Hooking Up

It is odd that the title essay in this collection by Tom Wolfe, which describes America at the turn of the millennium, seems musty and stale only a dozen years after publication, while Nineteen Nineteen by John Dos Passos (recently re-read) still comes off fresh as morning. The easy explanation is that Dos Passos is a far superior writer. Where Dos Passos collects facts and synthesizes, Wolfe collects facts and shows them off. The best things in this collection are two essays: on the microchip inventors, and on the "three stooges" who attacked Wolfe's A Man in Full.

Me and Kaminski

A new author to watch: Daniel Kehlmann, whose novel I picked up on a hunch at Dollar Tree. He's not as interesting as Bernhard and not as deep as Frisch, but this breezy book about a bumbling journalist, an elderly artist, and their picaresque adventures is sharp and at times very funny. His big seller, Measuring the World, looks good and is on my list.

The Song of Roland

Action, treachery, bravery, and greed are the elements of a ripping yarn, and the author whose name is lost to history cooked all of these into The Song of Roland, an account of the betrayal of Charlemagne's army and the valiant death in battle at the hands of the Saracens of his beloved Roland. The "clash of civilizations," much threatened today, comes to life in eighth century France and Spain. To keep the excitement going, there are popping eyeballs, spilled brains, and "pagans" being split in half vertically by jewel-encrusted swords.

Remembering Laughter

Aside from hearing of the title Angle of Repose, my knowledge of Wallace Stegner was null before picking up this short novel from 1938, his first. Featuring hidden family pain and written in clean, evocative prose, the story succeeds and will, I suspect, linger in the memory.

Rabbit, Run

On page 7 of this novel, John Updike uses the adjective "crisscrossing." On page 14, he uses it again. I think it was too soon, but maybe it was intentional. I have a hard time believing it was laziness. Updike can be annoying in the way he pumps out a gusher of adjectives, and more than once I found his metaphors strained, or odd. But then he comes out with a pure, beautiful sentence like this one on page 81: "In all the green world nothing feels as good as a woman's good nature." And far from being annoyed at the use of the same adjective -- twice in the space of five words, no less -- you are stunned.

Nineteen Nineteen

The second volume of John Dos Passos's U.S.A. trilogy immerses the reader in the non-military world of the Great War era. The conflict intrudes on the fictional characters in ways that manage to be both realistic and intensified, while some of the biographies, Paxton Hibben's for example, rescue important figures from obscurity. If there was such a thing as a time machine with an all-seeing intelligence to provide commentary, it could not do much better than Nineteen Nineteen.

Winesburg, Ohio

Sherwood Anderson's tales of hopes, desires, and agonies in Middle America retain their power nearly a century after they marked out a new territory in the national literature. If, as Isaac Bashevis Singer wrote, writers obtain true originality through extraordinary sincerity, "by daring to give everything of themselves," then Anderson qualifies as an original.

Zona

Zona is Geoff Dyer's appreciation of the Andrei Tarkovsky film Stalker. As in his other nonfiction books, Dyer illuminates the subject by making connections between it and passingly related works or experiences. An account of the World Trade Center after the terrorist attacks, for example, also describes a leaky, ominous tunnel in the 1979 film: "The darkness grew loud with the sound of falling water, which turned out to be bands of mysterious subterranean rain ... falling from the confusion of ruin overhead." To hear Dyer tell it, cinema was invented to allow this film to be made. But if his claims stretch too far, or he takes a personal detour that seems odd, most readers will not mind. Such is the latitude given a great stylist.

The 42nd Parallel

In an introductory note to the 1937 Modern Library edition of this novel, John Dos Passos explains that the content of a novel determines its form. The content of U.S.A., of which The 42nd Parallel is the first book, is the whole of America in the first third of the 20th century; the form is intersecting personal narratives threaded with news clippings, bits of songs, mini-biographies of important figures, and stream-of-consciousness Camera Eye sections following the author's own experiences. The techniques have lost none of their power in depicting small people struggling against large powers. The much-bruited Great American Novel was written between 1930 and 1936 in three volumes: It is called U.S.A.

Anyone Here Been Raped and Speaks English?

Edward Behr sets up his enormously entertaining and perceptive account of his years as a foreign correspondent with two foundational statements: laughter is never gratuitous, and the best reporters' stories are told in barrooms, not in print. From dinner with Mao to pissing next to Churchill, Behr was seemingly everywhere during a career that began shortly after World War II. The Algerian war, Vietnam, the partition of India and much more besides are covered with a rich store of anecdotes. (The book's title, which was changed for an American edition against the author's wishes, refers to a particularly crass British reporter's question shouted at refugees leaving a plane in Congo.)