- July 24, 2004 09:43 PM EDT

2 of 52 DOCUMENTS

June 20, 2004 Sunday
Late Edition - Final

SECTION: Section 7; Column 3; Book Review Desk; BOOKS IN BRIEF: FICTION; Pg. 16

LENGTH: 180 words

BYLINE: By Adam Mazmanian

BODY:

BETWEEN TWO RIVERS
By Nicholas Rinaldi.
HarperCollins, $24.95.

Geography is destiny in Nicholas Rinaldi's sprawling, elegant study of the residents of an upscale apartment building in lower Manhattan. ''Between Two Rivers'' opens not long before the bomb attack on the twin towers in 1993, and it concludes on Sept. 11, 2001. We witness the lives of, among other eccentric characters, Farro Fescue, the building's busy and observant concierge; a plastic surgeon; a World War II German flying ace; a maid; various businessmen; a quilter; and a widow who shares her apartment with a menagerie of creepy-crawlies and an all-consuming secret. These characters' histories collide with real-world events and with one another. Though the timeline of ''Between Two Rivers'' steers inevitably toward the horrors of 9/11, there is nothing overdetermined or reductive about the stories themselves. Rinaldi, whose previous novels include ''The Jukebox Queen of Malta,'' indulges his characters in their untidy lives, and readers who do the same will find their patience rewarded. Adam Mazmanian

URL: http://www.nytimes.com

LOAD-DATE: June 20, 2004

3 of 52 DOCUMENTS

August 24, 2003 Sunday ALL EDITIONS

SECTION: FANFARE, Pg. D35

LENGTH: 808 words

HEADLINE: Unnatural History

BYLINE: By Adam Mazmanian. Adam Mazmanian is a writer in Brooklyn.

BODY:

PARASITES LIKE US, by Adam Johnson. Viking. 341 pp., $24.95.

'If there are ghosts on this earth," writes Adam Johnson, "they are formed by the things you cannot utter, and they'll outlive the black in your teeth, burn hotter than any hole in your stomach." While "Parasites Like Us," the first novel by the author of the short story collection "Emporium," isn't a tale of the supernatural, it is inflected with the eerie resonance of the departed. This is in part because the story is narrated by Hank Hannah, an anthropologist who winds up among the relatively few survivors of a plague that all but wipes out the human race. It is possible to overestimate the importance of the near-eradication of the species to the events of the novel. Johnson's narrative is haunted by spirits of a more personal nature, among them the ghost of the decent, accomplished man Hannah failed to become.

To summarize the events of the novel is to describe an apocalyptic horror show. While it does arc toward its conclusion with a tight-knit group of survivors humping it over the frozen Dakota wastes, fleeing packs of ravenous wild dogs and desperate plague victims, "Parasites Like Us" is a very funny story. It begins with the murder of a pig.

Hannah is the chief exponent of the theory that large North American mammals - mammoths, giant beavers, sloths - were hunted to extinction by the Clovis people who migrated to the continent over frozen land bridges across the Bering Strait. When Hannah's prize doctoral student, Eggers, discovers a pristine Clovis spear point amid the excavated earth on the site of a future casino, they decide to test Hannah's theory in the flesh. The investigation into the gruesome death of the prize pig Sir Oinks a Lot brings together an unlikely crew that will eventually come to form the core of survivors. Yet the plague exists outside the scope of the novel. The characters don't cause it. They survive it, but not by any design of their own.

I mention this because it's pointlessly discursive and not a whole lot of fun to extrude the plot of Johnson's novel through the mold of a review. What's so interesting about the book is that it manages to fuse its comic nightmare to an epistemological critique of plot, of causality, of what we think of as story. Like George Saunders, Johnson uses satire to expose the fragile underpinnings of human longings. He uses a patina of irony to disguise, or at least to sugarcoat the scary notion that we can't know how much we don't know. At the same time, Johnson, like Saunders, advances the more comforting idea that this cosmic ignorance matters only to the extent that one is bothered by it.

"Beyond science is an area of not knowing," Johnson writes, "and to get past that, you must enter the story yourself, filling the blanks with your own past, splicing the helix of your own narrative into the gaps of another. You must enter the play before you, becoming a minor character, the ambassador or court jester who appears in the final scene to satisfy the audience's need to know how everything worked out." It's instructive, then, that Hannah is more than a first-person narrator. He writes as the author of a book that intends to explain to future generations the events that led up to the aforementioned cataclysm. He's also peddling the Clovis depopulation hypothesis. This very real theory has been largely discredited by radio carbon dating - a fact of which Johnson must be keenly aware. So if the narrator's science is off, one wonders if the reader is meant to view skeptically Hannah's understanding of the meaning of history.

It turns out that Hannah's real chore is personal, not pedagogical. The plague and its after-effects serve as a proving ground for working out his various imperfections, not least of which is his inability to imagine that his own life has any real impact on the life of others. He is also handicapped in that he is something of an jackass. As Hannah himself mordantly observes, "In universities across America were departments that had had only one encounter with Hank Hannah, and they will forever remember him as the jerk at the shrimp bowl, the ape at the lectern. But I wasn't the same man who once entertained a dean with a cocktail-napkin diagram of the sacred Mactaw fertility dance. I wasn't the same person who wore Highlander aftershave and walked around with a copy of my own book in my back pocket."

While Hannah doesn't have much of a shot at accounting for the human race and all of human history, he does stand a better chance to redeem his own life - a dangerously optimistic possibility. This, too, puts Johnson in league with Saunders and a handful of other contemporary writers who don't feel that seriousness of purpose and excellence of craft should necessarily stand in the way of a happy ending.

GRAPHIC: Photo - Book cover - PARASITES LIKE US

LOAD-DATE: August 24, 2003

5 of 52 DOCUMENTS

July 14, 2002 Sunday
Late Edition - Final

SECTION: Section 7; Column 1; Book Review Desk; Pg. 20

LENGTH: 241 words

HEADLINE: BOOKS IN BRIEF: FICTION

BYLINE: By Adam Mazmanian

BODY:

MEET JOHN TROW
By Thomas Dyja.
Viking, $24.95.

Thomas Dyja has written a genuinely weird second novel -- a tale of male menopause in Civil War drag that's tucked into a canny depiction of modern man's desire to live closer to the bone. Steven Armour, who telecommutes to his deadening job working on a corporate Web site, is hoping that an impending promotion will return him to the fast track. His humorless wife, Patty, is less sanguine about his prospects, and relies on him principally as an interface between their car and the supermarket. Steven's mounting rage against his own ineffectiveness finds an unlikely outlet: he joins a ragtag group of Civil War re-enactors who on weekends play the roles of actual soldiers from the region in a historical theme park in Connecticut. Steven is transformed by his impersonation of Pvt. John Trow into a flinty, decisive backwoodsman to such an extent that he begins to suspect a supernatural connection between himself and his long-dead subject. His suspicions are fueled as he reads Trow's correspondence with his lover, who just happens to be portrayed by the real-life wife of Steven's regimental colonel. Dyja treats his somewhat silly premise with the right balance of suspense and good humor. He skirts the supernatural angle without producing an out-and-out ghost story and satirizes the bloodless corporate politics of the Internet gold rush without descending into parody. Adam Mazmanian

URL: http://www.nytimes.com

LOAD-DATE: July 14, 2002

6 of 52 DOCUMENTS

The Washington Post

June 10, 2002 Monday
Final Edition

SECTION: STYLE; BOOK WORLD; Pg. C04

LENGTH: 903 words

HEADLINE: Climbs and Misdemeanors

BYLINE: Adam Mazmanian,, a New York writer

BODY:

OVER THE EDGE

The True Story of Four American Climbers' Kidnap and Escape in the Mountains of Central Asia

By Greg Child

Villard. 284 pp. $ 24.95Though "Over the Edge" is billed as a harrowing tale of adventure and danger in the mysterious high-altitude hinterlands of Central Asia, its exotic locales and riveting action are overshadowed by a bizarre last act that is unmistakably American. The subtitle provides an adequate summary of the bulk of the book's contents but omits any mention of the struggle for control of the story itself, or the unorthodox pecuniary relationship between the author and his subjects. Greg Child, a contributor to Outside magazine and a big-wall climbing enthusiast himself, becomes a major player in the back story that emerges in the wake of the action. More on this later.

Big-wall climbing is an extreme sport, expensive and dangerous to undertake, and requires a power-to-weight ratio that few athletes can muster. A big wall is just that -- a sheer face that defies mortal attempts to scale it. An example is a route up Smith Rocks in Oregon, described by Child as having "no hold larger than the width of a pencil in its 120-foot length." There are very few places in the world to attempt such perilous ascents. High up on this short list is the region known to climbers as the Karavshin, comprising several mountain ranges on the Tajikistan-Kyrgyzstan border.

In August 2000, four young Americans were taken prisoner by Islamic militants while climbing in Kyrgyzstan's Pamir Alai mountains. For six grueling days, tired and half starved, they were marched at gunpoint through dangerous terrain. With death looming, one took advantage of an unguarded moment to topple one captor off a cliff, presumably to his death.

Let's stipulate that the blow-by-blow account of the kidnapping, and even much of the establishing material on the climbers' personalities, the sport of big-wall climbing and Islamic militancy in the former Soviet republics of Central Asia is compelling and well written. What's more interesting is what happened when the climbers came home to the United States and their story quickly morphed into a media event.

For a while, when facing the media, the climbers stuck to their original story that they had collaborated in their escape. When it emerged that it was just one man who impulsively did the pushing, their credibility began to diminish. The controversy heated up when it turned out that their captor was still alive -- and talking to competing reporters. But the climbers refused to discuss these revelations with journalists because they had promised Child and his publisher an exclusive on the story. In return, Child agreed to share money from his book and movie deals with the climbers. This is called "checkbook journalism." Child is being kind to himself when he characterizes the arrangement as a mere "embargo" and "a simple matter of business common in publishing." Even now, attempts are being made to outlaw the practice in Britain.

In one respect, it's hard to reproach Child for his actions: It would be unfair if the victims in this affair went begging while a reporter cashed in on the story. But Child is trying to have it both ways. He attempts to discredit the work of others who, deprived of access to the principals, investigate independently whether their story is true.

One reporter, John Bouchard of Climbing magazine, visited Kyrgyzstan on his own to work on the story. Child's narrative follows Bouchard's trip, relying to a great extent on the account of Garth Willis, an American living in Bishkek. Willis told Child that Bouchard told him that this story was "his big chance to make it as a writer." If ambition is the seed of bad conscience, as Child seems here to insinuate, then his own motives are just as shaky as Bouchard's.

For Child, too, this story signifies the chance to make it as a writer. It means leaving the ghetto of specialty magazines and book publishers and graduating to the mainstream, where advances are measured in six and seven figures. The adventure-book category is capable of generating enormous sales and minting name-brand authors in the process. Child's admission of "respect" for rival reporter Bouchard's "conviction" is a debater's trick, allowing him to appear as though he is questioning his own motives and conscience while still characterizing Bouchard as a monomaniacal hack.

This little tempest is all the more unfortunate because Child's account is well researched, vivid and more than plausible -- it is very probably the truth. I do not doubt that Child's rivals resent his access to the climbers, and it may be that their pique with the story stems in part from that resentment. But if Child believes this to be true, why not put the question to Bouchard -- or at least double-check quotes that he attributes to Bouchard? Instead he brags about never having made the attempt. It is a shame that a journalistic rivalry and the promise of a big payday threaten to diminish not only the author's credibility but also the suffering of his subjects. If Child had wished to keep his story honest, he would have refused to pay his subjects, or he would have revealed how much money he received and how it was divided, then left it to the reader to decide if his account is corrupted by the sum. As it stands, Child is either arrogant or naive to expect us to take him at his word.

LOAD-DATE: June 10, 2002

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The Washington Post

June 7, 2002 Friday
Final Edition

SECTION: STYLE; Pg. C04

LENGTH: 172 words

HEADLINE: Upcoming in Book World

BODY:

The following books are scheduled to be reviewed next week in Style:

OVER THE EDGE: The True Story of Four American Climbers' Kidnap and Escape in the Mountains of Central Asia, by Greg Child.

Reviewed by Adam Mazmanian.

THE RUSSIAN DEBUTANTE'S HANDBOOK, by Gary Shteyngart. A novel about a young Russian American pursuing success in New York and Prague. Reviewed by Chris Lehmannn.

MONARCH: The Life and Reign of Elizabeth II, by Robert Lacey; QUEEN AND COUNTRY: The Fifty-Year Reign of Elizabeth II, by William Shawcross. Reviewed by Alexander Rose.

MORAL HAZARD, by Kate Jennings. In this novel a speechwriter for a Wall Street investment company must deal with her husband's advancing Alzheimer's. Reviewed by Jonathan Yardley.

BEAUTIFUL BODIES, by Laura Shaine Cunningham. Six Manhattan women in their forties gather for a party. Reviewed by Carolyn See.

Find Book World online at washingtonpost.com/books. This week: Russian diplomacy revisited -- new books by Strobe Talbott and Stephen Kotkin, reviewed by Martin Malia.

LOAD-DATE: June 7, 2002

8 of 52 DOCUMENTS

March 31, 2002 Sunday
Late Edition - Final

SECTION: Section 7; Column 3; Book Review Desk; Pg. 17

LENGTH: 279 words

HEADLINE: Books in Brief: Fiction & Poetry

BYLINE: By Adam Mazmanian

BODY:

THE SECRET LIFE OF BEES
By Sue Monk Kidd.
Viking, $24.95.

Poor Lily Owens. She's 14 and still making her own dresses in her home economics class. In the halls, popular girls hush themselves at Lily's approach -- a torment that leads her to scratch phantom itches and chew her fingertips raw. Her mother died 10 years earlier from a gun accident -- one that may have tangentially involved Lily herself -- and Lily's father, a peach farmer named T. Ray, is so cruel that he makes Lily kneel in piles of knee-shredding Martha White grits as punishment for the mildest infractions. Most of Lily's thoughts revolve around fantasies of escaping to (somehow) find her mother alive. Her one clue is a picture of a black Madonna with "Tiburon, S.C." scrawled on the back. She finds a way out when Rosaleen, her black caretaker, is arrested for pouring snuff juice on some white men's shoes -- a jailable offense in Sylvan, S.C. in 1964. Lily and Rosaleen eventually light out for Tiburon, where she finds her Madonna in a woman named August Boatwright, the proprietor of a honey farm that's a harbor of quiet civility. Lily is a wonderfully petulant and self-absorbed adolescent, and Kidd deftly portrays her sense of injustice as it expands to accommodate broader social evils. At the same time, the political aspects of Lily's growth never threaten to overwhelm the personal. The core of this story is Lily's search for a mother, and she finds one in a place she never expected. August and her sisters, June and May, are no mere vehicles for Lily's salvation; they are individuals as fully imagined as the sweltering, kudzu-carpeted landscape that surrounds them. Adam Mazmanian

URL: http://www.nytimes.com

LOAD-DATE: March 31, 2002

9 of 52 DOCUMENTS

March 13, 2002 Wednesday
Late Edition - Final

SECTION: Section A; Column 6; Editorial Desk; Pg. 24

LENGTH: 134 words

HEADLINE: 'Ulysses' and the Slocum

BODY:

To the Editor:

Re "Remember the Slocum? Probably Not," by Clyde Haberman (NYC column, March 9):

The timing of the wreck of the excursion steamer General Slocum on the East River fixes the date of the events chronicled in James Joyce's "Ulysses."

We know that Bloomsday is June 16, 1904, because of several references to the Slocum disaster of the day before, including this one in the Wandering Rocks episode: "Terrible affair that General Slocum explosion. Terrible, terrible! A thousand casualties. And heartrending scenes. Men trampling down women and children. Most brutal thing."

"Ulysses," read and studied the world over for generations and for generations to come, does more to preserve the memory of the Slocum than a lonely monument set in stone ever could.

ADAM MAZMANIAN
Brooklyn, March 9, 2002

URL: http://www.nytimes.com

LOAD-DATE: March 13, 2002

10 of 52 DOCUMENTS

February 17, 2002 Sunday
Late Edition - Final

SECTION: Section 7; Column 2; Book Review Desk; Pg. 17

LENGTH: 287 words

HEADLINE: BOOKS IN BRIEF: FICTION

BYLINE: By Adam Mazmanian

BODY:

THE EXECUTION
By Hugo Wilcken.
HarperCollins, $23.95.

Within moments of meeting Matthew Bourne, a handsome and successful 29-year-old human rights campaigner, it becomes clear to us that he's ripe for comeuppance. His detachment and superciliousness are as much a part of his uniform as the crisp indigo dress shirts and charcoal three-button suits he no doubt favors. I say no doubt because Matthew's dress, like many of the tactile and visual details in Hugo Wilcken's first novel, is left to the imagination. The noirish first-person narration fashions a textbook study of bad conscience from the steady accumulation of psychological observations. Wilcken doesn't waste any time getting started. When the wife of a colleague dies in a car crash, Matthew is enlisted to accompany the dazed widower to the morgue and ends up identifying the body. This experience startles Matthew out of his stuporous routine, and, plagued by feelings of inauthenticity, he confronts the riddles burrowed beneath his everyday life: is the African dissident he's charged with saving from execution a prisoner of conscience or a violent criminal? Is his affair with a boozy art promoter symptomatic of problems in his marriage or just a series of noonday larks? And just what does his wife, an artist, do all day? He discovers, to his great surprise, that his cool pose isn't fooling anybody, and what follows is a series of twists and betrayals that occur too deep in the novel to be revealed here. Wilcken can be forgiven for resolving knotty plot problems with a well-timed coincidence here and there; his book is an exciting, nervy thriller that fulfills the demands of the genre while resonating on deeper frequencies. Adam Mazmanian

URL: http://www.nytimes.com

LOAD-DATE: February 17, 2002

11 of 52 DOCUMENTS

December 23, 2001 Sunday
Late Edition - Final

SECTION: Section 7; Column 1; Book Review Desk; Pg. 17

LENGTH: 223 words

HEADLINE: BOOKS IN BRIEF: FICTION & POETRY

BYLINE: By Adam Mazmanian

BODY:

SKIPPING CHRISTMAS
By John Grisham.
Doubleday. $19.95.

