Review: Gail Caldwell's A Strong West Wind

Out of the Panhandle . . . and into the fire
Book critic Gail Caldwell describes her move from idyllic Amarillo to the white-hot cultural ferment of 1970s Austin.

By Edward Nawotka
SPECIAL TO THE AMERICAN-STATESMAN
Sunday, February 19, 2006

In 1973, when Gail Caldwell was 22, she and her friends hatched a plan to kidnap the feminist author Gloria Steinem. The occasion was the National Women's Political Convention in Houston, and Caldwell's all-girl honky-tonk band, the Soeur Queens, had driven in from Austin to play the gig. Fortunately, the plot was short-lived. Still, Caldwell writes in her memoir "A Strong West Wind," "a few of us did go so far as to join Steinem in an elevator and serenade her with 'Glo-o-o-o-o-o-o-r-r-ia, in excelsis deo.' "

It was just the kind of madcap plan a college drop-out living in Austin and casting about for direction would concoct in the '70s. Caldwell wasn't just a musician — she was an anti-Vietnam War protester, a cashier at Grok Books (which eventually morphed into Book People) and a paralegal for a lawyer more fond of drinking at Scholz Garten than preparing for court. She served as confessor to "Gay Place" author Billy Lee Brammer and peer-counselor to the distressed at Womenspace. "Austin in those days," she writes, "had the casual habit of setting itself on fire."

That was Gail Caldwell then. Today, she's the chief book critic at the Boston Globe, where she won a Pulitzer Prize in 2001. Her tough-minded opinions helped shape my ideas of what constituted a good book and offered a thoughtful counterpoint to the diet of academic theory I was fed as an undergraduate at Boston College. For that, I will always be grateful. My mother, on the other hand, can't stand her reviews, which she finds far too grumpy.

So how has Caldwell done in her first foray into book-length writing? Wonderfully. Texans — especially Austinites — will likely regard "A Strong West Wind" as an instant classic of the state's literature.

Born in Amarillo in 1951, Caldwell was "a shy girl in glasses in a do-nothing town" who limped from polio. After her sister taught her to read at age 4, she sought refuge in the library, "where you could lose yourself for hours in sanctioned daydreams." This is a typical creation myth for a writer, but Caldwell invests it with genuine poetry. When she discovers the meaning of the word "the," she imagines it as a "fencepost along the road of text, connecting the stories that seemed to go on as far as, and even beyond, the north Texas plains."

Unlike many memoirists, Caldwell describes a relatively uneventful and happy childhood. "My pleasures remained pensive or interior," she writes, "fishing with my dad, climbing trees with my sister to our fort (in actuality, a neighbor's forbidden flat-topped garage roof), where we read and ate pimiento-cheese or butter-and-sugar sandwiches."

The tempests of adolescence brought this idyll to an end, prompting Caldwell to revolt against the Panhandle's conservative values. She protested the Vietnam War, creating a wedge between her and her father, a World War II veteran nicknamed Wild Bill. She dated an ex-University of Texas quarterback who dropped acid and lost his scholarship. She traded in her George Jones records for Joe Cocker albums.

Caldwell enrolled at nearby Texas Tech University in Lubbock, but she was so confused about her ambitions that she declared seven majors in seven semesters — before getting arrested for marijuana possession. And so she moved to a part of Texas where such behavior might be indulged. "However much the notion might have horrified my preacher ancestors," she writes, "Austin was to be my city on a hill: the little utopia where my best self might emerge."

She made the move in 1970. By 1981, aged 30, she was looking at Austin through the rearview mirror of an old Volvo, "leaving behind a decade of idealism and excess — and a city whose casualties of history had convinced me not to be one of them." The intervening years had been filled with radicalism, consciousness-raising and, eventually, undergraduate and graduate work at UT.

Chapters describing academic studies might sound like a sure-fire interruption of what Caldwell calls the "temporary fugue state that every reader knows." But Caldwell manages to convey the excitement she felt during watershed moments in her intellectual awakening. She writes of an American studies professor whose handwritten comments on her papers "coax(ed) me into the light like some feral creature in the woods." Other professors, such as the one rumored to open a doctoral orals exam with the question, "Why is 'Jaws' a better book than 'Moby-Dick?' Defend," were the sort of people who "lived for the scent of graduate student fear."

Though Caldwell dropped out before taking her oral exams, she managed to get a master's degree in 1980 and in 2002 was named an outstanding alumna of the university.

"A Strong West Wind" doesn't venture far into Caldwell's post-collegiate life — perhaps that's grist for a second volume. Instead, she recalls the yearning that Amarillo evokes in her: "My sister drew and sketched her horses, my mother fussed over her roses in the barren Texas soil, my father drove around town on Sundays at twenty miles an hour, his left arm hanging out the window. These were the activities not just of semi-small-town innocence, but of another age, when daydreaming was a necessary and legitimate activity."

The second half of the book is mostly a paean to the enduring love among the members of her family, especially the women in her life — her sister, mother and Aunt Connie who suffered from depression and was married three times, an archetype who gave Caldwell a "weakness for dogs, novels and bourbon." The details in these final pages are a bit more diffuse than the harder edged early chapters, but they're no less heartfelt.

The white-hot core of this book is the political and social upheaval that Caldwell experienced during her years in Austin. These chapters, as intense as the early autobiographical essays of Joan Didion, are notable for their clear-eyed perspective and a distinct lack of nostalgia for the hippies and hijinks that Caldwell — and Austin — have clearly outgrown.

Q&A with Ana Marie Cox, aka Wonkette, on "Dog Days"

Ana Marie Cox is known to most by her online moniker “Wonkette.” As editor and principal writer of “Wonkette.com,” a scabrous two-year-old Washington D.C. blog about misbehavior amongst our elected officials, Cox has become one of the queens of the blogosphere.

But at the ripe age of 33, Cox is leaving the blog behind to focus on writing books, and adopting the mantle of “Wonkette Emeritus.”

A photogenic strawberry blond, Cox has become well known for her looks and the smattering of star-spangled tattoos on her right arm--usually prominent in her publicity snaps—as her trenchant observations about Beltway society.

She is touring the country to promote her first novel “Dog Days” (Riverhead Books, 274 pages, $23.95), a political satire about a Democratic presidential campaign run amok. Cox spoke with Edward Nawotka by phone while in-between tour stops in California.

Nawotka: How do you succinctly describe your novel to people who haven’t read it yet?

Cox: It is a fantasia of the Kerry campaign and takes a fun house mirror view of the last election and looks at it through the eyes of a young communications worker. Two aspects of her life begin to be threatened: She has an affair with a married man and her candidate is attacked by a Swift-boat style campaign. So she and her friend come up with a “Wag the Dog”-type distraction. Chaos and hilarity ensue.

Nawotka: Since you’ve been on book tour, have people been more interested in asking about the blog or the novel?

Cox: I’ve been lucky and most people have been genuinely interested in the book. Questions have ranged from my favorite brand of gin to “When do you think America might lose its foreign policy dominance?”

Nawotka: Gin? That’s not the type of question that Paul Bremer is getting on his tour.

Cox: Bremer is definitely getting the question about foreign policy. But I also write a lot about drinking. Because I did a blog for so long people seem to think that I know something about politics.

Nawotka: Were you able to do things with your characters that you hoped people in real life would do?

Cox: They definitely had better conversations. They’re wittier. But they have just as dirty lines. There’s a lot of ham-fisted flirting that happens, which I think is an accurate reflection of Washington.

Nawotka: You’ve said that D.C. is “the only city in America run by nerds.” But Silicon Valley is also full of nerds, and you don’t get the sense the people out there are having a lot of sex.

Cox: I don’t think people there have the same fate-of-the-free-world sense of purpose. That can be a real aphrodisiac.

Nawotka: You also write that Washington D.C. is a lot like high school. How so?

Cox: Well, it’s very cliquish and status oriented. People are really insecure and ambitious. Who you have lunch with matters, a lot. There is a prom, which is the White House Correspondent’s Dinner. Finally, there is no such thing as having a separate life from Washington. It’s all consuming in the same way life was in high school, when everything matters so much all the time.

Nawotka: Do you have the same kind of break downs that you had in the movie “The Breakfast Club,” with the jocks, brainiacs…

Cox: There are not the jocks, but I think there are probably nerds of the nerds. But I haven’t met them. There are very deep in the bowels of some think tank somewhere.

Nawotka: If you could go back and spend any time with any politician from the last 100 years, who would it be?

Cox: Lyndon Johnson. He was a heck of a guy who was willing to cut a lot of corners to accomplish something he thought was ultimately a moral good. He was also a big fan of bourbon, as am I.

Nawotka: Any particular brand?

Cox: Maker’s Mark is my default choice.

Nawotka: Now that you’re Wonkette Emeritus, what’s next?

Cox: I’m writing an anthropological study of young conservatives. It’s a culture I don’t understand and is very important in this country. I plan on studying it without bringing a whole lot of judgment to it. Although, I plan to mock for mocking’s sake.

Spying on Americans, Ruling Iraq: Books by Risen, Bremer, Envoy

Spying on Americans, Ruling Iraq: Books by Risen, Bremer, Envoy

By Edward Nawotka

Jan. 20 -- In the 1998 movie ``Enemy of the
State,'' Will Smith portrays a Washington lawyer eluding goons
from the U.S. National Security Agency. In scene after scene,
NSA high-tech wizardry tracks the attorney, keeping him under
surveillance and on the run.
What seemed like a paranoid Hollywood fantasy at the time
has come much closer to reality since the terrorist attacks of
Sept. 11, 2001, writes James Risen in ``State of War: The Secret
History of the CIA and the Bush Administration'' (Free Press,
240 pages, $26).
Risen is the New York Times reporter who disclosed in
December that U.S. President George W. Bush had authorized the
NSA to eavesdrop on the international phone calls and e-mail
messages of American citizens and foreign nationals. The purpose
of that spying was to search for what Risen calls the
``potential evidence of terrorist activity without search
warrants or any new laws that would permit such domestic
intelligence collection.''
The NSA report forms just one chapter in Risen's book,
which discusses half a dozen episodes of alleged intelligence
blunders and deceptions going back to the administration of
President Bill Clinton. Risen's main focus is the Central
Intelligence Agency, which he dubs ``the government's equivalent
of Enron.'' Highlights include a CIA operation in 2000 that
Risen says slipped blueprints for a nuclear weapon to Iran.

