October 9-15, 2003

cover story

BQ Shorts FICTION

Saul and Patsy

By Charles Baxter Pantheon, 336 pp., $24

Is there anything more boring than love?

Married love, that is. The kind of married love that has its ups and downs, its minor triumphs and setbacks, but is overall complacent and makes its participants happy on any given day. Happy couples are among the most boring topics in the world. Few things are more likely to induce ennui than long conversations with happily married couples about their ... happiness.

In his new novel, Saul and Patsy, novelist Charles Baxter gives us a couple that has every reason to be happy. Saul and Patsy are a culturally correct couple straight off the pages of the Sunday Styles weddings section: liberal arts degrees from Northwestern, a successful interfaith marriage, decent jobs as a loan officer (her) and a high-school English teacher (him). They have no trouble getting pregnant, they are liked by their neighbors, they enjoy playing Scrabble together and they have an active sex life.

Here’s the rub: They’re not perfectly happy, at least, Saul isn’t. He’s miserable in the middle of his bliss, in the way that Woody Allen’s neuroses prevented him from being completely happy with Diane Keaton in Annie Hall. Then one of Saul’s disturbed students from the high school becomes obsessed with the family’s life, there is a suicide on Saul and Patsy’s front lawn, some family members begin acting bizarrely and life interferes in myriad ways. Saul and Patsy’s perfectly ordinary happiness becomes a truly sublime and compelling love story because it is no longer about their bliss, but about their bliss despite interruptions and challenges.

Baxter’s last book, The Feast of Love, was nominated for a National Book Award. Like its predecessor, this new novel delivers exquisitely clear writing and unexpected turns. Far more gratifying than any celebrity love story ripped from the headlines, Saul and Patsy is a sublime story about what it means to be indie, grown-up and in love. —Meredith Broussard

The Great Pint-Pulling Olympiad: A Mostly Irish Farce

By Roger Boylan Grove, 464 pp., $14

Roger Boylan desperately wants to take his place in the ranks of Great Irish Comic Writers. Unfortunately, his latest novel bears the very same resemblance to the Great Irish Novel that your local Bennigan’s does to a Great Irish Bar. Boylan’s worked hard to string together all the right bric-a-brac; he’s manufactured his own version of blarney; and he puts forth a rote, lifeless, sanitized performance that’s merely bland and familiar.

Boylan, educated in Ireland and residing in Texas, takes as his subject the fictional County Killoyle. He’s assembled, between this book and its predecessor, Killoyle, a loose cast of broad stereotypes, and he’s pulled their stories together with the voice of Milo Rogers, failed poet and present innkeeper. Milo served as hero of Boylan’s first novel; The Great Pint-Pulling Olympiad ostensibly centers on typical, hard-drinking waster Mick McCreek and embittered Pakistani waiter Anil Swain. Over the course of the book, these caricatures carom off each other repeatedly -- Mick while losing a job and falling in love, Anil while implicated in a terrorist plot (his time as a fugitive from justice mostly involves the guardia breaking doors down and bellowing for ’Anal Swine,’ a joke that gets no funnier with repetition). For his part, Milo/Boylan inflates a thin plot into a thick book with hundreds of tangential footnotes, each delivered in the tone of a stranger’s sodden barroom confidence.

The tired stereotypes, rambling footnotes, incoherent plotting and twee dialect delivery, though, stand only as symptoms of Olympiad’s root problem. Boylan wants so badly to stand shoulder to shoulder with Joyce, Swift and Flann O’Brien that he apes them, building a transparently fake Irishness in the name of comedy. Unlike other, better Irish-American writers (like William Kennedy or John Kennedy Toole), who write about their own surroundings with a characteristic dry wit, Boylan remains wedded to the surface specifics of the auld sod. It’s this inauthenticity that makes Boylan’s Ireland just a paper Celtic tiger. —Justin Bauer

A Faker’s Dozen: Stories

By Melvin Jules Bukiet Norton, 268 pp., $23.95

Bukiet, the author of Strange Fire, has a knack for chewing up our sad values and spitting them back out in new but recognizable wads of absurdity. But there is also something forgiving and tragic about these short stories. His protagonists are so busy gazing at the sky and dreaming of love, fame and glory, that they hardly notice when fate -- or an angry lover -- comes around to whack them below the knees.

It probably helps that Bukiet’s characters are charming and engaging. You don’t blame the aging philosophy professor in ’The Return of Eros to Academe’ for indulging in a little student nooky. Even the exploitative tabloid photographer in ’The War Lovers’ is sympathetic.

