I'm on a Richard Yates Kick, Apparently: The Easter Parade

The Easter Parade by Richard Yates

"Neither of the Grimes sisters would have a happy life, and looking back it always seemed that the trouble began with their parents' divorce."

Before I get to The Easter Parade itself, it's worth remarking that Richard Yates is criminally underrated as a writer. And I guess I'm not talking about criminally underrated when it comes to being a master of plot or character or dialogue, though he's certainly good at all of these things. I'm talking about sheer writing technique, and that's not a thing that usually catches my eye, at least to a point where I'd remark upon it.

Nine times out of ten, give me some crackling dialogue, and a story that moves, and I'm happy. But with Yates, I'm happy to sit back and just let the words wash over me, never mind that the stories and their characters are largely steeped in troubles that have lost some of their freshness in the literary imagination.

The Easter Parade is about two sisters who couldn't be more different, but somehow wind up equally doomed. Sarah is the more conventional sister, who falls into a great romantic love affair with an Englishman who looks like Laurence Olivier, settles down with him, and raises a family. Her happiness with Tony seems almost decreed by the Fates themselves. They "meet cute," have a stirring courtship from which the book gets its title, and engage in the endearingly annoying custom of intertwining their arms as they take their first sips from a cocktail. But over the course of the novel, it gradually becomes clear that their romance is anything but storybook.

And then, there's Emily, who fervently strikes out on her own path as a Barnard coed, a burgeoning intellectual, a career girl, and a serial siren. Though Sarah plays a large role, the story is really Emily's, and follows her through her careers and her men, each of which eventually proves to be singularly disappointing and unsuitable.

Sarah chooses marriage and family, and it goes bad. Emily chooses career and romance, and it goes bad. Unlike other books from this period, which have some agenda about what women ought to be doing with themselves to avoid malaise, Yates takes the more interesting view that certain people just aren't cut out for happiness. The happiness part is in the details, and in Yates's universe, characters are very good, and certain, at managing their major life choices, and not so good at making them work out in the day to day.

The last 50 pages of the book are among the most inevitably, quietly heartbreaking you'll ever read.

Which leads me to wonder, if you're sitting down to adapt a Richard Yates novel to film, why on earth would you choose Revolutionary Road with The Easter Parade around? While the former might have been nominated for a few awards, the latter would have swept them. Which is not to say that The Easter Parade is a discernibly better book, just that it'd make a much better movie.

Unlike Revolutionary Road, where you're trapped in a suburban house waiting for the moment when everyone cracks up, The Easter Parade moves around, and gets out in the world a little bit.

And proves that suburbia doesn't have the market cornered on unhappiness.

The Original Mr. and Mrs. Draper: Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates

Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates

I wish I could know what it would have been like to read this book in 1961, when the ideas of suburban hell and thwarted, if vague, creative aspirations and painfully loveless marriages hadn't been dissected and exorcised in books to the point where they'd practically become cliches. Would the story of Frank and April Wheeler living the life they never wanted, in a neighborhood that suffocates them, with friends they secretly hate, and jobs they openly despise have seemed fresh and honest then?

But then, I wonder if the suburbs weren't already something of a cliche in 1961. In the Los Angeles Times's "Worthy, Though Neglected, Novels of 1961," John W. Aldridge wrote that Revolutionary Road was "a rare example of an effort to be honest about suburban life in the face of the almost irresistible pressure to dress it up in one of the fashionable, ready-to-wear cliches."

I guess the story of people rebelling against conformity, complacency, and the uneasy comfort that those two provide is always a cliche. It's all in how it's done. On Mad Men, the trappings of the Draper household -- the high-powered city job, the heavy drinking, smoking, and womanizing, the housewife's malaise -- are all cliches, but the characters of Don and Betty Draper aren't. They're compellingly doomed.

Richard Yates makes Frank and April Wheeler a little too bound up in, and too self-aware of, those constructs. However, they're compelling in a different way. They're compelling, because they're also aware that they're completely ordinary, not particularly talented or creative individuals who were, somewhere along the line, led to believe that they were special and deserving of extraordinary lives. But then their ordinariness butts in and gets in the way, and fouls everything up.

The way the book is framed is particularly effective. It begins with the Wheelers at the height of their ordinariness, their nasty squabbles and their contempt for one another. And then, there's a glimmer of hope. They just might love each other, take a risk, and escape it all. And then, well, you've seen all the distraught, teary, sweaty-faced movie trailers with Kate and Leo...

Though Sam Mendes's adaptation is the first to see the light of day, Paul Wendkos, best known for directing several Gidget movies and numerous episodes of numerous television programs in the 1960s and 1970s, planned to make Revolutionary Road under the entirely inappropriate title, Love's Lovely Game in 1964. However, the project fell apart. Maybe it was the whole extramarital affair/aspiring home abortionist thing that did it in.

I haven't seen the movie, but I'm inclined to agree with the friend who gave me Revolutionary Road, and say that while it's a good book, it might make for a dull film adaptation. It's a very dialogue and interior monologue-heavy book, and while it moves along at a very nice clip on the page, I just don't think that kind of thing translates very well to the screen.

Battle Royale: The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

Do young readers like dystopian fiction because they're morbid little buggers, or do they like it because it's the most consistently solid and inventive little sub-genre in the YA universe? Lois Lowry, Scott Westerfeld, Nancy Farmer, M.T. Anderson have all done terrific work with the subject matter, but Suzanne Collins's new series introduces readers to an even grittier, scarier, more complicated world.