`Critical Precedent'

In places, Risen makes alarming suppositions. He quotes an
unidentified source, for example, who says Bush asked then CIA
director George Tenet why an imprisoned al Qaeda member, Abu
Zubaydah, had received pain medication. Then Risen asserts:
``In many ways, the Abu Zubaydah case was the critical
precedent for the future handling of prisoners both in the
global war on terrorism and in the war in Iraq.''
(Tenet will this year publish his own memoir, tentatively
titled ``At the Center of the Storm,'' according to a statement
from his publisher, HarperCollins.)
Risen also asserts that Bush allowed Vice President Dick
Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to create an
atmosphere of intimidation that prevented U.S. generals from
requesting more troops in Iraq.

`My Year in Iraq'

One man who says he wasn't cowed by the likes of Cheney and
Rumsfeld is L. Paul Bremer, the U.S. administrator of Iraq
following the fall of Saddam Hussein in April 2003.
Before heading to Iraq, Bremer sat down to lunch with Bush
to make it clear that he was ``the president's man,'' not a
servant of Rumsfeld or former Secretary of State Colin Powell,
he writes in his memoir, ``My Year in Iraq: The Struggle to
Build a Future of Hope'' (Simon & Schuster, 417 pages, $27).
Bremer's book describes his work at the Coalition
Provisional Authority from May 2003 until sovereignty passed to
the Iraqis in June 2004. Written almost like a diary, the memoir
shows how Bremer collaborated with the U.S. military, the United
Nations mission and various Iraqi factions to fill ``the chaotic
power vacuum'' with something resembling law and order.
On his arrival in Baghdad, Bremer says he felt as if he had
landed in ``a postapocalypse Los Angeles.'' His headquarters in
one of Hussein's former palaces smelled of ``diesel exhaust and
overloaded portable toilets.'' He ditched his dress shoes for a
pair of Timberland boots, which he wore with blue suits.

`Revolt on the Tigris'

The book unfortunately bogs down in blow-by-blow accounts
of diplomatic exchanges and bureaucratic maneuvering. Bremer's
days are long, hot and frustrating. While Bremer supported the war, he is concerned about being abandoned to become a fall guy for controversial decisions, such as his disbanding of the Iraqi army, an order he says came down through the political chain of command.
In the end Bremer, who survived numerous assassination attempts and had a bounty of 10,000 grams of gold on his head offered by Osama bin Laden, expresses little regret about the job, only wishing he’d done more to bolster the economy by limiting subsidies and improving overall security. Though short on startling disclosures, ``My Year in Iraq'' will be essential primary reading for future historians.

A more absorbing account of the occupation comes from Mark
Etherington, a U.K. diplomat who acted as governor of southern
Iraq's volatile Wasit province from October 2003 to May 2004. He
describes this stint in ``Revolt on the Tigris: The Al-Sadr
Uprising and the Governing of Iraq'' (Cornell, 252 pages, $25;
published in the U.K. by C. Hurst, 15 pounds).
Garrisoned in the town of Kut, Etherington and his U.S.
deputy, Timm Timmons, were charged with administering a
region that included about 1 million people and a stretch of
border with Iran running 145 kilometers (90 miles) long. The
group was initially protected by a modest contingent of
Ukrainian soldiers and later by an Abrams tank nicknamed ``Be
Sensitive.''
Wasit province was home to Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr,
who was fomenting a rebellion. The diplomat's limited defenses
proved inadequate when the cleric's Mehdi army attacked in April
2004, temporarily forcing him to flee the region.
Etherington displays the expected stiff upper lip under
pressure, yet manages to communicate the pathos of daily
civilian life in Iraq. Just before leaving al-Kut, Timmons says
something that sums up the whole occupation of Iraq:
``You know -- it just could have been done a lot better.''

Q&A with Julian Barnes on "Arthur & George"

Q&A with Julian Barnes, author of "Arthur & George"

By Edward Nawotka

Julian Barnes is a quintessential English novelist, albeit one who is also an unrepentant Francophile. It's only appropriate that he of all the writers in the U.K. would come across a British equivalent to the infamous 1896 Dreyfus Affair in France and make it the pivotal event in his new book: "Arthur & George" (Knopf, 386 pages, $24.95), Barnes' tenth work of fiction is a densely detailed historical novel that re-imagines an obscure episode from the life of Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, when in 1903, George Edalji, a half-Indian lawyer was tried and imprisoned for mutilating farm animals in Great Wyrley, Staffordshire. Doyle, sensing a miscarriage of justice, investigated the accusations and eventually secured Edalji's release and pardon.

The echoes to the Dreyfus Affair, in which writer Emile Zola rose to the defense of the Alsatian Jew Alfred Dreyfus who'd been mistakenly convicted of treason, are unmistakable.

"Arthur & George" was last year shortlisted for the Booker Prize -- Barnes's third time on the shortlist -- but lost out to John Banville's "The Sea."

Barnes, whose Oxbridge accent makes his speech sound as if his vocal chords have been marinating in cognac, spoke with Edward Nawotka by phone as he began his North American book tour. Barnes will read at A Clean Well Lighted Place for Books at 601 Van Ness Avenue on February 10 at 7 p.m.

Nawotka: How did you find this story that seemed to have been lost to history to all but avid Sherlockians? Were you much of a Sherlockian to begin with?

Barnes: I came to it from a different direction: by reading about it in a book about the Dreyfus case. I began investigating and Conan Doyle came attached to the case. I read Sherlock Holmes as a boy and didn't know much about his life at all, so in writing the book I was discovering Conan Doyle as much as I was George Edalji. Had Kipling come attached I would have been just as happy.

Nawotka: Have you gotten a blizzard of letters from Sherlockians critiquing your portrayal of their hero? They tend to be fanatical about detail.

Barnes: True. Conan Doyle is the only writer that I know of who has three different literary clubs devoted to his memory. And there is a radical difference between the Sherlockians and the Doyleans. Some believe that Doyle was only the literary agent and Sherlock wrote the stories. Other true believers won't even mention Watson's name in public. It's all a form of literary fundamentalism. But this is not one of those books that has subtle allusions to Holmes or Doyle and I haven't heard from a single Sherlockian...perhaps they are the reviewers that didn't bark in night?

Nawotka: Why did you choose to write the story as a novel instead of a nonfiction account?

Barnes: The problems of doing it as a nonfiction book were twofold. First, very little is known about George and his family background. There are some photos and he wrote a couple of articles himself, but his character and nature are lost. As to what his life was like, I had to invent 95% of it.

Likewise, the period I'm covering in Conan Doyle's life is an emotional black hole, one which he lies about in his autobiography. I could have done it as nonfiction, but I would have had to say things like, "At this point in his life, Conan Doyle must surely have felt..." I hate the conditional tone. Prose fiction is the best way to describe how people think and feel.

Nawotka: Were you pleased to discover that Conan Doyle had a robust life outside his study? It makes him a more dynamic character.

Barnes: That, and he was also a very admirable man, generous and chivalrous. He believed action should be taken and wrongs be righted. Conan Doyle came from that generation of publicly involved writers who had influence with politicians. That has disappeared. If you ask Tony Blair who he rather be photographed with, Ian McEwan or Bob Geldoff, I doubt he would choose McEwan.

Nawotka: Are you envious of that time when writers had more influence?

Barnes: If you're asking if I'm a frustrated man of action, I'm not.

Nawotka: Why is it that interest in Conan Doyle, who was a lesser writer than some of his contemporaries, has endured?

Barnes: He created an archetypical character in Holmes. Mostly, I think people are intrigued by the idea of using the power of the intellect to work out crime. There's also a sort of nostalgia for that late-Victorian world, which translates so well into television.

Nawotka: It's something you can see by the popularity of the various BBC adaptations of Dickens novels and the like. The serialization of "Bleak House" has just started running on public television starring Gillian Anderson from the X-files.

Barnes: Ohhh, I thoroughly enjoyed that one! It's one of the best adaptations from Dickens I've ever seen. That woman really can act.

Nawotka: Though the true story of "Arthur & George" is over 100 years old, there are significant contemporary echoes. In particular, the case is largely about racism. Why has it largely been forgotten until now, while the Dreyfus case remains well-known.

Barnes: The Dreyfus case was about bigger issues and was about treason. French anti-Semitism was stronger than the Henny-penny racialist feelings in Britain. Maybe the British have a greater tendency not to discuss things and make a principle out of them like the French do? Though the Edalji case was sensational and instrumental in setting up the court of criminal appeal in Britain, even criminal lawyers, some of eminence, don't remember it.

Nawotka: It's been nearly a year since the book was published in Britain. Do you still look forward to your tour? To visiting San Francisco in particular?

Barnes: I look forward to meeting readers. I like going to cities where I've never been, such as Houston, Cincinnati and Columbus. It's not just a grind. In San Francisco, I'm looking forward to my first visit to a proper Californian vineyard. I'm just going to stare at the vines.

Nawotka: Are you a collector?

Barnes: I'm a wine drinker. Collector is a dubious term. It usually means you just sit around and stare at the labels. I'm a collector of what's inside the bottles.

Eve vs. eye: Ross King's The Judgment of Paris

Eve vs. eye

In his third book of popular art history, Ross King chronicles a radical shift in the way we see the world.

By Edward Nawotka
SPECIAL TO THE AMERICAN-STATESMAN
Saturday, February 04, 2006

On September 19, 1870, the Prussian army of Kaiser Wilhelm I began bombarding Paris with long-range Krupp cannons. Within two weeks, the painter Édouard Manet, who was serving as a lieutenant in the National Guard responsible for defending the city, acknowledged the situation was desperate: "We can no longer get cafe au lait," he wrote in a letter to his wife. In November, he wrote that "there are now cat, dog and rat butchers in Paris. We no longer eat anything but horsemeat."

