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Books Update from NYTimes.com
Books Update from NYTimes.com
Friday, May 11, 2001
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Colson Whitehead's "John Henry Days"
1. In Sunday's Book Review: Colson Whitehead's "John Henry Days"
2. Also Reviewed This Week: Paul Theroux's "Hotel Honolulu"
3. Audio Interview: Barbara Ehrenreich
4. New in Stores: Philip Roth's "The Dying Animal"
5. In the News: Black Captive in a White Culture?
6. New on the Best-Seller List: Anne Tyler's "Back When We Were Grownups"
7. In the Forums: The Reading Group Discusses Jane Jacobs
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1. In Sunday's Book Review: Colson Whitehead's "John Henry Days"
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Freeloading Man
The hero of Colson Whitehead's new novel is out to set a record of his own at a festival celebrating John Henry.
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JOHN HENRY DAYS
By Colson Whitehead.
389 pp. New York:
Doubleday. $24.95
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Colson Whitehead, author of "The Intuitionist," takes on the
legend of the "steel-driving man" John Henry, in his new
novel. "The book draws strength and thematic reach," writes
novelist Jonathan Franzen, from the man who, according to
folk tale and ballad, labored to build the C&O Railroad, won
a contest against a steam-powered rock drill and then fell
dead "with a hammer in his hand."
"John Henry Days," Franzen says, "is funny and wise and
sumptuously written, but it's only rarely a page turner.
There is very little story to speak of beyond the pageant,
the scripted performance, of the eponymous event." Franzen
concludes that, "Whitehead manages . . . to wrest from the
book's essentially static structure a lovely, satisfying
ending. 'John Henry Days' may end up haunting you the way
'The Ballad of John Henry' haunts its pages. The novel is an
aleatory fugue on the difficulty of manhood in an age that
measures a man by what he buys or what he wears, not by his
labor, not even by his human decency."
Audio: Colson Whitehead Reads From "John Henry Days"
Recorded on March 14, 2000.
Tunnel Vision: An Interview With Colson Whitehead
First Chapter: 'John Henry Days'
2. Also Reviewed This Week: Paul Theroux's "Hotel Honolulu"
===========================================================
In "Hotel Honolulu," Theroux's unnamed narrator is a writer
in retreat -- from writing and from life, summarizes
reviewer Sven Birkerts. "After a trajectory in many ways
mapping the author's own, the man has landed in Honolulu,
where he takes a job managing the Hotel Honolulu, a midlist
establishment catering to a rather extraordinary diversity
of visitors."
In Birkerts' view, Theroux's latest novel is "part
'Decameron,' part 'Ship of Fools' and perhaps also part
'Satyricon.' Theroux strings together dozens of these dark
parables with practiced care. But while most of them are
compelling (or hair-raising) on their own, their
accumulation renders the novel increasingly amorphous."
http://www.nytimes.com/books/01/05/13/reviews/010513.13birkert.html?0511bk
------
Featured Author: Paul Theroux
This retrospective includes reviews of "The Great Railway
Bazaar: By Train Through Asia" (1975), "The Mosquito Coast"
(1982), "My Other Life" (1996) and other books by Theroux,
as well as interviews with the author and articles written
by him for The Times.
-----
"Glue"
By Irvine Welsh
Welsh is best known for his 1993 novel "Trainspotting."
Jonathan Lethem, author of "Motherless Brooklyn," and other
books, says that "Careful readers have all along glimpsed
Welsh's heart, hidden up the sleeve of a fashionably caustic
prose style." This "superb and hilarious new novel
brandishes that heart like an eye-catching cuff link. More
conventionally structured than any of his previous novels,
and eschewing the typographical high jinks that gave several
the sheen of experimentalism, 'Glue' is nonetheless full of
the vernacular oddness that is Welsh's hallmark."
In Lethem's view, The novel's "peculiar genius is to first
disguise itself as, and then transform itself into, a
solidly traditional novel, one rewarding in all the timeless
ways. Terry, Billy, Carl and Andrew . . . are four boys
coming of age together in an Edinburgh housing project (or
'scheme'). Relaxed, generous and wise, 'Glue' should slow
the superficial comparisons of Welsh to William Burroughs
and Celine. Here he's really more like an unflinching
contemporary Dickens -- if Dickens had freed his characters
to gather in an alehouse and write one of his novels by
Dictaphone, as an oral history."
