Zadie Smith

White Teeth had several strikes against it.

1. It’s found in every airport bookstore.
2. It’s always on display tables with Bridget Jones.
3. The back cover had a big picture of the author.
4. The author is too pretty.

None of those disqualify a book for me. I enjoyed Bridget Jones, and Nick Hornby’s in every airport, and Steinbeck made sure readers knew what he looked like, and there’s plenty of room in the world for pretty people. When you put them all together, though, it sets a certain expectation.

Zadie Smith far surpassed that expectation!

Although the book could be lumped in with the recent wave of immigrant-lit, Smith’s story swells in breadth and depth beyond the usual nobody-loves-me themes. She creates on a multi-generational tale with major political and religious themes, and she juggles it masterfully with wit and compassion. She restored my hope that Britain may still produce great authors.

If there’s no “Writing the Opposite Sex” award, there should be, and it should go to her. The only woman I’ve read who manages it as well is Pearl S. Buck-but Buck’s job is easier since she doesn’t bother with humor. Unfortunately, her female characters don’t seem nearly so alive. All of them play one-trait roles and seem merely to propel the story of the male protagonists even when the story switches to their point of view.

The only other weakness in the book comes from her lack of empathy for those with strong religious views. Jehovah’s Witnesses are fairly easy targets, but she spends a lot of energy knocking them down. I appreciate her depiction of Euro-Muslim extremists as wanna-be gangsters without business sense, but the comedy seems like a veneer over a general inability to appreciate faith. Regardless of her faith or lack thereof, this is a weakness that I hope she overcomes in future books.

Fyodor Dostoevsky

What can I say about Dostoevsky that hasn’t been said better, in dissertations and studies and monuments? Only this: he lives up to the hype; he changed my life.

I started with The Brothers Karamazov, went on to The House of the Dead, and then Crime and Punishment, and Notes from the Underground.

The Brothers was recommended by an older cousin. He was in college, and I was 13, but he was my hero, so… I finished it 5 years later. The second reading, a few years after that, only took a month. It’s one of those great novels designed to last through nine months of television-less winter, so it has it all: philosophy, religion, sex, murder, poverty, mental disorders, and courtroom drama. If big Russian novels scare you, you’d be better off starting with Anna Karenina.

I haven’t re-read The House of the Dead. It’s not bad-in fact, it’s probably as good as it gets in the genre of prison memoirs, topped only by Solzhenitsyn’s A Day in the Life of Ivan Illych. But how many times do you want to read a prison memoir?

If all of the monuments and dissertations were to somehow disappear, I can imagine scholars thousands of years from now arguing convincingly that Crime and Punishment and Notes from the Underground were written in the late 1900s instead of the mid-1800s. The word angst comes to mind, but it’s insufficient. We’re talking antiheroes with attitudes so bad they’d see the Fight Club guys as optimists.

Dostoevsky isn’t an author who will make you happy. His comedy scenes can bring a smile, but the smiles are tinged with tragedy. No, happiness isn’t his thing. Joy, on the other hand… maybe. As the ranting drunkard who pimps his daughter asks in Crime and Punishment, what if grace can reach even me?

Edward Simmen, ed.

North of the Rio Grande is a collection of, mostly, stream-of-conscious slice-of-life pieces by Mexican Americans, Mexicans who immigrated to the U.S., and other U.S. Spanish-speakers.

As a collection, it wasn’t really worth the read. There’s not much variation in the themes and characters, and you don’t read stream-of-conscious for the plot.

Like most anthologies, though, there’s a jewel somewhere. In this case, it was “The Somebody,” by Danny Santiago. The book didn’t sell me on norteamericano authors, but it sold me on Danny Santiago. I’m looking forward to reading more by him.

Stephen Ambrose

Undaunted Courage came at a great time for me. I’d just spent several years in social histories and political analyses, and I was starting to get depressed by the power of critics to strip away glory. Stephen Ambrose’s account of Lewis’ and Clark’s journey may be unfashionably patriotic and heroic, but it’s awed and awe-inspiring, and I needed it.

I picked up Citizen Soldiers shortly afterwards, and was again amazed. Ambrose’s fascination with heroism led him to interview thousands of G.I.s involved in the Normandy invasion and end of World War II. He occasionally employs social or economic analyses, but always trumps these interpretations with words of the G.I.s, often expressed in as direct quotations with little obvious editing. I’m not a World War II buff, but this book almost made me one. (For what it’s worth, many of the anecdotes he recorded appear in the film Saving Private Ryan. Ambrose doesn’t, however, imply that all of these anecdotes happened to a single group of super-soldiers.)

Americans at War is another strong work, with eloquent and passionate essays on soldiers from Little Bighorn to Mai Lai. His political biases come out more strongly in this collection than in the other books, but they aren’t distracting.

With Nothing Like It In The World, my fascination faded, but it’s not Ambrose’s fault. I’ve never really cared about trains. The whole romance is lost on me. My reading a book about the transcontinental railroad by a devotee was as doomed as a deaf person’s reading a book about hand-crafting violins. I can appreciate his research and storytelling technique, but it didn’t grab me. And it left me wondering… considering the breadth of his interests (he also wrote a multi-volume biography of Eisenhower, which I haven’t read, and supposedly has time to teach college classes), how does he manage to know all of this?

