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FictionComic Fiction

Eley Williams

A literary whodunit, a comedy of intentional errors, a paean to romance and rebellion—when talking about Eley Williams’ The Liar’s Dictionary, it’s hard to resist uttering a constellation of descriptors, thanks to the abundance of clever (delightful, inventive, loopy, memorable) words that pepper its pages.

WATCH NOW: BookPage editor Cat Acree chats with January cover star Eley Williams! The author of The Liar’s Dictionary talks about her lifelong love of language and why her favorite word is pamphlet.

In the mystery aspect of Williams’ entertaining tale, the Swansby’s New Encyclopaedic Dictionary is the case file, and mountweazels (made-up dictionary entries) are the crimes against vocabulary. The perpetrator of said crimes and the sleuth sniffing them out are separated by a century but bound together by their mutual employer, London’s Swansby House. And the potential victims? Well, that’s where reading the book—and learning a plethora of pleasurable words, genuine and fake—come in.

Williams speaks with BookPage as she walks her dog near her London home, where she lives with her wife, writer Nell Stevens. Williams explains that the inspiration for the novel came from acts of literary subterfuge that were born both of her studies—her Ph.D. research and thesis were about mountweazels—and the ways in which her own perspective on dictionaries and other arbiters of language has changed over time.

“Words are deemed slang or dialect rather than proper English, but who is making that call?”

When she was a child, Williams explains, her parents “kept an illustrated Collins Dictionary by the dinner table. It seemed normal at the time, but it’s probably not good to have books surrounded by steam.” Potentially wrinkled pages aside, she says that for a long time, “I found comfort in pedantry and in saying no, that’s not what that word means; I can check. . . . That rigidity was a useful thing worth preserving.”

But as the years passed, her outlook on language became more fluid. “Words are deemed slang or dialect rather than proper English, but who is making that call?” she says. “What does that say about their political or ideological position? Now it’s more important to me to query that, to resist the idea of immutability.”

And so, in the hands of her character Peter Winceworth, mountweazels become tools of resistance. The year is 1899, and he works as a lexicographer in charge of the letter “S” for Swansby’s New Encyclopaedic Dictionary. One of many employees at the bustling Swansby House, he’s a reserved man prone to (and it seems, fond of) lying.

The Liar's DictionaryOne of his longest deceptions: a lisp he affected as a child when he realized it “made people respond to him with a greater gentleness.” Williams paints a spot-on portrait of an emotionally stunted man who is always at least a little bit enraged, often hilariously so. His erudition makes for some impressively articulate internal rants about, say, a too-loud bird or his boisterous co-workers.

While there’s a certain poetic justice in seeing Peter seethe at a situation created by his co-opting a speech impairment for his own gain, it’s also fascinating to bear witness as he embarks on his next fabrication—or rather, series of fabrications, via mountweazels galore. He knows that language “is something you accept or trust rather than necessarily want to test out,” thus ensuring that made-up words like “skipsty (v.), the act of taking steps two at a time” will be published unnoticed because, after all, who would even think of inserting dishonesty into a dictionary?

It is important to note that mountweazels have often been deliberately employed by dictionary publishers as a creative means of protecting their copyright. The evocative term originated in the 1975 New Columbia Encyclopedia, which describes the fictional Lillian Virginia Mountweazel as having died “in an explosion while on assignment for Combustibles magazine.”

But generally speaking, one presumably would not expect a dictionary-house employee to simply make up words . . . unless that employee was Peter, who is trapped in a life of unending frustration, massive workloads and unrequited love.

“So much of the novel is actually about the workplace and how one can feel valued or under-valued or purposeless within a structure or architecture that’s bigger than you,” Williams says. “The motif of the dictionary formed a correspondence with notions of labor and of boredom, and of value and self-worth.”

Indeed, despite having never held an office job (“It was an entire fantasy!” she says with a laugh), Williams truly captures the essence of office life— its moments of revelation and accomplishment, as well as its lack of privacy and enforced camaraderie—both on the cusp of the 20th century and, as in the novel’s second timeline, in the 21st century, when sole Swansby’s employee Mallory is tasked with digitizing the entire dictionary.

Mallory works under the supervision of 70-year-old David, a descendant of the Victorian-era Swansbys, who is determined to create a new company legacy. Mallory’s assignment sounds straightforward enough, if a bit of a slog, but there is an unfortunate catch. Her mission will not be complete until she has found and eradicated all of the mountweazels from the dictionary, while tracking her work on what she believes to be the world’s slowest computer. Like Peter’s irritated ravings, Mallory’s restless internal perseveration on her computer’s please-wait hourglass is grimly humorous in its familiarity: “The iconography of the hourglass hinted at a particular progression: that all natural things tend toward death. This was not good for office morale.”

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our starred review of The Liar’s Dictionary.

Betwixt and between hourglass-induced distress, Mallory’s other primary duty is fielding daily phone calls from a deranged-sounding man who issues bomb threats because he’s angry that the definition of marriage is changing (to include more than just a man and a woman). The calls are terrible and traumatic, and doubly so because Mallory is struggling with self-disclosure. Her partner, the gregarious and loving Pip, has always been out, but Mallory isn’t ready just yet.

Williams says that this aspect of The Liar’s Dictionary drew on real-life events from when she was writing the novel, particularly the backlash to certain dictionaries making changes to their definition of marriage. This, she explains, raises “the idea of language as no longer a useful tool that rises from society, but rather something potentially constrictive and to do with didacticism, rather than something changeable and mutable.”

Williams is far from alone in her desire to reexamine and challenge the status quo of societal monoliths, dictionaries or otherwise. After all, she says, “The idea of an infallible dictionary can seem quite sinister, and not about what language can be, and is. There are enough syllables in the world . . . for us to communicate while being supple with language, ambiguous rather than relying on fixity and an ordained truth.”

Under Williams’ guiding hand, much is mutable in The Liar’s Dictionary, and wonderfully so. The narrators’ parallel secrets surge to the fore and shrink back, heightening their feelings of isolation and honing their desire for genuine personal freedom. Comedic set pieces involving an unfortunate hard-boiled egg, drunken perambulation and an agitated pelican are as memorable as they are deliciously subversive (and in the case of the pelican, just . . . astonishing). And there are more secrets in this book than those—ones that inexorably lead our heroes to a conclusion that is exciting and gratifying in the realms of both vocation and vocabulary.

On the whole, The Liar’s Dictionary is a smart, funny, passionate exploration of how language can serve, challenge or define us. It’s also a testament to the power of speaking up and using our voices, whether on the page, in our own heads or out loud.

Fans of Williams’ acclaimed Attrib. and Other Stories have been looking forward to this novel, which she wrote while working as a lecturer in creative writing at Royal Holloway, University of London. She’s also a fellow of England’s Royal Society of Literature where, she jokes, “We all have a go at sitting on the throne.”

Alas, there are no literal thrones—but she does get to be “a part of literary culture” in England. “The best bit is,” she says, “when you’re inducted, you get to sign your name in a big book, and you get to choose a pen. The pens on offer—one belonged to Byron, another to George Eliot, I think another was T.S. Eliot, and they’d just stopped using the one from Charles Dickens. You do have that moment a bit like Mallory and Winceworth, where it’s just an object, just a thing, but you’ve invested so much in notions of literary worth and value, and you’re just enthralled by it and have that moment of connection.”

At this point in our chat, Williams and her dog, a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel named Bryher, prepare to hurry on home. Of her dog, Williams insists, “You must say, ‘She’s so athletic and dedicated!’”

Done and done.

 

Author photo by Antonio Olmos

A literary whodunit, a comedy of intentional errors, a paean to romance and rebellion—when talking about Eley Williams’ The Liar’s Dictionary, it’s hard to resist uttering a constellation of descriptors, thanks to the abundance of clever (delightful, inventive, loopy, memorable) words that pepper its pages.

RomanceSuspenseRomantic Suspense

7 questions with . . . Karen Robards

Karen Robards, author of Justice (as well as 39 other books and a novella . . . and counting!), gives us a sneak-peek into her writing world. Her thrillers combine suspense and scorching romance, and, according to our reviewer, the second story of Jessica Ford and Mark Ryan is a “winning summer read.”