The Hunger Games is set in a futuristic United States that looks more like the Dark Ages. The country has been divided into twelve territories, each singly devoted to producing particular goods and services for the convenience and comfort of those in the wealthy, dictatorial capital. After a failed revolution, those in the territories suffer more than ever, and as a reminder of their defeat, each year the Capital demands a tribute of two children from each territory, their names drawn from a bowl.

The children are then whisked away to the Capital, styled into pint-sized warriors, and then pitched into a fight to the death that's televised nationwide. Twenty-four tributes enter the battlefield, only one leaves. While some territories groom their tributes from an early age, others are unlucky, malnourished, weak, and very young (your name starts going into the hat at 11).

Katniss is a wily and hard-hearted 16-year-old from the poorest territory of Panem, roughly defined as our Appalachia. When her younger sister's name is drawn for the tribute, Katniss volunteers herself instead, and is forced into an uneasy alliance with Peeta, the other tribute from Panem.

The Hunger Games is a gripping, brutal book that succeeds because it neither underestimates its readers nor devolves into gratuitous gore. The story is sophisticated enough to appeal to an adult audience as well - I liked it better than most of the "adult" fiction I read this year, and had a hard time putting it down to do things like eat and not miss my bus stop.

One word of warning: it's best if you, unlike me, know that this is only the first book in a series going in. My reaction upon finishing The Hunger Games amused Brady to no end:

"End of Book One? END OF BOOK ONE?!?!?"

The Past Isn't Over, It's Not Even Past: The Turnaround by George Pelecanos

The Turnaround by George Pelecanos

I suppose it's probably for the best that George Pelecanos took a break for most of the fourth season of The Wire to work on his previous novel, The Night Gardener. Heartbreaking as that season of television was, if Pelecanos had been there, it would have been emotional carnage.

This isn't to say that he was the best writer on that show (in that crowd, it's nearly impossible to pick), but in all of Pelecanos's writing, he demonstrates an almost preternatural ability to turn his characters inside out, sparing the reader nothing. It's not just the characterization, though. Pelecanos's characters exist in a moral universe that's guided by a strong sense of what it means to be good, what it means to have done wrong, and what it means to live with choices and mistakes made.

The moral crisis at the heart of The Turnaround begins on a summer night in 1972 when three white teenagers, buzzed on beer and weed, goad one another into driving through a black D.C. neighborhood. One boy shouts a racial slur, and another throws a fruit pie out the window. Unfamiliar with the neighborhood, they drive down a dead end street, where they are confronted by three black teenagers from the neighborhood.

One of the white boys runs away, another is given a beating that disfigures his face, and the third is shot in the back and killed. Two of the black teenagers are sentenced to prison terms. No one gets out unscathed.

The book moves forward 35 years, and from here, focuses mainly on two of the men involved in the incident. All charges were dropped against Raymond Monroe, a hot-headed youth who'd begun running with a bad crowd. After that night, Monroe leaves his old ways behind, and goes on to become a physical therapist at the Walter Reed Hospital. His only child is serving in Afghanistan, and helping veteran amputees learn to use their artificial limbs allows him to feel he's doing something to help, even if it doesn't help to soothe his fears for his son.

The other man is Alex Pappas, the boy who was beaten, the boy who sat in the back of the car and did nothing. His scarred face and ruined eye are the visible penance for his inaction, but Pappas lives most of his life as though he's still being punished for what happened all those years ago. He, too, had a son serve in the Middle East, but now that son is dead.

Pelecanos manages to bring the surviving characters together in a way that isn't contrived -- this isn't the sort of thing that can be resolved with a talk. Some characters are seeking oblivion and escape from the past, others want payback, and the resolution that Pappas and Monroe are looking for doesn't come easily.

Unlike Pelecanos's other books, The Turnaround isn't a crime novel in any traditional sense of the genre. There is crime, and a worthy villain, but more than anything else, the book is about the hard-won redemption of ruined lives. How things are eventually resolved is somewhat predictable, but the route there is anything but.

Trading Dreams At Midnight

Trading Dreams at Midnight by Diane McKinney-Whetstone

Spanning three generations of women, Trading Dreams at Midnight is a story about the way family relationships shape identity, and how one can and can't escape them.

Most of the story focuses on Nan, a woman who comes to Philadelphia in the late 1940s to find work as a seamstress, and falls in love with a man who brings her pain and joy in almost equal measure, and on Neena, the eldest of Nan's two granddaughters. However, the character at the book's center is one who is largely absent.

This is Freeda, Nan's beautiful, charismatic, and mentally ill daughter. After giving birth to two girls, Freeda twists in and out of their lives, leaving them with Nan during her unpredictable dark periods. Her presence is both exciting and terrifying. Sometimes she's lighting up rooms with her smile and painting the walls of her apartment bright pink, and others, she's hearing voices and compulsively eating box after box of Argo starch. When the girls are adolescents, she leaves for good, and disappears completely.

While Nan loves her granddaughters, she's washed her hands of Freeda, and encourages the girls to do the same. This is easy for Tish, Freeda's youngest daughter, who aligns herself with Nan, goes to college, and lands a perfect job and perfect man, never once looking back.

For Neena, though, finding Freeda becomes a lifelong obsession. She drops out of college, and spends the next fifteen years, tracking down any clue, any rumored sighting, no matter how vague or shady. As she looks for her mother, Neena pays the bills by hustling married men and shaking them down.

When Tish is hospitalized during her sixth month of pregnancy and risks losing the baby, Neena returns to Philadelphia, only to be told by Nan that her presence would probably do Tish more harm than good. Nan knows she shouldn't play favorites, but she's never been able to help herself when it comes to Tish.

Eventually, McKinney-Whetstone reunites these characters, but the journey that gets them there, and the changes they go through in the process are more important.