John Grisham's book, a new spin on the classic tale of holiday redemption, tells the story of Luther and Nora Krank, a pair of affluent suburbanites who decide to take a pass on Christmas. Luther, a tax accountant, discovers that the previous Christmas set him back about $6,000. Because their only child is serving in the Peace Corps during the holidays, the Kranks decide to save money by forgoing the obligatory gifts and parties and instead taking a Caribbean cruise. But there's a catch -- the Kranks' pushy neighbors, bent on achieving an uninterrupted string of garishly decorated houses, embark on a campaign of psychological warfare designed to snap the couple back into the holiday spirit. Grisham marshals his considerable skills as a thriller writer to evoke the urgency with which the forces aligned against the Kranks gather strength as Christmas approaches. The result is an odd mixture of tension, suburban comedy and schmaltz. Grisham appropriates the bizzaro-world mood of an existential nightmare but puts little of value at stake. The Kranks are just trying to save a few bucks, not discover what's come to be called the true meaning of Christmas. As a result, their trials leave a bitter taste that isn't redeemed by this novel's Hollywood ending. Adam Mazmanian

URL: http://www.nytimes.com

LOAD-DATE: December 23, 2001

13 of 52 DOCUMENTS

November 11, 2001 Sunday ALL EDITIONS

SECTION: CURRENTS & BOOKS, Pg. B13

LENGTH: 831 words

HEADLINE: Members Only

BYLINE: By Adam Mazmanian; Adam Mazmanian is a writer who lives in Brooklyn

BODY:

A MIND OF ITS OWN: A Cultural History of the Penis, by David M. Friedman. Free Press, 358 pp., $26.

IS IT POSSIBLE that human civilization has endured these many millennia without producing a one-volume cultural history of the penis? Some might argue that much of civilization itself was concocted as a tribute to the male organ, but though the thing itself is well represented in history and literature, the word "penis" is not.

Until very recently, frank discussion of the x-y appendage was confined to health class, VD clinics and psychoanalysis. All that has changed; one would be hard-pressed to discuss the Clinton administration without it. David Friedman's frequently sharp and funny book is offered in the spirit of open communication. It's a mature work, reasonably free of snickering and parenthetical guffaws, although he does use the word "thrust" rather more than necessary.

In the beginning, man's relationship with the penis was not complicated by religion, modesty or science. The penis was an emblem of power, pure and simple. According to a Sumerian creation myth, the Tigris and Euphrates rivers were watered by a divine penis. An Egyptian mural recounts the delivery of more than 13,000 severed penises to the Pharoah Merneptah as tribute after a successful battle. The Romans used the word "glans" to describe both the end of the penis and the bulletlike projectiles they fired from slingshots; in the Roman army, a large penis could earn a soldier promotion.

Augustine changed all that when he linked "disobedience in the member" with the fall of Eden. He argued that before the fall, Adam controlled his libido "the way one commands his feet when he walks." Afterwards, sexuality intruded uninvited - evidence of Original Sin. No more was the penis a point of pride; rather, it was a constant reminder that man is born into sin. This was the prevailing view on the subject until the Scientific Revolution, when advances in anatomy and biology illuminated the mechanics of human circulation and the invention of the microscope yielded knowledge of sperm cells - or "animacules," as their discoverer called them.

Friedman has a lot of fun with this material. Though he never quite stoops to the level of a freak-show barker, he lards his account with tales of the grotesque. There are passages that will cause certain of Friedman's readers to recoil in horror - especially his accounts of the amateurish surgical practices of castration cults and the various techniques designed to cure man of that most foul and deadly of afflictions - masturbation. Through the late 18th and 19th centuries, it was commonly believed, despite convincing evidence to the contrary, that masturbation caused blindness and premature death. As one physician wrote, "In vain we scan the springs of human woe/To find a deadlier or more cruel foe/To erring man, than this sad self-pollution/This damning wrecker of his constitution." The search for a "cure" was for a time the holy grail of medical science. Remedies ranged from plaster casts to leeches, electric shock, acid and a few too gruesome to mention in a family newspaper.

Friedman takes a serious turn in an excellent chapter on race and otherness, which identifies white supremacism with a primal terror of the black penis. Here Friedman veers from his chronology to examine European and American constructions of race, beginning with the earliest exploration of Africa and ending with a discussion of the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill affair. It's a grim history of violence, sadism and bad science that Friedman handles with necessary gravity.

The mood lightens as the scene switches to Vienna and the advent of psychoanalysis. To Friedman, Freud's theory of Oedipal conflict did as much to alter penis consciousness as Augustine's doctrine of Original Sin. He deftly teases out the similarities between the Freudian and Augustinian points of view without resorting to academic language or abstruse postmodern theorizing. His discussion of the feminist turn - "not an easy time to own a penis" - is flat by comparison.

Friedman's book tumesced from a magazine article on the research that led to the invention of Viagra. It's in this section that he loses a bit of control over his material. It seems, as the title suggests, to have a mind of its own. Though Friedman maintains a degree of distance from other archetypes of the penis, he does not view this new pharmaceutical incarnation as a scientific construction, but as an objective reality. Just as the communist state reaches its apotheosis with the withering away of the state, the idea of the penis finds its end in the withering away of withering. This is not to diminish Friedman's work. He's written a lively one-volume history that covers a good deal of ground. It flags a bit toward the end, but perhaps it's too much to expect such a work to arc less predictably than its subject.

GRAPHIC: Photo by Marion Ettlinger - David M. Friedman

LOAD-DATE: November 11, 2001

14 of 52 DOCUMENTS

The Washington Post

October 14, 2001 Sunday
Final Edition

SECTION: BOOK WORLD; Pg. T06

LENGTH: 771 words

HEADLINE: Rough Justice

BYLINE: Reviewed by Adam Mazmanian

BODY:

THE NAUTICAL CHART

By Arturo Pere[acute]z-Reverte

Translated from the Spanish

By Margaret Sayers Peden

Harcourt. 480 pp. $ 26

There's nothing like treasure to get the blood up. The promise of sudden, miraculous wealth stirs a feverish lust in its seekers. In fictions as diverse as Treasure Island and Treasure of the Sierra Madre, a common fable emerges, one of grasping ambition meeting well-deserved comeuppance. The Nautical Chart, the latest historical thriller by Spanish novelist Arturo Pe[acute]rez-Reverte, fits neatly into this tradition. It's the story of the search for a mysterious cargo of emeralds shipped from Havana to Spain in 1767 on the brigantine Dei Gloria, a ship in the service of the then-powerful Jesuit order. The purpose of the trip is not known, and the quest to discover that purpose forms part -- but not nearly all -- of the mystery at hand.

At the outset, the known facts are these: The Dei Gloria was ambushed by a pirate corsair called the Chergui. In the ensuing battle both ships, their cargoes and their crews were lost except for the cabin boy, whose subsequent testimony revealed the Dei Gloria's last known position. This single clue unites a diverse cast of characters in pursuit of the treasure. Manuel Coy is sailor without a ship, a first mate without a captain. A freighter touched bottom on his watch, shearing the hull. It wasn't his fault exactly, but it earned him a two-year suspension on dry land. He's going a bit batty, with only his beloved jazz music and favorite brand of gin to keep him company.

At an auction of maritime antiquities in Barcelona, he meets Ta[acute]nger, a comely young historian in the service of Spain's Naval Museum. At this auction she acquires a nautical atlas of the Spanish coast that was in use at the time the Dei Gloria sank, but only after a fierce bidding war with Nino Palermo, the ponytailed proprietor of a maritime salvage operation, and his diminutive, shadowy Argentine henchman Kiskoros.

Don't be alarmed if this all sounds slightly familiar; it's part of the plan. While the swashbuckling tale of mystery cruises along on a breeze freshened with gusts of Melville, Conrad and Stevenson, Pe[acute]rez-Reverte's real debt is to Dashiell Hammett's Maltese Falcon -- only here Coy, violent and half-smart, is miscast in the role of Sam Spade. The other characters fill their bills a little better: Ta[acute]nger as Brigid O'Shaughnessy, Palermo as Casper Gutman, Kiskoros in place of Joel Cairo and Wilmer Cook. It's a lovely homage, and Pe[acute]rez-Reverte does Hammett credit, weaving a web of shifting alliances and hidden motivations.

The narrator -- a minor character who enters the story only as it nears its conclusion -- cedes much of the tale to Ta[acute]nger, a modern European update on the classic femme fatale. She spins the historical mystery in long explanatory passages. Coy is a vulnerable audience. He wants to believe in Ta[acute]nger not so much for the treasure, but for a chance to believe in something besides the sea. Even before Coy hears the tale of the Dei Gloria, he is deep in Ta[acute]nger's thrall. Sitting in her apartment, he muses that "men's lives always turn around a single woman, the one in whom all the women in the world are summed up, the vortex to all mysteries and the key to all answers . . . the woman who possesses the knowing lucidity of luminous mornings, red sunsets, and cobalt blue seas."

Much of the story hinges on the minute differences in position that can be calculated from different nautical maps. Though it sounds a bit abstruse, in Pe[acute]rez-Reverte's capable hands this is far more interesting than it has any right to be. There's also the mystery behind the Dei Gloria's voyage. Almost grudgingly, Ta[acute]nger turns over the story of the clash between the Jesuits' rising power and the Spanish throne's mercantile dreams to Coy (and, by extension, us).

As with his previous books (dealing with such disparate subjects as chess and fencing), Pe[acute]rez-Reverte demonstrates total mastery of his subject. As Coy and Ta[acute]nger close in on the Dei Gloria, their enemies are closing in on them. The exterior drama of this double chase is suspenseful, but what makes this novel more interesting than your typical thriller is how these elements mirror the internal dramas of the characters. Coy in particular has a complicated relationship with himself and with the sea he loves. The real story here is of his discovery -- too late -- that his love of the sea and not his desire for wealth and women is the stuff that dreams are made of. * Adam Mazmanian writes frequently for Book World.

LOAD-DATE: October 14, 2001

15 of 52 DOCUMENTS

The Washington Post

August 26, 2001 Sunday
Final Edition

SECTION: BOOK WORLD; Pg. T04

LENGTH: 903 words

HEADLINE: The Deep

BYLINE: Reviewed by Adam Mazmanian

BODY:

GREAT WATERS

An Atlantic Passage

By Deborah Cramer

Norton. 442 pp. $ 27.95

The Atlantic Ocean originated over 230 million years ago as a humble ditch separating the breakaway continent of North America from the Pangea and Gondwana land masses. Fewer than 100 million short years later, as South America began to separate from Africa and the European, Indian and Asian continents lumbered into place, this upstart ocean trench filled with water. Today, the Atlantic is still expanding, growing at a rate of a few centimeters a year, but eventually it will contract, dry up, its waters flowing to new oceans carved by the collisions of the Earth's tectonic plates.

Good thing there's plenty of time between now and then to read Deborah Cramer's Great Waters, a cradle-to-grave account of the Atlantic. The unity of the sea and its inhabitants is the central theme of Cramer's work. No life form or process exists in isolation. No matter what is under discussion -- the influence of deep currents on weather, the life cycle of the copepod, undersea volcanoes -- Cramer forges links that leave the reader with a picture of the Atlantic Ocean as more than an enormous open system of complex relationships: It's an organism unto itself, with its own way of breathing, eating, cleaning and reproducing.

As the publicity material for the book points out, advances in oceanography have enhanced our understanding of the watery world in the 50 years since the publication of Rachel Carson's The Sea Around Us. Cramer is right to stress the ocean's intricate web of physical, chemical and biological cycles for the purposes of her reader-friendly survey.

However, her approach can become infuriating as it shifts between model and metaphor, science and platitude: "At birth, each of us, leaving the nurturing waters of the womb, repeats our ancestors' journey from the sea. . . ." If there were an award for most uses of the word "nurturing" in an environmentally themed work, Cramer would surely take the prize.

This anthropomorphic conflation of sea and soul is mirrored in the book's structure. She sets the story of the Atlantic Ocean (she calls it, simply, Atlantic, which is less precious than it might sound) against her voyage from Cape Cod to Barbados aboard a research brigantine full of college students. She doesn't lard her account with too much detail from her trip, but does provides a rough narrative that is useful for navigating between such disparate topics as glass eel migration, the Sargasso Sea's doldrums and the geologic origins of the world's oceans.

Cramer is at her best in showing how the ocean works as an engine of life, with currents, gasses, minerals, plants and animals as cogs, gears and fuel. Though this balance is dramatically altered over time by violent natural forces -- earthquakes, volcanoes, meteor strikes -- human hands are accelerating the Atlantic's decline. Time and again, Cramer makes the point that there is a cruel momentum to destruction as surely as there is a pure harmony to creation. Industrial hog and chicken farms have polluted wetlands with animal waste, giving rise to gigantic microbial blooms -- red tides -- that kill fish and vegetation and deoxygenate the ocean.

Though the book is not a program for environmental protection, Cramer warns against adopting a new plan to add iron to the sea to protect against the buildup of greenhouse gasses, and argues against the use of nitrogen fertilizers in watershed areas. Her main emphasis is on natural history, but she fails to connect her coverage of environmental degradation with possible solutions. She adopts the more generalist position that the depredations of the environment are not just dangerous; they are evidence of the failure of a way of life that puts too much emphasis on the individual, on appetites, on progress, on human aspiration.

Humankind has a skewed, colossal vision of itself -- ruling the earth from atop the food chain. Cramer traces this failure to its biblical origins: The ideas expressed in Genesis, passed on from generation to generation over thousands of years and considered sacred to millions, play in our unconscious, permeate our attitudes toward Earth.

At such times she comes off a bit high-toned and elitist, which is unfortunate because this attitude is not essential to her thesis: that the ocean is a natural masterwork of balance and proportion, and that mankind is swiftly tilting that balance toward destruction. But Cramer is a passionate writer and a passionate lover of the sea, and Great Waters would be a worse read if it did not reflect its author's deeply felt beliefs. Though Cramer could have gone further in representing all sides of the various environmental debates (particularly in the area of fisheries management), her book is scrupulously annotated, drawing from respected scientific journals. Any reader wishing to quibble with Cramer's reasoning is free to navigate any argument to its source.

Great Waters is a book to be read critically and not to be avoided because of occasional drift into breathy portentousness. In addition to being an excellent synthesis of the last half-century of oceanographic research, it is a humane and humble evolution of what we know about the waters of the world, and one that is ever aware of how much we have left to learn. *

Adam Mazmanian, a frequent reviewer for Book World, writes frequently about the sea.

LOAD-DATE: August 26, 2001

16 of 52 DOCUMENTS

July 18, 2001 Wednesday QUEENS EDITION

SECTION: VIEWPOINTS, Pg. A36

LENGTH: 871 words

HEADLINE: CITY POWER;
It's Hard Not to Make Book on Mark Green

BYLINE: By Adam Mazmanian; Adam Mazmanian is a writer living in Brooklyn

BODY:

I FEEL SORRY for anyone stuck with the job of doing opposition research on Democratic mayoral candidate Mark Green.

Generally, oppo-research is a matter of eviscerating the soft underbelly of a candidate's public record. For most political aspirants, this underbelly consists of the hundreds and thousands of votes a legislator casts over the course of his or her career.

Bills run hundreds of pages in length and even attentive legislators don't know everything they're voting for or against. It's usually fairly simple to discover that Congressman So-and-So voted to raise excise taxes on soft-serve ice cream or that Councilwoman What's-Her-Name helped eliminate reduced subway fares for war widows as part of an omnibus transportation bill. If nothing along those lines turns up, chances are that our candidate had a pretty shoddy legislative attendance record, also excellent fodder for negative campaigning.

But Mark Green never served in a legislature. As New York City public advocate and as consumer affairs commissioner under Mayor David Dinkins, Green's positions have been fairly non-controversial. Tobacco ads aimed at children? Green's against it. Higher pay for public school teachers? He's for it. Political professionals on the payroll of Green's Democratic primary opponents need to look elsewhere if they're planning on taking the low road with the most well-known candidate and presumed front-runner.

Where to look? Try the local library. Green's campaign literature touts his career as a literary man - the author or editor of 16 books. This claim itself is open to dispute - it appears that he counts revised editions as new works and two essay collections, "Changing America: Blueprints for the New Administration" and "America's Transition: Blueprints for the 1990s," are essentially the same book. Still, it would be folly for the other candidates (with zero books among them) to try to punish Green for this typical election year resume padding.

Once you whittle down the duplications, eliminate the books that Green merely edited rather than wrote, and only skim "Ronald Reagan's Reign of Error," a howlingly funny candy bar of a book comprised of verbatim quotes from the Gipper orating at the outer limits of reality, you're left with a handful of dense,well-researched but surprisingly lively policy books dating back to Green's work for Ralph Nader in the 1970s.

"Who Runs Congress," a 1972 bestseller that Green co-authored with James M. Fallows (later editor of U.S. News & World Report) and David R. Zwick, examines the shady financing of congressional campaigns.Though Green was then just 26, his book is a mature, well-reasoned, largely non-partisan assault on corporate interests. He proves himself an able journalist, with an eye for the telling quote. He has staunch Republican Rep. "B-1" Bob Dornan on the record as saying, "Corporate managers are whores. They don't care who's in office, what party or what they stand for. They're just out to buy you."

Green drops a few bombs himself. He characterizes Congress as "535 local heroes and potential presidents jousting among themselves for power and prestige." He pokes fun at the system of seniority in congressional committee assignments: "Parodying Darwin, the system has simply insured the survival of the survivors." Green's conclusions resonate today, given the current push for campaign finance reform: "Until Congress institutes the public financing of congressional campaigns as the best way to cleanse the epidemic of purchased politicians ... the jingle of corruption and bribery will continue to be heard in its halls."

"The Other Government: The Unseen Power of Washington Lawyers" (1975) is the only book for which Green takes credit as sole author. Like "Who Runs Congress," it's way ahead of its time in alerting the public to the aggregation of political power by special interests and lobbies. Though written against the backdrop of Watergate, there's very little barricade-storming here - just an earnest, well-researched look behind the curtains of power in Washington.

Before you rush out to the nearest library branch, you should know these books don't circulate widely in New York. Though Green's most widely known work, "Who Runs Congress," was a New York Times bestseller, the New York Public Library has exactly one copy to lend. Brooklyn and Queens have zero copies. Manhattan has a copy of "The Other Government," but it's in my apartment and it's not due for another couple of weeks. Brooklyn and Queens don't have a single one. (Conspiracy theorists may suspect a Giuliani-inspired purge of the stacks, but there's no evidence to substantiate this claim.)

Perhaps it's just as well that campaign researchers don't waste too much time reading through the Green oeuvre. In many ways, the author they'll find is more impressive than any candidate could be. His arguments are reasoned and his words well-chosen and there's no chance that he'll all of a sudden let slip with an ill-timed comment. Green comes off as a tough, independent-minded journalist with maybe too much allegiance to the truth to ever really make it as a politician.