Describe your book in one sentence.
Fledgling lawyer Jessica Ford’s killer new job may, literally, kill her – can hunky FBI agent Mark Ryan help keep her alive?

  1. Where do you write?

The third floor of my house is my office.

  1. What are you reading now?

Lee Child. I’m really enjoying his Jack Reacher character.

  1. How do you conquer writer’s block?

By writing. I employ the old seat of pants on seat of chair trick.

  1. Of all the characters you’ve written, which is your favorite?

That’s a tough one. I love all my main characters. I probably identify most with Clara in Night Magic or Summer in Walking After Midnight. I’ll leave you to figure out why.

  1. What was the proudest moment of your career so far?

The day I saw my first book on the shelf, of course.  The book was Island Flame (due to be re-issued by Pocket in February 2012, by the way), the cover was hot pink with a voluptuous blonde woman in a classic clench, and my name was so small you almost had to have a magnifying glass to find it. But it was my book! In a real bookstore! On a shelf with other real books for people to buy!

  1. Name one book you think everyone should read.

I’ve always loved A Wrinkle in Time.

Karen Robards, author of Justice (as well as 39 other books and a novella . . . and counting!), gives us a sneak-peek into her writing world. Her thrillers combine suspense and scorching romance, and, according to our reviewer, the second story of Jessica…
Children's & YAMiddle Grade

Beverly Cleary

We haven't read any new Ramona Quimby adventures in about 15 years, but she is back, and she is more fun than ever. Ramona's World finds Ramona entering the fourth grade, longing for a best girlfriend, and still being happily disgusted by Yard Ape. BookPage had the delightful opportunity to talk to Newbery Medalist Beverly Cleary about her writing, her life and her beloved Ramona Geraldine Quimby.

Cleary became interested in writing for children because reading meant so much to her as a child. "I was a great reader of fairy tales. I tried to read the entire fairy tale section of the library: Andrew Lang's Blue Fairy Book, Red Fairy Book, and so on, probably down to the Puce or Chartreuse fairy tales," she laughs. These days, Cleary reads biographies and some fiction by English women writers.

Ramona was first introduced to readers in the 1950s as a peripheral character (Cleary interjects, "a nuisance") in the Henry Huggins books. Had she visualized developing Ramona's character, or did Ramona take on a life of her own?

"Well, I didn't visualize anything more about Ramona. In fact, she was an accidental character. It occurred to me that as I wrote, all of these children appeared to be only children, so I tossed in a little sister, and at that time, we had a neighbor named Ramona. I heard somebody call out, 'Ramona!' so I just named her Ramona."

There are many similarities between Ramona and Cleary as she describes herself in her autobiography, A Girl from Yamhill. For example, both struggled with reading and were puzzled about the "dawnzer" song (also known as our national anthem). However, "People are inclined to say that I am Ramona," Cleary laughs. "I'm not sure that's true, but I did share some experiences with her. I was an only child; I didn't have a sister, or sisters, like in Ramona's World. Oh, there are many differences. Writers are good at plucking out what they need here and there."
 
Cleary indeed "plucked" here and there, but were any of her Klickitat Street characters specifically molded after anyone? "Well, probably Otis Spofford. Otis was inspired by a boy who sat across the aisle from me in sixth grade who was a," she pauses, "lively person. My best friend appears in assorted books in various disguises. She was Austine in Ellen Tebbits. And in my new book, Ramona's World, she appears as the woman who is concerned about children waiting for the school bus in front of her house. She lives in Portland, and we talk about once a week." 
 
Cleary took a departure from Klickitat Street to write four books for teenagers, "but girls read them younger now." Books such as Fifteen and Jean and Johnny were inspired by a group of junior high students who "said to me, 'Why don't you write like you write, only about our age?' So I wrote, like I write, about high school. I re-read Fifteen not long ago. I usually don't read my books, but I picked that up, and it's absolutely true to the period. Some people have said that those books are dated, but they're not. They're true to the period. If I were writing Fifteen today, I would write it exactly the same way, except I wouldn't have Jane's father smoke a pipe, and I wouldn't have Jane quite so pleased that Stan was tall. Of course," she laughs, "she would be pleased, but I wouldn't say that in the book. Jean and Johnny takes place in my own high school. I guess Jean's best friend was my best friend." Cleary's best friend seems to fill a lot of characters' shoes. "She's a very warm and friendly person; the sort of person everybody likes. I've known her since we were in the first grade. I don't think we've ever exchanged a cross word."
 
Ramona has been around since the 1950s, and this is the first Ramona book in 15 years. What challenges did Cleary face in keeping the story consistent, yet contemporary? "I'm writing about growing up. What interests me is what children go through while growing up. Some people think the books are more serious, but I think children, as they grow up, are more aware of life's problems than they were when they were in kindergarten. Quite often somebody will say, 'What year do your books take place?' and the only answer I can give is, 'In childhood.' They take place in a very specific neighborhood in Portland, Oregon, where I grew up. It must be the most stable neighborhood in the United States. In many ways, it's changed very little since I lived there."

The Quimbys' third child, Roberta, is now a toddler in Ramona's World. Generations of readers have watched Ramona grow up book by book. Will we be following Roberta's life in the same way? "Oh, I rather doubt it. I guess I was influenced by readers who asked that Ramona have a baby sister. It just started me thinking of how she would react." Ramona is a caring older sister because "she's old enough not to be consumed with sibling rivalry. She's more charmed with Roberta's tiny hands, etc. I think if they'd been closer in age, there would have been a problem." Cleary agrees that Ramona's relationship with Roberta is much different than that of Ramona and Beezus.

Henry Huggins, who was once a staple in Cleary's books, has faded into the background. What ever happened to Henry and Scooter McCarthy? "Well, they're floating around, but Ramona isn't particularly interested [in them]." Ramona is quite interested, however, in Jeremy, the older brother of her new best friend. "Oh yes," Cleary agrees, and adds that Beezus is very interested in Jeremy as well, but continues, "I don't know, I just became interested in Ramona. I once had a letter from a child that said 'Don't ever put Henry in anything else'."

No reason was given for the reader's anti-Henry stance, but Cleary does add that, in a previous book, Mr. and Mrs. Huggins make an appearance at a neighborhood brunch.

When asked for her concerns about the future of children's literature, Mrs. Cleary responds, "I feel sometimes that [in children's books] there are more and more grim problems, but I don't know that I want to burden third- and fourth-graders with them. I feel it's important to get [children] to enjoy reading."
 
Cleary credits her mother for encouraging her love of reading. "She read to me a lot and of course, we didn't have television in those days, and many people didn't even have radios. My mother would read aloud to my father and me in the evening. She read mainly travel books. [Parents need to] read aloud to your children and let them see you enjoying books. Children want to do what the grownups do. Children should learn that reading is pleasure, not just something that teachers make you do in school."
Ramona's World finds Ramona entering the fourth grade, longing for a best girlfriend, and still being happily disgusted by Yard Ape. BookPage had the delightful opportunity to talk to Newbery Medalist Beverly Cleary about her writing, her life and her beloved Ramona Geraldine Quimby.
Nonfiction

Edward Gorey

"Don't even ask me about my favorite movies!" Edward Gorey exclaims near the end of our conversation about The Haunted Tea-Cosy, his first major book in nearly 25 years. It's an irresistible invitation. So Edward Gorey rattles off an impressive list that begins with early Alfred Hitchcock ("His later films got so bloated, don't you think?") and ends with Jackie Chan's newest, Rush Hour, which Gorey has seen the night before my call ("Hilarious!" he says, laughing).

Where, I wonder, is the supposedly eccentric recluse of Cape Cod I had been led to expect? True, the writer and illustrator of almost 100 brilliant, darkly funny tales for adults and children has greeted me by announcing, "I have nothing to say." But he quickly launches into an amusingly exaggerated version of how The Haunted Tea-Cosy came to be.