It's a compelling story with richly drawn characters (even McKinney-Whetstone's supporting characters are fully realized and immediately recognizable).

If you like...: frank depictions of families dealing with mental illness like 72 Hour Hold by Bebe Moore Campbell or African-American fiction with an old-school feel like The Women of Brewster Place by Gloria Naylor, this book is for you.

The Southern Girl's Guide to Gracious Living: Girls in Trucks by Katie Crouch

Girls in Trucks by Katie Crouch

I suppose I should count myself lucky that my mother wasn't a debutante, that I was never forced to go to Cotillion classes, and that when my freshman year roommate asked me if I was going to rush, I had no idea what she was talking about (after she told me how many dresses it involved, I decided against it).

Still, there's something about the southern debutante that I find myself powerless to resist, a certain trashy mystique. After all, it's not every woman who can smoke a Marlboro Light in white cotton gloves or puke up a liter of Jim Beam without messing up her lipstick.

Sarah Walters is a Charleston-born and bred deb, though she isn't very good at it. She's a little bit plain and shy, and though good manners and heavy drinking come easily to her, things like female friendship and husband-hunting are more elusive.

Girls in Trucks follows Sarah as she ditches Charleston for a lackluster career in publishing and journalism in New York, and as she embarks on one disastrous and wrong relationship after another. She keeps in touch with her fellow, former debs, Annie, Bitsy, and Charlotte, but don't let the names fool you - these are no Sex in the City-esque ladies who lunch and dish. Their lives and problems would have made Carrie Bradshaw trade in her Jimmy Choos for a rural nunnery.

Even though their lives aren't perfect, the other three still manage to have problems glamorous and interesting enough to match their successful lives. Sarah, on the other hand, is a floundering wreck, her problems the products of self-absorption and a frustrating inability to make good life choices.

And that's the biggest problem with Girls in Trucks. Because Sarah sees herself as mediocre, plain, and a failure, the reader will, too. And while I found myself rooting for every tertiary character in the book, I couldn't root for Sarah because I knew she'd find a way to defeat herself no matter how promising her prospects. There are lovable losers, and then, there are just losers.

Still, I read the book in a single sitting (or rather, during a long day of subway connections and doctor's office waiting rooms), and really enjoyed Crouch's descriptions of debutante culture and social class hierarchies in the South.

If you like...: books about southern life and love like Garden Spells by Sarah Addison Allen, or books about women who just can't seem to get it together like The Man of My Dreams by Curtis Sittenfeld, this book is for you.

I'm All Lost in the Supermarket: What Was Lost by Catherine O'Flynn

What Was Lost by Catherine O'Flynn

What Was Lost is partly a mystery and partly a ghost story, but more than anything, it's a story about characters whose lives should have turned out otherwise.

At the heart of it, is a precocious 10-year-old girl and aspiring detective named Kate Meany, who lives with her grandmother in a Birmingham neighborhood full of shops, but no families or children her own age. Largely unsupervised, Kate spends her days stalking the nearby Green Oaks Shopping Center for potential jewel thieves and ne'er-do-wells, a stuffed monkey named Mickey and a notebook at her side.

Her only friend is Adrian, a young man who returns home to work in his father's newspaper shop after college, and Kate spends hours in the shop talking to him. Until the day she doesn't come home. Unable to find other leads, suspicion falls on Adrian, though police never press charges. Still, the moment he can, Adrian disappears, too.

After a remarkable beginning, the book jumps ahead 20 years to 2003, where we meet Lisa, Adrian's sister. Like most other working people in Birmingham, Lisa was unable to avoid the mind-numbing stability of Green Oaks. She's the assistant manager of a record store, a job she initially took for a year to save up money to travel -- now, she's been there for years, working for a petty tyrant boss, and is living with a co-worker boyfriend she neither likes nor dislikes. Alongside Lisa is Kurt, currently serving the thirteenth year of his sentence at Green Oaks as a security guard. Kurt is haunted by the death of his wife, and by the image of a little girl with a stuffed monkey who appears on the security cameras.

Predictably, their stories come together; however, the secrets that are revealed when they do are markedly unpredictable. O'Flynn spends a good deal of time in the day to day lives of the shopping center employees, an endless cycle of cramped breakroom lunches, malfunctioning elevators, cold wars with annoying customers, and the threat of unannounced mystery shoppers who never arrive. The accounting of this tedium, which will ring true to anyone who's ever worked retail, lulled me into believing that nothing important could possibly happen here.

However, it does, and it will snap you out of your shopping mall stupor in nothing flat. The resolution is perhaps too abrupt and quickly handled, but O'Flynn's eye for detail and storytelling chops make What Was Lost more than deserving of its many accolades and awards (the book was first published in the U.K. in 2007).

If you liked...: Case Histories by Kate Atkinson or What the Dead Know by Laura Lippman, this book is for you.

Where's MacGyver When You Really Need Him?: Severance Package by Duane Swierczynski

Severance Package by Duane Swierczynski

By page 7, there's a body on the floor and a villain. But that's not the only body, and not the only villain that Severance Package has to offer - they multiply like bloody, diabolically evil bunny rabbits.

The book's premise is simple, yet inventive. One Saturday morning, David Murphy summons seven critical employees to the 36th floor of a blandly modern Philadelphia office park. There, he reveals to them that their office is a front company for a government intelligence agency that is being deactivated, and as a precautionary measure, he has to kill all of them before offing himself.

Now, David has gone to the trouble of whipping up poisoned mimosas that will dispatch each of them quickly and painlessly, but to stifle any troublemakers, he's also set the elevator to bypass their floor and rigged the fire stair doors with sarin gas bombs.