The resolution to turn horses into food would have been particularly unsettling to Manet's rival Jean Louis Ernest Meissonier, the most celebrated painter in late 19th-century Paris, and a man known for his precise depictions of horses. As befitted his higher status, Meissonier served as a lieutenant colonel in the Guard. For a short time, Manet worked on Meissonier's staff, where he mocked the older painter's habit of doodling during staff meetings, much to the amusement of their colleagues.

Within a half century, Meissonier would be reviled by art historians and Manet revered. How this reversal of fortune came about is the story Ross King tells in "The Judgment of Paris," his third work of art history.

King, a former Canadian academic who now lives near Oxford, England, began his writing career by penning a pair of historical novels. Accordingly, he brings an instinct for storytelling to his nonfiction, which features strong narrative arcs and a surfeit of historical detail. He first came to the attention of American readers six years ago with "Brunelleschi's Dome," a compelling book about the construction of Florence's Santa Maria del Fiore cathedral. The follow-up, 2002's "Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling," had an even more mainstream subject, the painting of the Sistine Chapel. It hit the New York Times best-seller list and was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award.

"The Judgment of Paris" tackles a somewhat more esoteric topic: the Paris art scene from 1863-1874, when Manet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, Paul Cezanne and others challenged the establishment with their radical visions.

In the 1860s, the French art world was dominated by academic painters who rejected contemporary subjects in favor of romantic images of classical Greece or the Renaissance. Meissonier, their champion, favored miniaturized portraits of "silk-coated and lace-ruffled gentlemen" and photorealistic scenes of Napoleon's military victories.

The period itself favored what King calls "gauzy nostalgia"; the fashions of the court of Napoleon III mimicked the bicorn hats and silk stockings of previous centuries. The rest of French society dressed more practically, with the men in top hats and black frock coats. King notes that Manet's first act in defiance of convention was to depict Parisians in this contemporary style, earning him the moniker of a "realist" painter and the unflinching support of the writer Emile Zola.

King structures his book around the annual Paris Salon, "a rare venue for artists to expose their wares to the public and ... to make their reputations." It often attracted a million visitors — more than half the population of Paris.

Manet first submitted a painting to the Salon in 1859, entitled "The Absinthe Drinker." It depicted a drunken "rag-and-bone" man, and, as he expected, it was rejected. What dismayed the judges, even more than the debauched subject matter, was Manet's thick application of paint, broad brush strokes and suppressed details. Another Manet painting, "Music in the Tuileries," offered "a chaotic-looking blaze of figures painted with a smeary lack of fine detail." It so incensed the public that "they threatened violence."

The problem, writes King, was that the painting literally forced a viewer to look at it in a new way:

The viewing public was accustomed to standing close to paintings, studying them minutely and marveling over the delicacy of the handiwork. The work of a master like Meissonier even repaid, as John Ruskin would discover, the scrutiny of magnifying glass. But Manet's apparently clumsy brush strokes and lack of clarity in "Music of the Tuileries" did not lend themselves to this sort of appreciation.

During the next decade, though Manet endured still more critical ridicule, he forged a new direction in art that culminated in his masterpiece, "Olympia," a picture of a nude prostitute staring directly at the viewer. It appropriated the establishment icon of the classical nude and modernized it.

At the same time, Meissonier was mired in his own personal Waterloo, a painting called "Friedland, 1807." The painting, which depicted Napoleon's eponymous military victory, showed hundreds of horses in military formation, some at full gallop. Meissonier's painstaking technique required that he took almost a decade to complete the work. Typically, he built wax dioramas of the scene and made dozens of studies. He even went so far as to build a small railroad in his garden that enabled him to ride alongside galloping horses so he could accurately sketch them.

In "The Judgment of Paris" all this foment takes place against the backdrop of Napoleon III's Paris, a place awash in booze and sex (King estimates some 13 percent of the population was involved in prostitution) that eventually succumbs to the Prussians, the short-lived establishment of the Paris Commune and the adoption of la vie moderne. The painters themselves might admire King's skill in using this backdrop to highlight the artists in the foreground.

Though reading a book about 19th-century art-world politics may sound like a chore to some, King rarely descends to the level of pedagogy because he treats his story like a horse race between two very different artists. Meissonier sought to represent an idealized past as agreed on by all. Manet sought to represent the world around him through the haze of his own individuality.

By the end of the book, it is clear who has run the better race. Manet has finally won the favor of the Salon, where in 1873 his painting "Le Bon Bock" created a sensation. It inspired a restaurant in the Latin Quarter to change its name and helped turn Montmartre into a cultural center. Meissonier, for his part, has finished "Friedland, 1807," which was shown at an even bigger exhibition in Vienna, Austria. Today, it hangs in New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art — just outside the "Manet Room."

"The Judgment of Paris" might not be as immediately accessible as King's previous books, but it offers a clear sense of how the politics and personalities of late 19th-century Europe fused to push art in a new direction — and, at least as far as the impressionists are concerned, onto the dorm room walls of college girls everywhere.

Austin writer Edward Nawotka is a book critic for Bloomberg News.

The 'Monkey' on his back: Review of Nick Laird's Utterly Monkey.

The 'Monkey' on his back

Nick Laird swings through politics of Northern Ireland in mix of mundane, modern terror

By Edward Nawotka
SPECIAL TO THE AMERICAN-STATESMAN
Saturday, January 21, 2006

If you think the people in your reading group can be harsh about a book they don't like, think again. In Northern Ireland, if the locals don't like your writing, you might end up dead.

In November, Belfast playwright Gary Mitchell, his wife and 7-year-old son went into hiding after Loyalist paramilitaries gave him four hours to "get out or be killed." The warning came days after the thugs blew up Mitchell's car and wrecked his house. The gunmen were angry because Mitchell had portrayed them as fools in his plays. What irked them even more is that the theater communities in London and Dublin gave Mitchell awards for the work.

(enlarge photo)

Utterly Monkey Nick Laird Harper Collins, $13.95

Nick Laird also left Northern Ireland, but under his own volition, to attend Cambridge University. There, he met the somewhat better-known writer Zadie Smith, who is now his wife. After Cambridge, Laird worked as a corporate lawyer before packing it in to start a writing career. His first novel, "Utterly Monkey," has already won some awards in England, which means he better be careful about going home again.

"Utterly Monkey" is a lad-lit thriller about Danny Williams, a disgruntled lawyer from Northern Ireland who is living in London, and what happens when his hometown friend Geordie Wilson flees the North after getting kneecapped by the Loyalists. Geordie's sins: He stole cars to go joyriding, he dealt drugs and he dated a paramilitary's sister — all too common Ulster tales of woe.

The action starts when Geordie arrives on Danny's London doorstep, still limping and carrying 50,000 pounds he stole from the Loyalists. As one might expect, the paramilitaries are looking for their cash. By strange coincidence, a terrorist — one who reads Machiavelli and Sun Tzu — named Ian knows who has it and where to go looking for it.

When Geordie arrives, he's the least of Danny's concerns. Danny has just broken up with his girlfriend and is struggling with his job at a white-shoe London law firm, where he's working on a corporate takeover of Ulster Water, a Northern Ireland utility.

Laird spends a great deal of the novel parsing the lawyer's lot in life like a man who has lived it and not loved it: In a colleague's office he observes "a wooden golf putter was propped a little forlornly in the far corner, as if it dreamt of real grass." Danny, like his colleague Rollson, who pushes the firm to buy every conceivable ergonomic accoutrement for his office, isn't a "querulous man." He's just bored. His primary diversion is Ellen, a beautiful trainee lawyer, on whom he has a crush.

"Utterly Monkey" takes place over the week leading up to July 12, when the Protestants of Northern Ireland commemorate the 1690 Battle of the Boyne, in which Protestant William III defeated Catholic James II to regain control of England, Scotland and Ireland. The Loyalists, festooned in orange sashes, march through the streets and often right through Catholic neighborhoods, banging enormous drums and singing. It's as much a provocation as a celebration.

Though the novel's set-up is a fairly conventional one, in which our inadvertent hero tries to thwart terrorists while still getting the girl, "Utterly Monkey" offers a nuanced sense of the Loyalist side of the Troubles and how it still haunts those who have tried to move on. Ian, the well-read terrorist, is particularly sharp about the recent changes in the fortunes of the Ulster Protestants. (For years, the Protestants held swing seats in the British Parliament, giving them a disproportionate amount of power in London. Today, with numerous moderate and Catholic representatives from Northern Ireland sitting in Parliament, they've been marginalized.)

British novels are often a bit hard for Americans to understand. Even if you watch a lot of BBC America, the significance of a "mid-Atlantic accent" or why a character roots for the team that plays at Ibrox Stadium might be lost. Kazuo Ishiguro has speculated that writers, as a consequence of the demand to translate their works into multiple languages, unconsciously excise detail from their books. This often produces a kind of anesthetized literary voice, one that is articulate but cannot readily be placed.

Laird walks this fine line, managing to convey a lively sense of the people and politics of "that little patch of scorched earth" known as Northern Ireland without being too inscrutable. Which isn't to say he doesn't challenge his readers. Londoners and other Brits, many of whom, like Americans, only know of Northern Ireland what they see on TV, will be puzzled by the strange customs of his homeland, and why "when two Ulstermen sit down together, there's probably an even fifty-fifty chance they'll try to kill each other."

The book's denouement, which packs a nice narrative wallop, combines the best of high farce with modern terror. It's scary to realize that urban terror is something Londoners, Americans and the residents of Northern Ireland now all have in common.

Austin writer Edward Nawotka is a book critic for Bloomberg News. He lived in Northern Ireland off and on from 1995-99.

