Mike Shea on the month’s new releases
Marie Brenner
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
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San Antonio–born journalist Marie Brenner borrowed her memoir’s title, Apples and Oranges: My Brother and Me, Lost and Found, from the childhood nickname given to her and her older brother, Carl, with whom she was endlessly at odds. The nickname takes on a more literal aspect when Carl abandons his law practice for an apple farm, but the gun-loving right-winger and his New York–loving liberal sister grow no closer until 2001, when he is diagnosed with adenocarcinoma, which has an 11 percent survival rate. Seeking clues to their relationship in family documents, she uncovers intriguing relatives like Aunt Anita, a once celebrated author who was the model for photographer Edward Weston’s “Pear-Shaped Nude.” Brenner strives mightily to interest us in the sibling dynamic, but it’s the colorful anecdotes about her eccentric family that carry this chronicle to its heartbreakingly inevitable conclusion. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $25
Dan Jenkins
Doubleday
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As the father of the golf novel (exhibit A: Dead Solid Perfect, circa 1974), Fort Worth’s Dan Jenkins holds license in perpetuity to exercise the genre’s clichés, which he does with relish in The Franchise Babe. Self-absorbed pro golfers and sizzling golf moms in “jacked-up minis” are just a few of the country club species populating this raucous tale narrated by raffish sportswriter Jack Brannon. Having dismissed the PGA Tour as “Tiger whipping up on a bunch of slugs,” Jack pursues a feature story about young LPGA phenom Ginger Clayton, and—when not quaffing martinis and bonking Ginger’s mother, Thurlene—he stumbles upon a considerable scandal: Tour honchos have hushed up an attempt to poison their golden Lolita. Jenkins’s irreverent shtick is not for everyone (one might cringe when Jack describes his second wife as a “spend-with-both-hands, life-sucking bitch”), but if you liked him before, you’ll love him now. Doubleday, $24.95
Sarah Bird
Knopf
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How Perfect Is That marks Sarah Bird’s return to the madcap plotting that was her stylistic calling card in late-eighties novels like The Boyfriend School. It’s an entertaining flashback, but why now? The Texas Monthly writer-at-large was coming off her two finest novels, The Yokota Officers Club and The Flamenco Academy—literary sorties to post–World War II Okinawa and the caves of Sevilla that flashed humor against the horrors of wartime Japan and the smoky magic of Gypsy culture. Here Bird departs from that standard and spins a slapsticky yarn about the downfall of Austin socialite Blythe Young: Divorced, disowned, and ostracized by her nipped-and-tucked friends, the has-been hostess retreats to an unlikely haven—her old room in the patchouli-drenched Seneca Falls Housing Co-op. When Blythe’s idealistic past and cynical present collide, How Perfect Is That shows a satirical bite worthy of its author. Knopf, $23.95.
Sam Gosling
A decade of research by this University of Texas at Austin psychology prof has led to new ways of understanding the relationship between individuals and the spaces they inhabit, as he now reveals with Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You.
Snoop posits that our possessions open a window onto our inner selves. Didn’t we already know that?
Yes, but we didn’t know what you can learn. My research team went into bedrooms or offices and recorded their impressions in standard personality tests. We then compared what they thought about the occupants with what the occupants thought about themselves and what their friends thought about them.
And how did your team’s analyses match up?
It depends on where you look. Bedrooms reflect traits like openness to experiences, conscientiousness, and neuroticism. Offices reveal information about openness—and to a lesser extent conscientiousness—and extraversion. Facebook profiles are most revealing of extraversion and openness. In short, different contexts reveal different traits.
What kind of feedback have you received?
In a field where so much of the research involves relating one personality questionnaire to another, some of my colleagues find it quite refreshing to see someone collect real data from the real world! Basic Books, $25 (Read the full interview.)
Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You: Sam Gosling, published by Basic Books.