As one might expect, the employees do not take the news well. However, it's not a simple case of joining forces to outwit their murderous boss. These are, after all, employees of a secret government intelligence agency, and each one has his or her own agenda, vendetta, or mission to carry out.

Mostly. There is one employee who never quite fit in with the others, one who doesn't carry himself with government-trained killing machine competence. Even David Murphy isn't quite sure why this man has been included on his kill list.

His name is Jamie Debroux. He's a happy husband and new father. He writes press releases. And now, he is marked for death. Our Jamie is no MacGyver, no John McClane, no Jack Bauer. He is a soft-bellied office schlub with no previously untapped resourcefulness, bravery, or ingenuity. Jamie is screwed, or he would be, if not for an ace up the sleeve so secret and perverse, even Jamie doesn't know about it.

Duane Swierczynski is a relatively new voice in the neo-pulp genre, and it's a voice that is lurid, violent, cinematic, and big as day. And also, it is wicked awesome. Though I've never read a book with action quite so relentless, Swierczynski also paces everything brilliantly, with a twist ending that I guarantee, you'll never see coming.

Alongside Child 44, Severance Package is my top recommendation for a hardcore summertime read.

If you've ever secretly imagined that if the bomb, the zombie apocalypse, the killer bees, the rogue virus, the Big One, ever hit, YOU'D be the one to escape with all your loved ones, pets, and precious momentos intact, this book is for you.

Suburban Nightmares: The Shadow Year by Jeffrey Ford

The Shadow Year by Jeffrey Ford

The Shadow Year starts off with tremendous promise, reminiscent of two terrific novellas - Stephen King's The Body and Joe Hill's Voluntary Committal (from 20th Century Ghosts).

Like King, Ford creates what is truly a child's world. Set in the early 1960s, follows three siblings through one cycle of the kid year, which always begins on the last day of summer vacation. But it's a year marked by a string of mysterious disappearances, a malevolent stranger, and a neighborhood peeping Tom, and the three children decide it's up to them to investigate. Jim is the kind of older brother everyone wants - full of ideas, wise to the ways of the world, and protective of his younger siblings. The unnamed narrator is the middle child, quieter, more observant, and always scribbling in his notebook. The youngest, Mary, chain smokes and has an alter ego named Mickey - she's in a special class because her teachers can't figure out whether she's mentally disabled or a genius.

Mary also has a strange ability when it comes to Botch Town, and here's where the Joe Hill comes in. Botch Town is Jim's miniature re-creation of their neighborhood and the people who live in it. When the peeping Tom appears in the neighborhood, they make a figure for him and move it around the board to the houses he's visited. When the narrator notices he's being followed by a white car with fins, they add that to the board, too. However, Mary seems to know where to move figures around Botch Town that she shouldn't, and what's more, she knows where the stranger in the white car is going to turn up - and who he's watching.

The build-up is terrific, but unfortunately, Ford doesn't carry it through. Interesting plot lines fizzle out, characters that never quite gel are added late in the story, and the last 50 pages are so disappointing that it's almost like reading an entirely different book. The writing gets clumsy here, too, and though I suspect Ford had a very clear vision in his mind of what was happening to his characters, the action and intensity of the final scenes is a hard-to-follow muddle.

I'd recommend reading The Shadow Year, but only if you stop around page 225 and make up your own ending.

Home-Spun and Foursquare: The Blue Star by Tony Earley

The Blue Star by Tony Earley

Those who like Tony Earley have praised his wholesome, sincere, simple prose, while those who don't dismiss his writing for those same qualities. I think his book have been perhaps over-praised, which is not to say I don't think they're good.

Earley's first novel, Jim the Boy (2000), tells the story of a ten-year-old boy raised by his mother and bachelor uncles in a small North Carolina town during the Great Depression. In The Blue Star, it's 1941, and Jim is a high school senior who's fallen hopelessly in love with a half-Cherokee girl named Chrissie Steppe.

However, Jim can't really enjoy simple things like being BMOC or being in love, because bigger troubles loom on the horizon. With the nation on the brink of war, boys from his class are enlisting, and Jim is torn about that decision. To add to his troubles, Chrissie already has a boyfriend. Bucky Bucklaw is one of Aliceville's favored sons: he comes from a wealthy, respected family, and he's serving his country aboard the USS California. However, Jim can't stand Bucky for a variety of reasons that have nothing to do with Bucky's girlfriend. Add Chrissie to the mix, and Jim's dislike boils into pure hatred, a feeling that our good-hearted protagonist has a hard time stomaching.

The book takes a few chapters to get going. Earley has described the Jim books as "children's stories for adults"; however, at first, The Blue Star is too slow-moving to appeal to teen readers, and covers territory too well-worn to engage adults. But about halfway through, things become more complicated, and Jim is forced to confront issues that are somewhat above his maturity level. If the first half of the book nests Jim and his friends in the safety of small town teen life, the second half is about how adulthood is suddenly thrust upon them, and the decisions they make about the kinds of men and women they want to become.

If you liked...: Plainsong by Kent Haruf or Ferroll Sams's Porter Osbourne trilogy (Run With the Horsemen, The Whisper of the River, and When All the World Was Young), this book is for you.

My New Favorite Author: Southland by Nina Revoyr

Southland by Nina Revoyr

In the wake of the Margaret Seltzer faux-gangster memoir scandal last month, novelist Denise Hamilton wrote a column for the Times recommending a book to wash away the bad taste of that whole mess: Understand This by the wonderful Jervey Tervalon. The book focuses on the lives of eight teens living in South Central Los Angeles, and is, Hamilton writes, "as haunting and painful and tough and tender and true as Seltzer's memoir is false."

