Joanne Collings

It is easy for a life to become unblessed. Thus begins Dana Spiotta's complex second novel as young Mary Whittaker goes underground in 1972, after a Vietnam War protest turns fatal. Mary is leaving behind not only her lover, Bobby DeSoto, who has gone separately underground, and her family, but her very self. She's been coached on how to create a new identity if the need arises (Eat the Document could be a textbook on this process) and, even more important, how to become that person.

Spiotta moves her narrative back and forth in time and among several characters in addition to Mary: Bobby, who has become Nash, and manages an alternative bookstore where he is a daily witness to how the activists of his generation have changed; Henry, who owns the bookstore and who has the dreams of a Vietnam War vet although he was actually 4-F; Miranda, who is looking to shake the suburbs off her forever, and with whom Nash is smitten; and Jason, Mary's son, a 15-year-old obsessed with the music of his mother's youth, primarily the Beach Boys. Spiotta explores what happens to people forced to live false lives that gradually become their real ones and investigates the vast differences between the protesters of the '60s and '70s and the activists of the late 20th century. It's a world of sad and savage ironies: the same company that manufactured the dioxin that poisoned Vietnam vets now makes money from the drugs needed to manage their symptoms; a website hacker is offered a job by one of the corporations whose website he sabotaged and takes it; various alternative communities, including one Mary once spent time in, are turned into centers for franchising and profit. Although the novel's structure gives it an inevitably fragmented feeling, Eat the Document (the title comes from a documentary about Dylan's 1966 tour) is a powerful and disturbing book.

Joanne Collings writes from Washington, D.C.

Inspirational Fiction

Inspirational Fiction

Father Tim moves on

Review by Joanne Collings

by Joanne Collings

Preparing to become a vicar to a rural church closed for nearly 40 years, Father Timothy Kavanagh considers the challenges ahead: "He would still wear his collar and vestments; he would still celebrate the liturgy and perform all the other offices of a priest. So indeed, hardly anything would change." Then he thinks, "And so what if things did change." Father Tim could easily be speaking to Jan Karon's enormous readership: things will indeed change this is the last Mitford novel.

Karon has been preparing us for this farewell for some time. She began weaning readers from the little North Carolina town with 2000's A New Song, when Father Tim and his writer-artist wife Cynthia moved to Whitecap Island, where he served as interim priest for a year. Much of Light from Heaven takes place outside of Mitford as well, either on Meadowgate Farm, where the couple are staying for a year, or in the new church and parish of Holy Trinity, which includes a wide range of vivid characters. There's loquacious five-year-old Sissie; Jubal Adderholt and his squirrel-tail decorated home; Clarence, a gifted (and deaf) woodworker; and his mother Agnes, an Episcopal deacon. Still, Mitford is not far away, and Father Tim takes us on regular trips there.

Father Tim also struggles with the question of when to tell Dooley about his inheritance from Miss Sadie, looks for some money Louella has just remembered that Miss Sadie hid in a car, and engages in e-mail correspondence with former secretary Emma about her forthcoming trip to England. We meet the numerous and multitalented Flower Girls; there's a poacher on the farm. Two deaths occur in Mitford (one of which inspires the townspeople to take on an engaging new habit), as well as a wedding. Life and change go on.

So where do we go from here? Wherever Jan Karon takes us next, we can be sure it will be worth the trip . . . and the wait.

Joanne Collings writes from Washington, D.C.

Fiction

Fiction

Ellis’ American breakdown

Review by Joanne Collings

by Joanne Collings

Reading Lunar Park, Bret Easton Ellis' new novel about a writer named Bret Easton Ellis, is like nothing so much as watching a terrible accident occurring in slow-motion and reflected in a series of funhouse mirrors. You are never quite sure where reality is located if there is any reality or how to process what you are reading.

Fans of Ellis' earlier novels may be the best prepared for this book, although Ellis carefully recaps his biography, as lived by his alter ego, in the first chapter. If you haven't read his work, resist the temptation to Google him. Delineating and then blurring the lines between the truth and fiction is part of Ellis' game here. Just give yourself over to the book and let it cast its very real spell.

The plot is highly complicated and the ground constantly shifts beneath the reader's feet. Lunar Park effortlessly morphs from feeling like a Henry James ghost story into a John Updike skewering of the suburbs into the paralytic state of Anne Rivers Siddons' The House Next Door, with splashes of post 9/11 horrors reported in the most Thomas Harris-like offhand fashion. Ellis gives us an America where first-graders are assigned The Lord of the Flies, where parents want a return on their investment in their medicated, hyper-allergenic, superficially pampered children, and where acts of terrorism have become a part of daily life. It's not hard to see why Ellis the protagonist is having such a hard time making good on his promise to give up his drinking and drugging ways, especially when the house and some of its inhabitants appear to turn on him, and his narrow life outside it begins to crumble.

Lunar Park is well crafted and often very frightening, with the worst horrors not coming from terrorists or who/what is haunting Ellis and his house, but from what American life has become for one American man.

Fiction

Fiction

Booker winner mines the Thatcher years

Review by Joanne Collings

by Joanne Collings

For more than a decade, the Thatcher years have been a touchstone for British novelists of all genres. The Line of Beauty, winner of the Man Booker Prize and set between the two general elections that kept Thatcher in office, is literary fiction of the best sort: beautifully written, perfectly plotted and full of meaningful allusions.

Nick Guest has come to London to live with the family of his Oxford friend, Toby Fedden, son of a Tory recently elected to Parliament from Nick's home constituency. Unbeknownst to Toby, who has never really understood why he and Nick were friends, "but had amiably accepted the evidence that they were," Nick has recently accepted his sexual identity and is eagerly joining the gay world of 1983 before both AIDS and general acceptance. Nick is a graduate student whose hero is Henry James, with whom he shares the ability to "stand a great deal of gilt."

Nick Guest is perfectly named: he is a perpetual visitor, first in the Fedden household; then in a sex-in-the-bushes relationship with his black, older lover, whom he meets through an ad; and finally, as the novel progresses to 1986 and 1987 when AIDS has surfaced and begun to kill, as the employee and lover of the beautiful, wealthy Lebanese Wani, another Oxford friend, whose fiancee is paid an allowance by his mother to remain his fiancee.

Like most of James' protagonists, Nick is not entirely likeable or sympathetic: he finds the "etiquette" of preparing a line of cocaine as satisfyingly beautiful a ritual as James does that of taking afternoon tea in The Portrait of a Lady. Nick is not unlike Isabel Archer, the heroine of that James novel, in that circumstances ultimately put him in the position of victim, but Nick whose sexual preference has made him vulnerable, a situation which could easily have been caused by race, gender or class in another time never takes that convenient out.

Hollinghurst writes with the precision and desire for psychological clarity of a modern James, and the novel, despite its serious concerns, is often drolly funny. Nick would be happy to know that the spirit of The Master lives on.

Joanne Collings reviews from Washington, D.C.