LOAD-DATE: July 18, 2001

17 of 52 DOCUMENTS

The Washington Post

April 22, 2001 Sunday
Final Edition

SECTION: BOOK WORLD; Pg. T04

LENGTH: 1085 words

HEADLINE: Rough Sailing

BYLINE: Reviewed by Adam Mazmanian

BODY:

BLUE FRONTIER

Saving America's Living Seas

By David Helvarg

Freeman. 299 pp. $ 24.95

In this collection of interconnected essays, the unabashedly activist environmental journalist David Helvarg makes the case that the world's oceans are in crisis and that an urgent governmental and industrial response is necessary -- now. He totes up the usual causes: More Americans than ever are living closer than ever to the oceans, and their waste water and garbage are polluting bays and estuaries. Deep-water oil and mineral exploration will inevitably poison virgin ocean. Overfishing is depleting native aquatic species at an alarming rate. Global warming and melting polar icecaps are raising sea levels and threatening cities, and 100-year storms are rocking America's coasts with alarming regularity. Reckless overdevelopment is contributing to the erosion of beaches.

A remarkably energetic reporter, Helvarg is found here paddling on his surfboard, there clinging to the gunnels of a patrol boat as it bears down on an illegal lobster pot, again pressing down on senators and admirals at a catered banquet, now taking notes in the decompression chamber of an underwater research pod. His affable personal style serves him well in interviews with scientists, environmental cops, bureaucrats, fishermen, real estate developers, military men, politicians and activists as he endeavors to present a sort of state of the watery union aimed at general readers.

We also meet some characters less savory even than the typical soulless industrialists. For example, there's Pfiesteria piscicida, the "cell from hell." This aquatic microbe, when exposed to the nutrient-rich environment created by overflowing wastes from industrial hog and chicken farms, will multiply, causing devastation of near-Biblical proportions, dissolving the flesh off of fish, and inducing bloody lesions, vomiting, nausea and other symptoms in humans. Giant industrial farms, such as those profiled by Helvarg, are responsible for dumping millions of tons of untreated animal waste each year on land that's not equipped to absorb it. Because these huge farms tend to operate in states beholden to agribusiness, they often escape regulation and go unnoticed except, it seems, by neighbors and investigative reporters.

Helvarg reports on the largely unsuccessful attempts to prevent the fishing industry from depleting fish stocks in American coastal waters. Especially interesting is the story of the American Fisheries Act, which began its life as a bill designed to limit the take of huge factory trawlers in Alaskan waters but ended up subsidizing the modernization and consolidation of the large fishing concerns through a $ 95-million boat buyback program. That means that companies such as Trident and Resources Group International can afford to construct and deploy trawlers; one such behemoth is "capable of catching and processing about a million pounds of fish a day, using a net that could easily swallow the Statue of Liberty."

Meanwhile, back on land, ordinary Americans are subsidizing the desire of the wealthy to develop beachfront barrier islands. Worse, the construction of jetties and breakwaters in order to capture sand in the tidal flow and preserve the beach from storms in the short term is encouraging erosion over the long term. Coastal geologists term this process "newjerseyization." The agency responsible for America's littoral well-being, the Army Corps of Engineers, might be expected to reform these unsound development methods, were it not constantly inundated with requests for beach replenishment -- projects that cost billions of dollars, tend to favor wealthy landowners, and have only a temporary effect.

Perhaps coastal regions wouldn't feel as much need to gird themselves against storm damage if it weren't for the monster storms that now occur with remarkable regularity. Helvarg cites ice-core sample evidence suggesting that "there is more carbon dioxide in our atmosphere today than at any time in the past 420,000 years" and goes on to link the rise in 100-year storms with the rise in temperature due to global warming. And it's not just our shores that are threatened by these storms -- the nation's pocketbook hangs in the balance as well. As hurricanes such as Hugo, Floyd and Andrew pushed private insurers out of the flood-disaster business, the federal government stepped up to the plate and is, by Helvarg's lights, on the hook for more than $ 521 billion.

Though Helvarg's catastrophic litany may read like predictable environmentalist Chicken-Littleism (and to some extent it is), the author connects the dots among the various threats to America's oceans surpassingly well. Just as he traces the flow of water from rain clouds and snowmelt through rivers and under the ground into estuaries and the sea, he follows the bizarre alphabet soup of overlapping government regulatory agencies responsible for our oceans, and shows how each is either in over its head or sunk into the mucky swamp of industry.

Though Helvarg makes it seem obvious to characterize the damage caused by farm wastes, petroleum and mineral exploration, groundwater contamination, acid rain and other waterborne threats as part of a holistic cycle, our response to these threats is disturbingly atomized. Upwards of 16 federal agencies are charged in part with responsibility for America's oceans, among them U.S. Fish and Wildlife, the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Park Service, the Mineral Management Service, the State Department, the National Marine Fisheries Service, the Department of Transportation and even the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The umbrella organization that was created to coordinate oceanic research and preservation, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency (NOAA) is renamed "No Organization At All" by a few of its more cynical employees (though not for attribution).

While it's doubtful that any hardcore industrialists will be moved to sign up with Greenpeace as a result of Helvarg's book, regular beachgoers, anglers and coastal residents will recognize some or all of the symptoms of oceanic degradation that he describes. His book is a bit plodding in the beginning, wading through the history of federal involvement in oceanic research and its relation to the rise and fall of the Cold War. But Helvarg does his best work from the field where, thankfully, he finds himself most of the time. *

Adam Mazmanian is senior editor at About.com.

LOAD-DATE: April 22, 2001

18 of 52 DOCUMENTS

March 7, 2001 Wednesday QUEENS EDITION

SECTION: VIEWPOINTS, Pg. A40

LENGTH: 671 words

HEADLINE: CITY LIFE;
Mayor's Decency Idea Could Be a Hit

BYLINE: By Adam Mazmanian; Adam Mazmanian is a senior editor at About;com, an Internet company based in Manhattan

BODY:

WHEN I first heard the mayor's plans to establish a commission on public decency to protect the public morals from prurient works of art, I didn't hold my breath waiting for an invitation. I mean, New York's a pretty wide-open town, but there are more than enough finger-waggers, Bible-thumpers and bluestockings to staff the commission 10 times over.

So imagine my surprise when I read that many civic and religious leaders were less than enthusiastic about the prospect of safeguarding New Yorkers from blasphemy, apostasy, idolatry and nudity. Even the Catholic League's William Donohue expressed strong reservations about the commission. Of his hard-line ideological allies, only Staten Island Borough President Guy Molinari voiced even lukewarm interest, telling a reporter, "I wouldn't say no."

There are basically two reasons why New Yorkers are shying away from the commission: No. 1. No one wants to be identified with the mayor's signature brand of spiteful pique, especially as his mayoralty wanes. 2. People hate meetings.

Let's take the second objection first. Sure, the meetings sound like a drag. I hate meetings, too. At my New York-based Internet company, we sit around for what seems like hours talking about "leveraging synergies," "extracting value" and "killer apps." Of course, most of the time I love it to death, but sometimes the decision-making process feels, well, a little wishy-washy. Nobody ever wants to commit to a hard and fast judgment. It's all "that would be great, but" and "yeah, okay, maybe we could try that."

Bor-rrring! Imagine, instead, the Decency Commission meetings, we panelists sitting in rows on high benches, the sallow light playing off the folds of our judicial robes as in a Goya painting. Artists would file in to present their art for judgment. The verdicts would be swift and sure. If a work is found obscene, the chair would simply level his gavel at a petitioning artist and gravely intone, "I cast thee out!" With drama like that, who needs donuts?

And to all the people who think Mayor Giuliani's on the way out, well, they should think again. If Clinton's second act is a hit, hizzoner's has all the ingredients of a show-stopper. But he needs a little zip. A little pop. He's got to zig where others zag. Every retired politician writes books and makes talk show appearances. Forget "People's Court." He's got to think "outside the box."

The idea came to me when I actually saw Renee Cox's "Yo Mama's Last Supper" in the newspapers. With the artist's breasts and genitals redacted with black ink, the painting looks so dirty, much more so than it does hanging in the Brooklyn Museum. Apparently artists have been depicting religious icons in the nude for centuries. It's not generally considered a big deal.

But with that black tape stuck there like pasties on a stripper, boy, did I ever want to take a second look. That's when I realized that the decency commission is tailor-made for prime-time television.

Picture it: The Machiavellian malevolence of "Survivor" meets the bourgeois indignation of "Dr. Laura." And Rudy G. would be the ringmaster. Each week, a new group of artists would display their most prurient creations. The camera closes in on the offending portions of the work-naked bodies, animal excrement, viscera, whatever. The commission and the audience votes on the work, and then he delivers the verdict, along with a few zingers-like the way the mayor nailed that ferret guy on his call-in radio show.

I've even got the intro all planned out. It's totally killer: Kettle drums swell. A stern baritone voice announces, "Mayor Rudolph Giuliani!" A velvet curtain rises and he struts down the gleaming stage, the barely-clad Decency Commission Dancers kicking up a storm right behind him. He could even wear fishnets, too, if he wants.

"How are you tonight?" he leers at the crowd.

"We're offended as hell!" they reply in unison. "And we're not going to take it any more."

GRAPHIC: AP Photo - Decent legs: The mayor gets a kick with the Rockettes at the Inner Circle Show last Saturday.

LOAD-DATE: March 7, 2001

20 of 52 DOCUMENTS

October 24, 2000, Tuesday ALL EDITIONS

SECTION: VIEWPOINTS; Page A41

LENGTH: 385 words

HEADLINE: A RED SOX FAN WOULD PREFER A POX ON BOTH NY STADIUMS

BYLINE: By Adam Mazmanian. Adam Mazmanian is the arts and books editor of About. com

BODY:

AS A RED SOX fan, humiliated time and time again at the hands of both Yankees and Mets, I have only one question: Can't they both lose?

Like a lot of Red Sox fans who live in New York, I've mellowed on the current Yankees team. It's hard to root against the dignified Bernie Williams, the charismatic Derek Jeter or the wizened and crafty Luis Sojo.

Even Paul O'Neill, whose perfectionist histrionics make him an obvious target for the jeers of opposing fans, earned the respect of the Fenway Faithful last year when he bashed his already injured rib cage against the short right field wall in pursuit of a fly ball. They're positively lovable compared with the ego-tripping Bronx Zoo inmates of the 1970s.

But let's not forget our history. I remember vividly the so-called " Boston Massacre" of 1978, when the Yanks took 13 out of 14 games from the first- place Red Sox to force a one-game playoff to settle an end-of-season tie atop the Eastern Division. I was in Fenway Park for the playoff and watched as Bucky Dent won the game with a pop-fly home run over the Green Monster off Mike Torrez.

To this day, Yankees fans watching Boston take a game in the Stadium will chant "Buck-y De-nt! Buck-y De-nt!" to those few Boston fans brave enough to wear the Red Sox colors.

For decades going back to the 1940s, the Yankees have stood between Red Sox fans and their dreams of World Series glory. They did the same just last year in a poorly officiated series that still has some Sox fans smarting.

By way of contrast, the Mets have never really done anything that terrible to the Red Sox. Even though the tape of the infamous Bill Buckner error loops through the collective memory of Sox fans like a Diamondvision Zapruder film, what Mets haters don't always keep in mind was that Buckner should not have jumped for joy before attempting to field Mookie Wilson's weak grounder. The Red Sox had it, and they blew it.

So it's a no-brainer: Mets in seven. Let the bleachers rock with spilled hops and fisticuffs. Let the subways crawl from Shea to the Stadium, packed to the ceilings with irate fans. And, for the finale, Roger Clemens can play a tune from the Kenny Rogers songbook and walk in the winning run in the seventh game.

LOAD-DATE: October 24, 2000

21 of 52 DOCUMENTS

August 20, 2000, Sunday ALL EDITIONS

SECTION: CURRENTS & BOOKS; Page B13

LENGTH: 810 words

HEADLINE: MEAN STREETS

BYLINE: By Adam Mazmanian. Adam Mazmanian is arts and humanities editor of About. com.

BODY:

THE ROYAL FAMILY, by William Vollmann. Viking, 780 pp., $ 40.

A PRIMORDIAL LONGING occupies the core of William Vollmann's sprawling, ambitious new novel. The feral human passion for society has rarely been so exhaustively, microscopically dissected, cataloged and laid bare for inspection. The cast of whores, junkies, johns, bulls, gangbangers and hobos will be familiar to hardcore Vollman acolytes, as will the seedy Tenderloin district that they inhabit. But it's the author's sincere drive to create a taxonomy of suffering and desire that binds together the multitude of vignettes and epiphanies into a cohesive whole that will make readers of his 10 other works feel most at home.

"The Royal Family" is also an epic retelling of the story of Cain and Abel. Two brothers approaching middle age, Henry and John Tyler, abandoned by their father, both misunderstood by their ailing mother, enact a biblical drama of hatred and recrimination, regret and loss. Vollman stages the struggle between the Canaanites and the Chosen People as an eternal battle, fought in ghetto streets, hot-sheet hotels and in each human heart. While Vollmann does nothing so simple as construct a carefully tuned allegory, hewing strict and straight to the ridges and valleys of the Bible story, there is no mistaking the impression that he's out to set the record straight-that the Canaanites got a raw deal, and someone, or everyone, has to answer for it.

Henry is a San Francisco private investigator hired by a mysterious tycoon called Brady to track down the Queen of the Whores, a mythic pimp/earth mother who rules and protects a string of Tenderloin streetwalkers. Henry doesn't put much stock in the story of the Queen, but he's behind on his debts and Brady is paying a lot of money for his services. But as Henry pierces the veil of the San Francisco night, he becomes hypnotized by the netherworld of prostitutes, and as his investigation begins to suggest there really is a beneficent Queen ministering to this fallen flock, he finds himself called to find her.

There is much for Henry to run from. He's had an affair with his brother's wife, Irene, an unhappy Korean woman who escaped a strict immigrant upbringing to share her life with John, a priggish, self-satisfied attorney. Irene becomes pregnant, probably by Henry (though he denies it) and commits suicide rather than face the consequences of her betrayal.

Cursed by his love for Irene, cursed by his failure to belong, Henry searches deeper and deeper until he finds the Queen, a tiny, slender black woman called Maj or Africa, joins her circle and becomes her lover. He meets the Queen's children: Domino, a wrecked, impossibly stubborn wreck of a blonde who hit the streets hard and never recovered; Beatrice, a Mexican girl from a small peasant village who left home with the dream of becoming a dancer and found only violence and degradation. They and others take solace in the Queen's presence and from her power-with doses of her benedictive saliva, urine and other excretions-to calm their cravings for heroin and crack cocaine.

Here's the Queen describing one of her girls: "You see what she's about? You see why she's good? Jesus Himself ain't fit to pop her zit like you done. Jesus on the very cross of torture and shame never suffered like she suffered. And I don't care how much He gave. He never gave like she did."

Many readers will find this mixture of blasphemy and scatology shocking, even horrifying. So will they loathe Dan Smooth, the Queen's retainer and a confirmed (if non-practicing) pedophile. His musings on the sexuality of children, graphic and lovingly rendered, are chilling and erotic and all the more arresting as they implicate the reader in Smooth's strange but very real passion.

Vollmann, of course, intends to shock, and by doing so he draws the reader further into the world of the fallen, the rejected, the forgotten. He is fond of his characters mostly for their weaknesses. His aim is not to withhold judgment or suspend it, but to reject the very idea. His liberal use of quotations from the Gnostic Gospels to open sections of the book hints at a belief at the radical egalitarianism of early Christianity, offering solace and redemption to all who would partake, and implies a deep and abiding critique of what passes for Christianity today.

There's much else here to recommend. An essay on the California bail system appears in the middle of the book and is as apt and as welcome as Melville's disquisition on cetology in "Moby Dick." The infrequent authorial intrusions are not the work of some trickster or rote postmodernist, but instead serve to bridge the gap between subject and audience. The book is long, harrowing and demanding, but it's worth the effort.

LOAD-DATE: August 20, 2000

22 of 52 DOCUMENTS

August 13, 2000, Sunday, Final Edition

SECTION: BOOK WORLD; Pg. X09

LENGTH: 845 words

HEADLINE: Tasmanian Devils

BYLINE: Adam Mazmanian

BODY:

ENGLISH PASSENGERS

By Matthew Kneale

Doubleday. 446 pp. $ 25

The genocide of the Tasmanian Aborigines is so little remarked upon probably because it was so successful. Between the arrival of European settlers in 1804 and the end of a brief but concerted Aboriginal uprising in 1830, Tasmania's entire native population was exterminated, with but a few sad exceptions. A photograph credited to Francis Russell Nixon and dated April 1858 depicts four of the last indigenous Tasmanians foppishly outfitted in the Sunday best of a bourgeois Victorian. The photo is unevenly exposed and a bit worse for the years, but the still, deep-set eyes and flat, expressionless lips bespeak a hatred as vast and consuming as any that could be provoked by the evils of man.

An honestly crafted historical novel can't afford to veer too far afield from the truth; it can't right the wrongs of history or turn back the time to rescue the innocent and punish the guilty. But that doesn't mean that a writer can't unload with both barrels on the brutish, pompous, cartoonishly malevolent avatars of 19th-century imperialism. In his U.S. debut, English novelist Matthew Kneale does all that and more, sending up the biblical literalism of Darwin's critics, skewering the racial theorists who used Darwin to confirm their own twisted prejudices, mercilessly lampooning the penal-colonial complex that laid waste to Tasmania's 40,000 years of continuous human habitation in just short of 30 years. All this is done with a droll, ironical flourish that belies the stern, moral critique he develops in his novel.

That said, meet the clever, good-natured Illiam Quillian Kewley, a luckless Manxman who risks his entire fortune on a specially outfitted smuggling ship, the Sincerity. This being 1857, and duties on tobacco and liquor imported into England being what they are, Capt. Kewley decides that the small effort and risk involved in sailing from the tiny (and duty-free) Isle of Man would set him and his wife up in high style.

Just as Kewley gets under sail, Yorkshire vicar Geoffrey Wilson is plotting a strange trip of his own. Driven to distraction by Darwin, Wilson obsessively struggles to reconcile fossil evidence with his conviction that God created the world 4,000 years before the birth of Jesus. His answer to the evolutionists? The process of "Divine Refrigeration." Wilson, whose devotion to sophistry is unshakable, argues, "Seeing as our Lord enjoyed the power to create the world, it seemed only logical, after all, that he would also have had the power to alter its temperature." Equally logical to Wilson is the true location of the Garden of Eden: Tasmania.

Kneale gives full-throated roar to his many characters, alternating first-person narration among five major characters and many more minor ones. Among them is Peevay, a young Tasmanian aborigine who greets the first English settlers he meets with a shy optimism but gradually, through repeated depredations, learns to despise the interlopers. Unknown to Peevay, his mother had been kidnapped and raped repeatedly by Jack Harp, a freed convict. The sweet-natured, almost Panglossian Peevay is the unwitting product of this unsolicited union, and his mother hates him for it.