Alongside Tervalon's book, I'd also suggest Nina Revoyr's Southland, which captures an altogether different, and seldom examined side of South Central -- its history as one of Los Angeles's first racially mixed neighborhoods.

The book's main character is Jackie Ishida, a fourth generation Japanese-American woman whose parents' drive towards assimilation and upward mobility have effectively divorced her from her family's past. Though she's a UCLA law student and her parents are doctors, her grandfather, Frank, owned a grocery store in the Crenshaw district and raised his children there until the 1965 Watts riots.

When Frank dies in 1994, Jackie discovers an old will among his papers, leaving the store to Curtis Martindale, a man she's never heard of. A little investigation leads her to Curtis's cousin, Jimmy Lanier, who gives her some shocking news. Curtis Martindale was one of four African-American boys found locked in Frank's walk-in freezer after the riots. The murders were never reported to the police, since the neighborhood's beat cop, a white officer who frequently brutalized the black and Japanese residents, was seen leading the boys inside the store. Jackie and Jimmy decide to put together enough evidence to bring a case against the white officer, and begin tracking down people from the old neighborhood.

Revoyr intertwines this search with flashbacks spanning six decades, and told from a variety of character POVs. We see the Japanese-American interment camps of World War II and the segregation that exists for black workers in the Long Beach shipyards. But we also see the Family Bowl, frequented by Japanese and African-American Crenshaw district residents alike, and racially integrated neighborhoods where people are genuinely neighborly.

Revoyr doesn't view the past idyllically, but she's able to see a brief moment in time where Los Angeles could have moved in a much different direction. Here, and in her equally terrific The Age of Dreaming, she provides devastating historical accounts of racial prejudice in Los Angeles's sometimes white-washed past.

Although I've come to Revoyr's writing only recently, I can't recommend her enough. She's too good to miss.

The Air Between Us by Deborah Johnson

The Air Between Us by Deborah Johnson

Integration is slow to arrive in Revere, Mississippi, population "20,000 and sinking" It's 1966, and Reverend Streeter is still waiting for service at the River Cafe lunch counter, 10-year-old Willie "Critter" Tate still has to drink from the "Coloreds Only" drinking fountain, and the well-coiffed Deanie Jackson can't work at Pearl's dress shop -- she can't even shop there.

However, the larger picture of the segregationist South that Johnson portrays is more nuanced and complicated than these now notorious images of Jim Crow. In The Air Between Us, integration becomes an issue that cannot be satisfactorily resolved through freedom riders, Northern "agitators," or the federal government -- change is inevitable, but the people of Revere have to bring it about themselves if they want to save their town from an equally inevitable ruin.

The book begins with a scene that perfectly captures the cadence of segregation as it exists in Revere. Billy Ray Puckett, one of the poor whites who lives on the outskirts of town, shoots himself in the gut while setting up his tree stand, and is discovered by Critter Tate, who drives him to Revere's hospital. First he tries to drop Puckett off at the hospital's black entrance, and is turned away, then has trouble getting the nurses to admit him to the white side.

After Puckett dies, the Sheriff's department orders an investigation, and begins to uncover the uneasy secrets about the true nature of relationships between Revere's black and white residents. At the center of the story are Cooper Connelly and Reese Jackson, the hospital's two doctors, Connelly is white, Jackson is black. The two work together closely, but have a strained relationship which is explained during the course of the Puckett investigation.

All the while, discontent is brewing over the mandated integration of Revere's hospital and schools, which is soon to take effect. Much to everyone's surprise, Connelly has progressive views on integration, and his efforts to bring about change peacefully draw the venom of reactionaries and racists statewide. As the ugliness builds and turns violent, the people of Revere have to make a decision about the future of their town.

Johnson's thematic thrust is buttressed by a strong cast of supporting characters, like Reese Jackson's unhappy wife, Deanie, and her next-door neighbor, Melba Obrensky, a light-skinned fortune teller with a mysterious past. While the book's idealistic ending may seem a little rushed and fanciful, The Air Between Us is an interesting and engaging look at how a town's black and white residents choose to deal with the ugly legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.

If you like...: books about middle and upper class black families set during the height of segregation like Love by Toni Morrison, this book is for you. And if this book sounds up your alley, you might also like the most recent winner of the Bellwether Prize (an award for literature that addresses issues of social justice), Mudbound by Hillary Jordan.

Content and Form: The Learners by Chip Kidd

The Learners: The Book After "The Cheese Monkeys" by Chip Kidd

On the surface, The Learners has a lot going for it. Of course, it's no surprise that a book by a designer of Kidd's renown is absolutely gorgeous from cover to typeset. And like Kidd's previous effort, The Cheese Monkeys, it's cleverly written and often extremely funny. Also compelling is the book's setting, a New Haven advertising agency in the early 1960s. And best of all, Kidd situates our hero, the hapless Happy, smack dab in the middle of Stanley Milgram's obedience experiment, where subjects were directed to administer what they believed to be harmful or lethal charges of electricity to another person.

After graduation, Happy is hired by the New Haven advertising firm that employed his former mentor, Winter Sorbeck. And for his first solo gig, he's enlisted to design the newspaper ad soliciting volunteers for the Milgram experiment (a graphic of the ad, accompanied by ironically analytical annotations of the designer's concerns with its form is a highlight of the book).

After a cryptic meeting with his former classmate, the Holly Golightly-esque Himillsy Dodd, and a tragedy that leaves Happy with many unanswered questions, he decides to become a subject himself, and acquires some devastating insight along the way.

Despite its promise, however, the book is badly flawed. Unlike The Cheese Monkeys, which is driven by the charisma of Winter and Himillsy, the characters who populate Happy's ad agency are lifeless and grating. And while Kidd depicts Happy's participation in the experiment and his encounters with the researchers vividly, the scenes in the ad agency never quite gel.

