John Berendt, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil

This book has been a best seller for so long, I couldn't resist reading it. It turns out to be a wonderful book, one man's odyssey in the city of Savannah. It certainly makes me want to visit the place, and the characters that inhabit its pages, especially an unforgettable transexual named "Chablis," will inhabit your memory for a long time to come.

Gina Berriault, Women in Their Beds: New and Selected Stories

This book won the National Book Critics Circle Award and is a wonderful choice. It's clear after reading just a few stories that Berriault is one of America's most neglected writers. She writes beautifully honed sentences, filled with insight and new ways of looking at things. The situations she evokes are absolutely unique: an aging leftist publisher and writer encounters a colleague from his old life in a Las Vegas casino; a married couple travels the world to visit locations where important astronomical discoveries took place; a librarian becomes deeply connected to a homeless vagrant; a son demands his birthright from his famous sculptor father--and many more equally original. Here are a few sentences from a story called "Soul and Money" to whet your appetite: "If you're having trouble sleeping," his brother said, rising up from his recliner, "I'll tell you how to fall asleep. What you do is forgive yourself. Francie tells her patients this thing she thought up. She tells them, Forgiveness means giving up all hope for a better past. It stumps them for a minute and then they laugh and then they fall asleep."

Don Di Lillo, Underworld

What can I say about this remarkable novel? First that it took me over a month to read it-it's not a "page turner," but a book that you savor and sip slowly like a fine cognac. Second, that DiLillo is one of the great witnesses of the contemporary era-a man who at 61 is giving us his take on the emotional, spiritual and intellectual underpinings of life in the second half of the 20th century. Third, that this is primarily a man's book, a book about a male sensibility as it traverses the shaky and baffling terrain of contemporary life. It's central metaphoric preoccupation-tracing the whereabouts of the actual baseball Bobby Thompson hit for a home run winning the pennant for the Giants against the Dodgers in 1951-has particular relevance for "men of a certain age." Fourth, that DiLillo is one of the great prose stylists writing today-he can write about virtually anything, from the role of Jell-o in American life to the impact of Lenny Bruce on our culture, with exactness and eloquence. And fifth, that this is clearly his best, most important and most personal work, particularly the sections having to do with his upbringing in an Italian-American neighborhood in the Bronx. I could write an entire essay about any one of these aspects of the book, but this is not the place for it. Let me here simply direct you to a "state of the art" website dealing with DiLillo's work generally and summarizing Underworld in particular. It will serve to guide you through the densely packed pages of this masterwork with insights and understandings you would otherwise miss. Send your browser to http://haas.berkeley.edu/~gardner/underworld.html and enjoy!

Richard Ford, Women with Men

The Sportswriter and Independence Day convinced me that Richard Ford is one of our very best fiction writers. The latter novel especially is one of the most insightful depictions of fathers, sons, and the confused state of manhood generally in contemporary America. Now he gives us a collection of three novellas chronicling the state of the art in relations between heterosexual men and women, the first of which alone is worth the price of admission. It's called "The Womanizer" and focuses on the life of a self-absorbed, married American male in his forties who has a brief flirtation with a woman in Paris that leads to some very unexpected consequences involving divorce, child abuse, and various moments of truth. What sets it apart from the usual mid-life crisis tale is Ford's keen sense of the nuances that pass between men and women as they consider dalliances with one another. His prose style, too, is remarkable, detailed yet lean, observant, yet uncluttered.

Ernest Gaines, A Lesson Before Dying

This novel draws a grim, but moving portrait of 1940's America. It is the story of two Black men, Grant Wiggins, a schoolteacher, and a younger man, Jefferson, who has been convicted of murder in a small Louisiana town. The attorney defending Jefferson asked the jury to spare his life, because he was a "hog," not a man and there was no point in killing a hog who didn't know the consequences of his actions. Jefferson is sentenced to death anyway, but his godmother asks Wiggins to spend some time with the boy to teach him that he's a man, not a hog, so that he can die with dignity. The novel moves slowly towards its inevitable conclusion but along the way teaches us a good deal about the burdens of Black maleness in America, and makes us wonder how far we've come from the dark ages depicted here.