The story shifts in time between Kewley's 1857 voyage and the early days of the English settlement of Tasmania and the incipient Aboriginal rebellion of the 1820s. Barely out of his home port, Kewley is waylaid by the English coast guard. Members of the guard impound his ship despite their inability to locate his cache of whiskey and tobacco (stowed inside an undetectable second hull). Faced with a 200-pound fine--almost the full value of the ship--the sly Manxman charters his craft to Wilson's expedition. The Sincerity gets out of hock, and the two leaders embark on a hilariously ill-conceived journey of discovery that flips the Voyage of the Beagle on its head.

The Aboriginal rebellion is as tragic as life aboard the Sincerity is hilarious. While Kneale's narrators, either with their brute simplicity, misguided liberalism or misplaced optimism, lend a comic tinge to an otherwise dark chapter in human history, there's no mistaking where Kneale stands. The English are characterized by their arrogance and their stupidity, whereas the cruelest trait attached to the dispossessed native Tasmanians is either righteous anger or a sad streak of gullibility. The sly and independent Kewley's live-and-let-live Manx sensibility suspiciously aligns with a modern strain of tolerance that it is perhaps optimistic to assign to a 19th-century character.

Still, it's fun to warm to Kewley and Peevay and just as enjoyable to despise the loathsome Potter and the intensely irritating Wilson. Novelists bent on delivering a "message" too often paper over the fundamentals of storytelling. To his credit, Kneale spins a yarn as entertaining as any Flashman novel while revisiting one of the darker chapters of human history.

Adam Mazmanian is the arts and humanities Editor of About.com.

LOAD-DATE: August 13, 2000

23 of 52 DOCUMENTS

July 9, 2000, Sunday, Final Edition

SECTION: BOOK WORLD; Pg. X07

LENGTH: 826 words

HEADLINE: Doffing His Robes

BYLINE: Adam Mazmanian

BODY:

THE MANY ASPECTS OF

MOBILE HOME LIVING

By Martin Clark

Knopf. 345 pp. $ 24

Caper stories tend to follow a predictable structure: A plan is devised, an eclectic group is assembled to carry out that plan, capering ensues, and things either (a) go awry to comic effect or (b) come out all right despite overwhelming odds. First-time novelist Martin Clark either never learned these rules or decided he didn't particularly care for them. Rather than turn the conventions of thriller storytelling upside-down, Clark gives them a wide berth, steering into less well-charted territory: just north of Southern Gothic, just south of John Grisham, a few degrees to port of the supernatural.

The result is a book that feels like the second half of one novel followed by the first half of another. Though there is some criticism implicit in that statement, in the end Clark is more to be praised for taking formal risks than he is to be censured for not coming across with the goods. With that in mind, meet Judge Evers Wheeling, a louche sot of a magistrate who works a circuit of local courts in rural North Carolina. (Clark, a Virginia circuit court judge himself, acquits himself admirably when it comes to courtroom verisimilitude and portraying the seamy underbelly of good-old-boy local politics, but let's hope for the sake of justice that he smokes considerably less marijuana than his fictional counterpart.)

Evers was bred to be a Southern Gentleman for a world that no longer wanted, needed or even cared for the type. His life since college has been one of going through the motions: conserving his family trust, being married to a beautiful but faithless woman, passing judgment on area felons through an alcoholic haze. Evers's life basically peaked at the prep-school mixers he attended as the 1970s were coming to a close. Clark writes, "The sex was perfect, since anything beyond a kiss was a good and great gift. Sweet, warm, tentative, one button at a time, often alcoholic, eyes closed and blind. . . . There was no need to feign interest in Chinese cooking, the politics of de Gaulle, the greedy denuding of the rain forests, Joyce Carol Oates, or a ban on nuclear weapons. Evers was barely able to drive a car, and was years away and events away from evenings with harridans who would, where their favors were concerned, bicker and haggle like hucksters in a tent carnival to ensure that none of their kindnesses went unacknowledged."

So when a beautiful blonde called Ruth Esther comes to Evers with a proposition--dismiss pending criminal charges against her brother and join the siblings on an adventure to track down loot from a previous crime--he's more than intrigued; he sees a means of escape from his fog of cynicism and regret. He enlists his brother Pascal--a spendthrift and a loafer, he's more dissolute than Evers but less plagued by conscience--and the crew of stoners who hang out at Pascal's trailer to abet him in the scheme.

The plot--a trip to Salt Lake City to retrieve (legally) an envelope from a bank vault--nearly fails, despite less than overwhelming odds. And, not quite halfway through the novel, we're deposited back in North Carolina to wallow in the depraved and perjurious escalation of Evers's divorce, his burgeoning relationship with Ruth Esther's African-American lawyer, Pauletta, and the pot-smoking bonhomie of Pascal and his buddies. Here the first part of the second novel begins, when Evers's soon to be ex-wife, Jo Miller, turns up dead.

To retain the mystery of Clark's tale, the elements connecting the two stories are better left unexplained: the possibly magical properties of Ruth's alabaster tears, the contents of the envelope found in Salt Lake City, the unlikely recipient of one of Jo Miller's freely dispensed sexual favors. Suffice it to say that by book's end, most of the outstanding threads are tied up, though not with the astonishment and flair promised by the novel's finely woven beginning.

The ending may be lackluster. Clark's characters have the unfortunately tendency to speechify rather than talk, giving the impression that dialogue is being read rather than spoken. And the character of Pauletta, the bright, strident, somewhat caustic African-American lawyer, is ham-fistedly overwrought; she's more a parody of a Norman Lear character than a plausible, flesh-and-blood person. Despite these flaws, Clark's tale is, because of its languorous, unconventional pacing, a refreshing antidote to those thrillers whose writing seems to be merely an obligatory prelude to a screen treatment. The writing is occasionally rough and there are long patches of dialogue with no clear purpose--although a cruelly hilarious scene in which Evers catches his wife in the act of adultery is not to be missed. But on the whole this is a fun, satisfying and unconventional first effort.

Adam Mazmanian is the Arts & Literature editor of About.com.

LOAD-DATE: July 09, 2000

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April 30, 2000 Sunday, CHICAGOLAND FINAL EDITION

SECTION: BOOKS; Pg. 4; ZONE: C

LENGTH: 877 words

HEADLINE: A BEST OUT OF GREEK MYTHOLOGY SEARCHES FOR MEANING IN CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN

BYLINE: By Adam Mazmanian. Adam Mazmanian is a book critic and the arts and literature editor of About.com, a network of special-interest Internet sites.

BODY:

THE MINOTAUR TAKES A CIGARETTE BREAK

By Steven Sherrill

John F. Blair 313 pages, $19.95

Let's dispense with one thing before we get going: Yes, it's that Minotaur -- the grotesque result of Pasiphae's brief, unfortunate infatuation with a head of cattle, the half-man half-bull who patrolled the forbidding precincts of the Cretan labyrinth over 5,000 years ago.

In his comic, bittersweet first novel, poet Steven Sherrill plucks the Minotaur from the realm of mythology and drops him into the very real byways of the Piedmont region of North Carolina. The Minotaur (folks call him M) is something of a drifter, wandering from town to town in his well-cared-for, 1975 Chevy Vega hatchback.

When we catch up with M, it's 1990, and he's working as a line cook at Grub's Rib, a popular roadside restaurant considered to be the "king of the T-bone and the rib roast." He's regarded by the locals as something of a curiosity, but more of an everyday freak than a demigod. Only once does a character actually cower and recoil at the sight of the Minotaur. Most people barely give him a second glance.

Still, the Minotaur knows he's out of place working the deep fryer at a roadside chophouse. The tension that drives the story is generated by the dissonance between how the Minotaur appears and what's actually on his mind. Sherrill cleverly structures his book episodically to show off the Minotaur to his best advantage: Here's the Minotaur relaxing in his trailer at Lucky-U Mobile Estates; there he is hunting down a solenoid for his Vega at the local wrecking yard; again at the restaurant, whipping up a week's worth of onion soup even though it's his day off.

Inside, the Minotaur is by turns seething and optimistic, miserable and contented. He's held back by his near inability to speak. His huge bovine tongue can't get around the complicated sounds required for human speech. He communicates through a series of grunts and the occasional monosyllabic utterance:

"(T)he codes of language exist in the Minotaur's mind. His thought, his subvocal speech, is complex. He wants to say, I am tired of these horns and all that they mean."

Despite his human intelligence, the Minotaur's memory is faded. He has wandered the earth for millenniums, but he is only dimly aware of his storied and violent history. His past haunts him in impressionistic flashes free of context and without apparent meaning. These moments of recognition, when they come, terrify the Minotaur. These days, he's barely capable of anger. The cruelest of indignities will spur his old rage -- but only for a moment. He's not the beast he once was. "Boys remind him of what he was and what he can never be again, remind him of how even the animal in him has diminished."

What's left is basically a creature of yearning. The Minotaur craves to belong, craves attention even more. But because of his broken speech and clumsy manner, it's excruciating to watch his attempts to break into human society. Though he gets on fine with a few colleagues and his landlord, he's looking for a deeper connection. He cultivates crushes, but can't make a move. Sadly, "in the Minotaur's world it is far easier to kill and devour seven virgins year after year, their rattling bones rising at his feet like a sea of cracked ice, than to accept tenderness and return it."

Despite his burdens, the Minotaur is an optimist. "For as long as the Minotaur can remember -- no, for much longer than he can remember -- he has risen every day aware of the possibility of change." The plot, when it does emerge from the thicket of ordinary days, pits the Minotaur's childlike faith in the goodness of the universe against the dark, suspicious side of human nature. Distressingly, however, as the Minotaur begins to represent a type, becomes an archetypical outsider, the less compelling the story becomes. What's most remarkable about the novel is how seamlessly the Minotaur's strangeness is integrated into the recognizable world, so when the Minotaur is reduced to a mere symbol, the limitations of Sherrill's story become more and more obvious. The trailer-park setting reveals a slip of shopworn stereotyping, and the dialogue begins to feel a little canned. There are, too, almost risible attempts at irony, but to Sherrill's credit, the ignominy of a bull-headed man carving shanks of rare beef is soft-pedaled, played only partly for laughs.

As a meditation on hope and redemption, "The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break" is a bit of a bust. Its true sweetness and character come off much better on a human scale. Sherrill's uncanny depiction of restaurant work -- the frenetic pace of a busy night, the cutthroat institutional politics, the wet, gritty stink that clings to body and fabric after a hard shift -- is one of the novel's greatest joys. The same goes for the intermittent ruminations on auto repair. Sherrill has a real talent for writing about obsession, precision and characters with rare aptitude for losing and for loneliness. It's this mix that powers the novel through its few rough patches. When he's on top of his game, Sherrill reveals himself as that most endangered of literary species, a crafty, talented novelist who's not afraid to show his heart.

FICTION.

GRAPHIC: PHOTO GRAPHICGRAPHIC (color): Illustration by Judie Anderson.; PHOTO (color): (Book cover.)

LOAD-DATE: April 30, 2000

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April 23, 2000, Sunday, Late Edition - Final

SECTION: Section 7; Page 19; Column 4; Book Review Desk

LENGTH: 337 words

HEADLINE: Books in Brief: Nonfiction

BYLINE: By Adam Mazmanian

BODY:

THE MEN WHO WEAR THE STAR
The Story of the Texas Rangers.
By Charles M. Robinson III.
Random House. $29.95.

In December 1876, Judge H. Clay Pleasants presided over a hearing that saw seven participants in a bloody feud bound over for trial. With armed guards at his back, Pleasants informed the men in the dock -- and their partisans in the gallery -- that lawlessness in De Witt County, Tex., was at an end, and warned, "When you deal with the Texas Rangers, you deal with men who are fearless in the discharge of their duty and who will surely conquer you." This is the image of the Texas Ranger as handed down by Zane Grey and, of course, Clayton Moore: guardians of the wild frontier, Indian fighters, scourge of gunmen and train robbers, lean men in white hats, Colt revolvers strapped to their hips. The Rangers grew from a force of irregularly constituted militiamen, first organized under the Mexican flag, to become soldiers in the Mexican War and the Civil War before settling into their present-day role as state law enforcement officers. Charles M. Robinson III has written an assiduously researched if lackluster account of the Rangers from their beginnings -- 10 men mustered to defend against Indian depredations in 1823 -- to the early 20th century, when the automobile replaced the horse as the Rangers' mount of choice. Robinson, whose books include "The Buffalo Hunters," deftly balances the Rangers' more admirable exploits with darker tales of revenge, looting and lynching. Gen. Zachary Taylor, after fighting alongside Rangers in the Mexican War, wrote, "There is scarcely a form of crime that has not been reported to me as committed by them." "The Men Who Wear the Star" is hamstrung by the lack of archival material; Ranger records were twice destroyed by fire, in 1855 and in 1881. There is much to admire -- carefully reconstructed battle scenes, salty characters, political shenanigans -- but Robinson's plodding, detached style makes it rough going. Adam Mazmanian

http://www.nytimes.com

LOAD-DATE: April 23, 2000

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February 20, 2000, Sunday ALL EDITIONS

SECTION: CURRENTS & BOOKS; Page B12

LENGTH: 960 words

HEADLINE: JAILBIRD JUDGES

BYLINE: By Adam Mazmanian. Adam Mazmanian is the arts and literature editor of About.com.

BODY:

THE BRETHREN, by John Grisham. Doubleday, 366 pp., $ 27.95.

DESPITE a lifetime appointment to the court of public approbation, John Grisham may be on the verge of throwing in the gavel. How else to explain his latest offering, a joyless, limp political thriller that interweaves two equally improbable plot lines and reads more like a script treatment than a novel?

Don't be fooled by the plot summary, which suggests a witty, sardonic caper worthy of Elmore Leonard. "The Brethren" are three judges serving time in a minimum-security federal penitentiary in North Florida, not far from Jacksonville. They are: Joe Ray Spicer, a former small-town justice of the peace from Mississippi who was sent up for scamming bingo profits from a local Shriners organization; Finn Yarber, once chief justice of the California Supreme Court and now an inmate serving time for income-tax evasion- victimized, he claims, by the state's conservative governor who resented Yarber's opposition to the death penalty, and Hatlee Beech, a hanging judge who served on the east Texas federal bench before killing two college students while driving drunk in Yellowstone National Park.

The three operate as the prison's tribunal, adjudicating inmate disputes in weekly court sessions. On the side they make a few dollars filing sentence-reduction motions for their fellow prisoners, but their real business is their extortion scam. They place personal ads in gay-interest papers posing as young men in drug rehab seeking mature, discreet pen pals. They send a beefcake photo and exchange letters with their correspondents, prying into the extent of their wealth and their marital status before springing the trap, shaking down their victims for as much as they can cough up. Abetting from the outside is L. Trevor Carson, a down-at-the-heels booze-hound Florida attorney out of central casting right down to his rumpled seersucker jacket and bow tie.

The scam is based on a real-live lonely-hearts extortion plot run by one Kirksey McCord Nix from the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola. Nix netted hundreds of thousands of dollars before his scam was uncovered. Like the judges in the novel, he employed a hard-luck local attorney to act as a go-between and launder the ill-gotten booty. The most recent opinion in the case (U.S. vs. Sheri Lara Sharpe, et al) was handed down by the Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in October. I read the decision while preparing this review. Compared to the Grisham version, it's a barn burner. Its author, Judge John M. Duhi Jr., ought to hire Grisham's agent.

Paralleling the extortion scam is the story of Aaron Lake, a longtime Arizona congressman who's tapped by CIA chief Teddy Maynard to run for president on a platform of military preparedness. Maynard is another stock character, a wheelchair-bound paranoiac with fantasies of global chaos spinning in his febrile mind -imagine J. Edgar Hoover crossed with Dr. Strangelove. Maynard has a bee in his bonnet about a Russian general who's priming the army to take over the country, and from there, the old Soviet satellite states of Estonia and Lithuania before marching into Poland-now a member of NATO - triggering World War III. It's beyond implausible, and Grisham's goober-pea geopolitics ought to be required reading for any budding novelist who's thinking about skipping his research and just diving in.

Even more far-fetched is Maynard's electoral strategy for Lake. He campaigns on the doubling of the military budget. Defense contractors will fund the campaign, and terror abroad- as arranged by Maynard - will bring the threat home. The plan is, "Collect the cash from those who will profit. Scare the voters into racing to the polls. Win in a landslide. And in doing so save the world." Is this an electoral scenario that would be discussed by the head of the CIA and an experienced, ambitious legislator? Or is it a plot that would make a high school freshman with a passing knowledge of civics roll his eyes and change the channel?

Of course, it's only a matter to time before Lake, a closeted homosexual despite all evidence to the contrary, is drawn into the brethren's scam. Maynard's operatives keep a close watch on Lake, but he's already winning primaries before the spies learn of their candidate's indiscretion. Drastic but, by and large, predictible steps are required to keep things quiet. What Republican, after all, would vote for the Bi-Curious Candidate, no matter how hawkish he is?

Grisham's gifts haven't abandoned him entirely. When the overlapping plots are in place and the they-know-that-we- know-that-they-know endgame starts up, Grisham shows his remarkable talent for pacing. Still, there are few surprises here, and because his characters are so blandly drawn, despite their exotic resumis, there's no one to root for and nothing to sustain our interest.

Grisham's readers deserve more respect than they're getting here. Though Grisham is not known for his eloquent sentences or compelling set pieces, the atmosphere here is particularly thin. I searched the text in vain for any tactile, auditory or olfactory description that heightened tension or added depth to the many characters. The tale's implausibility isn't entirely to blame. The conspiracy at the heart of "The Firm," for example, was just as unbelievable, but the novel still raced by on the strength of Grisham's vivid characterizations.

I don't believe Grisham's having much fun this time out. It's as though he himself isn't engaged with his own creation. If he conveyed a sense of his own joy in playing the Fates, it would be a simple thing to go along for the ride not out of credulity, but for the sheer spectacle.

GRAPHIC: Photo by Deborah Feingold - John Grisham

LOAD-DATE: February 20, 2000

28 of 52 DOCUMENTS

February 13, 2000, Sunday, Final Edition

SECTION: BOOK WORLD; Pg. X09

LENGTH: 924 words

HEADLINE: Virtual Sincerity

BYLINE: Adam Mazmanian

BODY:

A HEARTBREAKING WORK OF

STAGGERING GENIUS

By Dave Eggers

Simon & Schuster. 375 pp. $ 23

Reviewed by Adam Mazmanian

Dave Eggers, if you don't know (and you don't, unless you're the type of person who reads media columns or scans magazine mastheads like box scores) is one of the most talented and inventive editors of his generation. He founded Might, a snarky, prankish, satirical and visually innovative magazine in the tradition of Spy. After Might folded, he worked briefly at Esquire before quitting to start McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, a stark, illustration-free literary journal that bills itself as a salon des refuses where writers can publish work that has been rejected by mainstream magazines because it is not sufficiently topical, celebrity-based, or formally derivative and inoffensive. McSweeney's has reaped reams of praise from media critics across the country as something of a "refreshing antidote" to the "crushing sameness" of popular magazines and has earned its creator some notoriety.

