends, lovers (of which there were many), teachers and colleagues, and gathers recollections, photographs and letters.

This brings him to Kathryn, one of David's first and most serious girlfriends. They are surprised to find themselves falling for each other.

For years, Ken wavers, committing and then changing his mind, convinced that his true motivation must have something to do with David, haunted by contradictory but equally compelling Biblical mandates. Deuteronomy 25:6 commands that a dead man's younger brother must marry his widow, while Leviticus 18:16 says, "do not uncover the nakedness of your brother's wife." Not that David was married to Kathryn, nor were the Dornsteins religious, but Ken nevertheless feels "caught, roughly speaking, between Deuteronomy and Leviticus."

Ken is an editor at the PBS documentary series Frontline, and the prose of this book reads at times more like a documentary than a novel. But it is ultimately a heartbreaking and beautiful account, one of Ken's journey to know David, to find himself amidst the rubble of the tragedy, to write a book his big brother would have been proud of, and, finally, to finish the decades-long chapter on grief and start a fresh one on hope.

Providence Journal>Books>Heppner's characters are miserable, for no reason

Heppner's characters are miserable, for no reason

PIKE'S FOLLY, by Mike Heppner. Knopf. 317 pages. $23.95.

By Beth Schwartzapfel
April 2, 2006

Pike's Folly is a miserable book. It's about miserable people who make each other miserable. For no reason. It's hard to discern a theme here, but if there is one, it's "for no reason." "I hate 'why,' " says the book's central character, Nathaniel Pike, who has recently erected a parking lot on the top of a thickly forested mountain, inaccessible except by helicopter and hiking boots. "I declare war on why."

Author Mike Heppner, a Rhode Island native who set the book largely in Providence, seems to have done the same. In the tradition of Thomas Pynchon and David Foster Wallace, Heppner uses caricatures instead of characters, and sets the plot in an absurd version of the real world. But where Pynchon and Wallace use caricature and absurdity as a means of satire, Heppner uses them-- you guessed it -- for no reason.

Nathaniel Pike and Gregg Reese are both outrageously rich. Pike is cocky, self-important, and defiantly uncharitable; he spends extravagant sums on intentionally useless, wasteful things. Reese, on the other hand, is dogged by guilt about his wealth and feelings of inadequacy in the face of the Reese family legacy. Although (or because) the source of its money is shadowy at best, the Reese family is a philanthropic force, one whose name is plastered on every do-good project in Rhode Island.

Some of the book's other miserable characters include Stuart, Pike's personal assistant, who wrote one pretentious novel some years ago and vacillates between berating himself for his pretension and berating himself for not being able to write another. Stuart's wife, Marlene, is a pathetic creature with no self-esteem who takes to exhibitionism so someone will finally look at her. Gregg's daughter, Allison, is a lost soul who dreams of doing something, but lacks any motivation to do so because she can comfortably live forever off her family's money. And Allison's boyfriend, Heath, is a "filmmaker" interested in "transgressive cinema" (read: downloadable clips of naked Marlene circulated around the Internet). The overwhelming sense is that even Heppner has no love for these characters, that he made them pathetic and miserable just to march them naked in front of us and say, look how pathetic and miserable they are.

The plot revolves loosely around Pike's "Independence Project," which consists first of the parking lot, and then a fully-stocked Kmart at the top of the inaccessible mountain. Various environmental activists and government bureaucrats get involved as they channel their righteous indignation at this latest incarnation of Pike's waste. Things almost get interesting in several spots - when the factions come to loggerheads in the contested parking lot, for instance, or when one of the bureaucrats digs up some skeletons, literally from Pike's (or is it Reese's?) closet -- but in the end, it all comes to nothing. The fight fizzles before it even begins, and the skeletons? They're made up. For no reason.

Heppner could have done a lot with this book. It could have been a comment on capitalism, on wealth, greed, consumerism. It could have been a comment on philanthropy, on the obligations we have to one another as human beings. Instead, it is adamantly about nothing. "The only things worth doing are pointless things," says Pike. I disagree. Reading this book was pointless. And not worth doing.

Providence Journal>Books>Love and healing beat the odds in Waldman's poignant novel

Love and healing beat the odds in Waldman's poignant novel

LOVE AND OTHER IMPOSSIBLE PURSUITS, by Ayelet Waldman. Doubleday. 340 pages. $23.95.

By Beth Schwartzapfel
March 5, 2006

Emilia Greenleaf has always prided herself on being a tough woman: proud, independent and sexy. She met and married the man of her dreams, Jack Woolf, a successful lawyer who is also kind and sensitive and handsome.

But now everything is wrong. Emilia must steel herself just to leave the house. She falls to pieces daily, in public places, with no warning. Jack's son, William, is a precocious little know-it-all, which is no wonder. William's mother is a neurotic ex-wife who seems hell-bent on exposing Emilia for the fraud of a stepmother that Emilia knows herself to be.

None of this would pierce Emilia so thoroughly had she not just lost her baby, her perfect Isabel, to SIDS during Isabel's very first night on earth.

Ayelet Waldman's Love and Other Impossible Pursuits is the story of Emilia picking up the pieces, of how she and Jack try to rebuild their marriage from within the ruins of their grief. Most of all, it is about learning to love little William, "this scrawny know-it-all of a boy, with his irritating precocity and his embarrassingly cloistered and self-centered view of the world." In so doing, Emilia is able to achieve what she would not have thought possible: healing.

This is a wonderful book, engaging and startlingly honest.

Waldman is perhaps best known as a wife and mother. Her column in the online magazine Slate and her occasional essays for The New York Times focus almost exclusively on her husband, novelist Michael Chabon, and their four children.

Even a cursory skim of these and her "Bad Mother" blog offer such a personal look into her family that you feel as if you are invading their privacy; you become privy to secrets that seem like, well, none of your business. So I suppose it is only natural that our window into Emilia's world is so stunningly clear, and that Waldman's insights into this character are so authentic.

Emilia is relentlessly reflective, policing herself to the point of paralysis. She is selfish and childish in her grief, and she knows it. She throws tantrums, lashes out unfairly at people who love her -- and then, compounding the anguish that caused the outburst in the first place, she is racked with guilt at having done so.

As a result - and this is to Waldman's credit -- I don't like Emilia; at times I feel trapped in her head, stuck like a gerbil on a wheel of self-loathing and sadness that's going nowhere. Still, the story is so compelling -- her grief is so real and so raw -- that you stick by her almost out of loyalty.

And it's worth it. When the fog starts to clear, you, too, feel as if you've received the gift of a second chance and that love may not be such an impossible pursuit after all.