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"The Holocaust on Trial"
By D. D. Guttenplan
"Lying About Hitler: History, Holocaust, and the David Irving Trial"
By Richard J. Evans
These two books chronicle the lawsuit brought by David
Irving, author of "Hitler's War" and other works about the
Third Reich, against Deborah Lipstadt, whose book, "Denying
the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory"
called Irving "one of the most dangerous spokespersons for
Holocaust denial," a man with neofascist connections who
bent historical evidence to suit his purposes. Even though
sales of the British edition of her book were tiny, Irving
sued for libel. The case went to trial last year. The first
two of at least six books promised on the case have now
appeared, and they are reviewed by Geoffrey Wheatcroft,
author of "The Controversy of Zion: Jewish Nationalism, the
Jewish State and the Unresolved Jewish Dilemma."
Guttenplan's book stems from his coverage of the case for
The Atlantic Monthly. Richard J. Evans, of Cambridge
University, is a historian of Germany who testified as an
expert witness against Irving at the trial. Guttenplan
"draws vivid portraits of the cast, particularly of the two
heroes for the defense, Evans and Anthony Julius, Lipstadt's
solicitor. If Guttenplan's narrative is excellent, his
ventures into theory are less happy, and his own perspective
is a little predictable."
Is a Holocaust Skeptic Fit to Be a Historian?
D. D. Guttenplan wrote an overview of the case for The Times in 1999.
Critic of a Holocaust Denier Is Cleared in British Libel Suit (April 11, 2000)
3. Audio Interview: Barbara Ehrenreich
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"Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America"
By Barbara Ehrenreich
Ehrenreich has a dozen books behind her dealing with the
social and political hallmarks of our economic system,
writes Dorothy Gallagher, author most recently of "How I
Came Into My Inheritance: And Other True Stories." Here,
Ehrenreich follows "in an honored journalistic tradition and
written a valuable and illuminating book. Presenting herself
as an unskilled worker, a homemaker needing to earn a living
after divorce, she entered the low end of the labor market
and spent one month in each of three different sections of
the country. She looked for the best-paying unskilled job
she could get, and hoped to earn enough money at it to pay
her rent for a second month."
Gallagher concludes from the experiment, "Even for a worker
holding two jobs, wages are too low, housing costs too high
for minimally decent survival. We have Barbara Ehrenreich to
thank for bringing us the news of America's working poor so
clearly and directly, and conveying with it a deep moral
outrage and a finely textured sense of lives as lived. As
Michael Harrington was, she is now our premier reporter of
the underside of capitalism."
Audio Interview: Barbara Ehrenreich
Of her experience researching "Nickel and Dimed," Ehrenreich
says, "I had a sense of leaving ordinary life, where I'm a
citizen of a democracy and entering some very strange
dictatorship."
"Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America"
4. New in Stores: Philip Roth's "The Dying Animal"
=================================================
In his new novel, Philip Roth revives the character of David
Kepesh, the hero of two previous books, "The Breast" (1972)
and "The Professor of Desire" (1977). In her review for The
Times this week, Michiko Kakutani wrote that Kepesh "has
become a mere shadow of himself. His personal history has
been reduced to the bare bones of sexual appetite and
perpetual dissatisfaction."
"Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America"
5. In the News: Black Captive in a White Culture?
=================================================
Houston A. Baker Jr., a provocateur on matters of race, is
required reading even for critics who find his pessimistic
views too extreme.
"Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America"
For a digest of this week's book news, visit:
http://www.nytimes.com/books/yr/mo/day/daily/index.html?0511bk
6. New on the Best-Seller List
==============================
Hardcover Fiction
#12) "Back When We Were Grownups," by Anne Tyler
A 53-year-old woman, the head of an unruly extended family
in Baltimore, tries to recover her "original self."
7. In the Forums: Jane Jacobs's "The Death and Life of Great
American Cities"
======================================================
The Reading Group's reaction to Jane Jacobs's 1961 urban
planning treatise, "The Death and Life of Great American
Cities," has been highly favorable overall. One reader
wrote, "Jacobs's most enduring contribution is the way she
turned existing attitudes toward basic facets of urban life
into an entirely opposite direction." But readers are
starting to quibble with parts of her argument. In defense
of Lewis Mumford, one of the city theorists whose work
Jacobs attacks, one reader dug up and summarized a 1962 New
Yorker review of Jacobs's book by Mumford. Another Mumford
fan agrees: "Jacobs gave Mumford an unnecessary
tongue-lashing."
http://www.nytimes.com/books/forums/index.html?0511bk
On this week's broadcast of "Saturday Today in New York"
(Channel 4, 9-10:30 a.m.), I'll talk about new books by
Peter Mayle, Ruth Reichl and mystery novelist Elizabeth
Peters. The videos of my last few television appearances are
now available on a Web site jointly created by The Times and
WNBC:
http://www.wnbc.com/bookreview/weekend.html
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Bill Goldstein
Books Editor
The New York Times on the Web
bill@nytimes.com
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