Ian Schwartz

Christopher Moore’s re-imagining of the King Lear story is closer to Shakespeare on acid than Shakespeare in the Park. The comic novelist kicks tragedy to the nunnery in Fool, a Monty Python-esque tale of irreverence, profanity and gratuitous sex. Who knew the mad king and his three daughters were so much fun?

Moore’s story is told by Pocket, the Fool. Lear’s favorite jester, Pocket is horrified when the king disowns his youngest daughter, Cordelia, and divides his kingdom between his two older daughters, the sadistic Regan and viperish Goneril. Since Cordelia is Pocket’s favorite—and the only daughter the Fool has not shagged—he hatches a plan replete with treachery, double crosses and an invasion by the French army to get Cordelia back at court where she belongs. Aligned against Pocket are the sisters, who mistrust him almost as much as they enjoy dragging him to their royal beds; Edmund, the dastardly illegitimate son of the Earl of Gloucester; and the combined forces of two armies.

Pocket’s allies are an old, discredited knight and his apprentice fool, Drool. Smart as his name implies, Drool nevertheless owns the uncanny ability to repeat conversations word-for-word in the exact voices of the original speakers. Also on Pocket’s side—possibly—are a comely ghost, who is not above pinning down the generously endowed Drool for a spot of fun, and a trio of witches.

Moore creates a fun voice in Pocket, who lives by his wits and quick tongue in a land where only strength and royal birth are important. Pocket carries a tiny image of himself on a stick called Jones, used as a ventriloquist’s dummy to utter jibes that may otherwise beget a beheading. The reader gets the impression that Moore uses Pocket the same way as he both lampoons and pays homage to Shakespeare, liberally sprinkling quotes from the Bard’s works throughout. Of course, not all of the lines are Shakespeare’s. When the grizzled old king asks Pocket if he is dead—Moore’s characters often voice confusion in that regard—the jester answers in the negative, saying, “but ye were close enough to lick death’s salty taint.”

Does the Royal Shakespeare Company issue fatwas?

Ian Schwartz writes from San Diego, California.

Families, as anyone who has ever had one knows, are never perfect. But thankfully, they are also rarely such complete and utter disasters as the one created in Mark Haddon's novel, A Spot of Bother.

George Hall is the 61-year-old patriarch of a quartet dysfunctional enough to put a psychologist's kids through college. His daughter is a single mom trying to decide whether to marry a man everyone dislikes, possibly including herself. His son is resentfully gay, convinced his father despises him, and unable to commit to the man he loves. George's wife is having an affair with his former co-worker.

This obviously is not the retirement George had envisioned when he quit work and began the manly project of building a shed in his garden. Is it any wonder that he is going quietly but unmistakably insane? Aided by a mysterious growth on his hip—which in one of the more distressing scenes of a strangely disturbing book, prompts George to try his hand at surgery—and catching his wife in flagrante delicto with her paramour, George's normally placid mind wanders to darker and darker places. As they plan for a wedding that may or may not take place, the family rallies, in their own inimitable way, around their failing father/husband, whose depression at times leaves him nearly catatonic.

The trials and terrors of late middle age have been put on paper by some of our best fiction writers, most notably of late by talents like Richard Russo and Paul Auster. Haddon, who captured attention with his wonderfully imaginative novel, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, is no stranger to a creative challenge.

Haddon's effort is ambitious—the novel is told from the point of view of all four family members—which is perhaps why it meets with limited success. It doesn't quite work as a comic novel; frankly, the Halls are just too troubled to be very funny. But it paints a vivid, brilliant tableau of a family striving to come to grips with their mediocrity and each other.

Ian Schwartz writes from New York City.

Considering these permissive times, it may be difficult to understand that not so long ago, sex not only didn't saturate nearly everything we watched and read, but was a taboo subject in general. In The Inner Circle, his charmingly prurient look at American sex, best-selling author T.C. Boyle whose last book, Drop City, was a finalist for the National Book Award takes us back to an era when we were quicker to conquer Nazi evil than we were to conquer our own inherent prudishness.

It is 1940 when John Milk, a diffident Midwestern college student, is first exposed to Dr. Alfred Kinsey. While the astute Milk may have guessed that the magnetic professor of the university's most talked-about course, Marriage and Family, would become a sexual revolutionary, he never would have imagined such a fate for his more prosaic self.

But it doesn't take long before Milk is much more than Kinsey's student. He soon becomes Kinsey's first and most loyal factotum in the professor's quest to publish his now famous books on male and female sexuality. The two, who develop a relationship almost like father and son, travel the country grilling everyone from sexual adventurers to repressed housewives about their bedroom habits. They also take time to indulge in sex with each other. The road, after all, can be a lonely place.

Opposition to Kinsey's project abounds, but the central conflict is between Kinsey and Milk's beautiful and independent-minded wife, Iris. Resentful of the spell that Prok, as those close to Kinsey call him, has cast over her husband, Iris alternately tolerates Milk's job and tries to woo her husband away from his work. Kinsey, who is by turn satyr, workaholic, generous mentor and sullen child, recognizes Iris as a threat to his project and tries hard to reel her into his inner circle, but without success.

Even today, Kinsey's unorthodox research project continues to inspire controversy. Director Bill Condon's Kinsey, a biopic scheduled for release this fall and starring Liam Neeson and Laura Linney, has already drawn fire from critics concerned that it will glorify a man whose pursuit of knowledge led him onto some shaky moral ground. Kinsey's 1948 interview with an admitted pedophile which provided information on children's sexuality is often cited as an example of this. Boyle doesn't ignore this aspect of Kinsey's personality. In fact, he fictionalizes this event in a fascinating scene in <B>The Inner Circle</B>, using it to illustrate how single-minded the doctor and his team were in their research. Kinsey stubbornly clung to the tenets of the project: all results were to be confidential, and no researcher was to react negatively to any information provided, no matter how bizarre.

In recreating the larger-than-life Kinsey, Boyle has authored one of the most memorable characters in recent literature. Milk, often a milquetoast when backbone is called for, is his perfect foil, young and as malleable as wet clay. The Inner Circle is more than a fictionalized account of Kinsey's efforts to bring his life's work to fruition. It is paradoxically a celebration of free love and strong relationships as well as a paean to men, women and their sexuality. This important slice of Americana leaps to life, returning us to an era when sex was more than just a click away, and all the more titillating for it.

Ian Schwartz writes from New York City.