Rebecca Shapiro

An omega point, as defined by philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, is the supreme point of complexity and consciousness to which the universe is always striving. It is curious, then, that the postmodernist master Don DeLillo chooses this as the title of his very succinct latest work, clocking in at only 128 pages and seemingly, at first glance, less sweeping in scope than his previous novels. But, as one might expect from DeLillo, this sparse, beautifully crafted modern fable packs a solid punch.

Bookended by haunting scenes of a museum exhibit that has stretched Hitchcock’s Psycho to a full 24 hours,the novel focuses on Richard Elster, a curmudgeonly former war strategist who has retreated to a remote California desert. He is joined by Jim Finley, a young filmmaker escaping his own demons back East, who is intent on making a bare-bones, one-take documentary of Elster. As the visit stretches on, the pair engages in typical DeLillo-esque intellectual banter—tackling death, war, art, etc. Soon, Elster’s grown daughter Jessie shows up, exiled from New York in the hopes that she’ll escape an unwelcome suitor, and the trio forms an awkward but strangely functional family, sharing space, omelet dinners and the strange, beautiful desert that surrounds them. This is, of course, the calm before the storm.

DeLillo’s latest novel is also his most human—his characters are strikingly emotional, particularly in times of profound stress. When tragedy strikes Elster’s family, he—the scholar—crumbles, making almost obsolete the preceding intellectualizing. It is fitting, then, that DeLillo has inverted Teilhard de Chardin’s term for his title. Elster’s desert compound is perhaps the antithesis of the most complex point of consciousness to which the modern world strives, but within it lies something deeper and all the more harrowing.

Rebecca Shapiro is an assistant editor at the Random House Publishing Group.

Fiction, World Fiction

Fiction World Fiction

Separating truth from fiction

Review by Rebecca Shapiro

by Rebecca Shapiro

J.M. Coetzee’s magnificent Summertime is a work of fiction. Never, though, has a genre seemed more ambiguous, more masterfully and provocatively tampered with than in this incredible novel.

A biographer is writing about a novelist named John Coetzee in Summertime, interviewing five people who touched Coetzee’s life as a young man living in Cape Town. With the biographer’s—and of course Coetzee’s—coaxing, characters that might otherwise feel peripheral come alive. A cousin speaks about a night she spent stranded with him, a Brazilian ballet dancer muses on his unreturned love letters and a married lover recalls with mild indifference the nights that they spent together. Remarkably, and seemingly intentionally, the interviewees all become more interesting as characters than Coetzee himself.

The portrait of Coetzee is often unflattering—he appears distant, emotionally incapable and painfully socially awkward. In this sense, the book feels tremendously honest, an almost cathartic exercise in which the author has striven toward extreme self-evaluation. The problem with this reading, though, is the presupposition of truth, which Coetzee has robbed from his reader. As one of his interview subjects tells his biographer, “It would be very, very naive to conclude that because the theme was present in his writing it had to be present in his life.”

It is ruthlessly tempting, of course, to try to separate fact from fiction, and Coetzee seems almost to be taunting his readers with clues, particularly in relation to the indisputable facts of his publishing history—indicating, for example, that the dancer was the inspiration behind his much lauded novel Foe. But the frustration that comes with the reading experience is what, in turn, makes it so genius. Truth, Coetzee seems to argue, is irrelevant, and the reader’s reliance on it is dangerous.

Rebecca Shapiro is an assistant editor at the Random House Publishing Group.

J.M. Coetzee’s magnificent Summertime is a work of fiction. Never, though, has a genre seemed more ambiguous, more masterfully and provocatively tampered with than in this incredible novel.

A biographer is writing about a novelist named John Coetzee in Summertime, interviewing five people who touched Coetzee’s life…

Fiction

Fiction

The painful echoes of a sister’s death

Review by Rebecca Shapiro

by Rebecca Shapiro

Thirteen-year-old Mathilda Savitch doesn’t see the world like most people. Something inside of her wants to be bad—and not just breaking the supper dishes on purpose bad, but really core-shakingly awful. Her sister Helene has been dead for a year, and Mathilda’s parents are spiraling into complete dysfunction—her mother has become a full-blown alcoholic, which overwhelms her father to the point that neither is paying much attention to Mathilda at all.

Mathilda, too, is reeling with grief in her own way, becoming obsessed with the circumstances of her sister’s death. She roots through Helene’s perfectly preserved room and realizes that she can use the relics of her sister’s old life to both haunt her parents and dig deeper into the person Helene was and how she came to die.

Though the circumstances surrounding Mathilda’s family are unthinkable, they are not the only formidable forces in her young life. There has recently been a new wave of terror attacks, which Lodato implies are the first major ones since September 11. Mathilda’s cool indifference and her bizarre way of thinking about the world are particularly fascinating in the face of what has become a crisis to everyone else.

Mathilda isn’t just a monster, though—there are moments of deep compassion that not only make her a sympathetic narrator, but also one of the most interesting new voices in fiction. Lodato’s absolutely incredible rendering of her narration, ripe with as much humor as darkness, is what makes this masterful novel shine so brightly. If The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time had an evil twin, it would be Mathilda Savitch.

Rebecca Shapiro is an Assistant Editor at the Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc..