"If the truth were told, and I'm not sure that I want it to be, the New York Times magazine called me up about this time a year ago and said they were going to do a modern version of Dickens's Christmas Carol. They wanted me to be one of five people to illustrate it. I said, 'Okay, send me the manuscript.' A week or so passed, and they called me again and said, 'Everyone here is so thrilled that you want to work on it that they want you to do the whole thing.' I should have realized that everybody else had turned them down, but I said, 'Okay, send me the manuscript.' A few more weeks went by, and they sent me a paperback copy of the Christmas Carol. There was no manuscript. I thought, 'Oh tish tosh.' So I sat down and wrote this dizzy little book. It was published in the magazine. After Christmas, Harcourt Brace called me and said, 'Oh, can we do the book?' and I said 'Okay.' I re-colored the book in a manner which nobody else would know the difference but me, and there you are."

The new book, subtitled "A Dispirited and Distasteful Diversion for Christmas," is not quite the offhanded production Gorey would have us believe it to be. His many fans will find here the same indescribable mix of humor and terror, learned and obscure references, verbal play, and artistry that has enchanted and perplexed us for years.

"I used to spend a lot of time anguishing over these things," Gorey says. "As the years have gone by, I've found I prefer not to suffer when I'm working. Somebody once said that it doesn't much matter whether you're conquering an empire or playing dominoes, it's just another way of passing time. Now I think first ideas are just as good as endless revisions. Of course, most of my drawing is considerably more meticulous."

His drawings, Gorey says, have been heavily influenced by 19th-century illustrations, his sensibility by Jane Austen and 19th-century English novels, among others a partial explanation for why his books seem to carry the aura of distant era. But Gorey is also unreasonably interested in surrealism and Dada. At Harvard in the 1950s, after a stint in the Army on the fringes of World War II in the Utah desert, he roomed with the poet Frank O'Hara and was friends with the poet John Ashbery. "We were all very interested in being avant garde. John Ashbery and Frank O'Hara were especially good at discovering people nobody else would hear about for years."

Gorey now thinks nothing new has happened since 1914. "You could probably push that back to 1885." Still, his unreasonable interest continues to lead him into strange places. "At the moment, I'm reading an absolutely incomprehensible book about visual poetry from 1914 to 1928. I saw it for two dollars in a catalog, and I thought, oh well, I'll give it whirl. Apollinaire and a bunch of Catalonian poets I have never heard of (and I can understand why) were doing these kinds of visual poems. The author, who is from a university in Illinois, has written an endless book analyzing these vaguely visual poems. You know, page after page after page. And I think, oh, surely not!"

So why read it? Gorey says he may soon produce some visual poems of his own. "I've also fiddled around with collages lately. I'd always been afraid to attempt them because I was so stunned by Mr. Ernst's collages. My attempts are all very minor, but they're different from anyone else's. It's something I can count on: no matter what I start out copying, it ends up looking completely different, so that nobody will have the faintest idea where it came from."

For the last 15 years, since giving up his apartment in New York and moving to Cape Cod, he has been also been seriously involved in the theater. "I'm sort of pushy about my theater stuff," he says. "I just did a puppet show this summer. Half of it was a parody of Hamlet; the other half was the plot of Madame Butterfly. I got carried away and had a great time absolutely mangling everything!"

Gorey seems to have read everything. He's in and out of the local bookstores once or twice a day and never leaves empty-handed. (He notes that the carpet in the local chain bookstore seems mainly designed so that it won't show vomit—an observation that will surprise no one familiar with the elaborately patterned backgrounds of his drawings.) His music CDs number in the thousands, replacing thousands of cassettes, which replaced thousands of LPs, he says. If there's one thing he misses about New York ("I always found New York terribly provincial"), it's the live performances. But Gorey's pleasures and enthusiasms recounted with humor and irony seem to sustain him now that he lives far from New York. Moreover, they insinuate themselves into his work in fascinating ways.

So what is the source of the more disquieting aspects of his work? "I don't really like to talk shop," Gorey says. He is self-deprecating about his drawing ability, claiming in fact that he can't draw very well at all. "I don't think I ever knew that I was an artist," he says. "I'm not even sure that I know that I am one now." Suddenly one senses a vast reserve within the man, a private place entirely his own, off limits to others. Maybe this is what people mean when they hint that he is eccentric and difficult.

As it happens, our conversation begins less than 15 minutes after the humiliating broadcast of President Clinton's grand jury videotapes concludes. "About a month ago, I decided I would give up the news the way I gave up smoking," Gorey says. "I have not looked at a newspaper, and I have not watched one second of television news. The whole world could be coming to a complete and utter stop, and I wouldn't have the faintest notion of it."

For some reason, I tell Edward Gorey that there are dozens of Web sites devoted to him and his work on the Internet. "I'm the perfect little cult figure," he says somewhat disconsolately. "I really do feel we're getting so far from reality. I'm getting to the point where I'm hoping we'll go back to something primitive as soon as possible. I find myself wondering at what point a cult becomes a major religion? "

 

Alden Mudge is a writer in Oakland, California.

"Don't even ask me about my favorite movies!" Edward Gorey exclaims near the end of our conversation about The Haunted Tea-Cosy, his first major book in nearly 25 years. It's an irresistible invitation. So Edward Gorey rattles off an impressive list that begins with early…

Children's & YA

Jim Arnosky

Thanksgiving is a time to reflect on our blessings, congregate with family, and, yes, eat turkey. But how well do we really know this seasonal celebrity? In his most recent book, All About Turkeys, writer, illustrator, and naturalist Jim Arnosky explores the feeding, hunting, and mating habits of the wild turkey. In so doing, he carries on his fine tradition of educating children about familiar aspects of nature, and that is something to be truly thankful for. Arnosky, 52, lives with his wife on a farm in Vermont. He has written and illustrated more than 45 nature books for children, including three additional titles published this year: Little Lions, Watching Desert Wildlife, and Crinkleroot’s Visit to Crinkle Cove. Each shares Arnosky’s exquisitely detailed, yet gentle, illustrations and straightforward text, which combine to excite young readers about the natural world. BookPage recently spoke with Arnosky about his passion for nature and his voluminous body of work.

When did you first develop your appreciation of nature?

As a child, I lived in rural Pennsylvania and would spend entire days outdoors. I was fascinated with cartoons and wanted to be an artist, so I’d create animal characters, like raccoons and foxes. But the pivotal moment occurred while visiting my grandmother in New York City. I saw these raccoons at the Central Park Zoo, which I later learned were native to Pennsylvania. It was such a revelation, that these animals lived where I lived even though I couldn’t readily see them. I became consumed by the elusive nature of wildlife and began looking for tracks and other signs of life to discover what else lived in my world.

Which came first, your love for writing or for illustrating?

Definitely my love for art. I have wanted to be a cartoonist since I was a kid. I didn’t begin writing until the early 1970s, when my wife and I were living in a cabin at Hawk Mountain in Pennsylvania. I was a freelance illustrator for Ranger Rick and other publications when I met a wise old man who gave me a piece of invaluable advice keep a journal. So I bought a leather-bound journal that I thought I’d use for sketching. To my own surprise, I began writing about every wildlife encounter that I had. Writing books, though, came much later.

What artists and writers influenced you?

John Burroughs, John Muir, and Ernest Thomas Seton affected me deeply. Reading Burroughs was like listening to me talk to myself. I felt like I was actually with him on his fishing and hiking expeditions. After steeping myself in his books, I was determined to do that too, to make kids believe they are experiencing nature with me. Ernest Thomas Seton is less well known, but he was a wildlife writer and naturalist who specialized in children’s books.

What was the first book you published?

In 1974, I wrote the first book about Crinkleroot, the sage woodsman. I wanted him to be an expert in the natural world, yet lovable and whimsical enough to bring natural history to kids. The book was entitled, I Was Born in a Tree and Raised by Bees. Recently I re-colorized the art, made the book more current, and it will be published as Crinkleroot’s Nature Almanac.

How do get ideas for your books?

Everything comes either from what I see either through my eyes, a camera, or a video camera or where I identify a lack of information. I want to know not only what lives where I live, but also where my readers live. For example, rattlesnakes are common in the southwest, so I wrote All About Rattlesnakes for kids living in the desert.

Is there one central message that you hope to impart to children?

I am convinced that if you love the outdoors, natural places, and wildlife, you will grow into a person who will consider those factors no matter what work you do. My job is to foster an appreciation of nature and a curiosity about wildlife. I tell kids what I know and let them decide how to think about it. Hopefully they’ll use that knowledge and make a difference.