Kidd is at his best when he's going for funny; however, the darker themes addressed in The Learners allow less room for comedy, and Kidd can't deliver the emotional resonance and introspection that Happy's personal tragedies need.

In the end, the book's form is a success, while its content is not. Those interested in graphic design and rabid fans of The Cheese Monkeys should check it out, but other readers probably won't find much to sustain their interest. If you're interested in fictional accounts of famous/notorious scientific and psychological studies, however, I'd suggest T.C. Boyle's The Inner Circle, an excellent and racy account of Alfred Kinsey's research.

The Woman Without a Country: The English American by Alison Larkin

The English American by Alison Larkin

Pippa Dunn was born to American parents, but adopted by a British family as an infant. Now 28, Pippa has a posh accent, a boarding school education, and uneasy feelings about the differences between herself and her adoptive family. They're tidy and proper and reserved, while Pippa often has some trouble assuming the proverbial "stiff upper lip," and more in assuming a life that could be called tidy or proper.

Despite a loving relationship with her family, Pippa has issues with abandonment and rejection. She dates men she doesn't really like so she won't care if they leave her, and takes jobs she doesn't care about, trying to forget her dream of becoming a playwright.

When the book begins, Pippa's been having dreams about her birth mother, and contacts the adoption agency in the hopes of reuniting with her. Her curiosity and desire to be understood by the woman who's described in the non-identifying adoption file as "well-spoken, lively, highly intelligent" runs her headlong into the infuriating legalities of the U.S. adoption system. Eventually, with the help of a sympathetic private researcher, Pippa is able to contact her birth mother, Billie, a dramatic, creative woman who's every bit as untidy as Pippa.

Immediately, Pippa travels to the United States, and feels an immediate connection to Billie, and later, to her birth father, Walt. She allows herself to become enveloped in their lives, moving in with Billie and taking a job for her "creativity consulting" business. In the U.S., Pippa also begins to rediscover her own creative side, and begins taking the train to New York to perform in a gay bar, where her "British redneck" act is a huge hit.

However, as Pippa learns more about Billie and Walt, their happy reunion becomes cloudier and more complicated. While she'd longed for acceptance and a sense of belonging with them, the further she's drawn into their worlds, the more she loses herself.

While reading the first few chapters, I kept putting The English American aside, thinking it another piece of overly gloopy chick lit -- British singleton, messy personal life, chance for self-discovery, obvious "perfect man" that our heroine is too blind to see, etc.

However, I kept picking it up again, and eventually found myself completely won over and charmed by Larkin's witty writing and shrewd observations about the difference between Yanks and Brits.

Best of all, though, is Larkin's depiction of the relationship between Pippa and her birth parents. Though there are plenty of subtle warning signs early on, Pippa is too excited to notice their flaws or the unreasonable expectations and demands they place upon her until it's nearly too late. As Larkin explores the dark sides of these characters, Pippa's inability to see the reality of the situation never becomes frustrating because it's so believable.

If you like...: fiction about the complexities of adoption like Girls in Trouble by Caroline Leavitt or Brother and Sister by Joanna Trollope, or humorous fiction about British expatriates, this book is for you.

Methadone!

Wire withdrawal, day 2: The shakes aren't so bad, and there's less bugs crawling around under my skin than there were last night, so that's good. On the other hand, I'm still only answering to "Bodie" or maybe "Bunk" and this morning I set up surveillance on one of the cats, whom I suspect is holding.

But what's this? Over at The House Next Door, a list of Wire-related and Wire-esque books for those who, like me, are jonesing something fierce in the wake of our beloved show's cancellation?

Score!

A Q&A with Debut Novelist Mercedes Helnwein

The Potential Hazards of Hester Day by Mercedes Helnwein

Novelist Mercedes Helnwein has always been a writer, but until recently, was better known for her visual art, which has been called "an exciting mixture of purity, mysticism and raging beauty that follows the concept of no rules." And now, she's written a novel, which has gotten nice write-ups in Los Angeles Magazine and PW, to boot.

In The Potential Hazards of Hester Day, we meet the lovably disillusioned Hester, recently graduated from high school, and anxious to get out of a pit commonly known as Florida. If Mommy had her druthers, young Hester would be off to become a brain surgeon, but Hester knows that any proper escape has to be on her own terms.

After arranging a hasty marriage of convenience to her arch-nemesis from the public library, a prickly amateur scholar named Fenton Flaherty, Hester finds herself in hot water. So, she leaves home with the only decent member of her family, her 10-year-old cousin, Jethro, and hitches a ride in Fenton's camper.

Soon, the unlikely trio is off on a road trip through the South and Midwest, embracing the eccentric and the surreal with open arms. Of course, none of this can end well, and certainly not as our heroes expect.

I recently got to chat with Mercedes about the book, her research road trip to the South and Midwest, and the connection between writing and fine art.

There's a lot going on in The Potential Hazards of Hester Day -- a spontaneous, unconventional marriage, kidnapping, makeshift families, and a road trip, to mention a little of it. Was there any particular spark or idea that served as your point of entry to the story?

The entry point to the story was definitely based on the characters. Hester was developed fully in a short story called "Amazing Grace". I knew immediately that I had to write a lot more for this character -- I was far from done using her. And this was paired with the idea of putting her into a mismatched but genuine friendship with a ten-year-old kid. For some reason that was enough to let loose the rest of the novel.

What drew you to writing about the Midwest and the South?

I got into the blues when I was about 14 and immediately became obsessed with this music. I fell in love with the lyrics and felt that it was the first time I heard something that was completely honest.

