This week: a landmark biography of Joan Didion, and much more.
Leo: A Ghost Story by Mac Barnett, illus. by Christian Robinson (Chronicle) - As a ghost, Leo may be invisible and intangible, but he can still feel bruised. When a family moves into the empty home he occupies, they aren’t exactly pleased to see the floating tray of tea and toast he has prepared for them. “This house is haunted!” cries the father as the family cowers in the bathtub. “I hate tea!” says his son. “And I hate ghosts!” In one of several funny-sad moments, Robinson (Last Stop on Market Street) shows Leo floating above the family, hands clasped to his mouth in shock at their reaction. Leaving the house, Leo explores the unfamiliar city and befriends a girl named Jane, who mistakes him for an imaginary friend. Robinson’s blue-black palette reflects the somewhat somber mood; along with the somewhat retro look of the art, Leo’s formal attire suggests he’s been a ghost for some time. Barnett (The Skunk) concludes on a high note, though, as Leo foils a robbery with help from a classic ghost accessory—the white bed sheet. It’s a warm and wise story about acceptance trumping difference—including that between life and death.
Lair of Dreams by Libba Bray (Little, Brown) - Bray illuminates the dark side of the American Dream in her long-awaited sequel to The Diviners (2012), weaving xenophobia, industrial progress, Jazz Age debauchery, government secrets, religious fervor, and supernatural horror into a sprawling and always entertaining narrative. Romances among the major players get significant time in the spotlight: Evie O'Neill, now "America's Sweetheart Seer" of radio fame, finds herself pushed into a publicity-driven relationship with fellow Diviner Sam Lloyd; their combative (and often alcohol-fueled) exchanges are among the funniest in the novel. Follies girl Theta struggles to maintain her interracial romance with Harlem healer Memphis while keeping her own abilities secret from him. And musician Henry DuBois's efforts to locate the boy he left behind in New Orleans lead him into friendship with fellow "dreamwalker" Ling Chan, whose Chinese-American community is being vilified as a deadly sleeping sickness sweeps across New York City.
The Last Love Song: A Biography of Joan Didion by Tracy Daugherty (St. Martin's) - Daugherty, author of the Donald Barthelme biography Hiding Man, offers a monumental, novelistic examination of Joan Didion’s life and career. The book’s impressively detailed attention to place, beginning with Didion’s California origins, grounds Didion’s development as both a fiction writer and a journalist who served as “our keenest observer of the chaos” of the 1960s and beyond. At times, Daugherty tries too hard to mimic Didion’s own famously cool and elliptical style, as in the passages about her time in Hollywood, but he settles into confident, engrossing prose when focusing on Didion’s literary achievements, from the prematurely world-weary early novels and the groundbreaking essays that cemented her fame to the “extremely political, icily angry” mature works and the heartbreaking late memoirs The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights. Taking a loyal, often protective tone toward his (physically) “famously frail” subject, Daugherty crafts a complex, intricately shaded portrait of a woman also known for her inner toughness and intellectual rigor. This landmark work renders a nuanced analysis of a literary life.
Billion Dollar Ball: A Journey Through the Big-Money Culture of College Football by Gilbert Gaul (Viking) - A commercial entertainment juggernaut has conquered academe, argues this incisive, acerbic exposé of Division I college football. Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Gaul surveys the powerhouse football programs that are essentially independent, hugely profitable companies and virtual “extensions of ESPN”; the multi-million dollar salaries and severance packages for superstar coaches with lackluster records; the barely literate players pampered with lavish tutoring (including nannies who make sure they go to class); sky-high (but tax-deductible) “donations” for choice stadium seats; and the cutthroat marketing jihads (the University of Alabama threatened legal action against a baker who decorated cookies with team colors, mascots, and the letter A). The hypocrisy of this grubby business masquerading as education is clear in Gaul’s telling, though it appears less harmful at powerhouse schools where football funds not only itself but the many women’s rowing teams that provide Title IX balance (visiting one, he discovers the true spirit of collegiate athletics). Gaul’s mix of shrewd financial analysis and colorful reportage makes for an engrossing account of America’s most sentimental yet mercenary sports culture.