Before any of this happened, however, Dave Eggers's parents died. Both of them. Of cancer. Within 32 days of each other. Eggers, then 21, left his leafy Chicago suburb for San Francisco, where he and his sister Beth raised their 7-year-old brother, Toph, and where Eggers reflects upon "the triumph of the human spirit" as well as "the inevitability of decay" and "the short life of anything real or beautiful."

The result of these reflections is, as billed, a tribute to Eggers's peculiar sort of genius (it is genius, though perhaps not of the staggering variety), which is driven not by tragedy or suffering but his by his indomitable will to communicate, his wish for some means of collapsing the distance between his "true heart" and ours.

His writing is often exhortatory, demonstrating his half-joking belief that he was chosen to ignite the passion and purpose of his generation, as though his words might persuade young people to rise up in a spontaneous articulation of rage. He writes, "the lattice is the connective tissue. The lattice is everyone else, the lattice is my people, collective youth, people like me, hearts ripe, brains aglow." There is no political purpose behind the rhetoric; he's simply in love with youth and its possibility. Indeed, Eggers evokes the terrible beauty of youth like a young Bob Dylan, frothing with furious anger: "Don't you know that I am connected to you? Don't you know that I'm trying to pump blood into you, that this is for you, that I hate you people, so many of you . . . "

Yet he pokes fun at his own sincerity at every turn, with inventive, self-referential digressions: Characters step outside themselves to impugn Eggers's motivation for writing his memoir; a chart (available by mail order in poster form from the publisher for $ 5) traces the many themes of his book to the deaths of his parents; a balance sheet with the accounting of the expenses and deductions against his $ 100,000 advance is combined with an offer of $ 5 to the first 200 readers who write "with proof that they have read and absorbed the many lessons herein." Yet his passionate, almost desperate effort to make himself understood courses through all the tricks and gamesmanship.

Some readers might find such devices precious, even obnoxious. Well, Eggers is way ahead of you. He outlines the scope and strategies of his book in the introduction, where he addresses "The Painfully, Endlessly Self-Conscious Book Aspect" and its corollary, "The Knowingness About the Book's Self-Consciousness Aspect," where he preempts "your claim of the book's irrelevance due to said gimmickry by saying that the gimmickry is simply a device, a defense, to obscure the black, blinding, murderous rage and sorrow at the core of this whole story."

"Thus," he writes, "an incomparable loss begets both constant struggle and heart-hardening, but also some unimpeachable rewards, starting with absolute freedom, interpretable and of use in a number of ways." Of use, that is, to Eggers. Readers in search of inspiration or therapeutic guidance are advised to look elsewhere. In fact, considering that Eggers's memoir could not have been more cynically calculated to satisfy the demands of an enterprising publisher -- dead parents, cancer, alcoholism, the trials of single parenting, mental illness, sex, recovery, even entrepreneurship; sort of an Angela's Ashes meets Prozac Nation meets Iacocca -- there is very little for the soul in torment to glean here. Not only isn't Eggers one for bromides, he isn't exactly humble, either. Whatever strength of character saw him through his struggles, it's hard to escape his unspoken presumption that it is not universally shared.

Despite the occasional high-hat, this memoir will resonate with people of a certain age who long to relive the brief but memorable promise of the slacker, pre-boom 1990s. And Eggers is a pleasingly complicated writer, constitutionally incapable of simple reflection; he always considers the multiplicity of paradoxical feelings and motivations behind a thing, as though only in descending orbit around this morass of complexity, this chaotic internal dialectic, can he get us closer to what he calls his "core," the thing that "can't be articulated. Only caricatured." He takes us close, shows us as much as he can bear. At its best, his book is a comic and moving witness that transcends and transgresses formal boundaries.

Adam Mazmanian is the Arts & Literature editor of About.com.

LOAD-DATE: February 13, 2000

29 of 52 DOCUMENTS

November 7, 1999, Sunday ALL EDITIONS

SECTION: CURRENTS & BOOKS; Page B12

LENGTH: 799 words

HEADLINE: NOT THE SUMMER OF LOVE

BYLINE: By Adam Mazmanian. Adam Mazmanian is a writer in Brooklyn.

BODY:

PERV - A Love Story, by Jerry Stahl. Morrow, 341 pp., $ 24.

JERRY STAHL is best known for "Permanent Midnight," his memoir of life as a heroin-addicted screenwriter, which was made into a film written by Stahl. So it's not surprising that his first novel, a coming-of-age tale set in the Pittsburgh of 1970, has a strongly cinematic style, relying on a lot of close-ups to advance the story. In a film, Stahl's various set pieces - orgies of sex and drugs culminating in violence - would only be hinted at in a script.

For the viewer, there would be no wondering whose leg is draped across whose backside, or whose mouth is clamped on which heroin-laced joint. You'd just see it. In a book, though, full of complex sequences of physical description, it is left to the reader to block the scenes, keep it all straight. In "Perv," a funny, addled mess of a first novel, sometimes you see it, but most of the time, you don't.

But if "Perv" is more a study for a film than a novel, it's going to be a very funny, very sordid film. Imagine a Farrelly Brothers picture, only harder, meaner. It's the story of Bobby Stark, a 15-year-old hippie wannabe whose life unravels after he is expelled from his Pennsylvania prep school. The allusion to "Catcher in the Rye" is unmistakable, and the book follows the same essential arc as Salinger's classic novel of teen angst - basically, from bad to worse. (You'd think people would have learned by now not to promote books as "the next 'Catcher in the Rye," or " 'The Catcher in the Rye' for the current generation," or, in the case of "Perv," "'The Catcher in the Rye' as if written by a schizzed-out combination of Lenny Bruce and Woody Allen." It's the literary equivalent of being dubbed "The next Bob Dylan"; it creates unreasonable, insurmountable expectations.) "Perv," however, is no mere rehash. For one thing, Holden Caulfield was expelled from Pencey Prep for poor academic performance. Bobby gets the boot because he's caught, more than redhanded, after losing his virginity to a local girl - he's third in line in a basement rumpus-room gangbang - trying to retrieve a lost prophylactic from his lusty, if jaded, sex partner. He's busted by the girl's father, Mr. Schmidlap, a one-armed barber, who shares a few beers with young Bobby and cries about his ailing wife. Bobby shares the tale of his father's suicide. Mr. Schmidlap takes pity on Bobby. Instead of administering a well-deserved beating, he tattoos a red rose over his nipple. With no painkillers.

From there it gets stranger. After his expulsion Bobby returns home to his mother, a depressed, pill-popping widow who alternately reviles and smothers him. At the airport, he recognizes a Hare Krishna girl as Michelle Burnelka, a grade-school crush. After things go badly at home - his mother's new boyfriend makes a pass at him; he's nabbed by an elderly lady (coincidentally, Michelle's grandmother) sniffing panties in the laundry room of his mother's apartment complex; a scheduled pep talk from one of his late father's law partners morphs into a pathetic, drunken plea for love - Bobby decides he's had it.

Even though he views his hair as an impediment to hippiedom ("My hair wouldn't grow long. It just got fat. Just frizzed out, fatter and thicker, sticking out sideways and never reaching my shoulders. Until my head was shaped like the Ace of Spades"), he idealizes the counterculture and all it stands for and decides to move to San Francisco. He contacts Michelle and she's hot to leave town too, having been molested one too many times by the charismatic proprietor of her ashram. They try to hitchhike out of town and are picked up by two older hippie types who, though they sport the emblems of peace and love, have violence and mayhem on their minds.

This is where the novel fizzles. A bizarre, hard-to-follow drug-fueled rape scene dominates the last 70 pages of the book. It has the effect of demolishing Bobby's illusions of free love and harmony - from Woodstock to Altamont, as it were. Culturally, this is an important shift in the collective consciousness, but represented here it feels tacked on (though not nearly so tacked on as the wildly improbable and disappointing epilogue) and diversionary. As with the conclusions to such overrated 1960s films as "Medium Cool" and "Easy Rider," extreme violence is apparently the only destination Stahl could imagine once the story had run its course. Though much of the dialogue crackles with sharp humor and Stahl's characterizations are vivid and effective, eventually the weight of dubious coincidence becomes oppressive, as is the tendency for every supporting character, upon meeting Bobby, to behave strangely. The authentically grotesque gets lost here amid the labored pandemonium.

GRAPHIC: Photo by Geoff Cordner - Jerry Stahl

LOAD-DATE: November 10, 1999

30 of 52 DOCUMENTS

November 7, 1999, Sunday, Final Edition

SECTION: BOOK WORLD; Pg. X06

LENGTH: 919 words

HEADLINE: Postmodern P.I.

BYLINE: Adam Mazmanian

BODY:

MOTHERLESS BROOKLYN

By Jonathan Lethem

Doubleday. 311 pp. $ 23.95

Reviewed by Adam Mazmanian

As with a high-concept Hollywood blockbuster, the premise of Motherless Brooklyn is easily contorted into an alluring, one-sentence pitch: A private eye with Tourette's Syndrome solves the murder of his mentor.

An infinite potential for comedy is contained within this improbable plotline. The private eye, as traditionally conceived, is a sharpie, a wisecracking, hard-drinking, aloof tough guy. Tourette's Syndrome is a neurological disorder expressed in physical and verbal tics ranging from facial twitches to uncontrollable flashes of profanity. The man in the trenchcoat, a cigarette dangling coolly from his lower lip, loses his credibility when he risks lurching into a fit of coprolalia at the drop of a well-blocked fedora.

But Lionel Essrog, both detective and narrator, is not a risible character, even though he is often called "freakshow" and "crazyman." He's an orphan, raised in a Brooklyn orphanage, and educated by Frank Minna, a mysterious, mobbed-up South Brooklyn operator who runs the Minna Detective Agency (and, it seems to young Essrog, all of Court Street in Brooklyn). Minna, who took Essrog as an apprentice when he was 13, plays father, hero and role model to him and three fellow orphans -- Tony, a blustering Mafia wannabe; Danny, a lithesome, imperturbable hoopster; and Gilbert, who is doughy and unreflective.

The novel opens with a stakeout. Essrog and Gilbert are trailing Minna to a meeting at a Buddhist temple on Manhattan's East Side. Despite their attentive surveillance, Minna is abducted and killed. The novel arcs around Essrog (at age 33, in many ways still a child, the receptacle of a single influence) and his compulsive search for the killer. But the real mystery, the deeper story, is even riskier, more interior and deceptively ambitious. Essrog's ticcing carves a path between the subconscious and the surface of things, suggesting myriad connections and conspiracies ("wheels within wheels" is one of Frank Minna's refrains) between the brain and the observable world too numerous to document, suggesting a universe of experience unavailable to the "normal" brain.

Simultaneously, Essrog's ticcing charts sound and meaning, unearthing a hidden language of false cognates, rhyming slang, spoonerisms and puns -- a poetry of cerebral overload. Offered Thai soup in a restaurant he stammers: "Tie-chicken-to-what? Tinker to Evers to Chicken." When Minna's abductors threaten to escape, his mind screams, "Follow that car! Hollywood star! When you wish upon a cigar!" Reflecting on both the case and his position on a mental map of New England, he exclaims "invest-in-a-gun, connect-a-cop, inventachusetts. . ."

Jonathan Lethem, author of four previous, well-received novels, is known for clever genre-bending, the sort generally categorized under the imprecise catchall "postmodernism." ("Most ponderous!") Lethem's new book, however, is so true to the conventions of detective fiction that it's startling whenever Essrog betrays his awareness of them. When a suspect in the novel's central crime is murdered offstage, eliminating him from the controversy, Essrog muses, "Have you ever felt, in the course of reading a detective novel, a guilty thrill of relief at having a character murdered before he can step onto the page and burden you with his actual existence?" Pistol-whipped into unconsciousness, Essrog quotes Philip Marlowe on the subject of oblivion. He even tics on The Maltese Falcon: "The quieter the monk, the gaudier the patter." This self-consciousness is the novel's weakest aspect, drawing attention to the formulaic plot pieces, from the opening murder to the obligatory warning ("Get off the case!"), to a numbingly expository final confrontation that would leave Hercule Poirot winded: "You know more than me. . ."; "Let me work out the next part. . ."; "When did you figure out the truth?"

The detective genre, I think, is singularly ill-suited to this sort of arch meta-narrative because the literary impulse behind a good detective story is already ironic, detached, playful and self-conscious to the point of self-parody. Go back to your Chandler, your Marlowe, your Thompson. The cartoonishly iron-jawed, rye-besotted, fast-talking exteriors of their detectives belie their compulsion for the truth, mask a craving for disclosure. Essrog is not so different except that his Tourette's is the crack in the mask or, rather, an infinity of pinpricks.

This literary-historical self-consciousness is a minor intrusion. I will also fault Lethem for his cartoonish portrayal of two aging, high-level Italian gangsters who figure prominently. They speak in stilted, portentous tones that recall champion wrestler Lenny Montana's turn as the hypothyroidal hitman Luca Brasi in "The Godfather." It's a little silly, and an inauthentic turn in a novel that takes pains to describe real and actual Brooklyn buildings and businesses. In Essrog, however, Lethem has fashioned a lovably strange man-child and filled his cross-wired mind with a brilliant, crashing, self-referential interior monologue that is at once laugh-out-loud funny, tender and in the honest service of a terrific story. It would be quite unlike Lethem to saddle up Essrog for another go-round, but I can't help thinking, as sentimental and unfashionable as it sounds, what a shame.

Adam Mazmanian is a writer living in Brooklyn.

GRAPHIC: Illustration, david miller

LOAD-DATE: November 07, 1999

31 of 52 DOCUMENTS

August 1, 1999, Sunday ALL EDITIONS

SECTION: CURRENTS & BOOKS; Page B13

LENGTH: 1025 words

HEADLINE: PLAYING BALL IN THE GUILDED AGE

BYLINE: By Adam Mazmanian. Adam Mazmanian is a writer in Brooklyn.

BODY:

A CLEVER BASE-BALLIST: The Life and Times of John Montgomery Ward, by Bryan Di Salvatore. Pantheon, 477 pp., $ 27.50.

JOHN MONTGOMERY WARD, whose baseball career spanned 21 seasons between 1877 and 1894, is not the best remembered player of his era. That title would have to go to Cap Anson, the hard-driving player/manager of the Chicago White Stockings who is popularly credited with banning blacks from professional baseball.

Neither was he the fans' favorite; King Kelly - the roguish, alcoholic Boston outfielder who once, as a manager, abruptly inserted himself into the game to make a play on a foul ball drifting toward his bench - takes that honor. And even though Ward excelled as a pitcher, hurling baseball's second recorded perfect game and winning 47 games for the Providence Grays in 1879, the strain of tossing close to 600 innings a season drained the juice from his arm after seven years of major-league pitching.

But in his day, Ward, a gritty perfectionist, literary man, lawyer and labor organizer, was equal in renown to Kelly and Anson, and, according to one sporting correspondent, "talked of more than President Cleveland." He played a crucial role on two pennant-winning New York teams, married and divorced Helen Dauvray, a leading stage actress, and most notably, organized the revolt that resulted in the shooting star that was the Players League. He wrote several books on baseball, was briefly general manager of the Boston Braves and, in retirement, became a top-ranked amateur golfer. One strains to imagine a more eventful life in a more memorable time.

Ward's career spanned the Gilded Age when sporting men drank like stevedores, wore handlebar mustaches and played ball in gaudy, candy-striped uniforms; when newspapers began to cover the goings-on in dramatic and athletic circles with an attention to detail formerly reserved for affairs of state. Bryan Di Salvatore, a magazine writer and amateur base-ballist himself, brilliantly captures New York's nascent fascination with celebrity at a time when the burning white lights of Broadway competed for one's sensory attention with the stench of offal and horse droppings.

Here is Di Salvatore's account of Opening Day, 1883, when the Polo Grounds, in its first incarnation, occupying the northern end of Central Park, opened its doors: "The Second, Third, and Sixth Avenue els are bursting - no matter the many extra sections ordered for the day. So are the omnibuses. A cab? - you might as well look for a stray giraffe as an empty hack! The chaos! It would be bad enough, but May 1 is also 'relocation day' - the day that leases all over the city end. Dreaded warrants, with their two-hour warning of imminent eviction, fly like losing tickets at the race track. ... The misery! The shrieks of the dispossessed - who knew there were so many languages on earth? - would melt Satan's heart, tax Milton's pen." It is the personality of the age that sings here, more than that of Ward himself. He may have personified his time so exactly that few of his contemporaries saw fit to comment on his character, other than to praise it to the heavens. His chief emotion seems to have been the contentedness of a man who knew himself and by and large achieved what he set out to do. Ward was born in the bucolic western Pennsylvania town of Bellefonte in 1860. His mother was a local saint whose death merited several columns of lamentation in the town newspaper; his father was generally mired in debt from one failed business venture or other, and often owed money to his wife's family. If Ward suffered any spiritual hardship from his father's weakness, or because he was, by age 16, an orphan, he kept it to himself. Ward was already a young man of some renown, and when he left town to play professionally, the Bellefonte Democratic Statesman editorialized "There is no reason why a base-ball pitcher should not eventually become a great man, but the chances, for Monte's sake, we are sorry to say, are against it ... Monte quit it, and go to your books again." Monte - a nickname he despised - did hit the books again. In 1883, after four tremendously successful seasons pitching for the Providence Grays of the National League, he signed with the New York club (then only informally known as the Giants), and started work on his law degree at Columbia University.

Whether his consciousness was raised at law school or he naturally resented being treated as chattel is not known, but in 1885 he helped found the Brotherhood of Professional Base Ball Players to combat notoriously collusive league bargaining practices. At that time (and, in fact, until 1975) players were bound to their teams by the restrictive reserve clause under which players were, as Di Salvatore puts it, "tangible, absolutely secured assets, and their contracts ... negotiable instruments on the baseball stock market." After the 1889 season, the owners added insult to injury by creating five "ironclad" pay categories, effectively freezing player salaries.