I also read "Huck Finn" around the same time and a little later got into Steinbeck. All these things were about old America in the South and Midwest -- different angles and views and layers of it, but somehow the same thing.

I'm very old-fashioned when it comes to ideals and aesthetics. I think this modern age has lost a lot of qualities that were once naturally part of every-day life. Going through the Midwest I was kind of looking for traces of Good Old America -- proof that it existed and maybe still does in places.

I also understand that you took a road trip through the Midwest as research for the book. What kinds of things did you discover, and what was your favorite stop along the way?

Yes, in the winter, just like in the book. This was the first time I had ever gone through the Midwest/South, so I was extremely ecstatic and, to be honest, it really didn't take much to fascinate me.

There are a few things that come to mind. Crossing the Mississippi for the first time. Driving through the Kentucky hills on a quiet Sunday morning, and seeing people walking to an old, white-washed country church. Getting lost in the extreme middle-of-no-where Kansas. Visiting Mark Twain's boyhood home. Eating a weird lunch in this tiny restaurant off the side of a road in Kentucky, where everyone knew each other.

Even just seeing a barn for the first time. As I said, it didn't take much. I was easy to impress.

At one point in the book, Hester tells another character that all she wants is to embed herself in situations that are surreal; however, she seems to gravitate with equal enthusiasm towards what is romantic -- is there a connection between the two?

Yeah. I think that just depends on the person gravitating towards the romantic. In Hester's case, she's odd enough to where the romantic could be the surreal for sure.

What is the relationship between your writing and your visual art? Does your work in one medium inform the other? And are there things about the creative process that are the same (or different) for each?

It's related, and yet it's not. The two of them compliment each other extremely well. The fact that I do all this visual work, helps me in my writing and vice versa. Subject matter-wise, I'm not sure if there are that many similarities. Some people say there are. For me personally it's hard to tell, because the two activities are so different; I'm in very different mind-sets for them. But at the same time, they do kind of inspire each other, so I guess there are ties between them.

What are some of the things that inspire your writing?

Old American folk songs and blues songs. Music in general. Anything weird enough to grab my attention -- conversations, bumper stickers, commercials, viewpoints, news stories. Great sentences no matter where they come from.

What are you reading now?

I'm reading through a collection of Bukowski poems. Open All Night.

What are you working on right now, writing or otherwise?

I'm working on a new series of drawings for a solo show in L.A. this September at the Merry Karnowsky Gallery.

I'm also working on a new novel, as well as a screenplay. It's a very interesting combination of work going on all at once. I definitely never have nothing to do.

Teenage Wasteland: Beautiful Children by Charles Bock

Beautiful Children by Charles Bock

By turns harrowing, profane, pornographic, and tragic, Beautiful Children is not for the faint of heart. But, as a book about the darkest corners of Las Vegas, populated by a cast of disaffected and irreparably damaged urban nomads, how could it be anything else?

At the book's center is the disappearance of 12-year-old Newell Ewing, and the dissolution of his parents' marriage as they struggle to come to terms with their loss. The book's narrative jumps around in time, gradually revealing the events of what may be Newell's last night, as well as the aftermath of his disappearance.

Pieced in as well are other characters' stories: a stripper named Cheri Blossom, her wounded and sinister boyfriend, Ponyboy, and a host of teenage runaways living on the streets of Vegas, including, most memorably, Lestat, a gaunt and delicate boy who has taken a pregnant runaway under his wing.

Gradually, the shadowy social network that holds these characters together becomes evident. The porno book store where Newell's father buys videos receives its deliveries from the former teen hustler turned porn courier, who goes home to sponge off of his stripper girlfriend. She goes to work, and performs a lap dance for the overweight, unloved comic book artist, who earlier that day, signed books and chatted with Newell and his gawky, older friend, Kenny.

We are all connected, however uncomfortable those connections may be.

Whatever their demons, Cheri, Ponyboy, and the Ewings all exercise some control over their place in the world. The runaways don't, and when Bock turns to them the book is at its most heart-breaking. In scenes that might turn exploitative and voyeuristic in another writer's hands, Bock unfolds the day-to-day survival of these street kids, and the things that keep them trapped there, with great empathy.

Also well-handled is Bock's portrayal of Kenny, a sexually confused teenage boy who clings to the edges of the visible world. An aunt who takes him in, artistic talent, his friendship with Newell are the only things keeping him from joining the ranks of the lost children, yet he doesn't fit anywhere else either. In the scenes describing his night out on the town with Newell, he's at once an outcast, a goony, unwanted mentor, a predator, a chum, but always on the verge of breaking into pieces. Bock allows him to hold together, and fall apart, in a way that's frustratingly open-ended, but also feels very real.

The book suffers some from its dizzying narrative structure, and more from rambling interior monologues and occasional prose freak-outs that tend to take the reader away from the plight of Bock's characters. However, it's these characters that ultimately bring the book back to earth -- each one is a fully realized masterpiece, and their stories and personal horrors make Beautiful Children a staggering and unforgettable work.

Charles Webb, You're Trying to Seduce Me

Home School by Charles Webb

Before The Graduate made Dustin Hoffman a star and Mrs. Robinson a household name, it was the first novel of a recent Ivy League graduate named Charles Webb. Published in 1963 to lukewarm reviews (the Los Angeles Times described it as "repetitive, pointlessly detailed melodrama," while others called it "inept" and "ridiculous"), Webb sold the film rights rather quickly. Unfortunately, he received only a one-time payment of $20,000 -- while the film went on to gross over $100 million.