Review: Physical by James McManus

A gambler visits the Mayo Clinic to assess his odds, McManus' exam serves as rumination on health care

Review by Edward Nawotka

James McManus understands long odds. A semi-professional poker player who wrote about his fifth-place finish in the 2000 World Series of Poker in his previous book, "Positively Fifth Street," he knows "each drag off a spliff or a cigarette, each mouthful of garlic mashed potatoes or Billecart-Salmon brut rosé deducts x minutes, y seconds" off his life. All of which limits his chances of seeing any of his three daughters, two of them preteens, "speak as valedictorian of her law school class, get married, score her first goal."

At age 52, McManus finally fully realized that with his family history of heart attacks, including a grandfather who died of a coronary at age 35, the deck was stacked against him. That sudden and sobering realization propelled him to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., for a full-body "executive" checkup, an experience he documents in his new memoir, "Physical."

The good doctors put him through a battery of tests, from dermatological and eye exams to blood and urine analysis. They gave him a "chest CT without biopsy," immunized him against hepatitis and counseled him to lose weight. In his own words, McManus was "bled, scraped, shaved, freeze-dried, stressed, scanned, and sanded, all by the best in the business." Throughout, McManus puts up a macho front. He fantasizes about "a two-mistress session" of S&M with his nurses and wants to "bump fists" with his gastroenterologist after the doc expertly lassos and removes a tiny polyp from McManus' colon. He even doesn't balk at the bill, $8,484.25. (It was covered by Harper's magazine as an expense for an article he wrote.)

Medically speaking, McManus is fortunate. His full-time job as professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago means he's not one of the 45 million Americans without medical insurance. Plus, his body is more or less OK, too: His only major health concern is his cholesterol, which runs "moderately high." As one might expect, his doctors advised him to stop indulging in his predinner martinis and post-dinner Parliament Lights and to exercise.

Early in the book, McManus establishes his skepticism of the medical establishment -- and for good reason. His younger brother died at age 41 from complications of a bone marrow transplant at Johns Hopkins. And his son committed suicide at age 22, possibly as a result of symptoms of depression exacerbated by the antidepressants he was taking. As a result of his suspicion, McManus does his research, and along the way treats us edifying disquisitions on everything from the history of smoking and obesity to toilets and vasectomies.

Being a novelist, as well as a gambler and a journalist, McManus seasons his text with literary and historical allusions. All the while, he highlights factoids that bear repeating. I'm sure you already know that insurance companies spend a whopping 31 cents of every dollar on paperwork instead of medical care, but it's no less startling the 15th time you've heard it.

McManus' greatest health concern is his eldest daughter, Bridget, 30, who suffers from diabetes. In discussing her affliction, he makes a strong argument in support of embryonic stem cell research, which might help her and, according to White House statistics, "approximately 128 million Americans." He castigates the Bush administration for having a "schizoid" position that curtails 99.8 percent of stem cell research and lionizes the South Korean government for supporting groundbreaking research.

In particular, McManus looks to the work of scientist Hwang Woo-Suk, who in 2004 claimed to have cloned a human embryo and extracted stem cells from it. Regrettably, in December, the same scientist disclosed that his claim was faked, which will no doubt crush the author.

When he's not being a nagging polemicist, McManus is generous with praise where he feels praise is due. In particular, the Mayo Clinic comes out looking like a paragon of good sense and medical idealism. He explains that the not-for-profit institution offers general health care to much of southeastern Minnesota in addition to serving high-end clients. In general, the doctors he encounters also impress him. When an especially skilled eye surgeon saves his daughter's eye after she's stabbed by an errant magic wand at a children's birthday party, he considers that it might be appropriate for his wife to thank the doctor by sleeping with him. Could there be a greater tribute from such a macho guy? Probably not.

The majority of us find medical matters an intimidating mystery. McManus' grab bag of personal anecdote, medical history and polemic offers an entertaining and often insightful look at one man's experience with the health care system. If there's any message to take away from McManus' book, it's to enjoy your good health so long as you still have it. Once you lose it, getting it back is an all-consuming task.

Why Do I Love These People? Honest and Amazing Stories of Real Families by Po Bronson

Why Do I Love These People? Honest and Amazing Stories of Real Families by Po Bronson

This article originally appeared in People magazine.

'Think your family's dysfunctional? Bestselling author Po Bronson (What Should I Do with My Life?) decided in 2002 that he wanted to "decode the mystery" of family relationships. Bronson gave the project three years, interviewed 700 people and found 18 fascinating families whose secrets are revealed here. Along the way, he unearthed enough juicy drama for 20 episodes of Oprah--homing in on the heartbreak and healing, the emotional tremors and transitions that are part of every family's saga.

Few readers will be surprised by the author's assertion that the face of the American family is changing. He notes that fewer than 23 percent of the 57 million married couples in the United States have children, and that disparate racial and religious backgrounds are no longer a rarity. It's what's going on inside those families that captures our attention; the book's strength lies in Bronson's depiction of the sometimes eccentric ways family members maintain their ties. Anne Jacobsen asked for and received her husband's permission to have an affair; Mary Garrett, a post office worker, never hugged her eight children but sacrificed beyond measure to send six to Ivy League colleges. Bronson's conclusion? "Real love ... is a mere starting point." It's a theme worth exploring and a book worth reading.

Turow’s WWII Novel Surrenders to Cliché

Turow’s WWII Novel Surrenders to Cliché: New Books

Reviewed by Edward Nawotka

Scott Turow risks deviating from his usual courtroom thriller, to try a World War II spy story in the mold of Alan Furst. “Ordinary Heroes” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 370 pages, $25) recounts the story of WWII JAG lawyer David Dubin, a Lieutenant in Patton’s army, who in October 1944 is ordered to find and arrest Major Robert Martin, a rogue OSS spy and possible double agent. It’s a mission that mysteriously leads to Dubin being court-martialed with the possibility of execution.

“Ordinary Heroes” begins in the present when Dubin’s son Stanley, a 55-year-old burnt-out journalist (and minor character from 1987s “Presumed Innocent”) discovers among his father’s belongings a cache of letters addressed to a mystery woman and records that reveal Dubin’s heretofore unknown court-martial. Investigating, Stanley tracks down the now elderly lawyer who defended his father and is given a manuscript written by Dubin that explains what happened. “Ordinary Heroes” alternates between Stanley’s present day story and Dubin’s wartime memoir, which makes up the majority of the narrative.

Dubin is the second generation son of Russian immigrants and Jewish socialists. He shortened his name from Dubinsky to mask his identity upon enrolling in a posh Midwestern college and arrives in Europe as an idealist, believing he is serving “a land of equals where everyone deserved to be greeted by only one label—American.” What he finds is a segregated Army where his dogtags are stamped with an “H” for Hebrew and he is warned not to be “the wrong kind of Jew.” It’s only after questioning the integrity of his job, which consisted primarily of court-martialing “Negro” soldiers, Dubin is sent to pursue Martin. The order is issued by General Roland Teedle, an alcoholic rumored to be homosexual, who hates socialists “Because they believe mankind can be good without [God’s] assistance” and opines that “So much of civilization is merely the recovery period between wars.”

On the second page of the book, Dubin vows to “happily remain a lawyer, not a foot soldier.” But just as soon as he tracks down Martin, a man with the charm of William Powell and the courage of Audie Murphy, Dubin is cajoled into joining a mission to blow-up an underground arms depot using a locomotive wired with explosives. Here he meets Gita Lodz, a vampy Polish partisan who will seduce and dupe Dubin, helping Martin repeatedly escape arrest. And when Martin does escape, Dubin pursues both him and Gita, for whom he has fallen, going so far as to make a harrowing low altitude parachute jump into occupied territory to continue the chase.

War fever inevitably infects Dubin (and Turow) who is distracted from his prey by the German army making its last stand at the Battle of the Bulge. For nearly a third of the book, Dubin leads an infantry division in defending the town of Bastogne, Belgium, and stars in a series of cinematic military tableaus, including a bloody Nazi ambush and capture by the SS. Battle hardened, he becomes inured to the stench of war until (cliché alert) he encounters the horrors of the Holocaust first-hand.

As a novel of derring-do, “Ordinary Heroes” delivers plenty of action and romantic interludes. But the book fails outright as a mystery: too early on Turow reveals that Dubin’s court-martial was dismissed and his sentence dropped, and it’s all too obvious how the relationship between Dubin, Martin and, especially, Gita will work itself out.

Although Turow based this novel in part on his father’s experiences as a doctor with Patton’s army, the story itself just seems overly familiar. Anyone that has already seen “Band of Brothers,” which features many similar scenes and settings, will likely experience frequent moments of deja-vu.

If this seems like a surprising direction for the author who made his reputation writing modern legal thrillers, it’s not. Turow has turned to writing polemics. His previous book, 2003s “Ultimate Punishment” outlined his arguments against the death penalty. “Ordinary Heroes,” in addition to being an enjoyable, if hackneyed WWII adventure story, is also a vehicle for Turow to deliver lawyerly disquisitions on war, religion, and patriotism. Unfortunately, all too often Turow’s characters become talking heads who slip into leaden cliché--such as Dubin’s observation that “The general’s names might be remembered by historians, but it was [real soldiers] who would fight the true war,” and Martin’s proclamation, “I thought fascism was the plague. But war is. War is.”—that are bested only by the recent Star Wars prequels.

It’s been fun, but Turow should to the courtroom where he has total command of the milieu.

Review; H.W. Brands' 'Andrew Jackson: His Life and Times'

How Andrew Jackson changed the world

By Edward Nawotka

SPECIAL TO THE AMERICAN-STATESMAN

Tuesday, November 15, 2005

When Andrew Jackson was an 18-year-old apprentice lawyer in Salisbury, N.C., he took the bold step of inviting not one, but two women to the town's annual Christmas Ball. A scandal ensued. The problem wasn't with the number of women he'd invited or that they were mother and daughter, no less. The problem was that the women were prostitutes.

This story, from University of Texas professor H.W. Brands' compelling new biography, "Andrew Jackson: His Life and Times," foreshadows the type of revolution Jackson brought to American politics.