Ward struck back, organizing his brotherhood into a rival league for the 1890 season. The Players' League fielded teams in eight cities - six of which already boasted National League clubs. Given that the National League already faced stiff competition from the American Association, the success of the Players' League might have been the death knell for the "senior circuit." And the league was successful, outdrawing both older established leagues for the season. Ward's Brooklyn team placed second, and Ward himself had a fine season, batting .335 with 188 hits. Despite its success, though, the Players' League collapsed, for reasons that defy easy summary. Even though Ward was no radical, and indeed, barely even a trade unionist, it must have pleased him immensely to hear brass bands open Players' League games with this paean to his brotherhood: Hurrah for the gallant lads Who boldly struck for right! The dauntless souls like knights of old Who fought and won the fight! Mammon's greed, Oppression's power They boldly now defy.

So cheer them to the echo, lads, And fling your hats on high!

GRAPHIC: From the Book - New York Giant John Montgomery Ward in 1888

LOAD-DATE: September 10, 1999

33 of 52 DOCUMENTS

July 11, 1999, Sunday, ALL EDITIONS

SECTION: CURRENTS & BOOKS; Page B14

LENGTH: 533 words

HEADLINE: BEACH BOOKS / SHERLOCK FROM JERSEY

BYLINE: By Adam Mazmanian. Adam Mazmanian is a writer in Brooklyn.

BODY:

HIGH FIVE, by Janet Evanovich. St. Martin's, 320 pp., $ 23.95.

THOUGH SHE'S tough in a pinch, Stephanie Plum, the 28-year-old Trentonian hero of Janet Evanovich's successful mystery series, is prone to the usual vices of bachelorettes on her side of the turnpike: clotted coats of mascara, short clingy dresses, big hair and chocolate pig-outs. At her job as a bounty hunter she's still prone to rookie mistakes. She's outmaneuvered by a dwarf computer whiz while attempting a routine apprehension. She's asleep on the job when a gang-banger in the throws of drug withdrawal surprises her with a pistol. At home she wrestles with her finances, broods over the sporadic affections of hunky Trenton cop Joe Morelli and feeds her pet hamster leftovers from her parents dinner table.

She's not much of a detective in the big picture sense, as Stephanie herself admits when her mother asks her to look into her uncle Fred's disappearance. She gets by with a mixture of instinct and bombast and a maximum two degrees of separation from the entire Trenton population. She also has a trusty Watson in her Grandma Mazur, a busybody so incapable of embarrassment that she sets off a fire alarm at a closed-casket viewing in order to snap pictures of a murdered corpse. Still, Stephanie is a good enough investigator to keep up with a dizzying array of clues, including photographs of bloody body parts, canceled checks that weren't paid out properly and the ever-increasing pile of stiffs around the headquarters of a garbage carting company with which Fred had a billing dispute.

There's more than enough suspicion to go around. The garbage company has ties to the mob. There's a man claiming to be Fred's bookie tailing Stephanie to collect on outstanding debts. Fred's wife Mabel misses her husband so much that within days of his disappearance she trades in her old Pontiac for a shiny new import, shops for a new washer-dryer and plans a Bahamian vacation. At the same time, Stephanie has to contend with the romantic attentions of her fellow bounty hunter, the shadowy, mysterious (but hot, Cuban and very very buff) Ricardo (Ranger) Manoso. "Ranger wasn't listed under potential boyfriends in my Rolodex," Stephanie frets when their association takes an unprofessional turn. "Ranger was listed under crazed mercenaries. " She's also being stalked by Benito Ramirez, the heavyweight boxer and brutal rapist who vowed revenge after Stephanie locked him up in Evanovich's first Plum novel, "One for the Money." (The novels are titled sequentially: "Two for the Dough," "Three to Get Deadly," etc.)

Though the Ramirez angle is chilling, most of the time Evanovich plays for laughs, pushing the local color to the hilt. Juicy Fruit snaps off every page as Stephanie hurtles from the pork roll factory to the Grand Union chasing down clues. The action is improbable and cartoonish, and all the more enjoyable for being so. The lighthearted mood makes for more of a campy (if forgettable) romp than a thriller. Ever unflappable, Stephanie finds a way out of every situation and no one really likable gets killed. Which is fine: Evanovich will want them all around for the sixth book.

LOAD-DATE: July 11, 1999

34 of 52 DOCUMENTS

July 4, 1999, Sunday, Final Edition

SECTION: BOOK WORLD; Pg. X08

LENGTH: 1055 words

HEADLINE: Manners, Music and Murder

BYLINE: Adam Mazmanian

BODY:

THE DROWNING PEOPLE

By Richard Mason

Warner. 340 pp. $ 24

Reviewed by Adam Mazmanian

It's impossible to consider the literary merits of The Drowning People separate and apart from the outrageous sum of money paid to its 20-year-old Oxonian author. Even the publisher touts the "record-setting two-book deal" among the book's selling points. Rightly or not, the huge advance (in excess of $ 1 million combined from Mason's American and British publishers) sets expectations so high that only an extraordinary effort could meet them. The Drowning People, a dense, plodding, relentlessly interior thriller, is at best a mixed debut from a promising genre writer. At worst it is the embodiment of the cynical hustle that is the book business, a critique underscored by the editor's gushing praise of Mason: "He's not only articulate and charming, but he looks like Hugh Grant."

Because Mason is so young and because he is a talented writer (and because he has a sweet face, boyish and gentle like Hugh Grant's), it is somewhat unfair to take him to task for his publisher's marketing strategies. However, for Warner to make its money back on this book, they're going to have to sell it and sell it hard. The Warner hype machine -- responsible for the unaccountable popularity of such atrocities as The Bridges of Madison County and The Notebook -- has an impressive record of moving less than quality product, so any harm to Mason's reputation falls within the limits of acceptable collateral damage.

The story is improbable from the very beginning. James Farrell, a violinist, aged 70, has murdered Sarah, his wife of 45 years. To explain why, he recounts his doomed romance with Ella Harcourt (Sarah's first cousin) 50 years previous, in the mid-1990s, meaning that Jamie is telling his tale late in the first half of the 21st century. This appears to be an easy-to-ignore conceit; the story hinges on abstruse British modes of class and duty, and the temporal distance gives Mason an excuse to explain the intricate web of British social relations to a (presumably American) audience without appearing to condescend. Yet even the brief treatment of the novel's present makes it clear that these same attitudes inhere in the future England of Mason's imagination, if only as a historical vestige. In other words, things then are much the same as they are today, rendering his invention useless except as a device to prevent him from setting the novel in the past.

James meets the troubled Ella and woos her away from her fiance, Charlie Stanhope, a stolid, well-born young banker, the very model of English decorum. Though Ella does not love Charlie, she felt compelled to marry him because of her duty to her inheritance: the forbidding island Castle of Seton. Ella was educated in the United States (moved there by her father after her mother died in a car crash) and is conflicted about the obligations of her ancestry. As she laments to James, "Family tradition is so tangled up with who I really am that sometimes I wonder how much of me is real."

Sarah, however, is to the manner born; at ease with her upper-class heritage, she despises her cousin Ella and covets Seton for her own. Indeed, she was in love with Charlie when Ella swooped down on him. No stranger to tragedy herself, Sarah lost both parents in the crash that claimed Ella's mother. (If you're rubbing your temples in anguish, I'm explaining it correctly.) The mystery here (if it can be called that -- the story unfolds predictably) is how James came to marry Sarah even though he truly loved Ella.

James's musical career takes off, and his and Ella's romance blossoms. "We smashed our world with the arrogance of gods: tradition, responsibility; social constriction; all crumbled under the vehemence of our attack," Mason writes. "We thought to re-create society in our own image. And in so doing we forgot our place in the heavenly order. Human beings are not gods; they should not play with divine fire. Ella and I committed the sin which the Greeks have taught us is fatal."

As the passage above suggests, the novel is humorless, prolix and severe in a way I can only describe as reactionary, as though Mason were personally offended by late-20th-century advances in narration and were on a one-man mission to turn back the clock. Or perhaps it can be read with an eye to the wink, the wry aside, evidence of a youthful writer predisposed to mischief. There are a few signs: James Farrell himself may be named for the American novelist known for his dense, descriptive -- some might say turgid -- interior style (cf. Studs Lonigan). The only other writers named in the novel are Edith Wharton and Henry James, two of Mason's stylistic progenitors. Tantalizing though these hints at self-awareness may be, stacked up against the rest of the novel they suggest that the author is entirely in earnest.

Where Mason shows his youth is in his narcissistic insistence on the celebrity of his characters. It's not enough that James is a talented musician; he must be the best of his generation, profiled repeatedly in the Times. When James and his accompanist, Eric, travel to Prague to preside over an auction of Eric's aunt's paintings and to study music with an accomplished teacher, it's international news. When Sarah publishes an article in an historical journal about some of the more sordid aspects of Harcourt family history, including the suicide of Ella's grandmother, timed to coincide with Ella's cancellation of her engagement to Charlie, the story makes headlines in the tabloid press. The characters' renown adds no weight to their suffering. They are not heroes; they have no power save what they wield over each other. It's as though Mason's lack of confidence in his characters impelled him to use an outside spotlight to command attention.

All that said, Mason is only 20. He can write a good sentence, even if he's less adept at stringing them together. He's written a fair approximation of a 19th-century psychological novel, and doubtless he has the ability to write a contemporary story. In the meantime, The Drowning People will likely become a movie, probably one with a lot of nudity and rather less brooding monologue, vastly improving the tale.

Adam Mazmanian is a writer living in New York City.

LOAD-DATE: July 04, 1999

35 of 52 DOCUMENTS

June 6, 1999, Sunday, ALL EDITIONS

SECTION: CURRENTS & BOOKS; Page B14

LENGTH: 630 words

HEADLINE: BEACH BOOKS / SCHEMING IN CUBAN

BYLINE: By Adam Mazmanian. Adam Mazmanian is a writer living in Brooklyn.

BODY:

HAVANA BAY, by Martin Cruz Smith. Random House, 329 pp., $ 24.95. OF ALL THE clever devices spy-thriller writers have used to sidestep the inconvenient collapse of the communist menace, Martin Cruz Smith's solution is perhaps the neatest: He sets his tale in Cuba, where disciples of Marx coexist with black marketeers, Santeria cultists and junketeering European sex tourists. Into this tropical stew of intrigue he plunges Arkady Renko, the world-weary detective of three previous hit novels.

Smith's books inevitably hinge on some bit of espionage, but Arkady is more investigator than spy. Though he is often compared to Porfiry Petrovitch from "Crime and Punishment," Arkady is morose and ironic where Dostoevsky's creation is jovial, upbeat; Porfiry is a steaming cup of tea, Arkady a rough wooden bowl of cold borscht and more aptly likened to Levin from "Anna Karenina," a true Russian, dour and dark.

When we catch up with him in Havana, he's hit bottom. Reeling from the loss of his beloved Irina in 1992 s "Red Square," he's cashed in half his life savings for a round-trip ticket to claim the body of his old tormentor and friend, Sergei Pribluda, whose gelatinous remains were - the Cuban authorities believe - found floating in the harbor. Though Arkady disputes the medical examiner's identification, it's more out of habit than conviction. In fact, Pribluda's moldering corpse reminds Arkady that "he was at a point now where he knew more dead people than alive." He decides to commit suicide, but he is interrupted in this when the translator assigned to him by the Russian embassy tries to murder him and, instinctively, Arkady kills his attacker.

Now there are two bodies, and one very angry and, naturally, very attractive detective named Ofelia Osorio ("she combined the sharp features of an ingenue with the grave expression of a hangman," Smith writes), who makes it her business to see that Arkady ends his sojourn in Cuba without further loss of life and without further cooling already tepid Russo-Cuban relations.

Instead, a rejuvenated Arkady begins to piece together a far-reaching plot that extends from the fishermen of Havana Bay up the food chain to the highest echelons of the government, the resolution of which is the book's weakest point; it implodes under the weight of its own improbability. However, Smith's plots have always run from the merely Byzantine to the incomprehensible. Even a detective as skilled in the art of intuition as Arkady couldn't solve a Martin Cruz Smith mystery just by reading it. Arkady's method is to shake the tree and see what falls loose. Here it's a bounty of charming and nefarious supporting characters: the sexy and menacing Sgt. Luma of the secret police; Dr. Blas, the courtly medical examiner; Erasmo, the wheelchair-bound master mechanic; George Washington Walls, a black nationalist fugitive from American justice, and Ofelia's mother, who taunts her ideologically devout daughter by running an illegal lottery out of their home.

Looming as large is the character of Cuba itself, which Smith paints as a deeply conflicted land where "everybody does two things," where poor fishermen drag nets from inflated inner tubes borne along by the current; where Ernest Hemingway's 1957 Chrysler Imperial still hugs the winding oceanside roads under the guidance of an American profiteer; where fearful comrades indicate the Maximum Leader not by saying his name, but with the furtive stroke of an imaginary beard. Indeed, what draws Arkady and Ofelia to each other (other than the thriller writer's obligation to spin a couple of tortured sex scenes) is their shared inability to go along to get along. It would be a shame if this is the last we hear of Ofelia; they make quite a team.

LOAD-DATE: June 6, 1999

36 of 52 DOCUMENTS

May 31, 1999, Monday, Final Edition

SECTION: STYLE; Pg. C02; BOOK WORLD

LENGTH: 859 words

HEADLINE: Paradise Found and Lost Again: Two Views of Tahiti

BYLINE: Adam Mazmanian, a writer living in Brooklyn.

BODY:

IOLANI

Or, Tahiti as It Was: A Romance

By Wilkie Collins

Princeton University Press. 205 pp. $ 24.95

WORLD ELSEWHERE

By Peter Brooks

Simon & Schuster. 224 pp. $ 23

It is no wonder that Wilkie Collins's first novel languished for 154 years before finding a publisher. It is a truly awful book. Its amateurish melodrama, cheap hooks, long ungainly sentences and mawkish characterizations all mark "Iolani" as the unedited work of a 20-year-old dilettante, which it is.

Even the introducer, Ira B. Nadel--an English professor at the University of British Columbia, whose efforts in bringing this lost novel to light suggest that he's an admirer of Collins's work--will not commit to actual praise. He merely suggests that the work is "the embryo of Collins's later fiction" (which includes such classics as "The Moonstone" and "The Woman in White"), that it "provides a glimpse of the method and materials he will later elaborate."

The story of the book's disappearance and rediscovery is far more compelling than "Iolani" itself. Collins wrote it while an apprentice to a London tea concern. After being rejected by two publishers, the manuscript vanished until 1900, when it was purchased at an auction. After that, it bounced around considerably among private collectors until resurfacing in 1992, when its owner, who remains anonymous, offered it for publication.

If this lends the manuscript an alluring, romantic hue, like a foolscap "Maltese Falcon," consider the disappointment of cinematic bird-chasers Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre upon learning that their prize is a fake--17 years of hard work and thousands of dollars all for nothing. Even this cruel twist of fate does not come close to approximating the sense of wasted effort I experienced after completing "Iolani."

Briefly, then, "Iolani" is the story of Idia, a young Tahitian woman who flees her village rather than submit her newborn to the practice of infanticide. Iolani, the villainous high priest, gives chase. Civil war, betrayal and death follow.

Collins had never been to Tahiti when he began to write the book. The South Seas were enjoying a literary vogue, as novelists and explorers and missionaries painted native Tahitians alternately as wanton, amoral heathens and noble savages living in a state of grace. Collins preferred the Christian explanation to the romantic. His knowledge of Tahiti was cribbed largely from "Polynesian Researches" by William Ellis of the London Missionary Society; Collins went so far as to take his characters' names from Ellis's book. This accounts, too, for Collins's nearly unreadable topographical descriptions, so minute in detail, so lacking in vitality.

As if an antidote to Collins's smug, middlebrow moralizing, Peter Brooks's "World Elsewhere" is a truly lush, sensual, wondrous account of Tahiti as it appears to fresh, inquisitive eyes. Like Collins, Yale critic Brooks is indebted to a particular observer of Tahiti, Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, who visited the island in 1768, a year before Captain Cook's famous voyage, and captured his travels in journals.

Brooks's novel is the story of Prince Charles of Nassau-Siegen, a dissolute and debauched 21-year-old French nobleman whose web of romantic entanglements and diminishing inheritance prompt the youth's uncle to volunteer him on Bougainville's ship, the Boudeuse. Young Charles is unaccustomed to the hardships of sea travel. He's so at home in the salons and boudoirs of Paris that he considers the flaccid, slender thighs of his lover as "a kind of final realization of French civilization." But it doesn't take long for him to slough off the cloying sterility of his upper-class upbringing and embrace the innocent sexuality and egalitarian humanism he perceives among the Tahitians.

Charles's reaction to the Tahitians is, at first, erotic astonishment. Brooks, a first-time novelist, takes unabashed delight in portraying the tawny limbs and dusky aureoles of the free and easy island girls and Charles's sexual romps with Ite, a young Tahitian woman. As Charles notes, "I took sex to be my contribution to our mission of exploration. I couldn't leave that to the forecastle of the Boudeuse."

The sexual adventurism dovetails with the more crucial inquiry into the nature of man. The novel is a stage for a debate between the Enlightenment of Voltaire and Diderot and the romanticism of Rousseau. The ship's naturalist, Commerson, takes Charles under his wing as they puzzle over this island Eden.

"Could we Europeans ever be innocent again? Were we truly fallen creatures?" Charles wonders. No, the Panglossian Commerson suggests, "men could be governed in a way that does not suppress and pervert their natural goodness."

The plot, a trifle that hinges upon the killing of some natives by errant sailors, brings the debate to a head as the dark side of Tahitian culture--human sacrifice, infanticide--is exposed. These revelations suggest that the utopia the explorers have alighted on is merely a projection of their imaginations, that, sadly, "the true paradises are perhaps only those we have already lost."

LOAD-DATE: May 31, 1999

39 of 52 DOCUMENTS

APRIL 4, 1999, SUNDAY, SUNDAY EDITION

SECTION: SUNDAY REVIEW; Pg. 9

LENGTH: 736 words

HEADLINE: Coney Island Is a Carnival of Greed in a Novel of the Early 1900s

BYLINE: REVIEWED BY Adam Mazmanian

BODY:

DREAMLAND

By Kevin Baker

HarperCollins; 519 pages; $26

-----------------------------------------------------------------

In his brilliantly imagined and assiduously researched historical novel, Kevin Baker re-creates the New York of the early 1900s with all its seediness and bubbling optimism intact.

The title comes from a legendary Coney Island attraction -- "a million electric bulbs spinning a soft yellow gauze over the beach and parks" -- that was destroyed by fire in 1911.

Coney Island was America's first proletarian amusement park. New immigrants -- as many as 90,000 a day -- left their crowded, unsanitary tenements to stroll the boardwalk there, catch the ocean breeze, eat hot dogs (a Coney Island invention) and watch staged spectacles such as the "Fighting the Flames" show, in which acrobats leaped, apparently fearing for their lives, from a ramshackle tenement set ablaze.