Since The Graduate, Webb's unusual biography has eclipsed his literary career, the latter being steady, if relatively uncelebrated. And when it came out that Webb would publish a book that clued readers in to what became of Benjamin and Elaine after they hopped the Santa Barbara bus, folks pricked up their ears. However, once they got past the initial novelty of the book's premise, the reviews have not been kind.

And I suppose this one won't be either. However, it's got nothing on David L. Ulin's recent LAT review, quite possibly the most decisive pan I've ever seen in the book pages of a periodical.

Home School suffers from a lack of focus, silly 70s caricatures, and an artless over-reliance on dialogue. Benjamin is an insufferable, priggish dilettante, Elaine is a passive-aggressive shrew, and their children are annoyingly precocious. The cloying, manipulative Mrs. Robinson is far and away the book's most likeable character.

However, it is not without its redeeming qualities.

In fact, once I resigned myself to these problems, and to the fact that I wished painful and sustained misfortune upon each of the book's characters, I actually began to enjoy it a bit.

When the book begins, Elaine and Benjamin have moved to the other side of the country to escape Mrs. Robinson, and are illegally home schooling their children. Benjamin wants them to grow up without being poisoned by the institutions that led to his post-graduate shiftlessness. But eventually, the school system catches up with the Braddocks, and forces the children back into public school. Apparently, this is ominous enough a threat for Benjamin to contact Mrs. Robinson and ask for her help. But once Nan, as she's now called, is in their house, the problem becomes how to get her to leave.

Conveniently, it was right around this point that I made my peace with Home School, because Webb ratchets up the conflict, old secrets come out, and things get truly nasty.

While I can't entirely recommend Home School, the moment I learned of its existence, I set about tracking down a copy. And for curious fans of The Graduate, it's certainly worth checking out.

Some books shouldn't have sequels, simply because they end precisely where they ought to. If an archivist turned up a copy of a lost Flannery O'Connor story detailing the further adventures of the Misfit, I know it would be awful, as sure as I know I'd be first in line to read it. We ought to let (un)happily ever after well enough alone, yet morbid curiosity will always keep us turning the pages on literary icons.

"There Goes the Neighborhood": Them by Nathan McCall

Them by Nathan McCall

In Nathan McCall's examination of the dark side of gentrification, Barlowe Reed is a printer who lives in Atlanta's Fourth Ward, the birthplace of Martin Luther King, Jr. Pushing 40, Reed decides it's time to settle down and sets about trying to buy the house he rents from his evasive, white landlord.

The reason for the landlord's reluctance soon becomes clear as realtors begin snooping around the neighborhood, and striking deals with its residents. Soon, "For Sale" signs start popping up in front yards, and moving vans carting white middle class suburbanites and their Pottery Barn furnishings begin to appear in front of the houses. And whitey has some definite ideas about how "their" new neighborhood ought to be shaping up.

Longtime residents of the historically black Fourth Ward are initially wary of their new neighbors, and vice versa; however, these feelings quickly evolve into something much uglier. Reed strikes up a tentative friendship with his next-door-neighbor Sandy Gilmore, a well-meaning, if annoyingly naive white woman. Sandy is determined to fit into the Fourth Ward, while her husband, Sean, adopts more of a siege mentality. While Reed and Sandy attempt to broker some kind of peace in the neighborhood, Sean throws in, almost gleefully, with their "us versus them" white neighbors.

The book is strangely reminiscent of Tom Perrotta's suburban wastelands, with national dramas being enacted on a local scale. McCall does an excellent job of handling all sides of the class and race warfare that erupts in the book, and hints at the idea that the source of the problem lies more with the faceless realty companies and civil bureaucracies (entities which Reed uniformly refers to as "Caesar") than with individual players. Additionally, Reed is a fully realized and wonderfully complex character, whose attitude towards the future of his neighborhood shifts believably during the course of the book.

Supporting characters, unfortunately, are a bit more wooden and sometimes fall into caricature. However, McCall still carries out that delicate task of writing a book that addresses big, sometimes abstract issues head-on without sacrificing the personal struggles of most characters and their stories to didacticism. It's one of my favorite books of the year, and dare I haul out the term, an important one.

"Filing Is My Forte": Lois Lenz, Lesbian Secretary

Lois Lenz, Lesbian Secretary by Monica Nolan

As she prepares to graduate from high school, pep squad captain Lois Lenz is feeling awfully mixed up about her future and about her feelings for her gorgeous best friend, Faye. However, she's resigned to attending the local community college, pledging a sorority, and settling down like a good 1950s girl. Or, that is, until the school guidance counselor singles her out for her remarkable organizational skills, and offers to set her up with a secretarial position.

Despite her mother's fears of Communists, white slavers, and other threats to the virtue of small town girls, Lois strikes out for Bay City and the prestigious advertising firm of Sather & Stirling. As one concession to her worried mom, Lois does move into a women's boardinghouse, the Magdalena Arms. She's thrilled to be surrounded by vivacious career girls like herself, although she can't help noticing that they all seem a little, well, queer.

But that's nothing compared to life at Sather & Stirling, where no one is quite what they seem and everybody has something to hide. Lois soon finds herself swept up in blackmail plots, missing persons, and sinister filing schemes, with a predatory boss and duplicitous co-workers, to boot. Armed only with her wits and her copy of the Standard Secretary's Desk Reference, Fourth Edition, Lois must prove that she has what it takes to make her way in the business world. But surely there's time for a little bit of love and self-discovery along the way?

Lois Lenz, Lesbian Secretary may have a saucy premise, but somehow manages to be steamily PG-13. Nolan focuses more attention on a colorful cast of characters, and a terrifically fun plot that embraces the tropes of lesbian pulp and runs with them. Not just for a gay audience, Lois Lenz will appeal to lovers of all things pulp, camp, and cult.