The man who would later become our seventh president was not of the patrician stock that had previously filled the White House; he was the son of Ulster-Scots immigrants to South Carolina, and his father died in a logging accident weeks before he was born. "Jackson devoted his public life to battling birth and breeding as requisites for personal advancement," Brand writes.

He led an eventful life. At age 13 he was captured while serving as a courier for the American Revolution. Later, he moved to Tennessee, where he began life as a "frontier gentleman," working as a lawyer by day and moonlighting as a land speculator and slave trader. It was there that he established the political career that eventually led him to Washington, first as a representative, then as a senator and finally as president, the first such man to serve in all three roles.

Brands, who has published well-regarded biographies of Benjamin Franklin and Teddy Roosevelt (and a history of Texas), moves quickly through Jackson's youth and political rise in order to get to the good stuff: Jackson's pursuit of military glory and honor.

This central section of the book is the one that most readers will find themselves lingering over after Thanksgiving dinner. Jackson took over the militia, became one of the most merciless American Indian fighters and led his troops in the Battle of New Orleans, where the American side suffered a total of 13 casualties, while the British lost 1,600. It remains one of the most undervalued victories in American history; had we lost New Orleans, it is likely the British would have sailed up the Mississippi and tried to split the country in two. Jackson, always more a frontiersman of the West than a politician of the East, would have never let that happen.

One of Brand's most laudable skills as a biographer is his ability to connect the smaller moments in a subject's life to the watershed events of the day. In public lectures, and one would assume in his classes, he refers to this as "little history" and "big history."

In this way, Brands draws a clear connection between Jackson's dueling skills and his ability to absorb barbs during his presidential campaigns. In one memorable instance, Brands recounts the story of a duel in which Jackson, knowing he was the lesser marksman, absorbed a pistol shot from a man standing only 24 feet away, and then returned fire, killing him. It's the same resilience that earned him the nickname "Old Hickory": A hickory branch, writes Brands, is "thin but impossible to break."

Later, when Jackson ran for president in 1928 against incumbent John Quincy Adams, he tolerated what Brands calls "the longest, bitterest, ugliest campaign in American political history." Not only was Jackson's spelling mocked, but his wife was accused of adultery. In a 19th-century version of the attack ad, a "coffin handbill" was printed up that depicted six coffins for soldiers Jackson ordered executed during the War of 1812. Nevertheless, he won with a large majority of the popular vote and served two terms.

The section of the book that deals with Jackson's presidency offers far less drama, perhaps because there was no momentous event that marked his administration out for special historical consideration. A proponent of state's rights, Jackson dismantled the Second Bank of the United States, creating a decentralized banking system, but then later cajoled South Carolina, which was agitating for secession, to remain in the Union.

The legacy of his post-presidency years is more important to Texans; it is through his relationship with former Tennessean Sam Houston that Jackson helped make sure that the independent republic of Texas would become part of the United States. (Pull out a $20 bill right now and say "Thank You" if you wish.)

Jackson's revolution was to bring pluralism to American politics, henceforth known as "Jacksonian democracy." It's a concept Brands brings most alive when he describes the "astonished" looks on the faces of Washingtonians as Jackson's supporters rushed into the city for Jackson's first inauguration. One wrote: "It was like the inundation of the northern barbarians into Rome. . . . The West and the South seemed to have precipitated themselves upon the North and overwhelmed it. . . . Strange faces filled every public place, and every face seemed to bear defiance on its brow."

Jackson's populist aura might explain why we seem to be experiencing what may turn into a small revival of Jackson boosterism. In 1946, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. won the Pulitzer Prize for "The Age of Jackson," which was the first to argue that Jackson deserves credit for laying the founding principles of the Democratic Party; Schlesinger went so far as to compare his policies to Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal. This year, Princeton professor Sean Wilentz has authored two books that focus on Jackson: a short biography edited by Schlesinger and a mammoth work of political history, "The Rise of American Democracy," that uses Jackson as the linchpin of its argument. Perhaps modern-day Democrats are looking to find a historical standard bearer for their somewhat beleaguered political party.

Still, Brands is a bit too breezy in his acceptance of this interpretation of Jackson's legacy, especially given that the man was a slave owner who was best known in the public imagination as an American Indian killer. Brands' book gives far more support to the idea that Jackson's primary achievements were military and social, rather than political, and more thorough discussion of this point would have been welcome. It's a shortcoming that might simply be a consequence of Brands' effort to condense Jackson's eventful life into a single volume.

That quibble notwithstanding, Brands is a good match for his subject. Though his book is academically astute and erudite, it is hardly above relying on a good gunfight or a political scandal to carry the story, rather than freighting down the narrative with he-said, she-said theoretical equivocation. (For that, you can turn to Robert V. Remini's authoritative three-volume version of Jackson's life.)

This is, simply put, a readable and exciting book, much in the mold of such perennially popular presidential biographers as David McCullough and Joseph Ellis. It is, in a sense, as populist in its inclinations as Jackson himself.

Austin writer Edward Nawotka is a book critic for www.bloomberg.com

Interview: Simon Winchester, The day the Earth didn't stand still

The day the Earth didn't stand still

Simon Winchester excavates the San Francisco earthquake of 1906

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By Edward Nawotka

SPECIAL TO THE AMERICAN-STATESMAN

Sunday, October 23, 2005

The New York Times has called him the "Dean of Disaster," but that's not quite right. If anything, Simon Winchester should be called the "Don of Disaster" — he is an Oxford man, after all, and it wouldn't be right to get the nomenclature wrong. Then again, it wouldn't do to reduce Winchester to such a narrow profile. The geologist-turned-journalist-turned-author has written on subjects from the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary (in "The Professor and the Madman") to the history of modern geology (in "The Map That Changed the World"). As a travel writer, he's covered the damming of the Yangtze River and written books on the Balkans and Mumbai, and just this year he took over as publisher and owner of Art AsiaPacific magazine.

Still, Winchester is the first to admit that he's familiar with the topic of disaster. His 2003 book, "Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded, August 17, 1883," looked at possibly the most devastating volcanic eruption in history. In his latest book, "A Crack in the Edge of the World," he retells the story of what some consider to be the most tragic natural disaster in American history: the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, which leveled the city, killed hundreds and left a quarter-million people homeless.

"Both events underline the point that there are spasms in the Earth's history," says Winchester, "and there are occasional years, such as 1906 or (2004-2005), that are very, very bad years." Winchester points out that 1906 was "one of the worst years of all time." In addition to the San Francisco earthquake, 20,00 people were killed by an earthquake in Valparaiso, Chile; 200 were killed by an earthquake on Formosa; and Italy's Mount Vesuvius erupted. The past year has been similarly awful: There have been devastating earthquakes in Iran and Pakistan, and a brutal tsunami struck Asia at the end of 2004.

In "A Crack in the Edge of the World," Winchester serves up a succinct lesson in the history of plate tectonics and how the Earth's shifting crust threatens us all. The long-term consequences of these disasters are sometimes surprising. "One result of the Krakatoa explosion was an upsurge in interest in fundamentalist Islam throughout the region," says Winchester. "Likewise, in San Francisco there was an upsurge in Pentecostalism. It was essentially born then and got its enthusiastic push off from (the earthquake)."

In his latest book, Winchester also travels across the North American continent, visiting the site of other earthquakes, offering insight into specific fault lines, such as the San Andreas. Which brings up the question: As an Englishman who spends most of his time living in New York, does Winchester worry about the safety of Californians who live in the shadow of "The Big One?"

Winchester's answer is circumspect. "I do question them," he says, "but I also understand that the reason people live in such risky places is that they offer extensive geological history and are very beautiful. If we live near a mountain, that mountain is itself evidence of geological violence. The likelihood is there will be more violence. In Kansas, nothing ever happens."

Nevertheless, Winchester predicts that it's not the crazy Californians who should worry most of all. Instead, those who should be looking to move are the residents of . . . Missouri. "A seismic event will likely take place sometime in our lives at a spot 150 miles south of St. Louis, and will affect the people of Cincinnati and Indianapolis," he says. "Wait for it. It will astonish people."

Edward Nawotka is the former programming director of the Texas Book Festival and a free-lance book critic.

Interview: John Berendt, Sinking into the Lifestyle of Venice

Sinking into the lifestyle of Venice

'Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil' author John Berendt returns to print with a portrait of the world's most enigmatic island.

By Edward Nawotka

This article originally appeared in the Austin American-Statesman

Sunday, October 9, 2005

It's been more than a decade since John Berendt's "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil" became a publishing phenomenon, spending an astounding 42 months on the best-seller lists. Berendt's follow-up, "The City of Falling Angels," exchanges Savannah for Venice, Italy, where he finds a cast of titled aristocrats, high society patrons and artists equal in eccentricity and intrigue to Jim Williams and Lady Chablis of "Midnight."

In 1996, Berendt was just three days into a visit to the city when a suspicious fire destroyed the Gran Teatro La Fenice opera house (where Verdi's "La Traviata" and "Rigoletto" debuted). Sensing a story, Berendt began a casual investigation, interviewing witnesses and other interested parties, from an elderly Murano glassblower who interpreted the fire in a series of vases, to a variety of wealthy American expats.

While the book does unravel the mystery of the fire, it is more of a travelogue than a true crime tale. The reward of reading it is in the way Berendt decodes dramatic episodes from day-to-day life along the canals of this ancient watery port city, from the annual ritual of the masked Carnevale to whose palazzo is most prestigious and why.

Berendt, whose book tour brings him to Austin on Wednesday, spoke with the American-Statesman by phone from his home in New York City.

Austin American-Statesman: You quote the writer Mary McCarthy in her book "Venice Observed" as saying of Venice that "Nothing can be said (including this statement) that has not been said before." Yet, you persisted in writing a book about the city. When did you realize that there was indeed a story there for you?

John Berendt: Venice is a magical city that I just loved. I'd been there a dozen times since 1977, and initially I went there looking for a book. ("Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil") had a very strong sense of place and I thought it would be worthwhile to do another book where the locale was strong. I had been living there a little less than half the time since the fire, but I didn't commit to writing a book until 2000.

