The PEN / O. Henry Prize Stories 2011

This short story collection is surprisingly political.  I only sampled a few of the stories, and aside from one top pick, "Your Fate Hurtles Down at You" by Jim Shepard, they all had a political edge to them.  All in all, I liked them for being "fierce" stories, as editor Laura Furman writes in her introduction to the collection, but after a while it became obvious that the panel that picked the stories had a bit of an axe to grind.  They chose stories with liberal themes or preoccupations -- one story, for example, imagined a world after global warming in which food was scarce in Britain, complete with an attempted rape and many other unexpected horrors in a world with few resources; another imagined a horror of horrors in Budapest at the end of World War II.  Rape or the threat of rape seemed to hang over many stories.  One story I skipped was entitled "Melinda" -- just from the title, I feared that it would be about rape, but from the description at the back of the book it seems to be about a meth addict.  I'm not sure I need to be exposed to this kind of fiction, no matter how adult I am or sophisticated as a reader.  The most important short stories are about people who break rules.  I understand that.  I just don't see the need to be badgered in fiction.  The story I liked the best was the aforementioned "Your Fate Hurtles Down at You," which studiously avoids the politics of the Alps in the 1930s (not very pretty politics, I assure you).  It is a fierce story without being polemical or obvious.  It continually surprises with subtlety and tension in a set of family dynamics that matches the tension in the snow before an avalanche.  The extended metaphor of the avalanche dominates the story, and it makes for compelling reading.  I am glad I bought the book just for that story, but I can't say I recommend the whole collection.

People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks

This novel traces the roots of a remarkable book, the Sarajevo Haggadah, through several hundred years of history.  More importantly, it brings the creators of the book to novelistic life through the imagination of the author.  It also tells a taut, dramatic story about the restoration of the book in the modern era, centering around a young fictional Australian expert named Hanna Heath.  Hanna's story could stand alone as a novel all its own, and it provides quite a bit of drama in the end parts of the novel.  It also allows us to see the survival of the book through to contemporary times, and that it is always more complicated than we would expect for something like the Haggadah to survive.  The "people of the book" are Christian, Muslim, and Jewish, and the survival of the Sarajevo Haggadah tells of the complex interplay between these faiths.  First of all, the book is Jewish, but it is illustrated in a style influenced by Christian prayer books, or books of hours.  It ended up in the hands of Muslim caretakers, and the novel ultimately traces the art back to a Muslim source, although that supposition is not proven as it would be in a non-fiction work. The creators and preservers of the book come into the book through artifacts that are found in the binding or on the pages when Hanna restores the book -- she finds a butterfly wing, for example, that leads into a story of survival during the Nazi era. 

Decision Points by George W. Bush

The 43rd US President's memoir conveys quite dramatically some key decisions of his time in office.  The transformation of the Presidency from peacetime to what the former President calls a "war footing" is striking.  The first few chapters focus on Pres. George W. Bush's family life, the decision to run for President, and stem cell research.  Then, he describes learning of the attacks on September 11 while attempting to promote testing in public schools, and the book shifts into a different gear. The former President attempts to describe the way September 11 forced him to confront some stark realities, in a chapter entitled, "A Day of Fire," but it skirts some other important issues.  The use of what Pres. Bush terms "enhanced interrogation techniques" and others have called torture gets some explanation, but Abu Ghraib and the abuses there get about one sentence -- an off-hand reference when someone says Guantanamo is "no Abu Ghraib."

Deal Breaker by Harlan Coben

I found this book at the local bookstore -- they were featuring the author at one of the front displays.  It is the first novel in a crime series that centers around sports, specifically through the detective/investigator in the case, sports agent Myron Bolitar.  The novel made me want to keep reading, and really was a page-turner in the best sense of the word.  The plot centers around the disappearance of a young woman from a college campus -- she was the cheerleader dating the star quarterback, who happens to be Myron Bolitar's first big client as a sports agent.  Myron is funny and sarcastic in the first scene, in which he negotiates with the team's owner over the quarterback's contract.  This disarming humor throughout the book helps keep readers on Myron's side, even as he and his sidekick/enforcer, Win, descend into some dirty business and commit acts that could be called morally questionable.  The morality level isn't too heavy in this one, though -- it's clear there are good guys and bad guys, and the scenes showing prostitution and drug dealing go out of their way to make those crimes seem completely unappealing.  The author does the standard crime novel trick of releasing just enough information to leave readers guessing, right until the very end.  The twist at the end was a surprise, at least to me, although I probably should have seen it coming.  I am not very good at guessing these things, but I had some hunches that turned out to be right.  Overall, this novel is a very entertaining read.  I noticed a few details from the early 90s that stick out now as outdated, but the novel holds up pretty well with all the changes we've been through since then.