You’re very prolific. How long does it take you to write and illustrate a book?

I do four books a year, and each takes about three months. First I research a site, photographing or videotaping a species. Then I let the ideas percolate for awhile before I illustrate my images. The pictures determine the story, so the words actually come last.

What are you working on now?

I’m finishing a video companion to All About Deer. Few children even know the size of a deer. When I ask kids how big a deer is, I get answers ranging from the size of a dog to the size of a pony. And I’ll be starting All About Turtles soon. Next spring I have two books for very young children coming out, called Mouse Numbers and Mouse Letters, which were originally written for my daughter when she was three. I’m also working on a surprise book that is a celebration of my own years watching wildlife.

We’ll be watching to see what you help children discover next.

Lisa Horak is a mother and a freelance writer living in Annandale, VA.

Thanksgiving is a time to reflect on our blessings, congregate with family, and, yes, eat turkey. But how well do we really know this seasonal celebrity? In his most recent book, All About Turkeys, writer, illustrator, and naturalist Jim Arnosky explores the feeding, hunting,…

Fiction

Bret Lott

Brett Lott is a constant stranger. Born in Los Angeles to a transplanted Mississippi family, educated in Massachusetts and Ohio, married to a woman from New Jersey and now teaching in Charleston, he writes as one coming into, rather than growing out of his environment.

So it is not surprising that when he began Jewel, a novel based on his own family history, he wrote not a Roots-type celebration of continuity but a severe if sympathetic examination of one woman’s obsessive dedication to her mentally retarded child and the wrenching displacement it wreaked on that family.

"My grandmother is 84, my aunt is 48," Lott says as if the ages were themselves a reminder of their constant struggle, "and every day my grandmother makes my aunt’s lunch and wraps the lunchbox with masking tape so it won’t break open if she drops it. My aunt has a job bagging nuts and bolts . . ."

One day they’d do the bolts, another day the nuts, then the bolts, then the nuts. Certainly there’d been joy in her accomplishing that much; she even brought home a paycheck once a month, always for some odd small amount, $7.31, or $6.96. On those afternoons, she came home waving the check, we’d go right down to the bank, cash it, then go to dinner at a Denny’s or Sizzler, where I’d let her pay for her meal herself, though money still meant nothing to her, only pieces of paper, chunks of metal handed over to a smiling waitress.

". . . and when she gets paid they go out to Denny’s for dinner, and grandmother waits for the bus every day, and that’s what Brenda Kay’s life is about — wrapping tape around the lunch box and waiting for the bus."

Jewel, the book’s eponymous narrator, is Lott’s grandmother, and Brenda Kay is his aunt (the names and relationships in the book are all real, although the author’s is slightly changed). In 1943, after giving birth to five healthy children, Jewel and her husband Lester had what doctors then called "Mongolian idiot" who was not expected to live much beyond her second birthday. Terrified and then enraged, Jewel refused to institutionalize the child and committed herself to getting Brenda Kay the best treatment and training available – thus sentencing her already poor "cracker" family to even more severe financial privation, social stigma and finally a total and irrevocable uprooting. Those two harsh sacrifices — Jewel’s singleminded drive to better her child’s lot and the heavy price it exacted from the rest of the family — are the helix at the heart of the novel.

Some of the research for the story was relatively straightforward, Lott says, "Like, ‘What did you eat for dinner in the winter in Mississippi? What was it like to be told in the backwoods World War I Mississippi, that your child was a Mongolian idiot?’" But the real undercurrents ran deep, and for a long time dark.

"I had always intuited the difficulties" the family faced, Lott says. "My father told me he and his brother used to feel ashamed sometimes; they wouldn’t know whether to tell their girlfriends or take them home to meet the family, and sometimes they did and sometimes they didn’t. Uncle James" — the oldest, who had joined up and was going to school in Texas on the GI bill before Brenda Kay’s condition was known — "never told his wife until the day the whole family showed up at their door on the way to California. My other uncle had a football scholarship to Mississippi State, but he gave it up to go on ahead to California to make money to support the family."

It was James who gave Lott the first important clue. "He told me, ‘Mama had to break Daddy’s will.’ It was a known fact in the family that Grandma has to completely break my grandfather to get him to go to Los Angeles," where there was a school that pioneered in education for retarded persons.

But the real key to the novel came, fittingly, from the Jewel herself. "I believe that all the great characters in Southern literature are failures," says Lott. "So I asked my grandmother, ‘What was your failure? How did you fail in your life?’ and she said, ‘I thought I could fix things, but I couldn’t.’"

I could fix things, I knew I could. All the child in my arms, all Brenda Kay — I decided then, there, that no one would ever use those two words, use Mongolian idiot to describe her in my presence, unless they wanted my full wrath down on them — needed was my love, not my abandonment . . . no matter my baby wasn’t normal as I’d been, was sick in some way I couldn’t understand; no matter he was already figuring on her dying. He didn’t know me, didn’t know what I could live through. I could do it. I could fix things: my life, my children’s lives, my husband’s life, Brenda Kay’s.

"There it was, the perfect motivation. I had a wonderful character who was convinced she could fix anything, and a situation that would never change." Every day, packing lunch, taping the lunch box, waiting for the bus.

The rest, says Lott, began to tell itself. Every day he sat at his desk, surrounded by "hundreds of family photographs," and lost himself in Mississippi. The one completely invented character, the black deus ex machina with the name Cathedral and the awful gift of prophecy, is at once truly Southern and larger than life, a gothic spirit of both revelation and retribution that gives Jewel its most pervasive Southern flavor.

That in itself poses a sort of dilemma for Lott, whose first two novels ("apprenticeships," he calls them) were kindly reviewed but not particular commercial successes. Jewel, on the other hand, has already been optioned by Sally Field, and "it would be the easiest thing in the world to write another big, sprawling Southern gothic novel. But I don’t want to be a Southern novelist, or a ‘New England novelist’" — his first two books were set in the North, garnering the predictable comparisons to John Cheever — "I just want to be an American novelist."

He’s already at work on his New Jersey novel, a love story set in the Pine Barrens; and after that he pans to try a novel based on his other grandfather, the merchant mariner-streetcar conductor-bit movie player. Yes, that would mean writing about Los Angeles, the hometown he’s never understood — but after all, it would be L.A. before it was L.A.

Brett Lott is a constant stranger. Born in Los Angeles to a transplanted Mississippi family, educated in Massachusetts and Ohio, married to a woman from New Jersey and now teaching in Charleston, he writes as one coming into, rather than growing out of his environment.…

Business & Finance

Harry Hoffman

After years in the business of distributing, then retailing books, Harry Hoffman decided to write one himself. The Pocket Mentor grew out of his empathy for young people who have taken jobs in the world of business but do not have a clear idea of what the business world is about he says he used to be one of them. He wrote The Pocket Mentor for such young people—as well as for older managers who feel their careers have stagnated but may not understand why. BookPage spoke with Hoffman by telephone.

BookPage: How did you get into the book business?

Harry Hoffman: I was very lucky. I started out as an FBI agent and left the Bureau to sell soap to retail grocery stores in New York City. Eventually, I found my way into the library supplies business. I was approached at a library convention and was asked if I would be interested in talking to some people at Ingram Book Company in Nashville. I visited Ingram Book Company, liked the people I met, and three months later moved to Nashville. I wanted to try new, different ways of doing business, and I was fortunate that the owners of the company let me have the freedom to run the company in ways I thought best. This was new for me. I had not had this freedom at other places. I believe that if the owners had not given me the freedom to try new ways of doing things, Ingram Book would not be in business today. Many companies and owners today would benefit from this approach.

BP: What do you think makes book people special?
HH: Book people are very intelligent and dedicated to their business. They are outstanding, smart, nice people, and very nice to deal with . . . without exception.