Unlike your first book, which is driven by a true crime story, "City of Falling Angels" is much more a series of vignettes about various people, many of them eccentrics, whom you meet along the way. Was this deliberate or did you find that the story of the opera house was less dramatic than you initially hoped?

While the book is bracketed by the fire and the rebuilding of the opera, what I wanted to do was give a sense of what life was like in Venice. I found I was much more interested in what the natives and the expatriates were like, and less interested in issues like the high water or gondoliers.

Very soon after I got there, someone told me "Everybody in Venice is acting," which intrigued me. I do tend to gravitate toward eccentric people. In Venice, I found the same thing that I found in Savannah: people who regard their lives as works of art in progress. An eccentric is a person who is creating their own reality.

Is that why so many expats, writers in particular, live there? You mention Henry James, of course, Byron, and Ezra Pound, whose story you recount, but I'm reminded of many others, such as Joseph Brodsky (author of "Watermark"), Harold Brodkey (author of "Profane Friendship") and, recently, people like the mystery novelist Donna Leon (author of the Commissario Guido Brunetti mysteries).

In general, Venetians are open to befriending foreigners and there are a lot who are integrated into Venetian society. There is an awful lot of doubletalk there. People tend to say whatever they feel like saying, and they tell stories even if they are not true. If you don't exaggerate, they will write you off as a bore. There is a great deal of imagination, pretense, playacting and role playing.

Whenever you're an American outside the U.S., you get a better sense of who you are in relation to other people in other countries. Maybe that's it. Being in Venice, I felt I was in a special place. It's very cut off from the outside world.

Was that what was meant by the poet Mario Stefani, who joked that "If Venice didn't have a bridge, Europe would be an island." Or is that more an indication of the pride Venetians take in their city, however at risk it is?

In a sense. Some people feel it is confining and claustrophobic, but Venice does have a constancy about it that is unusual. You really know that you are quite removed from the rest of the world.

One of the things that they say about Venice is that the history is right in front of you. The republic, which was the most powerful in the world at one point, lasted for 1,000 years and it has a spectacularly beautiful culture that is unique and has for the most part survived.

Another thing that Stefani said was that "Anyone who loves Venice is a true Venetian, even a tourist, but only if the tourist stays long enough to appreciate the city. If he stays only one day just to say he's been to Venice, no."

The ones they don't like are the ones that come in on the cruise ships. They don't go to restaurants, since they eat on their boats. They don't spend money. That's why they don't like them.

In restaurants, if you're noticed as a regular customer, they will give you a nice big discount.

That said, the old cliché is that the best way to see Venice for the first time is by water. Does that still hold true?

Yes. The best way to go into the city is across the lagoon in a boat. You can go in a water taxi or a motorboat. It's not cheap, it will cost 80 and 90 euros, and it takes 20 minutes. Or you can go in by mass transportation, but that takes 90 minutes. It's worth the splurge.

Review: The March by E.L. Doctorow

Sherman's War on Barbarity

The March by E.L. Doctorow

RANDOM HOUSE; 363 PAGES; $25.95

This review originally appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle.

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The Civil War has a long literary history, beginning with Walt Whitman's poetry and Stephen Crane's "The Red Badge of Courage" and peaking in the 1930s when Margaret Mitchell's "Gone With the Wind" became a national phenomenon, both in print and on film.

In 1990, Ken Burn's 11-hour PBS series "The Civil War" reignited war fever, a fire that turned recently deceased Civil War historian Shelby Foote into a best-seller for the first time. In recent memory, there have been a number of undeniably good books about the war, the most notable of which is probably Charles Frazier's 1997 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel "Cold Mountain."

With "The March," E.L. Doctorow makes a fine contribution to the Civil War bookshelf, one that offers a panoptic view of one of the most notorious military campaigns in U.S. history: Union Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman's infamous march through Georgia and South Carolina in the final months of the war.

Doctorow begins in the days after the burning of Atlanta in November 1864. With a scorched-earth policy intended to break what remained of the South's will, Sherman orders his 60,000 troops to burn crops, kill livestock and destroy any buildings (except churches and Masonic temples) in the Army's path. Plantation owners and other Georgia gentry are fleeing toward Savannah. Most have left slaves behind, who wait in expectation of the liberating army:

"And, as they watched, the brown cloud took on a reddish cast. It moved forward, thin as a hatchet blade in front then widening like the furrow from the plow. ... It was not fearsomely heaven-made, like thunder or lightning or howling wind, but something felt through their feet, a resonance, as if the earth was humming." The terror is not that of God, but of man. Where the slaves see the Union as sowing freedom in the furrowed earth, the Southerners see it as sowing death.

As the novel progresses, Doctorow shifts smoothly among a dozen points of view, from slaves to civilians to enlisted men and officers on both sides. Among the characters through whom we experience the war are Sherman himself (known to his men as "Uncle Billy"), a German battlefield surgeon named Wrede Sartorius, and Pearl, a 13-year-old "white negro" who is the illegitimate offspring of a plantation owner and one of his slaves.

Throughout, the portrayal of the characters constantly shifts. Sherman is alternately depicted as a ruthless warlord and an asthmatic and insomniac troubled by the deaths of his young sons. Sartorius, renowned for "removing a leg in twelve seconds" (an arm "took only nine"), appears at first with a bloody saw in hand, "inviolate in the carnage around him." But he also is a brilliant medical mind and predicts that there will be a time when "we will have other means. We will have found botanical molds to reverse infection. We will replace lost blood. We will photograph through the body to the bones."

At various times, Pearl will pass for white and black, a boy and a girl, a child and an adult, a nurse and Sherman's drummer boy. Southern belles profane themselves to maintain some semblance of status. In one of the finest turns in the book, a cowardly Confederate soldier who has previously commandeered the uniform of a slain Union soldier in order to save himself adopts the identity of dandified war photographer and very nearly becomes a hero of the Confederacy.

Despite his sympathy for the plight of the innocents, Doctorow make it clear that Sherman's barbarity is the evolution of an ancient militaristic impulse toward seeking glory through war, one that casts a shadow over all humanity. As an English journalist named Pryce remarks, "These chaps were industrial-killers, they had repeating rifles that could kill at a thousand yards, grape that could decimate an advancing line, cannon, fieldpieces, munitions that could bring down entire cities. Their war was so impersonally murderous as to make quaint anything that had gone on before." But at the same time, "the brutal romance of war was still possible in the taking of spoils. Each town the army overran was a prize. In this village was an amazing store of wine, in that a granary brimming to the rafters, a herd of beef here, an armory there, homes to loot, slaves to incorporate. There was something undeniably classical about it, for how else did the armies of Greece and Rome supply themselves?"

The cruel irony, of course, is that Sherman's brutal methods seem to have hastened the end of the war. He established a haunting precedent, one that probably contributed to the thinking that justified the dropping the atomic bomb on Japan, which helped to hasten the end of World War II. But aside from the cost in human lives, what is the intangible price of waging such warfare?

Doctorow seems to answer, in the voice of an elderly and dying Marcus Aurelius Thompson, chief judge of Georgia, as he flees from Sherman on the back of a wagon: "The wretched war had destroyed not only their country but all their presumptions of human self-regard. What a scant, foolish pretense was a family, a culture, a place in history, when it was all so easily defamed. And God was behind this."

It's a haunting valediction and one that echoes through parts of the South, even today.

Edward Nawotka lives in Austin, Texas, and is a member of the National Book Critics Circle.

Interview: Making the Case for Mark Twain

The Destiny of Ron Powers: Making the Case for Mark Twain

This article originally appeared in Publishers Weekly.

Ron Powers, coauthor of the bestseller Flags of Our Fathers, felt the influence of Mark Twain early on. "When I was a little boy in Hannibal," says Powers, "[Twain] was a mythic figure to me. His books and a bust of him were all over my friend Dulany Winkler's house, and I spent a lot of time there. Seeing that a guy from Hannibal made it in the world lodged in my consciousness. I have carried Hannibal and Twain round in my head all my life."

Powers has expressed his lifelong passion for the writer by penning a 700-page biography, Twain: A Life, which Free Press has just published. The book may help stake out a bigger spot in other readers' consciousness for an author who Powers believes is inadequately appreciated. The hefty volume draws together the disparate parts of Twain's personality, from his early days as a red-headed four-year-old sitting at the knee of his family's slave, Uncle Dan'l, through his early years in Nevada and San Francisco as a maverick newspaperman, to the glory days as the toast of the town in Boston, New York, Paris, Sydney and almost everywhere in between.

Before this book, Powers published three separate works touching on Twain and his hometown: White Town Drowsing: Journeys to Hannibal, an account of the failed attempt to "package" Hannibal on the occasion of Mark Twain's 150th birthday; Tom and Huck Don't Live Here Anymore: Childhood and Murder in the Heart of America, a true crime book that looks at the dissolution of smalltown values; and Dangerous Water: A Biography of the Boy Who Became Mark Twain,an examination of Twain's formative years. Powers, who now lives in Middlebury, Vt., says that the shared birthplace has given him an affinity for Twain. But the pair have more in common than a hometown. As demonstrated in Twain: A Life, Powers and Twain share a knack for word play and irreverence. "With any other writer," says Powers's editor, Bruce Nichols, "I wouldn't have let through so many puns. But here, it seemed appropriate." Nichols believes that Powers and Twain are "an extraordinary match of writer and subject," and the pairing is serendipitous. Without it, it is unlikely a publisher would have commissioned yet another biography of the writer, who due to the vagaries of academia and a spirited campaign against him by the NAACP, among others, has largely receded from the classroom.

Since Twain's death in 1910, there have been more than 40 biographical works written about Twain for a general audience, including several recently, such as Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain: A Biographyby Justin Kaplan, The Singular Mark Twainby Fred Kaplan and Mark Twain: An Illustrated Biographyby Geoffrey Ward.

