Mike Shea on the month’s new releases
David Haynes
Harlem Moon/ Random House
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THE FULL MATILDA (Harlem Moon/ Random House) is an elegant and bittersweet novel about Matilda Housewright, who bears not-always-silent witness to the social evolution of her African American family's near-century of domestic servitude to Washington, D.C.'s better families. Southern Methodist University professor DAVID HAYNES neatly presents the paradox of the Housewrights' situation—the skills that enable them to build a food-service empire were born of a status not far removed from the house slaves of the previous century. Matilda is a memorable and stoic character, even as a younger generation of Housewrights is visited by the twin modern plagues of racial violence and drug abuse.
James Hynes
St. Martin's
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Austinite JAMES HYNES found his literary groove writing hallucinatory satire about the inanities of academia in The Lecturer's Tale and Publish and Perish. With KINGS OF INFINITE SPACE (St. Martin's), he parodies mind-numbing bureaucracy through the fictional TxDoGS, the Texas Department of General Services. Antihero Paul Trilby is in unchecked free fall from his comfortable former life as a professor of English with a house and a spouse and, regrettably, two girlfriends. Now he inhabits a grim room at the Angry Loner Motel—a.k.a. the Grandview Arms—haunted by the ghost of his ex-wife's cat. At his lowly TxDoGS temp job, he is stalked by pale-faced clerklings in short-sleeved white shirts who, he fears, live in the ceiling crawl space. Hynes is over the top—occasionally a bit too far—but his enthusiastic skewering of petty bureaucrats is a hoot.
Herman Wouk
Little, Brown
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In 1993 Congress killed the Superconducting Super Collider project outside Waxahachie and unwittingly provided prime fodder for Pulitzer prize winner HERMAN WOUK's new novel, A HOLE IN TEXAS (Little, Brown). Wouk constructs a tidy atom of a story, with an earnest American scientist, a beautiful Chinese physicist, a jealous wife, and conniving senators, all in orbit around this tale's $8 billion nucleus—a nearly abandoned tunnel out on the plains. A Hole in Texas is a quick read that serves double duty as an entertaining contemporary romp and a gently compelling argument for taking the project out of mothballs.