Baker's Coney Island is also home to Trick the Dwarf, a fictional circus performer who tells the story of real-life Tammany Hall fixer Big Tim Sullivan, Mayor George McClellan, gangsters Gyp the Blood, Kid Twist and Arnold Rothstein, reformers Clara Lemlich and Frances Perkins, psychoanalysts Freud and Jung, and others -- all against the backdrop of an era when human life was cheap, children worked in locked garment sweatshops and the line between politicians and criminals was faint at best.

Bowery boy Kid Twist runs afoul of his rival Gyp the Blood at a rat-baiting contest in a blood-soaked basement tavern. Gyp has this trick: He can break a man's back over his knee and will do so on a $2 bet.

In an unexpected fit of conscience, the Kid brains Gyp with a coal shovel before he can cripple a young boy. The boy turns out to be Trick the Dwarf, who dresses as a child to mix safely in the rough-and-tumble clip joints downtown. The entire plot pinwheels off from this one event.

The Kid and Gyp have a shared contract to kill Herman "Beansy" Rosenthal, a gambler whose big mouth threatens to expose the inner workings of the Tammany machine. When Gyp's plans for revenge take precedence over the murder plot, Big Tim Sullivan is forced to insert himself into the matter.

Hiding out on Coney Island, Kid Twist falls in love with a young garment worker and budding radical, Esther Abramowitz, who just happens to be Gyp's estranged younger sister.

Baker revels in New York's gritty, sordid edges. He chronicles Kid Twist's leap into the Hudson River after the ship he's stowed away on ties up in New York: "He tore through the water and sank quickly through the incredible filth and offal of the harbor. He could see, floating past him in the oily yellow light as he sank: chicken guts and horse bones; loose turds; the severed paw of a dog."

Then there's Big Tim Sullivan, ruminating over the fate of street children in the world he'd helped build: "They were at the mercy of older cutthroats and panderers. The wagons and streetcars cut them down in droves, and now, too, the big new auto cars, swooping and careening recklessly through the crowded city streets."

Freud and Jung, visiting as a prelude to their famous Clark University lectures, hover over the convergent plot lines. They deliver a running commentary on their fracturing relationship and a truly alien perspective on the wondrous hell hole of New York but without really entering the story. Though entertaining, it's a sideshow the novel could do without.

Baker was in charge of the research for last year's "The American Century" by Harold Evans. He's brought his extensive homework to bear on his novel, but he also takes liberties here and there.

For instance, Mayor George McClellan, the son of the famously cautious Union general, had left office in 1909 -- two years before the events of the novel. The real-life Kid Twist was murdered in 1908.

Though an obscure parlor game can be made of the novel's verisimilitude, "Dreamland" is not for hair-splitters.

It's an outrageous celebration of a crueler, more innocent America, populated by rheumy-eyed cutthroats who plot murder while weeping over sad ballads sung by mustachioed waiters, by sad factory girls dreaming of elaborate hats and rich husbands and by street urchins still holding out for Horatio Alger's impossible American dream.

Adam Mazmanian, a Brooklyn-based writer, once lost his keys riding the Cyclone at Coney Island.

GRAPHIC: PHOTO, Kevin Baker

LOAD-DATE: April 5, 1999

40 of 52 DOCUMENTS

March 28, 1999, Sunday, ALL EDITIONS

SECTION: CURRENTS & BOOKS; Page B09

LENGTH: 2061 words

HEADLINE: BASES LOADED / EACH SPRING BRINGS NEW BASEBALL BOOKS - WITH NEW STORIES TO TELL, JUST WHEN WE THOUGHT WE'D HEARD THEM ALL

BYLINE: By Adam Mazmanian. Adam Mazmanian is a writer in Brooklyn.

BODY:

THE PRIDE OF HAVANA: A History of Cuban Baseball, by Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria. Oxford, 464 pp., $ 35. BRUSHING BACK JIM CROW: The Integration of Minor-League Baseball in the Jim Crow South, by Bruce Adelson. University Press of Virginia, 288 pp., $ 27.95. BASEBALL'S PIVOTAL ERA, 1945-1951, by William Marshall. University of Kentucky Press, 513 pp., $ 29.95. SUMMER OF 98: When Homers Flew, Records Fell and Baseball Reclaimed America, by Mike Lupica. Putnam, 209 pp., $ 23.95. TAKE TWO AND HIT TO RIGHT: Golden Days on the Semi-Pro Diamond, by Hobe Hays. University of Nebraska Press, 239 pp., $ 14 paper. YOU'RE MISSIN A GREAT GAME: From Casey to Ozzie, The Magic of Baseball and How to Get It Back, by Whitey Herzog and Jonathan Pitts. Simon & Schuster, 314 pp., $ 25. I WONDER IF, 10 years from now, the sports story we remember from the spring of 1999 is not the death of Joe DiMaggio, but how United States-Cuba relations began to thaw over a baseball game.

The Baltimore Orioles are in Havana today, playing a game against a Cuban national team, the first such visit by a major-league club in 40 years. A Baltimore Sun editorialist wrote in favor of the exhibition: "It should not be terribly important to the U.S. government that the Baltimore Orioles are going to Havana." On the contrary, it couldn't be more important, particularly if you hold the view that the United States should not have normal relations with Cuba. Nothing could appear more normal to an average Cuban than a baseball game.

Baseball is woven into the fabric of Cuban history and society to a degree unimaginable in the United States. Teodoro de Zaldo, a wealthy Havanan who attended Fordham University, is credited as the first man to throw a curveball in Cuba. His brother Carlos was Cuba's first secretary of state. Cuba never cared for our Marines, flotillas and gangsters, but the national pastime is another story, one masterfully and exhaustively detailed in a new history by Yale professor, and former semi-pro catcher, Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria.

Cuban baseball pioneer Nemesio Guill learned the game at Springhill College in Mobile, Ala., in 1858. He returned to Cuba in 1864 with a ball and bat among his possessions. The game spread as young Cubans returned from schools in the United States. As in the U.S., baseball was initially an upper-class diversion. But, with Cuba's independence from Spain and occupation by American soldiers, the game took root as the national sport for all levels of society, in part because they could beat teams of barnstorming American professionals. "The conqueror's mantle of superiority in economic and military power could not be denied," Gonzalez Echevarria writes, "but it was removed in the mock battlefield of sports."

If Gonzalez Echevarria has a scholarly appreciation for Cuban baseball, he also has a player's love of the game and a vivid sense memory of his native land. He recalls Gran Stadium in El Cerro, smelling "of strong coffee and good cigar smoke" and how, just outside the grounds, "pork was roasted on open fires for succulent sandwiches called pan con lechon, heavy with garlic and dripping fat."

He's made a detailed study of Cuban baseball heroes from Jose de la Caridad Mendez - nicknamed El Diamante Negro - a slight, gracious man who pitched 25 consecutive scoreless innings against the Cincinnati Reds in 1908 and went on to manage the Kansas City Monarchs in the Negro Leagues, to Adolfo Luque, a beanball artist and "snarling, vulgar, cursing, aggressive pug" known to wear a pistol to games. Luque played major league ball for Cincinnati; he went 27-8 in 1923, posting an ERA of 1.93. "It is an injustice," Gonzalez Echevarria avers, "that he is not in the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown." He makes the same case for Orestes (Minnie) Mioso and other Cuban stars, while exploding the myth that Fidel Castro ever played high-level baseball or tried out for a major league team, showing how Fidel has actually corrupted the Cuban game since taking power.

In 1997, baseball celebrated the 50th anniversary of integration. Players wore Jackie Robinson's number 42 on the sleeves of their uniforms to honor the pioneering Dodger second-baseman. With "Brushing Back Jim Crow," Bruce Adelson brings to light the more obscure story of the first ballplayers to toil in southern minor-league ball yards.

In 1947, there were minor league teams in 147 minor league cities. Teams such as the Macon Peaches, the Danville Leafs and the Dallas Eagles were forced to confront the integrated future, one player at a time. Deftly interspersing oral history and news clippings with just enough narrative to carry the tale, Adelson lays out a mosaic of reminiscence that illuminates the struggles of baseball greats and also-rans alike, including Henry Aaron, Ed Charles, Percy Miller, Bill White and Felipe Alou.

The situations were rarely simple. In the Cotton States League (CSL), which boasted four Mississippi teams, "resistance to integration in the spring of 1953 was one of the most vociferous of any taking place in the southern minor leagues." When the Hot Springs (Arkansas) Bathers signed brothers Jim and Leander Tugerson, the Mississippi teams threatened to leave the league, and that state's attorney general, J. P. Coleman, declared that interracial athletic competition was illegal.

The segregationists carried the day but were faced with boycotts by black fans of the Greenville (Mississippi) team two years before Rosa Parks and the Montgomery bus boycott. In the face of black protest, the CSL enjoyed record-breaking attendance. Though boycotts were more effective in New Orleans and elsewhere, Adelson's flaw is using race as his sole lens. Other factors such as television and radio, poor management and shifting population centers took a greater toll on the fortunes of minor league teams. That the CSL was integrated in 1954, and went out of business the next year, points out the odd array of forces at work in baseball at the time.

If William Marshall, director of Special Collections and Archives at the University of Kentucky libraries, has a flaw, it's that he's a bit of a homer. He's the custodian of Albert Benjamin (Happy) Chandler's papers. Chandler, who served as U.S. senator from Kentucky, replaced the legendary Kenesaw Mountain Landis as baseball commissioner, presiding over the game from 1945 to 1950 - a period Marshall characterizes as "pivotal."

Marshall recounts the highlights - Bobby Thompson's 1951 "shot heard round the world," Ted Williams all-star game home run off Rip Sewell's notorious high-arcing ephus pitch, the 1950 "Whiz Kids" of Philadelphia. This has all been written before, and far better.

More compelling are the behind-the-scenes business tales, including Chandler's hiring and eventual firing by baseball's owners; labor lawyer Robert Murphy's failed attempt to unionize the Pittsburgh Pirates, and Indians owner Bill Veeck's half-crazed publicity stunts, such as employing Jackie Price, a weak-hitting shortstop whose specialty was warming up the crowd by taking batting practice suspended upside down from a bar over home plate.

Marshall explains how television led to declining gate receipts for minor league teams. He agrees with International League president Frank Shaughnessey, who wanted to black out televised major league games beyond a 50-mile radius of the home city: "Radio aroused the curiosity of the fan," Shaughnessey groused. "Television satisfies it." In fact, Marshall's sole criticism of Chandler is that "when faced with the broadcasting issue he sacrificed the minor leagues to protect the reserve clause and to protect their own television profits." Bruce Adelson take note.

In the end, Marshall aligns himself with the Cassandras who claim that spoiled players, astronomical salaries and rising ticket prices are ruining the game, portentously concluding that "time is rapidly running out if baseball hopes to become the national pastime again." Anyone who followed last year's record-busting season knows that nothing could be farther from the truth. Even though small-market teams are having trouble competing for star players, recall that the Yankees, carrying the game's highest payroll, won four of the six world championships during Marshall's "Pivotal Era."

The blank line in the World Series table confirms it, but after last year, it's hard to believe the 1994 strike ever happened. The magic may fade from baseball, but the light never goes out, as Daily News sportswriter Mike Lupica reminds us in his memoir of the miraculous 1998 season: Kerry Wood's 20-strikeout performance; David Wells perfect game; Roger Clemens winning streak - played against the drama of Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa's race for the home run record. But it's also the story of Lupica the father and the son. His Little League coaching responsibilities include pitching to his own team. He learns that "there is not greater pressure in sports, none anywhere, than having a two-strike count on your own son."

Lupica writes in the clipped, deceptively breezy style of his columns; heavy on hyperbole and one-word paragraphs. There's a fair bit of cornpone as well, but it goes down easy. Harder to digest is the idea that Lupica represents the ordinary fan with an innocent, childlike love of the game. It's moving when he relates how the late, great broadcaster Mel Allen remembers 1961 as the year Roger and Mickey made boys out of us all. But when he brings his kids to meet Darryl Strawberry, strolls with his dad through Yankee Stadium's Monument Park or slips out of the house to drive from his elite Connecticut suburb back to the Yankee pressbox because David Wells is flirting with another perfect game, well, it's hard to shake the feeling that Mike Lupica has an easier time loving the game than the rest of us.

Hobe Hays, author of "Take Two and Hit to Right," spent six years playing semi-pro ball in the Nebraska Independent League in the 40s and 50s, first as a "college hotdog" in the summers and later while pursuing his graduate fine-arts degree. His pen-and-ink sketches, rough and shadowy as if cut from a Hardy Boys hardback, evoke the era as much as his musty-sweet recollections of Burma Shave billboards, grape Nehi and nicknames like Turkey-Neck and Baldy. Unlike minor leaguers, semi-pro ballplayers were not under contract, worked day jobs and could do as they please, "as long as they showed up sober for games and produced." Teams competed for shares of the gate receipts: 60 percent for the winner, 40 for the loser.

Hays played second base for the McCook Cats under the watchful eye of the foul-tempered P. O. Karthauser, a former Dodger prospect who ran McCook's pool parlor. Hays claims to have made it through two years in the Navy without once taking a drink, so it's left to Karthauser to do the honors, handing the heartbreakingly innocent 22-year-old his first bottle of suds. Though Hays baseball career never took off, he had a few big games, including a two-homer performance against Big Art Dolligan, ace of the Grand Island staff, and the time he gave up two singles to future hall-of-famer Richie Ashburn. Though the writing is a little rough in spots, the book is suffused with a glow of authenticity, like a manuscript found in an attic.

Former manager Whitey Herzog's hell-in-a-handbasket harangue, "You're Missin a Great Game," comes on like a beer-soddened old smoke who grabs your lapels and croaks, "Why, back in my day . . ." The "White Rat" has some good stories, but his hit-and-run cure for a game that's grown addicted to the long ball sounds tendentious - especially since he once managed the Cardinals to a World Series without drawing anywhere near the 3.2 million fans Mark McGwire packed into Busch Stadium. On the other hand, he did win the big enchilada in 1982 with a team that hit three fewer homers than McGwire hit alone. What's wrong with baseball? "One thing matters and one thing only: money." New Yorkers? "They think that if you don't live in their city you're just camping out." Baseball's owners? "They sound like a bunch of scared old ladies clutching their handbags." It's hard to tell what co-author Pitts brought to this project, other than a tape recorder. Shut it off. And call Whitey a cab.

GRAPHIC: Newsday Color Illustration / Bob Newman - A baseball player.

LOAD-DATE: March 28, 1999

43 of 52 DOCUMENTS

February 21, 1999, Sunday, Final Edition

SECTION: BOOK WORLD; Pg. X13

LENGTH: 756 words

HEADLINE: Tricks of the Trade

BYLINE: Adam Mazmanian, Special to The Washington Post

BODY:

THE HOUDINI GIRL

By Martyn Bedford

Pantheon. 307 pp. $ 24

Reviewed by Adam Mazmanian

What do a magician and a mystery novelist have in common? Both need to know the mechanics by which people are fooled. It's not arrogance alone that enables a magician to deal from the middle of the deck, palm a coin or saw a lady in half. As the audience, we're on guard for sleights, false-bottomed boxes and shadowy figures lurking behind a puff of smoke. The mystery reader pays close attention to marginal characters and shady circumstances but is equally sensitive to obvious tricks that insult the intelligence.

Payoff is the key for both prestidigitator and mystery writer. We'll forgive all the red herrings in the world if an illusionist delivers. But cough up a lame trick, and watch and be amazed as the air is sucked from the room. British novelist Martyn Bedford waves a convincing wand; he's adept at a sort of fashionable textual razzle-dazzle, structuring an intricate interplay of themes linking a murder mystery with the practice of magic. For all his stylistic maneuvering, though, Bedford falls short when it comes time to produce the rabbit from the hat.

Fletcher "Red" Brandon is a 29-year-old magician, a marginal success working England's circuit of seaside resorts and local theaters. The book opens in a smoky Oxford barroom where Red meets Rosa among a group of mutual friends. As their names suggest, they're a good match.

They go home together, "shag," and in a day's time Rosa has moved into Red's apartment. One Friday, a year later, Rosa dies, run over by a train.

The mysteries unfurl like a length of handkerchief from a wizard's sleeve. Did Rosa fall, or was she pushed? Why was she traveling when she was supposed to be at work? And what, really, does Red know about Rosa's past? Clues soon begin to accumulate. Rosa's bag arrives in the mail, containing a wig, her passport, a plane ticket to Amsterdam and Dutch currency. Red also learns that Rosa's job was not full-time, as he had thought: She had Thursdays and Fridays off. Doing what, he can only guess.

It's as important for the reader to follow Red's expositions on magic as it is to piece together Rosa's identity. Bedford describes the magician's tactic of "misdirection." "There are two essential elements to misdirection," he writes: "first, divert attention away from the methodology -- the secret -- of an illusion; second, divert attention towards some point or aspect which seems crucial, but isn't." He's as much as announcing that there's something up his sleeve, that there's some postmodern cunning that makes Red's adventure something more than a mystery novel.

Even so, it's disappointing when much of the story unfolds as traditionally as any dime shamus novel. Worse, the mystery of Rosa's past is not left for the reader to discover through Red -- the first-person narrative is interrupted by Rosa's autobiography, told in postmortem italics, describing childhood sexual abuse, adolescent drug addiction and her life in the dangerous underworld of Amsterdam's sex industry. Bedford's cheating here. The intermittent revelations rob the story of urgency, of the thrill of following Red as his investigations lead him to the dark center of Rosa's identity. It reads like a device tacked on by a nervous editor afraid that the true engine of the story -- Red's guilt over Rosa's death, his shame of never having truly known her -- was not enough to satisfy readers.

More's the pity, because Red's excavation of his memory for insight into Rosa's past is more compelling than his amateurish efforts to investigate the circumstances surrounding her death. He's an interesting character: a man accustomed to manipulating reality who comes to the painful realization that he has much less control over his own life than he imagined.

Bedford is a skillful writer, and though his book is unsatisfying it is never boring. He's done his homework where magic and the sex trade are concerned. Several set pieces describe tricks from the repertoire in pleasing detail. His treatment of Amsterdam's red light district is similarly assured. One scene even combines the two -- an X-rated magic show that has to be read to be believed. But ultimately it's a work of misdirection -- and not in the way it was intended. Through an accumulation of ineffective authorial tricks, our attention is diverted from the heart of Bedford's story and toward the smoke and mirrors.

Adam Mazmanian is a staff writer at New York Press.