John Lanchester, The Debt to Pleasure

A sumptously written book; in fact maybe too sumptously. Can fine writing and hypergourmandism actually get in the way of reading pleasure? This book tests that proposition. It's really too rich a meal for all but the most devoted Henry Jamesians. But if you can admire this sentence, you'll probably love it: "A group of tourists at the next table was discussing the relative traffic density of different holiday locations, their South German ich's slithery and lubricious; a middle-aged French couple was eating in the traditional Gallic concentrated reverential silence; a widow was dining alone with a small pampered dog across her feet; there was also a young British couple, the man instantly forgettable, of no interest whatsoever, the woman with sunlightened carless honey-brown hair, hazel eyes that brought the room toward them as if they, and not oneself, were the universe's center of consciousness, something Egyptian about the length and beauty of her neck, wearing a cream-colored dress that shimmered with her movements like windblown wheat, a single band of gold dismayingly visible on one of her long fingers as they absentmindedly curled around a tall wineglass (Entre-Deux-Mers, he had moronically ordered), her bread-breaking movements delicate and heedless, everything about her radiant, enhanced, wasted."

Frances Mayes, Under the Tuscan Sun

Here's a fantasy I suspect a lot of people share. How about cashing in your chips on the fast lane here in Capitalism.com and taking what you have and moving to the Tuscan countryside in Italy, where you can grow your own herbs and vegetables, remodel an old Tuscan villa, entertain friends and live the simple, good abundant life. Well Frances Mayes did just that and got a delightful book out of it to boot. Under the Tuscan Sun describes her Italian Odyssey in inspirational detail, making you want to take notes so you can follow in her footsteps.

Frances Mayes, who teaches in the Creative Writing program at San Francisco State University, has written a sort of 'dream book' for people who fantasize about dropping out of the rat race and living off the land, preferably a long way away from the "American Way of Life." Her choice of places to make this happen also happens to be mine. Mayes traded in her old life & marriage for a new one which enabled her to buy an old farm house in Tuscany, remodel it, and spend a good part of the year living there, adopting the livestyle of rural Italians, growing fresh vegetables and herbs, making pasta, and generally living the good life. Her book is something of a "How you can do it too" book, but something also of a "Don't you wish you were me?" Her accounts of dealing with Italian bureaucracy and workmen are funny, and immediately recognizable to anyone who has spent any substantial time in Italy. Despite the hassles she had to put up with, when I finished reading the book, I began to scan the NY Times classifieds for International Properties. Could I pull this sort of thing off?

Judith Moore, Never Eat Your Heart Out

What a good idea Judith Moore has for organizing her memoir. Since so many of our memories are often associated with food (as Proust taught us), how about shaping a remembrance of things past according to various foods that were important at different times of life? The book opens with memories of pies and extravagant breakfasts she remembers from childhood, takes us through her grandmother's making sauerkraut and butchering hogs, through watermelon summers and early newlywed dinners, as well as the Gerber's bottled baby meals she fed her two baby daughters. As her life becomes more complicated, the meals become more complex and sophisticated, culminating in a courageous and unflinching account of "Adultery," a chapter that is alone worth the price of admission. There's more to this book than just food, although to those of us who take our meals seriously, the phrase "just food" is sort of like saying "just life."

Janet H. Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace

If you're reading this book review you're a part of the growing segment of the populace that reads texts on electronic screens rather than (or in addition to) in books, and I think you'll find Janet Murray's account of where story-telling might be going in the 21st century of considerable interest. Murray explores the distinctive characteristics of the new digital media, moving comfortably back and forth between technical and literary understanding. She shows us how literary and filmic precursors of what she calls "multiform" stories (like Delmore Schwartz's "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities," Jorge Luis Borges' "The Garden of the Forking Paths," and the Bill Murray film, "Groundhog's Day, " for example) are precusors of the kind of narrative experience widely available on CD-ROM's and the Internet. She takes popular multimedia "games" like Myst seriously as new frames for narrative structures and introduces a host of cyber-literary experiences you can participate in right away. The book could use a CD-ROM supplement to illustrate some of her material, or at least a list of currently live websites where some of this narrative can be experienced.