BP: What advice can you give to struggling independent bookstores?
HH: An independent that is not strong in its particular niche and is not in a highly populated area may have a difficult time surviving the arrival of a superstore. But I think many independents could convert into superstores themselves. Find a big empty building in a fairly good location with parking, take more space, put in a cafe. This is not difficult. A good strong independent can work on getting financing from banks and good terms from publishers, and use creativity and imagination to find a location that is not too expensive. If the independent has been solid in its community, there are probably people in the area who would like to sponsor a thriving local bookstore. Most important, the bookstore owner should examine the need to make his or her store or concept better than anyone else's. People who are creative about their bookstore concept and inventive about securing capital have a better chance of surviving as independents.

BP: Is there an industry-changing idea you thought of while you were in the business that you still think should be implemented?
HH: Short books! This is the biggest opportunity that publishers have, and I've been preaching it for years. Publishers need to look at their competition, not only at other publishers, but at all the other things that are competing with books for a person's time: TV, computers, the Internet . . . with all the other demands on time, 300-to-400-page books can be overwhelming. Publishers should continue their publishing programs but also consider developing short-book imprints. If I were in a position to do so, I would start a short book company immediately, publishing short books on many subjects, getting excellent well-known authors to write the books. Instead of taking a year to write a book, an author might write two or three books in a year.

BP: Your book is short . . .

HH: Well, yes, and I hope young people will be able to glean a few things from it . . . and I hope high-quality short books of all kinds will be written by authors better than I. Harry Hoffman developed a small company that served as the Tennessee Book Depository into the largest book wholesaler in the world (Ingram Book Company), and then went on to take the Waldenbooks chain from an unimpressive number-two position among book retailers to a successful number one by the time he took early retirement in 1991.

After years in the business of distributing, then retailing books, Harry Hoffman decided to write one himself. The Pocket Mentor grew out of his empathy for young people who have taken jobs in the world of business but do not have a clear idea of…

Fiction

Barbara Kingsolver turns to her past to understand the present

Barbara Kingsolver was a little girl of seven when she and her family left their Kentucky home to spend two years in the Congo. When she returned, the world looked totally different to her. “I understood the way we lived in my little corner of Kentucky was just that,” says the author. “One little corner where we had certain things we did, possessed, believed in, but there was a great big world out there where people had no use for many of the things my community held dear. I came home with an acutely heightened sense of race, of ethnicity. I got to live in a place where people thought I was noticeable and probably hideous because of the color of my skin. These weren’t easy lessons,” says Kingsolver, “but they were priceless.” She has not forgotten what the Congo taught her. It made her the person, the writer, she is.

“I’m extremely interested in cultural difference, in social and political history and the sparks that fly when people with different ways of looking at the world come together and need to reconcile or move through or celebrate those differences. All that precisely describes everything I’ve ever written, Animal Dreams, Pigs in Heaven, all of it.” It also describes Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible, a novel of post-colonial Africa which brings to bear all she observed as a child in the Congo and all she came to understand of it as an adult.

“Given that this is what we did as a nation in Africa, how are we to feel about it now?” asks the author. How do we live with it and how do we move on? Given that this is our history, what do we do with it? One thing is very clear, there isn’t a single answer, there’s a spectrum of answers. Representing that spectrum is Nathan Price, a Baptist missionary, his wife, and their four daughters. The Prices arrive in Africa believing God is on their side. That changes quickly. “I always believed any sin was easily rectified if only you let Jesus Christ into your heart,” says Nathan’s daughter Leah, “but here it gets complicated.”  Indeed. A stranger tells Nathan, “I do not think the people are looking for your kind of salvation. . . . they are looking for. . . the new soul of Africa.” But in his eagerness to save everyone’s soul, Nathan is deaf to the truth, just as he is deaf to the nuances of the Congolese culture. “We sang in church, Tata Nzolo! Which means ‘Father in Heaven’ or ‘Father of Fish Bait,’ depending on just how you sing it,” recalls Nathan’s wife, Orleanna, who returns from her time in the Congo marked and stricken by loss.

Leah, on the other hand, embraces Africa in the 30-year course of the book, even at the risk of rejecting the cornerstones of her past. ” I had only faith in my father and love for the Lord. Without that rock of certainty underfoot, the Congo is a fearsome place to sink or swim.” Leah’s bookish twin, Adah, is a darker presence, a witness to the country’s horrors. Rachel the eldest Price daughter, is vain, contemptuous of her new life and full of comic malapropisms, given, as she is to feminine tuition. Ruth May, the youngest, is the Price always in a hurry, propelled by a child’s innocence and enthusiasm. The Price girls and their mother narrate The Poisonwood Bible in alternating chapters. Kingsolver chose multiple voices to portray the enormity, the complexity of her subject. That choice, however, created complexities of its own.

“I wasn’t very far into this book when I realized what I set out to do was impossible.” The author laughs. “Or at least extremely difficult, much harder than anything I ever did it before. The most difficult thing was to fine tune the voices five narrators, all in the same family, most of them about the same age. How do you make each voice distinct enough that the reader could open to any page and know who’s speaking? It led to many quiet little fits of flying paper in my office. But it was also great fun. What I love best about being a novelist is I get to do something different every time. When you’re flying by the seat of your pants, you’re never bored.” Writing is Kingsolver’s passion, but she’s no artiste. “I consider myself a writer of the working class, I’m a little bit smug about it, have so little tolerance for writers who have elaborate three-hour rituals before they even get down to work. I think, oh, please. My idea of a pre-writing ritual is getting the kids on the bus and sitting down.” The years she worked as technical writer taught her to produce “whether I wanted to or not. It would be easy to say oh, I have writers’ block, oh I have to wait for my muse. I don’t. Chain that muse to your desk and get the job done.

“I love revision. Revision is where the art really happens, when you begin to manipulate, shift things around so your theme begins to shine through.” While Kingsolver was revising her novel, the Congo itself began its own revision. Mobutu, the Congolese dictator in power for over 30 years, died and his regime fell. The new president, Laurent Kabila has clashed with Tutsi rebels, and the Congo is once again in the throes of bloody strife.

“It’s very odd,” says Kingsolver. “This book is in some way timely, and nothing could surprise me more. When I began writing, I thought my primary task would get my readers to believe there was a dictator called Mobuto, that all these things really happened somewhere far away and they should care.” As America and the United Nations study the Congo and analyze strategies for intervention, Kingsolver hopes governing bodies will heed some of the lessons she learned as a child, the lessons of The Poisonwood Bible. “We can never know, never look at history with anything but a narrow and distorted window, says the author. We can never know the whole truth, only what’s been recorded for us and what our cultural and political predisposition understands. Leah says history is never much more at a mirror we can tilt to look at ourselves.”

 

Ellen Kanner is a writer in Miami, Florida.

Barbara Kingsolver was a little girl of seven when she and her family left their Kentucky home to spend two years in the Congo. When she returned, the world looked totally different to her. "I understood the way we lived in my little corner of…
NonfictionPolitics

James Carville

James Carville is beginning to sound like Lamont Cranston's evil twin. He knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men, but he has no intention of using any old Tibetan mind-clouding methods to make himself invisible while tackling it. This is one up front, in-your-face Shadow, and if he is practicing a sort of verbal incantation, he's certainly doing it in public, out loud, and with a sort of deadpan folksiness that takes no edge off his words.

"You know something?" begins his new book, And the Horse He Rode In On: The People v. Kenneth Starr, with the sort of companionable frankness of a guy buying you your second beer. "I don't like Ken Starr. I don't like one damn thing about him. I don't like his politics. I don't like his sanctimony. I don't like his self-piety. I don't like the people he runs with. I don't like his suck-up, spit-down view of the world, how he kisses up to the powerful and abuses the life out of regular people. I don't like his private legal clients. I don't like . . ." well, you get the idea. And if you don't get it right off, Carville will make sure you get it a page or two farther along.

Impossibly impolitic and irresistibly quotable, James Carville is the President's most unabashed, adamant, and flamboyant advocate. His intentional lack of polish may be an anomaly in the political consultant-cum-talking head circles (and may in fact be as much pose as some people's polish), but it plays to the hilt outside the Beltway, as Washingtonians say. And Carville's hot-off-the-presses tract, with its last-minute appendix addressing the release of President Clinton's videotaped grand jury testimony, is as much an indictment of the anti-Clinton forces as it is a rallying cry for his supporters.