Among barbed send-ups of the publishing industry, ambitious writers and literary fame are a few quirky valentines to classic authors. Bukiet re-imagines the story of Kafka’s childhood in ’The Two Franzes.’ In the wonderfully titled ’Squeak, Memory,’ the narrator obsessively follows Vladimir Nabokov around New York, right up to the wingtips he leaves outside his hotel room door. ’The Suburbiad’ is a witty retelling of The Iliad set in a Long Island middle school, with the Trojan horse forged in wood shop. Bukiet is best at fantastic realism, and when he goes beyond into futuristic, dystopic visions, he tends to falter. At its best, A Faker’s Dozen is cutting but not cold, benevolently and quietly outrageous. —Elisa Ludwig

The Voices

By Susan Elderkin Grove, 324 pp., $24

In Susan Elderkin’s second novel, an Australian man named Billy, apparently friendless and penniless, wakes up in a hospital bed, severely injured and disoriented. As the narrative flashes back to his outback childhood, we learn that Billy once held more promise. An imaginative child who found adventure in the open land, as well as an escape from the clutches of his discouraging, selfish parents, Billy also found a spiritual connection to the natural world that clearly has since been lost.

Elderkin enjoys pairing unlikely characters for unexpected, life-changing relationships, as she did with a cowboy and an Englishman in her first novel, Sunset Over Chocolate Mountains, and here Billy finds some comfort in his relationship with Cecily, an Aboriginal nurse who helps him figure out who he is and how he got there.

It’s the perfect setup to explore the themes of native culture versus colonization, pure land versus urbanization, spirituality versus alienation. But Elderkin spares us the lecture and allows the ’voices,’ a Greek chorus of animal spirits, to chime in between chapters and show us, rather humorously, what came before the white man smothered everything in concrete. If it sounds difficult to digest, it may help to know that even Elderkin’s realism is touched by a showy, almost reckless use of metaphor (the sky is ’soft,’ a VCR has a ’hungry mouth’). Her dialogue, on the other hand, is crisp and precise, and she has a keen sense of narrative flow. The animal voices may be hard to take, but Elderkin’s own voice is fresh and original. —E.L.

How To Breathe Underwater

By Julie Orringer Knopf, 222 pp., $21

How To Breathe Underwater, nine short stories about young women and girls, is sharp and smart and often shocking to read. Author Julie Orringer perfectly captures the pain of everyday life, exacerbated by the egos and issues of other people you can’t avoid -- family and friends.

’Care’ details a day trip in which a pill-popping aunt, Tessa, takes her niece out to the San Francisco pier and scars her for life. Tessa is proud of herself for noticing that her niece is ’cared for in great detail,’ a phrase which perfectly describes Orringer’s brilliant, brutal prose. She forces the reader to feel empathy for even loathsome characters. Like when Tessa hides out in a bathroom stall waiting for her rush to come on, or digs in the dirt for her dropped pillbox as her niece watches silently; you’d hate her completely if she didn’t make the confession that it’s better her mom died when she did. Because who’d want to see her daughter strung out on pills? Never mind that her niece sees it.

Orringer’s work continually takes your breath away with its sudden turns and sharp twists. ’Pilgrims,’ about a Thanksgiving dinner for cancer survivors, is a morbid portrait of kids sadly forcing down seitan and peering in at their parents chanting amid curls of incense smoke. Forced to play outside, the kids witness one of their own go down in a terrible way. Orringer neatly ties together terminal illness, the loss of a parent and the discomfort of holidays with strangers and children’s brutal social hierarchies.

Then there’s the sneaky, funny Nabokov parody. In ’When She Is Old and I Am Famous,’ a fat, talented painter feels invisible beside her impossibly thin and gorgeous cousin, the fashion model. A romp in Italy becomes torture for the artist, even though she can look forward to the day when they can pass time together as peers without besting each other. Now, however, things suck. The model’s name contains an umlaut, an intimidating facet that enhances the power of her beauty. ’Aïda. That is her terrible name. Ai-ee-duh. Two cries of pain and one of stupidity.’ The Lolita nod sums up Orringer’s style perfectly: modern fiction with classical roots, daring to get close to the pain many of us aren’t able to articulate. —Alex Richmond

Monstrous Regiment

By Terry Pratchett HarperCollins, 368 pp., $24.95

The biggest knock against Terry Pratchett’s Monstrous Regiment -- let’s come out and say it -- is that it’s a fantasy novel. It features trolls and vampires, in major roles and with speaking parts. It takes place in an alternate world, Discworld, which is of course entirely flat. And Monstrous Regiment plows along with perhaps the most timeworn plot structure around: the quest, in this case, poor Polly Perks’ journey to find her brother, who has gotten lost in the wars.