Christopher Ricks, ed. The Inventions of the March Hare by T.S. Eliot

Well, it turns out that "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" did not spring into the world full blown. Eliot had been honing his craft for a while in a notebook he entitled "Inventions of the March Hare" where all sorts of permutations of Prufrock got a trial run. Christopher Ricks has gone through this notebook, annotating it scrupulously and he gives us what Anthony Lane in The New Yorker calls "the best book on Eliot." Of course it provides further ammunition for the "question that won't go away." How could this anti-Semitic, anti democratic, arrogant, sexist, American expatriate write the most unforgettable poetry of our century? Reading this book might help you answer that question.

David Shenk, Data Smog: Surviving the Information Glut

If you're out here browsing the web, this is a book you ought to look at. Though I wish it were more engagingly written, it raises some important questions about whither we are going in the electronic world and whether we ought to go there. Shenk offers a list of 13 "Laws of Data Smog," my favorite of which is "Cyberspace is Republican." You'll need to read the book to find out why.

John Thorne, Outlaw Cook

John Thorne has been called the best food writer in America. He and his wife publish a lively food newsletter called "Simple Cooking" which has spirited writing about plain and simple food. Imagine my surprise when the first issue I subscribed to was completely devoted to writing about DRY TOAST!! It's hard to imagine anyone writing 8 double columned pages on dry toast, but John Thorne can, and he makes it entertaining to boot. Outlaw Cook is an excellent way to sample what he has to offer or you can log onto his home page at http://www.outlawcook.com/index.html

Days, Poems by Gary Young

Gary Young is a friend of mine, so anything I say about his book is likely to be biased. But I'll say it nonetheless. Gary's poetry is magical and unlike anything else in contemporary American writing. These are prose-poems of a very few sentences which cut to the chase between a capital letter and a period. He watches the life around him with a keen intelligence and with all his senses at hyperattention. I think the best way to give you a sense of it is to quote the first and last poems in the book:

"She took my two hands in hers, pressed and caressed them as if she were bathing me. I held hers as mine were held, stroked her knuckles, her palms, then realized the finger I lightly traced was my own. How strange to find I could show myself such tenderness."

"I put asters in a small blue vase. Each morning they open, and the close again each night Even in this dark room they follow a light which does not reach them. They have bodies. That is all the faith they need."

John McNally, ed., High Infidelity: Twenty-Four Great Short Stories About Adultery by Some of Our Best Contemporary Authors.

The subtitle tells you what this book is about: cheating and its ramifications as portrayed by Margaret Atwood, Russell Banks, John Updike, T Coraghessan Boyle, and twenty or so less well known contemporary writers. It's a great idea for a collection, because as Tolstoi told us, "Happy families are all alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." These are the highly individualized stories of unhappy families, and several of them are particularly memorable. Sara Powers "The Wild" tells of a wife who discovers her husband's affair when he is mauled by a bear and his mistress is killed by a bear while he is supposedly on a wilderness expedition "with the boys," but instead is taking a "time out" with his girlfriend. Moly Swick's "A Hole in the Language" is a poignant story of two women who become intimate after the child of one of them drowns. David Huddle's Lolita-like "Goodness" has a sixty-year old man reminiscing about an affair he had in his forties with a fourteen-year-old girl. And Daniel Lyons' "The First Snow" tells us what it's like for a young man to find out his father is a homosexual . I miss Raymond Carver, Tobias Woolf, Anne Beattie, John Cheever, Alice Adams, and some other modern masters in this collection, but permissions fees to reprint material being what they are, I can understand the omissions. A list of other contemporary stories on the subject that McNally would have liked to include would have given this book more authority. But it's a fascinating read as it is.

Robert Fagles, trans., Homer, The Odyssey

In a famous poem called "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer," John Keats writes about discovering Homer for the first time when he read George Chapman's great translation of the work. When he read Chapman's translation, he wrote, he felt "like some watcher of the skies/When a new planet swims into his ken" or like the explorer who first discovered the Pacific ocean. While I can't wax as poetic as Keats, I felt something of the sort when I first looked into Fagles' Homer. This new translation of The Odyssey is surely the definitive one for our time. I read it this past summer re-experiencing the work anew and learning all sorts of new things about this most revered of Western epics. Bernard Knox's 64 page Introduction is a concise course in Homer all of itself.