George by Alex Gino (Scholastic Press) - Though others see her as male, 10-year-old George has long known that she is a girl, and she longs for people to see that truth, even while the idea terrifies her. When George’s fourth-grade class has tryouts for a school production of Charlotte’s Web, George desperately wants to play Charlotte, a character she adores. George’s teacher doesn’t allow to George to audition for the part, but her supportive best friend Kelly, who is cast as Charlotte, comes up with a plan that may give George the chance she needs. The taunts of a school bully, George’s self-doubts, and her mother’s inability to truly hear what George is telling her carry real weight as debut author Gino’s simple, direct writing illuminates George’s struggles and quiet strength. George’s joy during stolen moments when she can be herself will resonate with anyone who has felt different, while providing a necessary window into the specific challenges of a child recognizing that they are transgender. Profound, moving, and—as Charlotte would say—radiant, this book will stay with anyone lucky enough to find it.
Best Boy by Eli Gottlieb (Norton/Liveright) - Todd Aaron has lived at the Payton Living Center, a therapeutic community for those with autism, for more than 40 years. Known as the “village elder,” he passes his time working with the center’s grounds crew, or serving hot lunch at a local school. But when a new roommate, the brain-injured, abrasive Tommy Doon, and a new staff member, Mike Hinton, suddenly appear, Todd’s quiet existence begins to unravel. Mike reminds Todd of his abusive dead father and uses Todd as cover to assist him in devious acts, while Tommy spends his time yelling at Todd and searching for whatever dark secrets his roommates may have. Added to this is the arrival of Martine, a one-eyed resident who takes a shine to Todd, and whom he admires. Pressure builds, and Todd decides his best option is to escape the center and make his way back to his hometown and his wealthy brother. The latest from Gottlieb (The Boy Who Went Away) is written through the perspective of Todd: his voice is spectacular, oscillating between casual and obsessive and frequently challenging the stereotypes that haunt those with autism and similar conditions. The story will appeal to a very broad range of readers: it’s a fast read, and the plot is never less than captivating.
Kissinger's Shadow: The Long Reach of America's Most Controversial Statesman by Greg Grandin (Metropolitan) - Assessing Henry Kissinger’s impact on American foreign policy, Grandin (The Empire of Necessity) returns to the source of the man’s political thought: his Harvard undergraduate thesis, “The Meaning of History.” Within Kissinger’s earliest writing Grandin finds the basis for his “imperial existentialism,” a Spenglerian realpolitik that endorses action in order to resist decline and assert a nation’s purpose. Beholden to no moral or ethical code and armed with a tragic sense of human history, Kissinger left academia to formulate a doctrine that prioritized instinct and will over empirical data and causality. Though his tactics proved ill-suited to winning either wars or allies, they did prove effective in winning elections, cementing Kissinger’s position within the national security state. Grandin is unsparing in his criticism of Kissinger and his theories, but his aims go beyond polemic and towards resolving the contradiction of Kissinger’s two legacies: one as the man who opened China, improved relations with the Soviets, and ended the 1973 Arab-Israeli War through shrewd shuttle diplomacy; the other as the architect of the illegal bombing campaigns in Cambodia, the invasion of Laos, and a series of destabilizing coups and assassinations. Ever the marvelous thinker, Grandin will have even the most ardent Kissinger foe enthralled.
Latest Readings by Clive James (Yale Univ.) - James, an Australian-born literary critic and almost legendary London public intellectual, was diagnosed with leukemia in 2010. He has since crafted a collection of beautifully thought-out, piquant essays, some only a few pages, that survey what he has been reading with the clock ticking. The results are entirely free of self-pity, and emanate vitality and invention. In a James essay, Anthony Powell and season four of Game of Thrones appear on the same page. He calls V.S. Naipaul the “Kemal Ataturk of the Indian subcontinent,” a “modernizing force embattled against his own background” whose “language itself is the imperial inheritance that matters.” In one short essay he observes that in regard to 20th-century political history, Joseph Conrad “had underestimated the power of the irrational to organize itself into a state.” James relishes the limited reading time he has and makes no bones about it, providing sparkling commentary on his old favorites and new discoveries.