Perhaps more dismaying than its genre, Monstrous Regiment is part of a fantasy series, nearly 30 volumes strong, all set on the same flat world. But -- and this is where dismay turns to admiration -- Monstrous Regiment reads nothing like another installment in a long-standing series. Rather, it’s a fresh, clean, very funny story, and a perfect illustration of why Pratchett enjoys the success he does. Pratchett’s books, after all, are surprisingly popular. One estimate places his sales at 1 percent of all book sales -- new and backlist -- in Britain, a figure he attributes to the good fortune of having 40-odd books in print. And their appeal is no mystery. Far from being the dour sword-and-sorcery pulp of most fantasy fiction, Pratchett’s first books mock his chosen genre; a couple of decades into his career, his comic novels have taken on a variety of larger targets.

Monstrous Regiment, thematically, sets its sights on the very topical evils of blind patriotism, war and sexism. Polly runs up against all three after cutting her hair, dressing as a boy and enlisting; ultimately, her sweet reason triumphs, but certainly not in any kind of predictable fashion. Pratchett’s modus operandi in his series, of examining current issues through the lens of a fantastic world, is hardly new. But calling this novel a satire in the mode of Swift (setting aside the way that label gets overused to the point of meaninglessness) probably overstates the case. There’s very little bitterness or bite here; Pratchett’s humor seems like topical comedy rather than lashing satire. Instead, Monstrous Regiment makes for a witty, pleasurable, winsome novel, and the kind of book that confounds the expectations its genre puts on it. —J.B.

The African Safari Papers

By Robert Sedlack Overlook, 309 pp., $13.95

In this occasionally funny, morbidly juvenile novel, the narrator goes to Africa and journeys into the true heart of darkness: familial dysfunction. But dysfunction’s a mild word when you take into account 11 days of delusional paranoia, daily anxiety attacks, alcoholism, heroin usage and incestuous yearning. The stampeding elephants and bloodthirsty crocodiles are more reasonable.

Richard, our 19-year-old Canadian hero (think Holden Caulfield with a crack pipe), has left his job in the oil fields to meet his family for an African safari. His parents have moved to Paris, and once reunited with them, he immediately notices that their marriage, never good to begin with, is seriously tormented by his mother’s degenerating mental illness. Richard has his own concerns, chiefly, keeping his adolescent horniness in check, measuring out his drug rations for the duration of the trip and coping with the insecurity he feels about his harelip, not to mention a healthy dose of Oedipal angst.

This is Richard’s travel journal, so we are treated to heavily filtered accounts of family fights in grassland resorts punctuated by erotic fantasies and drug-addled philosophizing. But while another tale of a teenage curmudgeon might let you get a sidelong peek at its narrator’s inadequacies, this novel forces you to suffocate in the hermetically sealed pages of the diary. Reading it, you start to understand why weblogs are so infuriating -- once you get to that level of minutiae you’re either completely bored or terribly disturbed. In this novel it’s the former, though you get the feeling the author was going for the latter. —E.L.

And Now You Can Go

By Vendela Vida Knopf, 208 pp., $19.95

’5 a.m. Friday morning/ Thursday night, far from sleep.’ So go the opening lines of Tori Amos’ ’Me and a Gun.’

’It was 2:15 in the afternoon of December 2 when a man holding a gun approached me in Riverside Park.’ So begins And Now You Can Go.

The woman in Amos’ song realizes the absurdity of the thought that keeps her sane while she’s being raped: ’I haven’t seen Barbados/ so I must get out of this.’

Ellis, the protagonist of Vendela Vida’s first novel, is similarly aware of how absurd it is to quote poetry to the man who is holding a gun to her head.

And that’s where the similarities end.

’No one knows what to do with a story like mine,’ Ellis thinks.

She’s right. We have a script for talking to victims. We know what to say, at least at first, to the woman who’s been raped, the man who lost his wife violently. But how do we acknowledge the trauma of someone whose would-be assailant changes his mind?

Ellis doesn’t know either, and it happened to her. She spends months trying to figure it out.

Vida’s sensitive portrait keeps Ellis, a grad student at Columbia, at a distance. She can be cruel and oblivious, but also impulsively generous. The more you respect her motives, the harder it is to empathize with her.

She’s not an engaging woman, and it’s not entirely because of her encounter in the park. She divulges intimate details, but withholds some basic information. She throws herself into ambiguous interactions with ’the ROTC boy’ and ’the representative of the world’ -- two men with impulses both vicious and virtuous -- then retreats into her head.

Ellis’ relationships are too often overly symbolic -- mother/love, sister/protection, uncle/obligation -- but there’s no confusing any of them. In a book with so many minor characters, Vida’s imbued even the most fleeting of them with a sense of history.

There are no startling twists, but a series of confrontations nudge Ellis to a better place. It’s a place worth going. —M.J. Fine