Fiction, World Fiction

Fiction World Fiction

Acclaimed memoirist’s fiction debut soars

Review by Rebecca Shapiro

by Rebecca Shapiro

Sisters Van and Linny Luong, born in America to Vietnamese refugees, have never seen eye to eye. Sensible Van, in her khakis and pageboy haircut, has a law degree, a promising career, a mortgage and a perfect Asian husband. And wild Linny, who could never even finish community college, is spinning her wheels at a “Do It Yourself” catering company in Chicago and sleeping with a married client.

At home in Michigan, their widowed father is marking some milestones of his own—throwing a party to celebrate his new U.S. citizenship and auditioning for a reality show for aspiring inventors (for years, his passion has been devices designed to help the short statured, such as a claw grabber called the “Luong Arm” and a periscope called the “Luong Eye”). An eccentric man, he seems to have given more attention to his harebrained ideas and his gaggle of friends than he has to his family, and both sisters are ambivalent about his achievements.

Regardless, the sisters travel home for the events, and there they must confront some of the forces that shaped them into the young women they became. Linny wonders if her disastrous love life was a result of her suspicions that her father was having an affair of his own, and Van realizes that all of her years of hiding behind school have left her unprepared to deal with the fact that her perfect marriage may be anything but. As Linny’s affair and Van’s marriage both deteriorate, they find in each other a confidante that they never knew they had.

Nguyen made a splash with her memoir, Stealing Buddha’s Dinner, and this, her first novel, has been much anticipated—with good reason. In this relatively simple story, she brings in many of the universal challenges facing second-generation immigrants, not avoiding, but almost interrogating the clichés that plague so many similar stories. Her characters are stubborn, selfish and often paralyzed with inaction, but also warm, dutiful and loving, and this careful balance makes them incredibly real and sympathetic. But the real star is the prose itself, which is succinct, efficient and peppered with perfectly chosen details that make each scene come alive.

Rebecca Shapiro is an editor and fellow short girl who writes from Brooklyn, New York.

Fiction

Fiction

Auster’s most impressive work yet

Review by Rebecca Shapiro

by Rebecca Shapiro

If anyone could be considered an heir to Vladimir Nabokov’s legendary narrative trickery, it would be Paul Auster—a master of literary illusion whose novels have long been lauded for their intricate puzzles and bold subversion of traditional narrative structure. In recent years, though, Auster has used a lighter hand, and novels like The Brooklyn Follies suggested that he might be exchanging his signature postmodernism for more character-driven, even sentimental fiction. With his 15th novel, Auster has somehow balanced the two, creating in his winding maze of literary questions a searing, emotional bildungsroman.

Invisible opens in 1967 when Adam Walker, a bored Columbia undergraduate, is seduced, both literally and figuratively, by a charismatic Parisian couple he meets at a party—a visiting professor and his sad, sexy girlfriend. The professor makes Adam an incredible offer—financial backing for his own literary magazine. But Adam learns quickly that things that seem too good to be true are often just that. Forty years later, he contacts a former classmate, now a book editor, for help in telling his story—a life-changing incident, its aftermath and how it shaped his troubled life.

Perhaps his best trick is one of the oldest in the book—Auster alternates between narrative voices, telling the first section in the first person, the second in the second person and the third in the third person. With anyone else at the helm, this could feel like an MFA exercise gone awry. But Auster thoroughly engages with each voice and weaves them together so seamlessly that it becomes the most effective interrogation of narrative reliability in recent memory. At the end of the novel, it is literally impossible to understand, in the story’s many layers, the difference between fact and fiction.

With an overwhelming, often totally shocking story, Auster brings in the most universal, most difficult themes—guilt, love, anger, family and friendship, to name just a few. Powerful not only in form but also in feeling, Invisible is truly a masterpiece—Auster’s best, most complete effort in years.

Rebecca Shapiro writes from Brooklyn, New York.

Fiction

Fiction

The Lady Matador’s Hotel

Review by Rebecca Shapiro

by Rebecca Shapiro

Cristina García, the much-lauded author of Dreaming in Cuban, has been most frequently compared to Gabriel García Márquez and Isabel Allende. There are hints of both authors in her latest novel, but The Lady Matador’s Hotel gives a more substantial nod to Bel Canto than anything else. Like Ann Patchett’s modern masterpiece, The Lady Matador’s Hotel watches a diverse group of international figures interact in the wake of political turmoil.

The setting this time is Central America, and the heroine is not an opera singer but, most unusually, a female matador in town for a much-hyped fight. Suki Palacios—a half-Mexican, half-Japanese Californian who abandoned her medical studies to follow in the footsteps of her bullfighting grandfather—is the compelling focal point around whom García builds an intriguing cast of characters, all of whom are either staying at, employed by or relevant to the hotel where Suki is a guest. A Korean businessman contemplates suicide in the honeymoon suite where he is staying with his pregnant mistress; a troubled American couple tries to bond with their newly adopted daughter; a German lawyer with a complicated agenda facilitates the adoption; and an arrogant army colonel tries to pursue Suki while a waitress, formerly a guerrilla, plots her revenge against him. Tension at the hotel escalates in the wake of Suki’s fight as the characters become more and more entwined, showcasing the global reaches of conflict in this unnamed but very real place.

While García’s novel lacks the absolute urgency of Patchett’s, she writes with the same clear, lyrical prose that has earned her earlier novels so much praise. With a particular flair for detail, she creates distinct characters with endearing quirks that make this imaginative novel come vividly to life.