"I'm trying to get the Democrats fired up, so they'll get out there and vote," says Carville. "The press is so anti-Clinton: Where can the people who like the President go?" Horse is written in the same conversational style, a mix of straight stuff and a little commentary along the way, that he used in his last book, We're Right, They're Wrong, which like Horse trumpeted the economic and social victories of the Clinton administration. It's also a mix of demonstrable fact and reprinted legal criticism with partisan argument. After all, as Carville cheerfully admits, "People don't look to me for objectivity. A lot of the straight stuff is already out there, so it's sort of lists, talking points," Carville says. "My readers really want to have the information; I see them all the time with my book, and the pages are dog-eared and stuff is underlined. But they like a little sizzle with their steak, too, so I have to give them some of that." And once you get beyond that thigh-smacking style, it's a horse of a different color: furious, yes, somewhat redundant and occasionally ingenuous, but also deeply disturbing in its litany of conflicts, constitutional breaches, and at best ill-considered actions he lays at the door of Starr's office. (The publicly-funded ones, that is, not his private law firm's.) It may not win him any Mr. Congeniality titles from the Republican leadership, but then, as Carville would undoubtedly say, a man is known as much by his enemies as by his friends.

Besides, Carville, the most famous Clinton advisor who has neither been impersonated by Michael J. Fox nor sucked toes in the Jefferson Hotel (well, actually, I didn't ask about that), already has a list of sobriquets to treasure. From the relatively benign Ragin' Cajun jokes (he is in fact a native Louisianan) and marital Mad Dog jibes of the early '90s (Carville is famously married to the equally blunt-spoken former Bush campaign maven and staunch Republican Mary Matalin), his critics have long since passed to Clinton hatchet man, henchman, spinner and the snider political op, Washingtonspeak for hired gun. Even the usually straitlaced New York Times, which seems to dread Carville as some type of Sherman's revenge, denounces his scorched earth approach.

But no one can accuse Carville of backstabbing, ambushing, or entrapping his prey. This army announces its campaign plan in advance. He is Cpl. 'Cueball' Carville rollin' back into battle, as he put it on Meet the Press.

Much of Horse came right out of Carville's files. Carville has been stewing over Starr since he was first appointed as independent counsel in April, 1994; he wrote a letter to the White House urging that he be allowed to take on the man he already saw as unacceptably partisan, to warn the American people about who Ken Starr really was, but was persuaded to sit it out. Carville takes aim as well at the national media pack Carville thinks has given the baying Starr his head in return for a daily ration of scraps, i.e., news bites. One of the funniest (well, in a grim way) sections of the book just quotes one newspaper or news magazine story after another that as weeks and months passed each announced that Starr's investigation had reached a critical stage. He has a telling nickname for the journalists, editorialists, reporters, columnists and sycophants of the Washington establishment: JERKS.

On the other hand, Carville stands by the handshake rule your word should be your bond and is ungrudging in acknowledging the fair players among the press (in particular, the late Ann Devroy, a Washington Post reporter who agreed not to release the copy of that April 1994 letter secret when Carville asked to withdraw it).

Interviews and quotable jokes notwithstanding, Carville has more serious pre-2000 campaigning to do. "There are some books you want to do, and some books you have to do," he says. "This is a book I had to do, but now there's a book I really want to do." Tentatively titled Five Smooth Stones, he describes it as a more optimistic take on progressive policies, one in which he hopes to return to the politics of ideas rather than individuals. That's the sort of politics, in case you think he's going soft, in which you prove your enemies are merely fools, not criminals.

Incidentally, Carville has not interest in filling any elected office himself. "I couldn't stand the kind of scrutiny everyone comes under these days," he says flatly and for him, seriously. Then, "The only thing I'm running for is the state line. "

SIDEBAR
One reason Carville immediately sniffed at Starr's heels was that he had already met him or rather, been accosted by him. In what may be the single strangest episode in Carville's book, he tells of waiting for Matalin, whose flight was late, in an airline club at Washington National Airport in October, 1993. An intense, bespectacled man sidled up to Carville, and when Carville nodded at him, thinking perhaps they had met during the 1992 campaign, this guy started spouting an unsolicited and shameful tirade against the President. "Your boy's getting rolled," the man said with evident glee. Carville shrugged him off as just another hate radio fan, and forgot about him until ten months later, when a TV clip announcing Starr's appointment revealed him to be the weirdo from the airport.

 

Eve Zibart wishes to make clear that opinions expressed in this interview do not reflect those of any of the publications she writes for except perhaps this one.

James Carville is beginning to sound like Lamont Cranston's evil twin. He knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men, but he has no intention of using any old Tibetan mind-clouding methods to make himself invisible while tackling it. This is one up front,…

Mystery & SuspenseSuspense

Richard North Patterson

Richard North Patterson has grown a bit discontented with the praise heaped upon his recent best-selling novels. "’Better than Grisham’ has no more or less meaning than ‘worse than Updike,’" he says wryly during a phone call to his summer home in Martha’s Vineyard.

"I never set out to be the master of the courtroom thriller. I just happen to think the law is a good vehicle for writing about a lot of things. What has come to annoy me a little is the shorthand description ‘courtroom dramas.’ It reduces what I’m doing to a kind of trick. To the extent that my books work, it’s for the same reason that any book works — because the story, the characters, and the ideas are arresting. What’s gratifying to me about No Safe Place is that it just changes the subject entirely."

That’s right. Richard North Patterson’s arresting new novel — his best novel yet — has little to do with the law and even less to do with courtrooms. No Safe Place is about national politics and political campaigns. "For years I’ve thought about writing a political novel," Patterson says. "The question was always whether I could do the work and have the access that would make it a serious book. I mean a lot of political fiction is awful. Silly stuff. There hasn’t been a really strong novel of national politics since Advise and Consent, and that was more than 40 years ago. It’s a form I like and one that has fallen on hard times, so in 1995 I decided that I had the time and the wherewithal to take on such a book."

Set in the year 2000, No Safe Place follows the dramatic primary campaign of Kerry Kilcannon, a liberal-leaning U.S. Senator from New Jersey who is challenging the heavily favored sitting Vice President, Dick Mason, for the Democratic presidential nomination. The contest comes down to a crucial primary in California, where Kilcannon’s older brother James was assassinated 12 years ago during his own presidential campaign. In the final week of the California campaign, Kilcannon alienates key supporters on issues concerning abortion rights, is stalked by a religious fanatic who has already shot up an abortion clinic on the East Coast, and learns that unknown opponents are peddling damaging allegations about an extramarital affair to the national media.

In less able hands such a plot would yield an overheated potboiler at best. But Patterson’s political portrait is wonderfully laid out, thrilling, intelligent, and nuanced. Senator Kilcannon is an immensely appealing central character who carries a heavy emotional debt to his slain older brother. He struggles to tell the truth and remain authentic but is not afraid to play hardball politics and is certainly not infallible on issues of tactics or morality.

Patterson points to the life of Bobby Kennedy as one influence on his portrait of Kerry Kilcannon. "Obviously Kerry isn’t Bobby Kennedy, and certainly his relationship with his brother isn’t anything like the relationship between President Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy. But I’m not sure I would have written Kerry Kilcannon this way if it weren’t for the resonance of Bobby Kennedy. Kennedy’s spontaneity, reaction to direct experience, impatience, and internal war between the practical politician and the Romantic are elements you see working in Kilcannon. Those moments of spontaneity are really engaging because so many politicians are so robotic, are essentially programmed to follow a plan. The notion that you have somebody who is not only incapable of doing that but who realizes that his salvation lies in refusing to do that is very, very interesting."

Much of the book’s suspense depends on the moment-by-moment shifts of campaign strategy as Kilcannon and his staff scramble to deal with threats of scandal. To get these details right, Patterson spent a lot of time with top political strategists from both political parties, including Ron Kaufman and George Stephanopolous. "I explained the story and said ‘Okay, you’re advising Kerry Kilcannon. What do you tell him?’ Essentially we worked out this hypothetical campaign. It was just fascinating."