The answer to that question came when I started reading another of his books on World War II, which was published after Citizen Soldiers and includes entire paragraphs copied and pasted from the previous book without so much as a self-citation. I put it aside to avoid the page-by-page deja-vu.

Ambrose deserves applause for several of his books, but he lost me as a fan when I felt that I was reading amusingly retold snippets of a committee report instead of a human voice. Lots of other famous writers, Dumas and Michener, employed huge numbers of assistants to research their books. I don’t really like Dumas and Michener either.

Mark Bowden

As I was in the process of reading Blackhawk Down, I gave a simple writing assignment to my immigrant students: “Describe the house you grew up in.”

            The next day, with Blackhawk sitting on my shelf, a bookmark only 50 pages into it, I picked up the first of the essays. The young man described the orange trees, and the tan wall, and the bright dresses of the women who walked in front of his house, across the street from the Olympic Hotel in Mogadishu, before “all of it” happened.

            For those who have not read Blackhawk Down, “all of it” refers to the killing of hundreds of Somali men, women, and children, during an ill-conceived attempt to remove a warlord from the Olympic Hotel neighborhood of Mogadishu.

            There is no way I can describe how intensely that book moved me. Granted, I had a more personal link to the text than most of the readers, but most other readers I’ve met have liked it as well.

            Out of respect for my students, I didn’t see the film, which they described as an attempt to make the deaths of hundreds of their friends and family into the story of a few white Americans who made some bad choices. The book, though, does an exceptional job of presenting all of the people as real—and Bowden did excellent work in capturing the point of view of many of the Somalis involved.

            I’d love to read more of his books.

Denis Johnson

            It was totally unfair to the author, but I had a plane to catch. I read, Already Dead, The Name of the World, and Resuscitation of a Hanged Man in less than two weeks. Then I left the country.

            I don’t know of any author of Denis Johnson’s generation who deals with history, truth, and life so seriously.

The Name of the World had the feel of one of those fictionalized memoirs novelists write when they get famous and bored, but the others … I’d love to read them again. His writing deserves far more time than I was able to give in the first round.

Arthur Miller

I’m so glad I read Death of a Salesman first!

            The Crucible is standard. It fits right in with the standard American English 10^th-grade curriculum that is pitifully trying to make 16-year-olds interested in things that happened before America had many good novelists. May it live long on the high-school bookshelves. I have nothing against it. But it didn’t move me.

            Death of a Salesman, though… The first time I read it, I told my high school teacher that I couldn’t read anything else for at least three days. She understood. I’ve read it half a dozen times, seen it performed live, and own the movie version that Arthur Miller consulted on. Every character is pitiful, but so alive! Every line rings true.

            I won’t be surprised if history shows that more people read The Crucible—but Death of a Salesman may change, and save, more lives.

Ralph Ellison

Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison, left me in awe.

It had sat on my shelf for years, in a cheap paperback edition with a nondescript cover. Its title and the brief author bio on the back gave me the impression that it was some sort of early blaxploitation version of H.G. Wells.

It is by a black man.

It is about a black man.

And it reached me, a white man, more deeply than almost any book I’ve read. Dazzling language. Complex, intriguing characters. It was, in fact, the first book by a black author I’d ever read that I thought was trying to reach beyond themes of pigment and prejudice. It’s been too long since I re-read it.

Larry Brown

Larry Brown’s South is the type of place country singers don’t mention because it’s too depressing. The setting: grime. The tone: grim. Saying a Larry Brown character has a drinking problem is redundant—beer is almost a character—as is saying that his characters are poverty-stricken or unexpressive.

This probably doesn’t sound like a positive review, but it is. You just need to know what you’re getting into.

I didn’t know it when I picked up Father and Son, a gothic story of generational sins, justice, and redemption. It left me wiped out for several days.

And any author who affects me that strongly is worth another try.

Dirty Work, an anti-war tale based mostly on the conversation between two dying vets, didn’t affect me as strongly as Father and Son, but his masterful collection of short stories, Facing the Music hit me again and again.

“Hitting” is a decent metaphor for how it feels to read him. I don’t always agree with his theology, and I wouldn’t care to meet many of his characters, and I absolutely think there are better ways to live—but you don’t read Larry Brown to find someone who can wrap you in cozy phrases you think are true. You read him because he can beat you to the verge of despair.

I think it makes you stronger.

F.X. Toole

Million Dollar Baby is the best collection of short stories on boxing that I’ve found, and one of the best short-story collections period. Toole takes boxing, a theme that thrives of clichés, and reworks it to create original characters and explorations of race, poverty, and violence. Even more impressive, he does so without resorting to cynicism or condescension.

The movie is a compilation of episodes and characters from several of the stories. The stories are all strong on their own, but the title story is actually one of the weakest. My favorite is the original title story, “Rope Burns”.