Nichols, who paid a six-figure advance for the book, insists that despite the number of previous works on Twain, there was more to be said. "In every generation we need to rediscover our cultural giants. If the country was ever said to have a cultural 'founding father,' Twain would be it," he says. The Free Press is banking on the book's ability to appeal to the same readers who have made David McCullough into a bestselling author, opting to print 70,000 copies of the $35 hardcover.

As if to confirm Twain's timeliness, new works by the author continue to be published. In 2001, the Atlantic Monthly, a magazine to which Twain was a regular contributor, finally printed his novella, A Murder, a Mystery, and a Marriage, 125 years after it was first rejected by the magazine. In 2003—a three-act play originally written in 1898, entitled Is He Dead?—was discovered and optioned for Broadway. The Mark Twain Project at the University of California at Berkeley, which serves as the main repository for Twain's letters and manuscripts, has since its founding in 1949 managed to annotate only a modest percentage of Twain's work, which includes some 28,000 letters (with tens of thousands estimated to be at large moldering unfound in attics and steamer trunks), along with notebooks and other sundries, including 500 incomplete and/or unpublished manuscripts. The project's general editor, Robert Hirst, who has been publishing books of Twain's annotated letters, estimates it may take until 2021 just to finish annotating the letters. Powers says he owes a debt to Hirst and the scholars at the archive, who provided much of the never seen before material and helped with the lion's share of research. Nichols goes so far as to call Hirst the "godfather" of the book, and says that Hirst's staff fact checked the manuscript.

Unfortunately, even as new works appear, Twain's reputation remains diminished. The author is a victim, Powers maintains, of career academics "who are probably a little bit jealous.

The major objection that is always raised against teaching Twain is the liberal use of the word "nigger" in Huckleberry Finn in particular. Resistance came early, when the Concord Library banned the book in 1885, calling it "trash suitable only for the slums."Momentum built in the 1950s, when the NAACP suggested the book contained "racial slurs" and "belittling racial designations." Similar allegations continue today. As recently as 1998, PBS rejected an offer to broadcast a filmed version of Mark Twain Tonight!—the theatrical one-man show the actor Hal Holbrook has been doing for 40 years (and recently revived on Broadway)—because of concerns over Twain's language.

Another part of the ongoing trouble with the academy may be Twain's reliance on satire and humor to make his point. Humor doesn't necessarily resonate across decades; will our grandchildren's children find David Sedaris funny? Powers points out that Twain's laughter was "a seamless extension of his anger," but that after his death, "his humor, and anger, amounted to character deformations, and worked fatally against his higher literary potential."

In addition, Powers writes, Twain's books "tended to be sprawling pastiches, grab bags of personal narrative, some of it true, mixed with found art: sections from other books, recollected tales, happenstance, memory fragments, self-plagiarized letters and essays, anything to meet the word count." Modern critics find this lack of formal structure off-putting, Powers writes.

That Twain is not very much appreciated by academic gatekeepers is no surprise. Much of Twain's career was a reaction to and revolt against the patrician thought police who guarded the gates to the garden of literary respectability. Assisted by other writers, such as his editor at the Atlantic Monthly, William Dean Howells, who became a lifelong friend and champion, Twain introduced East Coast readers to vernacular American speech and, in doing so, to proletarian –Americans' ideas about class and race. At the same time, Twain was a striver and for much of his life was as passionate about making money as writing. He is, after all, the man who branded the Gilded Age.

This duality, evident in his personality and double name— Samuel Clemens/Mark Twain—appealed to the deconstructionist literary critics who became dominant in the 1980s. They revived him somewhat, but unfortunately, says Powers "they viewed [Twain] as a walking Freudian casebook." The prevailing work on him was a form of "psycho-biography," says Nichols, that speculated on everything from his sexuality (he lived in San Francisco, he might be gay!) to the origin of his showmanship.

Powers, with his lifelong interest in Twain, observed this period and felt throughout that Twain the man "was pushed to the side and abstracted into theory." When the time came in his career to address Twain full on, he sought to "bring the man to stand next to the theory" and argue for his role in American history. "Here was a Rorschach blot of America in the 1880s and 1890s," says Powers, "the representative man of his age and a prophet of our time. The man internalized the American experience to the bones."

That Twain has always been a polarizing figure and still can inspire debate is a testament to his ability to embody the issues at the center of the national character. Powers's book may go a long way toward reasserting Twain's place as a titan of American letters. Nevertheless, Powers remains modest in his ambition. "I don't have any grandiose expectations of this book," he says. "I just want to reconnect people to the pleasure of reading him."

Review: Alexander McCall Smith's Friends, Lovers, Chocolate

Alexander McCall Smith's 'Friends, Lovers, Chocolate'

By Edward Nawotka

SPECIAL TO THE AMERICAN-STATESMAN

Sunday, September 18, 2005

What kind of a title is "Friends, Lovers, Chocolate" for a mystery? It sounds better suited to a romance novel or a cookbook. Yet that's what Alexander McCall Smith, author of the immensely popular "No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency," has decided to call his latest whodunit.

Smith, who has sold some 3.5 million copies of his franchise series, is fond of such adamantly sweet titles. The last two "No. 1 Ladies" books were called "The Full Cupboard of Life" and "The Company of Cheerful Ladies." The next one, coming out in the spring, is "Blue Shoes and Happiness."

Give Smith credit for truth in advertising. The heroine of the "No. 1 Ladies" books is Precious Ramotswe, a Botswana detective with a milewide optimistic streak who putters around Gabarone in her "little white van" dispensing folksy advice, collecting orphans, settling lovers' quarrels and solving the occasional bloodless crime. Precious likes to eat (Smith calls her "traditionally built") and solves many of her mysteries while in quiet contemplation over a cup of red bush tea shared with her assistant.

These books are, for the most part, delightful. In Smith's eyes, Botswana is a place where good, hard-working people make the most out of their modest circumstances and there is little moral ambiguity. Those who don't play by the rules usually come to know shame and the failure of their ways.

Some have criticized the books as disingenuous -- for example, they rarely mention AIDS -- but Smith, who was born in nearby Zimbabwe and taught for a time in Botswana, has chosen his setting carefully. Botswana has a small population and some of the

largest diamond mines in the world. The government's longstanding partnership with mine operator DeBeers has given Botswana the fastest growing economy in Africa and made it one of the few politically stable nations on the continent. AIDS is an immense problem, but the force of pride prevents many from discussing it openly. (Which, of course, only makes matters worse.) Having lived in Botswana myself, I can verify that it's an oddly contented place.

Like the "No. 1 Ladies" books, Smith's latest series, "The Sunday Philosophy Club," features a middle-aged woman as its sleuth. Isabel Dalhousie lives in Edinburgh, Scotland, (as does Smith) and is a practicing philosopher who edits the Review of Applied Ethics. Like Precious, Isabel enjoys long daydreams while relaxing with a drink (though wine, rather than red tea, is her libation of choice). Both are women of limited, but adequate, means: Precious sold an inheritance of cattle to start her detective agency, while Isabel inherited shares in a Louisiana land company from her American mother. Both women draw on private sources of wisdom: When in a jam, Precious thinks back on advice that her deceased father gave her; Isabel relies on the poetry of W.H. Auden. Isabel is, for all intents and purposes, a European version of Precious.

But unlike the "No. 1 Ladies" books, Isabel's adventures are not entirely bloodless. The first in the series, last year's "The Sunday Philosophy Club," featured a man leaping to his death in the opening pages. The second, "Friends, Lovers, Chocolate," which arrives in stores this week, finds Isabel infatuated with her niece's ex-boyfriend Jamie, a musician 15-years her junior. She is also intrigued by a man who is the recipient of a heart transplant and is haunted by the former owner's memories, leaving him with the suspicion the other man was murdered. It's not quite as gritty as the crime novels of Smith's fellow Edinburghian, Ian Rankin, but it's a start.

Still, politics and any other matters beyond the characters' immediate concerns don't rate much discussion -- and even when they do, the discussion tends to defuse the issue at hand rather than illuminate or dramatize it. In "Friends, Lovers, Chocolate," Isabel dismisses her housekeeper's son's potentially violent politics with the observation, "He used to collect stamps, then he took up nationalism."

Though Isabel appears more cerebral than Precious, in the end, she is no less confident in her morality than her African counterpart. Here she is worrying over writing a rejection letter for a paper submitted to the Review entitled "The Rightness of Vice":

'It was impossible, thought Isabel. . . . She went over in her mind some of the vices explored by the author, but stopped. Even by their Latin names, these vices barely bore thinking about. Did people really do that? . . . Well, she had a responsibility to her readers. She could not defend the indefensible. She would send the article back with a short note, something like: Dear Professor, I'm so sorry, but we just can't. People feel very strongly about these things, you know. And they would blame me for what you say. They really would. Yours sincerely, Isabel Dalhousie.'

Later, she reflects on the fact that another author died shortly after receiving a similar rejection letter, and worries that she had "made his last few days unhappy." She concludes that she could not have reached any other decision about the manuscript, but "the imminence of death might make one ponder one's actions more carefully. If we treated others with the consideration that one would give to those who had only a few days to live, then we would be kinder at least."

A little of this sort of greeting-card morality -- there's nothing wrong with these sentiments, they just seem to exist in a rarified universe where vice is not only forbidden, it's unthinkable -- goes a long way. And there's an awful lot of it in Smith's books. At one point, in the voice of Isabel, he seems to acknowledge this critique: "It is hard to make goodness -- and good people -- sound interesting," he writes in "Friends, Lovers, Chocolate." "Yet the good were worthy of note, of course, because they battled and that battle was a great story, whereas the evil were evil because of moral laziness or weakness, and that was ultimately a dull or uninteresting affair."

It's a philosophy that runs counter to much mystery writing, which often requires a hero to dwell in the morally ambiguous fringe of conventional society; in many cases, fictional detectives commit crimes themselves in order to solve a crime. A good example of this is on display in the best-selling series of novels by Jeff Lindsay, "Darkly Dreaming Dexter" and "Dearly Devoted Dexter," which feature a vigilante serial killer who only kills, get this, other serial killers.