Anne Frank: The book, the life, the afterlife by Francine Prose

This interesting book re-introduces Anne Frank as an intelligent, observant writer and her diary as a work of art.  The author divides her book into three sections -- the life, the book, and the afterlife -- and devotes a final section to teaching the diary in classrooms and college.  The book made me want to attempt to tackle the diary in the classroom again -- the closest I got was showing a film called Anne Frank Remembered (a more complete version of her story than other documentaries) as part of a non-fiction unit.  It is a complex work, though, and putting it in historical context is difficult.  Reading the diary as a whole is something I've never really done -- I've been informed mostly by a dramatic version I saw in high school and excerpts from various textbooks and study books, and I agree with the author of this book that the play oversimplifies the realities of Anne's life and the reasons she was in hiding.  I may go back to the original diary and read it if I get a chance now.  Reading this book inspires a healthy respect for Anne Frank as an author with a self-conscious desire to be published.  A key revelation in the book is that Anne Frank herself went back and revised her diary, intending it to be published at some point.  She recognized that, even if she were "an oridinary girl" in extraordinary circumstances, her story has relevance beyond the walls of her "secret annex."  Her observations of herself and her companions in the annex make for vivid stories, and they symbolize what was lost in the Holocaust in very personal terms.  But beyond that, the work of her diary is to record the humanity and civility of a group of people, the vast majority of whom did not survive the Holocaust, and to document in terms of daily life the privations they endured.  She also explores herself and wishes for things to be different than they are, as most adolescents do, but in a specific context that crystallizes her wishes in very concrete ways.  The fact that her final entry, in which she wonders what she would be like if there were no one else in the world, is her final entry, reminds us that her story ended not in the way she wished but in Bergen-Belsen, a horror of horrors.  It is not enough to wonder what kind of writer Anne Frank might have been had she lived; rather, we have to wonder at the kind of writer she already was, and at the inhuman extermination edicts that placed her in such difficult conditions.  Anne Frank is not an easily reduced author.  She is not the poster-child for optimism that is represented in the play and film versions of her diary, nor is she a saint or a sex-obsessed teenager, as some have made her out to be.  Instead, she is a human being, a Jew, an author who lives on in her work.  That message came through in clear, direct language in Prose's book, and I am grateful for the portrait she offers of Anne Frank, the author.

At Canaan's Edge by Taylor Branch

This third book in the monumental series depicting "America in the King years" offers an amazing look into the struggles and real-life complexities of Martin Luther King, Jr's life.  The book does not shy away from awkward facts like the internal struggles against King's Poor People's Campaign in 1967-1968, or his "casual affairs" with women who were not his wife, but it does portray the civil rights struggle in such vivid detail as to give it new life.  The author does downplay those affairs a little bit, sometimes failing to name the woman with whom King was having the affair.  The overall effect of the book is to bring King into focus as a central figure in American history, who has failings like many others but whose  doctrine of non-violent protest of injustice brought about sweeping change in the country.  The villain of the story is definitely J. Edgar Hoover, who actively opposes King's campaigns, planting bugs and wiretaps to record his operations and glean embarrassing details, and often plants stories in the press in an attempt to discredit King.  The book does venture into some explanation for the reasons why civil rights became such a struggle, but it mostly sticks to the narrative, which is compelling in various ways.  First, there are the stories of pioneers who face hardship and suffer martyrdom in rural counties in Alabama in an effort to win voting rights.  Second, the dramatic march for voting rights from Selma to Montgomery in 1965 is portrayed in vivid detail as the "last revolution" of the civil rights movement.  King's oration upon finally arriving at Montgomery is particularly well described.  Finally, there is the Vietnam War, which enters the story through the Johnson White House.  Apparently, the White House was full of gloomy predictions about the prospects for success in this war, even as the President is asked for more and more troops to be committed.  According to this book, the war comes to dominate thinking on a national level and eclipses civil rights as the Johnson administration's focus.  The war is also one reason given for the failure of a protest march in Chicago to ignite a national debate on Northern racism.  These stories are important to remember in our era of supposedly post-racial politics.  It is true that we have come a long way from the 1960s, but we still have a long way to go.