Mike Shea on the month’s new releases
Neal Pollack
Pantheon
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Even the most cynical hipsters are terminally charmed by their own offspring, which explains how the birth of NEAL POLLACK’S first child, Elijah, sparked the satirist’s transformation—with the publication of ALTERNADAD and an online column of the same name—into America’s postmodern Erma Bombeck. Pollack writes of moving from Philly to Austin in 2002 with his pregnant wife, Regina, to raise their young’un in the warm glow of the city’s laid-back vibe. Though temporarily distracted by a fleeting madness that impels him to form a rock band (the Neal Pollack Invasion) and take it on tour, he eventually embraces the trappings and responsibilities of parenthood, not least, one suspects, as a wellspring of comic material. This new Pollack is less frantic in tone than previous models and more engaging for the change. And Gen X parents will nod knowingly when he recalls soothing a frightened Elijah during The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie : “That was the moment that I officially stopped pretending to be cool.”
Cormac Mccarthy
Vintage International
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Imagine a stage play with two characters in a ghetto tenement debating the value of life: White is a professor who jumped in front of a train, and Black is the ex-con who rescued him. This is the premise, weighted with all the pretensions of an Intro to Dramaturgy effort, of CORMAC MCCARTHY’s THE SUNSET LIMITED (awkwardly described as a “novel in dramatic form”). But remarkably, McCarthy’s playlet goes from sophomoric to sublime in a mere 143 pages of poignant dialogue. The urbane skeptic and reformed sinner parry and spar—White just wants to quit this earth and be finished; Black begs the soul-weary professor to let God lift his despair, saying, “I never knowed what the burden weighed till I put it down.” While the incessant proselytizing is a tad shrill, McCarthy’s passionate word craft transcends all staginess. The Sunset Limited carries a heavy load—death and redemption—and even the author can’t tell us what’s at the end of the line.
Bill Crider
St. Martin's Press
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MURDER AMONG THE OWLS, the fourteenth offering in BILL CRIDER’s Sheriff Dan Rhodes Mystery series, has no literary conceits; it is nothing more—nor less—than a pleasant police procedural set in the sleepy burg of Clearview. This time out, Rhodes is faced with the apparent slip-and-fall death of seventyish neighbor Helen Harris. Not fooled by the upended stool and burned-out lightbulb, he “somehow [doesn’t] believe” it was an accident at all. The laconic lawman brings his dry wit and down-home sensibilities to bear on his investigation, pondering how Mrs. Harris’s cat, Sam, escaped the deceased woman’s house, interrogating the starchy members of her reading group (Older Women’s Literary Society, the “OWLS” of the title), and thwarting her unruly nephew Leo’s chain saw attack on her grieving beau, Alton Brant. One could fault Crider for the happy sheen he applies to the mystery genre, but that would be to miss the point entirely.
Daniel Quinn
The Houston-based author first reached a widespread audience with his innovative novel Ishmael. His new book, If They Give You Lined Paper, Write Sideways, attempts to explain how he derives his ideas.
Your book is drawn from a transcribed dialogue between you and a woman named Elaine. How did you decide on that format? Dialogue is, to me, the most perfect example of synergy: the working together of two things to produce an effect greater than the sum of their individual effects—in this case the two things being two minds.
What should a reader know about Elaine? In the preface, I say that I received a letter from a reader who wondered if she might spend some time with me to “nail down” the ideas she had explored in my books. If I felt readers should know more about Elaine than this, I would have put in more. As it is, in the course of the book you learn a great deal about her character and her mind, which are the things that count here.
You liken your frame of reference to “that of a Martian anthropologist.” What role does that play in your creative process? I try to see our culture from a vantage point far removed from our own. For example, the Martian anthropologist observes that for us, “action” is good, even if it doesn’t work—as in, for instance, the war on drugs.
If They Give You Lined Paper, Write Sideways: Daniel Quinn, published by Steerforth Press.