The Farthest Field: A Story of India's Second World War by Raghu Karnad (Norton) - Indian journalist Karnad delves into his family’s past, learning that three ancestors—ones he knew only from faded photographs—died during WWII. Their nation’s involvement in that war is largely forgotten and unrecorded. More than a personal history, Karnad’s account encompasses theaters on three continents as he uncovers diaries, logbooks, requisition orders, and correspondence from the “largest volunteer force the world had ever known.” Just as the broader outlines of India’s pre-independence, pre-partition war effort have been forgotten, individual families also tended to elide their own involvement: “Everything my grandmother could save of my mother’s, she had. But of the men, there was almost nothing.” The tense, subservient relationship with colonial Britain defined the daily rhythms of army life; Karnad’s prose, heartfelt and hauntingly poetic, evokes an India at the crossroads, sending battalions of its young men to die in defense of the British Empire even as Gandhi and Nehru laid the foundation for its independence.
You Too Can Have a Body like Mine by Alexandra Kleeman (Harper) - Kleeman's debut novel is a fever dream of modern alienation following A, a young woman living in an unnamed city with B, her roommate, who has a tendency to bite people when she feels cornered. A has a boyfriend, C, who makes things "suddenly, instantaneously normal, just by explaining them." But A's dull proofreading job and her idle time spent watching Shark Week and porn with C start fading away, and events grow increasingly hallucinatory as B begins trying to look more like A (including cutting off her braid and giving it to A), and C becomes more distant. This is a world in which a man buys a supermarket's entire stock of veal, and something called Disappearing Dad Disorder runs rampant. But the strange becomes increasingly ordinary as it's filtered through A's quest to efface herself: "I looked forward to fully becoming my own ghost, which I had been told would resemble nothing and would look uniquely like itself." In the third act, a religious cult in which members wear ghostlike sheets takes center stage; members subsist entirely on a synthetic dessert snack called Kandy Kakes and are instructed to "misremember" (erase their own memories through meditative concentration). Kleeman's story is not really like any other, but could be described as a blend of the nightmarish disassociation of DeLillo's White Noise and the phantasmagoria of Bergman's Persona.
The Wolf Wilder by Katherine Rundell (S&S) - In 20th-century tsarist Russia, aristocrats raise captured wolf pups to perform as dogs, but when the wolves go mad, they send them to a girl named Feo and her mother, Marina, who "untame" them, so they may live in the wintry wild again. General Rakov, ruler of the tsar's Imperial Army, orders Marina to shoot the wolves; when she refuses, he burns their home and takes her prisoner. Feo plans to rescue her mother with the help of her best friends—wolves White, Gray, and Black—and Ilya, a teenage army deserter with "skinny wrists, but a muscly brain" and a passion for ballet. As in her previous novels, Rundell's (Cartwheeling in Thunderstorms) evocative prose offers startling imagery; when Feo, feeling abandoned, realizes she is not alone, "The moments in which the world turns suddenly kind can feel like a punctured lung." Fairy tale and history merge seamlessly; in a land where terror reigns and adults grow numb with fear, a "little wolf girl" outmaneuvers a sadistic general, awes a village, and inspires an army of children to march on St. Petersburg with dreams of justice. Breathtaking.
Base Nation: How U.S. Military Bases Abroad Harm America and the World by David Vine (Holt) - Vine (Island of Shame), an anthropologist and scholar of American military policy, focuses on the cultural and political role of the global U.S. base structure. The U.S. military maintains, by Vine's count, approximately 800 bases "in more than 70 countries," discussion of which is generally confined to the contexts of foreign policy and national security. Vine takes an alternate tack, investigating the bases' financial and human costs to the U.S. and host countries. Military bases, he argues, "perpetuate a 21st-century form of colonialism, tarnishing our country's ability to be a model for democracy." Too often they are vestigial, mostly relics of the Cold War created from a "newly expansive concept of ‘national security' " and surviving more from inertia than intention. Their deterrent value is often marginal, and their impact often catastrophic. For security reasons, foreign bases are self-contained, culturally isolated "Little Americas." They displace local populations, enable "massive human rights abuses" by "murderous antidemocratic regimes," inflict "profound environmental damage," and nurture an "exploitative sex industry" that reinforces a culture of "militarized masculinity." Vine recommends comprehensive shutdowns, and his presentation is eloquent and persuasive.
