It’s not clear why Random House threw 
It’s difficult to pinpoint the exact moment one achieves literary success, but when Stephen King picks up the phone to interrupt your Good Morning America appearance to personally thank you for writing your latest book, you know you are in the ballpark.
It might seem odd to describe a novel that involves barfing in cars, stalking boys and a drunk dad playing beer pong in his underpants as heartwarming, but Beach Week author Susan Coll is a master at finding wisdom in the unexpected.
Remaking society can take decades. But global rebellion is short work for sharpshooter Katniss Everdeen, who single-handedly foments a revolution in Suzanne Collins’ blockbuster young-adult Hunger Games trilogy. America likes its champions reluctant, and Collins specializes in that surly breed: her heroine trounces dystopic despots while chewing her cheek in self-doubt.
I live in Jersey City, about as far from a Betty Draper’s magnolia petal-overlaid redoubt as you can get. But every morning, I am mildly taken aback when I find myself marching among a troop that is entirely female, women of my age and station, ranging from the harried to the glamorous, all pushing one or two offspring toward the park in an assortment of urban-optimized carriages. Really? I think.
Jonathan Safran Foer has a son. He’s not the Son, I don’t think, although I might be forgiven for doing so. Because even though it is generally agreed that we are living in a child-centered moment, Eating Animals, the Everything Is Illuminated author’s somewhat reheated contribution to the recent spate of ruminations on flesh eating (verdict: don’t), is a singular entry in the annals of parenting literature—bypassing a now-commonplace obsession with one’s offspring to head straight to sanctification.
Welcome to ‘Fine Lines’, the Friday feature in which we give a sentimental, sometimes-critical, far more wrinkled look at the children’s and YA books we loved in our youth.
EARLIER this year, an icon of youthful abandon — bubbly, blond, a perpetual adolescent — left the grove of girlhood and gave birth to a baby boy. No, not Britney Spears. The puckish heroine Bridget Jones, whose fictional diary of the urban dating life was a best seller a decade ago, and whose recent journey to the delivery room has been serialized in The Independent in Britain. 
A story that rides on its own melting also runs the risk of dissolving entirely. In William Henry Lewis’s second collection of short fiction — his first, ”In the Arms of Our Elders,” was published by Carolina Wren Press a decade ago — the slow, lyric stories of love, loss and longing have a sensuous appeal, but they often threaten to disappear into the ether before they get off the ground.
The gates of the Krauss/Foer household should sport a plaque engraved with the words “Indulgences to Come”
We’ve been meaning to illegally post this review of Nicole Krauss’ The History of Love
Author dedications rarely merit noting, but in Nicole Krauss’ ambitious, ultimately unsatisfying second novel, they foreshadow indulgences to come. Aside from presenting photographs of her grandparents, Krauss gives a second, equally conspicuous nod to her husband: “For Jonathan, my life.” This line serves not only as a reminder that Krauss is married to the novelist Jonathan Safran Foer, whose work shares much with her own, but also to presage the tone of The History of Love: a world in which love is absolute, where it can, in fact, take over a life to the exclusion of all else — even, perhaps, to the detriment of a novel.
Leo Gursky’s life is Alma, the girl he loved in his Polish hometown before she fled to America in advance of the Nazis. When Gursky, having survived the Holocaust, follows her after the war, he learns she had been pregnant with their son when she left — and that, after having the baby and losing hope of seeing Leo again, she married her boss’ son in New York. Gursky tries his best to keep his distance, even as his son, who doesn’t know who his real father is, grows into a famous writer. But Leo cannot overcome his loss. The book
finds him as a retired locksmith wandering the city, leavening his loneliness with self-deprecating humor, and, on occasion, intentionally dropping coins in crowded stores, so that he not “die on a day when I went unseen.”
Krauss intertwines Gursky’s story with that of another Alma, a Brooklyn teenager whose father named her after a character in The History of Love, a little-known Spanish book by one Zvi Litvinoff that he found while traveling in South America. Alma’s father dies young, leaving her mother a permanent wreck and forcing the plucky Alma and her eccentric brother to fend for themselves. When a request arrives from a mysterious stranger for her mother to translate The History of Love, Alma turns literary sleuth. The book, we
gather, was actually written by a young Leo in tribute to his own Alma. He gave it to his fleeing friend Zvi to take with him to Chile for safekeeping during the war, but later, Litvinoff could not resist the temptation to publish the book as his own. He did it to impress the woman that he fell for in Valparaiso (Rosa, for those keeping score at home.)
It all makes for an intricate web meant to convey the power of the written word to forge connections and change lives. But while there’s some pleasure to be had in discerning the many links — no easy task, given all the manuscripts and letters and notes which crowd the book — the revelations pack little punch. For starters, it’s hard to credit the supposed potency of Leo’s book based on the excerpts provided — airy abstractions about the “Age of Silence,” when people spoke in gestures, or the “Age of String,” when they used “a piece of string to guide words that otherwise might falter on the way to their destinations.” The fate of Leo’s plagiarized book says as much about the power of writing to give or withhold authorial fame as it does about its power to transform readers.
Also limiting the puzzle’s payoff are the portrayals of lifelong love that lie at its heart. While Krauss is a talented stylist, her fable-like tales of grand passion are banal and unconvincing: “The sensation almost knocked the breath out of me. A tingling feeling caught fire in my nerves and spread. The whole thing must have happened in less than thirty seconds” is how Leo recalls falling for his Alma. It’s telling that Krauss’ depiction of the more mundane affections between the second Alma and her boyfriend is far more believable. We may live for the great love, but translating it to the page can be another matter.
We’re redacting the name of the author and the newspaper in which the review appeared for fear of getting anyone — ourselves, mainly — in trouble. But if you must know the name of the genius because you’d like to give him money/a hearty slap on the back/something to think about, email us and we’ll give you the deets.
Posted by altehaggen in Lit-ish @ Thursday, July 7, 2005 3:40 pm | | Comments (0)