THE RISE TO FAME of Wally Lamb here in the United States was sudden and unexpected–as it always is when talk show hostess Oprah Winfrey chooses her new book of the month. The book was his first novel, She’s Come Undone, and while it dealt with a subject her predominately middle-aged female audience would probably be interested in–an overweight woman’s overdue coming of age and recovery of her self-esteem–Oprah was taking a chance on him: Wally Lamb was the book club’s first male author.
Category Archives: Book Reviews
The War Effort
FROM 1991 THROUGH1995, few popular books or films celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of America’s participation in the Second World War. Individual ceremonies marked turning points like Pearl Harbor Day or the Battle of Midway or momentous events like the bombing of Hiroshima, but these attracted nothing deeper than TV coverage. The consensus in New York and Hollywood was that people weren’t interested in the war. Now, five years later, it’s amazing to see how quickly publishing and the movie business have changed their tune, and nothing illustrates this fact better than the success of Flags of Our Fathers, the new history of the Battle of Iwo Jima.
The Corrections
LIKE HIS FIRST TWO NOVELS, The Twenty-Seventh City (1988) and Strong Motion (1992), Jonathan Franzen’s long-awaited third is a feast. The Corrections follows the tribulations of the Lambert family from the stolid midwestern city of St. Jude. The grown children have long since fled to the hipper east coast, leaving Enid to tend Alfred, whose health, like their relationship, is declining precipitously. Enid’s dream is to have one last perfect Christmas together as a family–after she and Alfred take their dream cruise.
American Shots
FOR THE NOVELIST, as for any artist, the difficulty of taking on well-trodden territory is to overcome those past representations readers are most familiar with, to either pointedly avoid or consciously reinterpret the existing iconography. Imagine trying to make a gangster film now, or writing a serious novel about Washington politics. The artist has to demystify or put a wicked spin on the material, make it new or do it better. In American By Blood ($23.00, Simon & Schuster, March 2000), first novelist Andrew Huebner sets himself an almost impossible task, choosing that most-overworked of landscapes, the American West late in the U.S. government’s war against the Indians.
Captain Fantastic
IN HIS THIRD NOVEL,, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (Random House, $26.95), Michael Chabon goes back in time, braving the dangers of nostalgia to deliver the golden age of American comic books. Despite the seemingly light subject matter, the novel is epic, weighing in around 650 pages, and the author fills them to bursting, limning, in his masterful voice, the pre-war New York of the World’s Fair.
The Works of Stewart O'Nan 