During his research, Patterson also came to know and admire Secretary of Defense William Cohen and Senator John McCain, "both of whom have an absolute core, an idea of themselves that involves more than looking around a room and seeing how other people feel about them, an idea about themselves that transcends whether they are returned to office or not." Former President George Bush, "a modest man and a real gentleman" taught him about the "incredible focus and competitive drive you need to be President. It’s almost like having an extra chromosome."

Says Patterson, "I came away with the sense that the good politicians are better than we know and better than we have a right to expect, given the corrosive nature of the fundraising system that exists, the demands of the office, the absolute loss of privacy, dignity, and even respect. I mean, we all know the system’s crummy in a lot of ways, and we all know that it tosses forward a lot of people we wouldn’t want to have to dinner, but what we don’t appreciate is how good the good ones really are."

Patterson also manages to seamlessly weave into his dramatic narrative some of the most complicated challenges of American national politics — issues of character, gun violence, abortion, race relations, and the changing role of the media.

In fact the novel, which was completed last October, seems drawn from this morning’s headlines, which comes as no surprise to Patterson. "I have a theory that if you get it right, sooner or later it’s going to happen. Since I completed the book, we’ve had the Lewinsky matter, the Birmingham abortion clinic bombing, numerous occurrences of violence with guns, questions of whether the Secret Service can be called upon to testify on what it knows about a candidate’s life. All of those issues are floating around in my book. I think they are pretty predictable ones. Many of them flow from the kind of meltdown of standards that has occurred when you have so many different media outlets — including such non-traditional ones as the tabloids and Internet gossip columns — competing to define what is and what is not news."

"One of the points I am trying to explore in this book is the basis on which a candidate’s private life is reported and the difference between fact and truth. There are a lot of excuses offered for printing things that are based on assumptions that are either unknowable or an enormous stretch. I’m not suggesting that there aren’t times when personal conduct isn’t a matter of public concern, but I wonder if we haven’t gone too far in looking into every corner of a candidate’s life. In any event, that’s one of the things I really wanted to do with this book — provoke some thought on these very questions."

Alden Mudge is a writer in Oakland, California.

Richard North Patterson has grown a bit discontented with the praise heaped upon his recent best-selling novels. "'Better than Grisham' has no more or less meaning than 'worse than Updike,'" he says wryly during a phone call to his summer home in Martha's Vineyard.

"I…

Memoir

Homer H. Hickam, Jr.

"I guess it’s fair to say that there were two distinct phases to my life in West Virginia," writes Homer H. Hickam, Jr., in Rocket Boys: A Memoir. "Everything that happened before October 5, 1957 and everything that happened afterward." As it happens, Mr. Hickam’s pivotal moment was shared by millions across the globe; the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik 1 marked the dawn of the Space Age and sent spasms of disbelief and national self-doubt rippling across the United States. The author’s father flatly dismissed the prospect of Russian technology sailing over Coalwood, West Virginia. "President Eisenhower would never allow such a thing," declared the senior Hickam.

The satellite cast a long shadow over the mining town where Homer and Elsie Hickam were raising Homer Jr. and older brother Jim — mostly in the form of a challenge to American youth to redouble its efforts in mathematics and the sciences. The darkness and tension of the Cold War lent an almost supernatural quality to the feats of rocketry and spaceflight. Four decades later, Hickam remembers, "They [the Soviets] were so walled off to us . . . when you don’t know someone and they’re a mystery to you, you tend sometimes to ascribe superhuman qualities to them."

That fall, the Hickams were getting almost all of their news from Life and Newsweek. The magazines arrived on Wednesdays — and persuaded all that the "Red Moon" was a reality. The author had just turned 14 and liked "Pepsi and Moon Pies." He also really liked biology classmate Dorothy Plunk.

A love of reading — particularly science fiction — and some success at writing short stories distinguished the boy, but those qualities were largely lost on a father obsessed with his responsibilities as Coalwood’s mine superintendent. The fact that "Sonny" seemed ill-suited for a life in and around mining created a painful gulf between the father and his namesake.

As Sputnik augured an era that would pass the mines by, it also inspired the youngest Hickam to begin experimenting with rocket propellants and designs according to models seen in Life. He banded together a group of close friends and formed the Big Creek Missile Agency. As time passed, they would become known, in town and throughout the county, simply as the "rocket boys."

After early mishaps (including the launch of his mother’s rose-garden fence), the rockets began to soar. With better propellants and more sophisticated designs, the Auk series (named after a bird that cannot fly) began reaching heights of a mile and beyond. Auk XXXI, the final flight, would reach an altitude of more than six miles. Its design was the product of painstaking empiricism coupled with hard-won skills in chemistry, calculus, and engineering. For their work, the miners’ sons had won the Gold and Silver medal at the National Science Fair. Then, in the spring of 1960, hundreds gathered at "Cape Coalwood" for the final launch. Among them, for the first and only time, was Homer Sr. He flipped the switch to fire the rocket, and in one shining moment the door was closed on the tensions and confusion which had surrounded the two. Sonny Hickam had finally been given permission to be something other than a mine engineer.

There was another fine moment in that spring of 1960. Junior Senator John Kennedy from Massachusetts came through the county en route to the Democratic nomination. Sonny made it his business to let the candidate know that the United States should go to the moon. Kennedy seemed to take the idea more seriously than the well-wishers gathered that day. It’s an astonishing image, and Hickam plays it beautifully, deadpanning, "well, I really think that Wernher von Braun had more to do with it than I did, but . . . "

Next came four years at Virginia Polytechnic Institute. After graduating in 1964, his rockets took him not to Cape Canaveral and NASA’s triumphs, but to the dark side of the 1960s: service in Vietnam. "I volunteered to go over there. I felt I should go, and I had an ulterior motive: I wanted the experience. I was young and invulnerable, and the war was something I wanted to taste — a crucible to pass through. Once there, it took me about 48 hours to figure out ‘I don’t really want to die over here.’ I didn’t see much that was worth my life or the lives of my men . . ." Hickam finished his tour with a Bronze Star and the Army Commendation Medal and remained with the service as an engineer until 1981.

More than two decades after Sputnik, Hickam was living his boyhood dream. At NASA Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, he began training astronauts for orbit. He worked on many Space Shuttle missions, including the delicate rescue of the Hubble Space Telescope, before leaving the agency earlier this year. The time has been spent establishing an aerospace consultancy and concentrating further on his writing.

"I don’t look for inspiration. If I did, I’d probably never sit down in front of the word processor. The first thing to do is to go ahead and write and not worry too much about the style and format or anything like that. Get the story down and then go back — what I really love is to go back and re-write. I’ve made the mistake of faxing stuff when it was hot off the typewriter, and I’ve always regretted that. Every time."

Well, perhaps not every time. Rocket Boys the book began in 1994 when Hickam received a desperate call from an editor at Smithsonian Air and Space. A few hours and 2,000 words later, Hickam had submitted what amounted to the germ of a book. The hitch: he had to track down 14-year-old Sonny Hickam, his compatriots, supporters — and his father. The intervening years had pulled survivors away as it banished them to the edges of his memory. "Finding the boy’s voice was the real challenge," he says. "It was only when I started writing the book that it really came back to me — how I felt in those days before that last launch at Cape Coalwood . . . I’d have to say that in the intervening years I did not have any issues with Dad, and I don’t think he had any with me. I was quite contented about our relationship. In trying to find the boy’s voice, I had to bring the issue back up and worry it over."

With Rocket Boys in print and a Universal Studios film due shortly, Life magazine has again been arriving at his house — this time for photo shoots.

Meanwhile, as NASA struggles to regain the momentum of its early years, Homer Hickam is "disappointed, but not surprised" by the agency’s focus on Earth orbit at the expense of the moon. "When I spoke to Kennedy, I thought we should go, and I still think we should go." The author has given himself a productive way to "worry it over." Next up: a "techno-thriller" called Back to the Moon.

Christopher Lawrence is a freelance writer based in New York City.

"I guess it's fair to say that there were two distinct phases to my life in West Virginia," writes Homer H. Hickam, Jr., in Rocket Boys: A Memoir. "Everything that happened before October 5, 1957 and everything that happened afterward." As it happens, Mr. Hickam's…

Business & Finance

Knight Kiplinger

For Knight Kiplinger, the future has arrived. Ask the renowned financial journalist what the next decade holds, and he speaks of paths that run deep into the 21st Century. These are routes he already walks. Indeed, so do we all. Yet, where most travelers watch their footing, Kiplinger leaps ahead, embracing a vision of our biological, social, economic, and technological destinations.