Precious and Isabel, by contrast, are detectives by virtue of temperament and good breeding. If their goodness is, as Smith suggests, the result of a battle, it's a battle he never takes the trouble to depict.

Indeed, though Smith's books are very charming, they're not mystery novels -- they're romances.

Review: Salman Rushdie's Shalimar the Clown

Rushdie melds passion, politics in nimble novel that illustrates the mind of a Kashmiri terrorist

SHALIMAR THE CLOWN.
By Salman Rushdie.
Random House, 416 pp. $25.95.

Perhaps no other novelist is more qualified than Salman Rushdie to write a novel exploring the origins and mind-set of a Muslim assassin.

To recap, in 1989 the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran called for the execution of Rushdie, as well as his editors and publishers, after publication of The Satanic Verses, a novel Islamists accused of parodying the Koran.

With a bounty on his head, Rushdie hid for years, living under armed guard until the late '90s when he re-emerged into public life, appearing onstage at a U2 concert and becoming a fixture on the party scene in New York and London. His new lifestyle was reflected in a pair of entertaining of-the-moment novels, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, a book about rock 'n' roll, and Fury, a riff on boom/bust pre-millennial New York. More recently Rushdie has made headlines for marrying his fourth wife, the Indian celebrity cookbook author and model Padme Lakshmi, giving hope to every socially challenged bookworm on the planet.

Shalimar the Clown returns to the themes and settings of his superb early novels, Midnight's Children, about 1,000 paranormally enhanced children born at the moment of India's emancipation from Britain in 1947, and Shame, an allegory about the creation of Pakistan told through the lives of single family.

A story with depth

The action starts with an assassination. In the first few pages of Shalimar, Max Ophuls, an octogenarian French-born Jewish-American diplomat, has his throat cut by his driver, the Kashmiri terrorist nicknamed Shalimar the Clown. The murder takes place on the steps of the apartment building in Los Angeles where Max's 24-year-old illegitimate daughter, named India, is living. The day before his murder, Ophuls had given his daughter a DeLorean, the bat-winged car featured in the hit movie of that year, Back to the Future.

Rushdie uses the vehicle of the novel to jump back and forth through the 20th century, lingering on important milestones in each character's life: Shalimar's childhood in a culturally divided Kashmiri village, famous for the villagers' ability to throw a feast and offer live entertainment; Ophuls' youth in Strasbourg and his World War II role in the French Resistance, which made him a folk hero; and the moment when their two lives intersect at a dance at the village where Ophuls, by then U.S. ambassador to India, becomes enchanted by Shalimar's seductive and restless young wife, Boonyi.

Roughly a third of the way through the novel, Shalimar makes love to Boonyi for the first time and announces, "Don't you leave me now, or I'll never forgive you, and I'll have my revenge, I'll kill you and if you have any children by another man I'll kill the children also." The words take on a chilling resonance and make it obvious that Shalimar's killing of Max is motivated by something more than cultural and religious politics.

Giving tale realism

Rushdie is able like no other writer to reduce global events to individual lives, to marry macro socio-political conflicts to personal stories. In Shalimar he is able to re-create the political divisions of Kashmir, the disputed mountain valley on the border between Muslim Pakistan and Hindu India, within the characters themselves. The marriage between the Muslim Shalimar and Hindu Boonyi is itself a form of political compromise. (Ultimately, it is the introduction of modernity in the form of television, with its political propaganda, that divides towns.)

Rushdie is also a master at portraying the divided self. Shalimar, who is at first quite literally a circus performer, a high-wire expert whose dream is to "walk into empty air and hang there like a cosmonaut without a suit," is slowly transformed into a terrorist through a combination of suppressed sexual rage and religious pride. Likewise, Ophuls, who starts life as a freedom fighter and whose parents died in the Holocaust, evolves into a man a lot like our own Congressman Charlie Wilson, working with the mujahedeen who would later give succor to al-Qaida.

It should also be noted that Ophuls, who shares his name with a famous early 20th-century Jewish-German film director, has a history that frequently dovetails with that of former University of Texas professor Walt Rostow, who appears to have served as one of many sources for the character.

If the book has any shortcoming it is Rushdie's tendency to become overly baroque when writing about the role of spirituality and magic in the lives of the Kashmiri villagers. These passages bog down the pace of this otherwise nimble novel. Also, many of the settings and events will probably be unfamiliar to Americans and, taken cumulatively, can cause a minor headache trying to keep them straight. A glossary and timeline would ease the pain.

Ultimately, these are fairly minor quibbles compared to the overall joy of reading Rushdie's prose, festooned as it is with sharp observations and clever satire.

Though there are already a number of fine novels that have examined the mind-set of the budding Islamic terrorist — including Salar Abdoh's The Poet's Game, Viken Berberian's The Cyclist and Lorriane Adams' Harbor (just out in paperback) — this is probably the most important of all. Why? Because Kashmir, at the border of India, Pakistan and China, is the most likely flashpoint on the planet for an exchange of nuclear missiles between countries, thus making Shalimar the Clown a brilliant work of political imagination. You don't need to read far into the novel to know what Rushdie feels about the political state of Kashmir — one of the two epigrams is "A plague on both your houses" from Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet — but you'll need to read through the entire book to understand exactly why he feels that way. It's a welcome return to form for one of our modern masters of the novel.

This article originally appeared in the Houston Chronicle

Review: The Traveler by John Twelve Hawks and Death's Little Helpers by Peter Spiegelman

They're watching us: From ever-present eyes to private eyes, latest by Hawks, Spiegelman look at thrillers past and future.

The recent terrorist attacks in London made it clear how useful modern surveillance techniques can be to authorities. Within 24 hours of both attacks, Scotland Yard circulated detailed, color photographs of the suspects, which were then reprinted on the front pages of newspapers worldwide. The photos quickly led to tips and arrests.

Nevertheless, not everyone approves of being monitored in such a close, near-Orwellian fashion.

Early on in his new novel, "The Traveler," John Twelve Hawks points out that there are "four million closed-circuit television cameras in Britain, about one camera for every fifteen people" (although a recent study suggests there are actually as many as 7 million such cameras) and an average person working in London is "photographed by three hundred different surveillance cameras during the day." According to Hawks, the cameras are monitored by software capable of noting anomalies, such as a person lingering in front of a government building, and continually scan a database of known criminals for matches. It's enough to make anyone who's the least bit camera-shy squirm with discomfort.

The world of "The Traveler" resembles our own, aside from a pair of secret organizations dueling unseen for world domination. On the dark side is the Evergreen Foundation. Operating from their Westchester, N.Y., campus headquarters, they act as the public front for the Tabula, a group of fascist, crew-cut control freaks who are guided by the ideas of real-life 18th-century philosopher Jeremy Bentham.

Bentham designed the Panopticon, which Hawks desribes as a "model prison where one observer could monitor hundreds of prisoners while remaining unseen." Prisoners are isolated in cells and continually backlit, the idea being that if prisoners thought they were being continually observed, even when they were not, they would soon learn to police their own behavior. (One of the prisons that applied Bentham's principles for architecture was Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia.)

The Tabula and their operators have hacked into all those aforementioned cameras, not to mention all global computer networks, thus giving them eyes and ears almost everywhere in pursuit of their enemies, the Travelers.

The Travelers are humans endowed with the ability to project their "light" through the various realms of reality while leaving their bodies behind (think "The Matrix" here). At the point when the novel opens, all known Travelers have been wiped out by Tabula assassins, also known as the Brethren. With all Travelers dead, the Travelers' personal security force -- mystical sword-wielding bodyguards called Harlequins (think "Highlander" here) -- are out of work. As we meet one of the novel's heroes, an English Harlequin named Maya, she has forsaken violence and is working 9 to 5 at a London industrial design firm. Soon, she's called into action to protect a pair of suspected Travelers, twin brothers living in California -- one named Gabriel, a thrill-seeking rebel, the other, Michael, a cynical capitalist.

Hawks' polemic can be a bit heavy-handed. Characters in "The Traveler" refer to our reality as "the Vast Machine" and those ignorant humans who labor senselessly in pursuit of meaningless material wealth as "drones." Fortunately, his stump speeches are often brief, and overall, this is one supremely paranoid, occasionally adolescent, but mostly engrossing summertime beach read. Added bonus: It's billed as the first in a trilogy. With all of this surveillance, how could someone, especially someone famous, disappear in the middle of a place like New York City? The simple answer is that America isn't as blanketed with surveillance cameras as European cities.

The disappearance of a well-known Wall Street stock picker, Gregory Danes, is at the heart of John Spiegelman's novel "Death's Little Helpers." Where Hawks' book is a great example of the imaginative fringe of mainstream fiction, Spiegelman's is a well-executed traditional detective story.

Like Spiegelman's first book, the Shamus Award-winning "Black Maps," this, too, stars private investigator John March, a retired cop, recovering alcoholic and black sheep scion of a rich banking family. March is hired by Danes' ex-wife to track down the alimony check-writing man, and soon March is bribing people for information, interrogating the man's colleagues, friends and family, and looking for motive. This, coupled with diligent Internet research and head-clearing runs through Central Park, puts him on a warm trail.

Soon, March picks up a tail of his own who tries to coerce him into abandoning the case. It appears some people might benefit from Danes staying disappeared, including his shady half-brother, a financial TV show talking head, a Ukrainian mobster, assorted business rivals, and even Danes' investment firm. No surveillance necessary.

Spiegelman, a former Wall Streeter, knows the money racket. He moves the plot along briskly, connecting the dots between the principal suspects, all the while offering pointed riffs on big-time banking and investment schemes. It's a combination of old-school sleuthing with an up-to-date storyline, and a compelling read.

Its convincing conventionality is palate-cleaning after the far-out fantasies of John Twelve Hawks.

With changes in the air in New York City after the London attacks, one wonders how long it will be before Hawks' vision of a super-surveilled Earth becomes a reality and March's flatfooted manhunt gets fully supplanted by face-recognition software and a million clicks of his mouse.

This article originally appeared in the Austin American-Statesman