It is these destinations that Kiplinger writes about in his latest book, World Boom Ahead: Why Business and Consumers Will Prosper.

Consider the author's prognostications: the Asian economic crisis will spread, dampening growth worldwide before the Asian region surfaces as the star economy of the 21st Century. Genetic changes in human sperm and eggs will allow selected traits to be passed to succeeding generations. Geneticists will create super-producing livestock. Biotechnology will boost the world's food supply. People will live longer, be better educated, and enjoy a better standard of living.

Yet anticipating the future is tricky. Few understand that better than Kiplinger, who is editor of The Kiplinger Letter, the nation's leading business forecasting publication, and publisher of the widely read Kiplinger's Personal Finance magazine. Since many events World Boom predicts already show signs of emerging, Kiplinger gives recognition to the present day when he talks about the years ahead. He speaks, therefore, of the paths we all tread.

"My family and I have been visiting colleges at their web sites," said Kiplinger when asked about the shape of the next century, "My son is a high school senior. And we can take virtual walking tours of college campuses." Kiplinger also buys theater tickets for plays in London on the Internet. He buys books on-line. The Internet embedded in the flow of technology is one path to the future.

Other paths may seem ominous. Kiplinger tells, for example, how more sophisticated electronic sensors will be omnipresent. These tiny cameras and microphones will fit on a computer chip and will provide security in homes, offices and stores. But they also will raise new issues of privacy, especially when they are used to monitor and measure such things as worker performance. And our increased reliance on technology overall will render us more vulnerable to cybersabotage or cyberterrorism.

"These are the wild cards of the future that nobody can predict," said Kiplinger from his office on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C. "Evil people have more tools at their command today to work their will than ever before." Even so, World Boom offers a vision of the future in which the human condition in the main will be buoyed, not buried, by technology.

World Boom, on bookstore shelves starting this fall, is the latest Kiplinger map to the future. In the late 1980s, Kiplinger and his father, Austin Kiplinger, co-wrote America in the Global '90s. It accurately predicted a resurgent America in the 1990s.

"Typically near the end of the decade, we have a tradition of lengthening our telephoto lens and writing in greater depth about the big, long-term trends that will make world-changing differences in the lives of future Americans and future world citizens," said the author.

As in the earlier book, World Boom offers optimism in the face of a period of economic uncertainty. So its forecast of global growth in the next century looks contrarian, said Kiplinger.

"It will be an easy book to pick apart," he surmised. "But the forecaster's solace is that nobody can say your forecast is wrong right now. They can say, 'No, the outcome will be very different.' Or, 'He's all wet on this point. That's not going to happen.' I can say, 'Well, you might be right. Only time will tell.'"

Loretta Kalb is a writer in California.

For Knight Kiplinger, the future has arrived. Ask the renowned financial journalist what the next decade holds, and he speaks of paths that run deep into the 21st Century. These are routes he already walks. Indeed, so do we all. Yet, where most travelers…

Religion & Spirituality

Robert Benson

Being to the gift of each day: a talk with Robert Benson The shelves at Robert Benson’s home office weigh heavily from the many books of his favorite writers. My six wise guys, he calls them including Annie Dillard, Thomas Merton, Graham Greene writers he says have been given to me as teachers and guides. The reader indeed hears their echoes in Benson’s evocative prose; Benson’s first book, Between the Dreaming and the Coming True, drew favorable comparisons to the work of another of his mentors: Frederick Buechner. Now Benson’s newest, Living Prayer, continues his spiritual explorations, this time with a focus on prayer in daily life. Through images and personal stories he recounts his delighted discovery of the ancient Christian monastic tradition of using liturgical prayers throughout the day. Timothy Jones: What lies behind the title, Living Prayer? Robert Benson: My editors were the ones who came up with it. As they read bits and pieces of my story in the manuscript, they said, This is a book about living a life of prayer. I admit I am embarrassed a bit by the title. It implies that I’ve arrived in some way. I’m nowhere in the neighborhood of holy. But prayer is something pre-eminently to be lived.

TJ: What kind of reader will find this book helpful? RB: I wrote it keeping in mind people who have been in the church before, maybe all their life. But then they left. Or they’ve stayed but are dissatisfied.

They feel distant from the church because it didn’t speak to them in real ways about real things going on in their lives. They have had questions harder than somebody wanted to answer. Now they want to find or reclaim real ways to practice their faith. And real ways to pray.

TJ: You suggest in the book that nothing in our culture encourages us to marry our religion with the rest of our lives. RB: You don’t have a life and then somehow attach prayer to it. Prayer needs to sanctify all of life, not just pieces of it.

I grew up in an evangelical Protestant tradition. I learned one kind of prayer, extemporaneous prayer. That kind of prayer is fine as far as it goes, but until I was almost 40 years old that’s basically all I knew. Then I discovered the liturgy of the hours, sometimes called the daily office. Nobody had told me about this rich prayer tradition of the monks, about the regular prayers they have prayed for centuries. As I began to experience that kind of prayer, I connected at artistic, poetic, and spiritual levels. I said to myself, I have finally wandered my way into praying a kind of prayer that has lived in me all my life. Journaling, silence, and praying the Psalms and printed prayers are all part of this tradition. Suddenly I realized that there are all kinds of ways to articulate and live a wide-ranging life of prayer.

TJ: You write that today the primary rule of work is to cram as much into the hours of the days as you can. How is that a problem? RB: I worked for years in marketing and editorial departments in the music and book businesses. We all let work eat us alive. In our culture work takes all our energy. It’s the way we come to value ourselves and measure success.

Society overvalues work to the detriment of other values like prayer, rest, community.

TJ: But there’s another way. How would you describe it? RB: The life I live now as a writer is the life I always dreamed I would when I was 12 or 13. It took me about 30 years to get the courage and wisdom to actually try it. Not everybody should be a writer, of course. The world already has plenty of us! But whatever the profession, it seems to me that you can live in a way that lets who you are drive how you spend your time and energy, as opposed to what you do. TJ: How does prayer fit into that picture? RB: If all you do is work, then it is going to be hard to have any time to pray. Because most of prayer has to do with stillness and quiet and rest and waiting. It takes patience. Deep prayer is hard to do with a cell phone ringing in your ear. If you never stop, if you are never still, there’s a limit to what can happen when you pray. So take the phone off the hook. Or get up in the middle of the night. Or take a week of your vacation and spend it on a personal retreat in a monastery.

TJ: How can prayer, especially the monastic tradition of saying prayers at regular intervals, frame a day? RB: Those rhythms of prayer remind us the day is whole unto itself. When you pray the liturgy of the hours, you begin the morning by remembering God’s creation of the world, God’s saying, Let there be light. You remember that just as the world has been created, your day starts with your saying to God, in effect, Here I am. I’m sent off to work, to do what’s been set on my table.

Then in the middle of the day, according to the tradition, you stop, eat, rest, and pray. You acknowledge the gifts and graces God has given you and refocus yourself for the rest of the day. As you get to late afternoon, light begins to fade, and you allow yourself to pray, I didn’t get this or that done, or I can’t wait to get home to the kids. And the day fades and you say the vespers prayers. And the night comes and you ask Christ to be with you. Darkness comes, you put the house to bed, and you make your confession, and say, God is waking. Lord, guard my sleeping. And then what you do more than anything else is die. Because for all you know, for all the good you are for the next six or seven or eight hours, you’re dead. Until sometime in the darkness and void, there is light. And the day starts again.

This frame makes it possible to live fully in and for today. At the end of the day, I put all the day’s history aside, ready to start clean. Which means I can awaken with joy, not worrying about yesterday.

Timothy Jones is the author of The Art of Prayer (Ballantine) and 21 Days to a Better Quiet Time with God (Zondervan).

Being to the gift of each day: a talk with Robert Benson The shelves at Robert Benson's home office weigh heavily from the many books of his favorite writers. My six wise guys, he calls them including Annie Dillard, Thomas Merton, Graham Greene writers he…

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