GRAPHIC: Illustration, jonathan rosen

LOAD-DATE: February 21, 1999

44 of 52 DOCUMENTS

January 3, 1999, Sunday, ALL EDITIONS

SECTION: CURRENTS & BOOKS; Page B13

LENGTH: 1139 words

HEADLINE: MORE THAN ZERO

BYLINE: By Adam Mazmanian. Adam Mazmanian is a staff writer at the New York Press.

BODY:

GLAMORAMA, by Bret Easton Ellis. Knopf, 482 pp., $ 25. BRET EASTON ELLIS, the self-described "worst-reviewed novelist in the whole of America," is returning to a radar screen near you. A film biography of Ellis, "This Is Not an Exit," is kicking around London, and a script for his controversial snuff novel, "American Psycho," was green-lighted last month after languishing for years in development limbo (Christian Bale to star; Mary Harron will direct). That should soften up the zeitgeist for the embrace of his new book, an improbable thriller set against the fashion runways of New York, London and Paris.

It will be good to have him back. Since the publication of "American Psycho" in 1991, no literary debate has loosed the sort of vitriol from the pens of the professional reading class that makes book reviews fun to read. Lately the news has been all business, a steady stream of mergers and acquisitions. So boring. Ellis fifth novel, "Glamorama," is anything but.

Some critics will praise it as an ambitious if flawed vision of the corrosive, stultifying effect of global celebrity culture. Just as many will despise it as a spy novel tarted up to read like a scandal sheet with enough "American Psycho"-style violence to earn Ellis another stay in the pillory.

I'm not a big fan of Ellis, but I think he gets a bad rap because his work often sparks arguments about public morals, which miss the point. When I first read "Less Than Zero" as a teenager in 1985, I was taken with its affectless narrative, sketchy characters and amoral L.A. setting. But it never rang true for me, as it did for so many readers, with - as one critic put it - "an unnerving air of documentary reality." It was perhaps "unnerving" for older readers, parents afraid that their children would grow up into coolly cruel Ellis characters. To a kid it was fantasy. There was a similar critical reaction when the Larry Clark film "Kids," about licentious youth on the prowl in Manhattan, was released in 1995. Critics found it "uncompromisingly authentic" and "legitimately shocking" when, in fact, it was an exploitation film crafted to seduce suburban teenagers, shock their parents and make money off both.

People forget that exploitative art exploits its audience, not its characters. Ellis is, at bottom, an exploitation artist. On this level, "Less Than Zero" succeeds by providing transgressive pleasure to two generations of readers: For adults it comes in the form of dread, for kids, decadence. "American Psycho," too, equally pleases its fans and detractors, each in search of a platform from which to horrify and be horrified.

None of this changes the hard, critical truth - that both "Less Than Zero" and "American Psycho" are mediocre novels, passing off tepid stylistic innovation as an excuse to ignore plot, character and imagination. With "Glamorama," Ellis has found a way to package his trademark flat affect, gratuitous violence, drug use and decadent sex in a comic and frightening story with differentiated characters and a plotline that arcs and undulates as in an authentic novel, leaving a most pleasing exploitative taint in its wake.

It's the story of fame-obsessed 27-year-old "model-slash-loser" Victor Ward, a player in Ellis second novel, "The Rules of Attraction." He's struggling to open a fashionable nightclub for shady financier Damien Ross while negotiating a Byzantine web of personal entanglements, including a relationship with supermodel Chloe Byrnes and occasional assignations with Ross girlfriend, Lauren Hynde (also recycled from "The Rules of Attraction"), and Ross fiancee, Alison Poole (bizarrely recycled from Jay McInerney's "Story of My Life").

The first third of the book charts Victor's manic schedule as he whizzes around Manhattan on his Vespa scooter between band practice, fashion shoots, lunch with his mysterious, politically connected father and personal training sessions. It's full of real-life celebrities and old Ellis characters. Even Patrick Bateman from "American Psycho" makes an appearance, 10 years after his killing spree and apparently unmolested by the authorities ("He's strange," Chloe says).

When the club opening is a bust, and Damien learns of Victor's various betrayals, his position in Manhattan becomes untenable. It's just then that a plot device - a novel trope for Ellis - appears in the form of F. Fred Palakon, who offers Victor $ 300,000 to locate actress Jamie Fields in London, where she's shooting a movie, and return her to her parents. Once in London, he discovers that Jamie is part of a terrorist cell led by Bobby Hughes, an 80s supermodel who's now dividing his time between movie premieres, nightclubs and militia strongholds in the Middle East. Bobby is vague about his ideology; he's a student of chaos and instability, a recycled J. G. Ballard character with washboard abs.

The novel takes a dark turn as the scene switches to Paris and Victor is drawn into participating in random bombings, although the celebrities continue to show up at all the right places, even as shrapnel kills innocents nearby. It's an odd tone, but Ellis gamely keeps it up, employing another new (for him) characteristic - remorse. After one gruesome torture scene, Victor tells Jamie, " 'They killed the French premier's son yesterday too. . . . They cut off his leg. I watched him die. How can you wear that dress? I ask, my face twisted with loathing." It may sound trite out of context, but Victor is genuinely confused. He's in with the most glamorous crowd he's ever known, but they're stone-cold killers.

The plot maneuvers through doubleand triple-crosses, some convincing, some not, but "Glamorama" is not a conventional thriller given to upholding conventional standards of plot. To underscore this point, Jamie's film, in production throughout the novel, is a shadowy analog of Victor's life. There are occasional references to "the script" and appearances by assistant directors and cinematographers who want to know why various "actors" have disappeared. At first it seems like a device to unfold the action without compromising Victor's somewhat dimwitted, trusting nature and his shaky hold on reality. But upon a second reading, it appears to do more, although precisely what I cannot say. I found it more intriguing than irksome, though it will doubtless bother many readers.

Well, a lot of people read Ellis to be bothered, and even though this novel represents a great leap forward for its author, there's plenty here to annoy. But the pleasures of a celebrity-worshipping narrative overlaying a violent, chilling and, in the style of Ballard, instructive plot are too great to ignore, as are the discreet charms of a fatuous hero who diffuses tense situations by telling people they look "Uma-ish."

GRAPHIC: Photo by Ian Gittler- Bret Easton Ellis

LOAD-DATE: January 3, 1999

45 of 52 DOCUMENTS

November 01, 1998, Sunday, Final Edition

SECTION: BOOK WORLD; Pg. X05

LENGTH: 889 words

HEADLINE: Scare Tactics

BYLINE: Adam Mazmanian

BODY:

BAG OF BONES

By Stephen King

Scribner. 529 pp. $ 28

Reviewed by Adam Mazmanian, a staff writer at the New York Press.

"Politicians, ugly buildings and whores," John Huston intoned in the film "Chinatown," "all get respectable with age." It's an adage worth keeping close by if you want to understand the mindset behind Stephen King's publicist-driven bid for literary credibility. Consider that King's promotional material touts his O. Henry Award before stooping to mention his millions in sales. Note his recent appearance in the New Yorker (typically, a King novel is heralded by a story in Playboy, which boasts over four times the circulation of its non-nudie counterpart).

Reflect upon the rich heritage of King's new publisher, Scribner, which made its name publishing such canonical luminaries as Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Dos Passos, and Wolfe. Add up these efforts and you get a triumph of marketing, not of letters. King is a terrific writer who's written some very good books. That plus a little time will buy respect.

Bag of Bones, however, does little to advance the cause. King's dirty little secret is this: As brilliantly as he crafts horror and suspense, he's not so hot with the supernatural. His spectral universe lacks the internal consistency of Lovecraft's or the ambiguous subjectivity of Poe's. At his best -- I'm thinking Different Seasons and Misery -- King exploits everyday terror: fear of failure, the nagging suspicion that the people closest to us are not what they seem. Bag of Bones answers on both scores, and the first three-quarters of the novel rank with anything King has written. But in the end, the book falls apart in a fusillade of bullets and a gathering of ghosts that spoil the delicate tension that King has labored for 400 pages to establish.

Bag of Bones stars a novelist, Mike Noonan, a writer of supernatural romantic thrillers, hyped by his publisher as a male V.C. Andrews. Temperamentally, Noonan runs more towards Paul Sheldon of Misery than Jack Torrance of The Shining. He's a minor bestseller and happy with the bargain he's struck with "the wallahs in New York": "three hundred and eighty pages bound by string or glue every twelve months." But after the sudden death of his wife, Jo (deftly dispensed with on page one), Noonan is seized with writer's block so consuming that he vomits at the sight of the Microsoft Word pen-and-ink logo on his computer screen.

For a while he makes do turning in unpublished novels he's stowed away. After his stock runs out, and with a fat new contract to honor, he leaves his house in Derry, Maine, for his vacation home in the unincorporated rural township of TR 90 to resurrect "the bookberry tree." It's a goofy horror device, the codicil in a madman's will that says you will inherit a fortune -- after a night in a haunted house! And of course the house, named Sara Laughs after black blues singer Sara Tidwell -- who lived "on the TR" with her band, the Red Top Boys, around the turn of the century before vanishing mysteriously -- is full of ghosts both psychological and numinous.

Also on the TR is Mattie Devore, widowed daughter-in-law of demented computer tycoon Max Devore. Mattie is 21, poor, pretty and in trouble -- she's about to lose her daughter, Kyra, in a custody battle with Max, until she meets Noonan, who springs for the Park Avenue attorney who helps save the day. Not surprisingly, Noonan and Mattie fall in love. Meanwhile he learns that Jo, in the last year of her life, had been making secret trips to Sara Laughs, researching the connection between Noonan's obscured maternal ancestry, Sara Tidwell's fate, and a ghastly crime that shackles the natives of the TR to the land and to each other.

King masterfully limns the claustrophobic insularity that is the trademark of the tiny Maine towns of his fiction. Max Devore makes a gleefully wicked villain, and his amanuensis, Rogette Whitmore, is as sadistic an old biddy as you'll find outside of L. Frank Baum. The only wrong note is the relentlessly cute 3-year-old Kyra, whose risible malapropisms persist even as the bullets fly. But the romance between Mattie and Noonan is portrayed with care, especially as Noonan's loyalty to his dead wife (who is, after all, dishing out clues from beyond the grave, mediated by magnetic letters on Noonan's fridge) collides with his desires. After such an absorbing setup, it's a shame that King lets loose the spirits as a sort of trowel to smooth over the far-flung elements of the plot.

Like The Shining, another nearly great novel held captive to King's ghostly preoccupations, Bag of Bones just misses being more than a page-turner. Too bad, because only middlebrow snobbery keeps King's best work out of classrooms. Why not teach Carrie to high school students instead of The Scarlet Letter? It plies the same currents of the American psyche, and is more fun to read besides. And how about Christine instead of Frankenstein and Cujo over The Call of the Wild? Certainly 10 or 12 of King's short stories put such fiction anthology regulars as "The Lottery" and "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" to shame. When King finally does chart the passage between horror and the heart, the generation of critics that grew up on his novels will be there to give him his due.

GRAPHIC: Illustration, Chuck Groth for The Washington Post

LOAD-DATE: November 01, 1998

46 of 52 DOCUMENTS

August 2, 1998, Sunday, ALL EDITIONS

SECTION: CURRENTS & BOOKS; Page B14

LENGTH: 660 words

HEADLINE: BEACH BOOKS / GIRL, DISAPPEARED

BYLINE: By Adam Mazmanian. Adam Mazmanian is assistant editor of New York Press.

BODY:

GONE, BABY, GONE, by Dennis Lehane. Morrow, 374 pp., $24. FIGHTING crime is a rough racket. So what's a mystery writer to do about the bullet wounds, sucker punches, blackjack beanings and car wrecks that detectives will inevitably collect as the cost of doing business? The easy answer is to ignore them: Indeed, the physical, financial and emotional resilience of detectives is the governing conceit of serial mysteries. After all, who would invite Miss Marple up to the country house for a weekend, no matter how charming her company, knowing that a corpse will turn up by Sunday? Philip Marlowe drank so much whiskey and was slipped so many mickeys that his liver was probably in worse shape than that of his booze-addled creator - hardly a figure to inspire confidence in prospective clients.

Jim Thompson had a tidy if inelegant solution to the problem. He discarded his protagonists to either death or oblivion at the close of his novels and concocted a nearly identical character for the next one. But Thompson was working in the early days of literary franchise and wasn't as sensitive to the commercial demands of the day as contemporary writers in a glutted market need to be. This is what makes Dennis Lehane so special. His novels are highly commercial, extremely violent, obscenely gory - breathless and compelling to the very end. But his detectives, Boston-born and bred Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro, here in their fourth outing in as many years, not only break their bones and bleed but carry their scars - physical and moral - around with them as debts that can never be fully repaid.

The opening of "Gone, Baby, Gone" finds Kenzie and Gennaro nursing their wounds after the showdown with a serial killer at the end of "Sacred." Their mutual crush, conducted stealthily throughout the first three books, has bloomed into a love affair. They're living together, working easy cases and beginning to con- template a more permanent arrangement. So when 4-year-old Amanda McCready disappears from her room without a trace and no sign of a struggle, they're reluctant to take the case, and do so only at the insistence of the girl's Aunt Beatrice, and in spite of the warnings of the Boston police department.

The pair's suspicion immediately falls on the girl's mother, Helene McCready, a junkie and part-time prostitute who is only dimly conscious of the world as it exists outside her own pathetic appetites. Soon we learn that Helene stole and hid $200,000 from a powerful drug dealer when a deal she was involved with went awry. The money is soon recovered by the police. Rather than log the cash as evidence and turn the matter over to the FBI, the two detectives assigned to the case - the voluble and charming Poole and the dapper but explosive Broussard - propose to trade the money for the child.

Thus we meet the perfidious drug kingpin Cheese Olamon, whose affected 1970s ghetto cant belies a sharp intelligence - especially where his own hide and reputation are concerned. Cheese, who knows Kenzie from childhood, denies any knowledge of the abduction, but not long after their meeting an anonymous call announces the location for the proposed exchange. But instead of an exchange, it's an ambush. The cops lose the money, and Kenzie and Gennaro nearly lose their lives. Little Amanda is no less lost than she was before. And we're not even halfway through the book.

Lehane's readers know that in his universe there is no limit to how high corruption can go, no sort of villainy that is too twisted and aberrant for him to contemplate and no character whose motives are beyond reproach. Though his most recent novel, "Sacred," was something of a disappointment, Lehane is back with the polish he showed off in his breakout book, "Darkness Take My Hand." His crisp dialogue, the oddball supporting cast and the Kenzie-Gennaro romance provide much-needed lightness to what is, ultimately, a dark and harrowing tale.

LOAD-DATE: August 2, 1998

47 of 52 DOCUMENTS

July 23, 1998, Thursday, ALL EDITIONS

SECTION: PART II; Page B02

LENGTH: 777 words

HEADLINE: FROLICKING WITH THE BOYS AND GIRLS IN THE BAND

BYLINE: By Adam Mazmanian. Adam Mazmanian is assistant editor of the New York Press.

BODY:

THE EXES, by Pagan Kennedy. Simon & Schuster, 203 pp., $23. I'LL LET LILLY, the singer / protagonist in Pagan Kennedy's high-concept novel of Boston's indie rock sub-basement, pitch the logline herself. "We'll call ourselves the Exes," she explains to ex-boyfriend / guitarist Hank, "and the thing is, we will be exes - everyone in the band will have gone out with someone else in the band." And so the stage is set for another Gen-Xploitation frolic of futon-hopping cluelessness - sooo '94 - as seen through the eyes of four bandmates.

Hank is the musical brains of the outfit. We know this because during practice sessions he dispenses instructions like "This one's got too much clove cigarette . . . let's give it more malt liquor." He's a cipher even to himself, a "human Etch-A-Sketch" able to "shake himself to clear away all the crap." He and Lilly reach the breaking point when she stomps on Hank's eight-track copy of Kiss' "Love Gun" during a blowout. Hank's colleague at the Vile Vinyl record store sums up Lilly with the line, "Her mood ring's gone permanently black." She dropped out of the University of Tennessee to come north on the wings of a pornographic correspondence with a Boston rock hero and has been dreaming of the big time ever since.

Shazia, a Pakistani emigre raised in Islam, rebels against her family's traditionalist expectations by playing bass, working in a bakery that specializes in licentious confections and dabbling in bisexuality. Walt, the Prozac-popping drummer, abandoned his fellowship at Harvard's biology department for the workaday comfort of a postal route. He and Shazia qualify for admission to the Exes as a result of a brief fling they had when she came east from San Francisco.

As the band gets noticed, its members are forced to decide whether or not to see the project through. Hank and Lilly want to get signed and make records but Shazia, who ditched a band on the verge of a national breakout to join the Exes, has mixed feelings about success. Walt, too, worries that accomplishment might intrude on his program of sanity via simplicity. That, plus the sexual tension between Lilly and Hank, is what drives the story. But reading "The Exes" isn't about plot points, it's about hanging out with rockers. Unfortunately, Kennedy's creations are even less interesting than the genuine article, and about as authentic as the names stitched on their vintage gas-station attendant's jackets.

Mostly, they are characterized by accessory, by resume. The relentless referentiality (Etch-A-Sketch, eight-track, mood ring, Prozac, etc.) leaves no cultural touchstone unturned. It's a too-familiar trope - a hipster version of product placement - designed to get an easy laugh. But instead of being illuminating or comic, it comes off as frayed and focus-grouped.

For example, at the dinner Shazia throws to introduce her new boyfriend Mick to her ex-lover Kate, Mick sniffs at the zinfandel Kate brings: "Hmmm, pink wine. I suppose we ought to chill it." In case we missed the point, Kennedy adds, "This was a perfectly normal thing to say, but Shaz, picking up the sarcasm in his voice, knew he'd already classified her as a zinfandel drinker, a person who listened to world music, a backrub-giver . . . a representative of all the things he sneered at." For her part, Kate bristles at his martini glasses, chrome barstools and Bettie Page pin-ups. Their clash is animated by mere fashion, not sublimated sexual jealousy. The contest for Shazia's affections is waged, it seems, by dueling subscription profiles: Details magazine vs. Mother Earth News.

Later, when Shazia learns of Lilly's pregnancy, Kennedy writes, "When had Lilly become this other person? How had Shaz missed this transformation?" Fairly easily, as it happens, since there was no transformation to speak of. We must learn of it in passing, as Kennedy has forgotten the old writing-program chestnut "action is character."

More's the pity, because Kennedy's first novel, "Spinsters" (1995), is a tour de force of character. It's the story of two sisters in their 30s who take to the open road after the death of their doting and demanding father. Patiently, subtly, believably, Kennedy spins out younger sister Frannie's belated discovery of the world. "Spinsters" is especially impressive, considering that its 1968 setting - Kennedy herself was 6 years old at the time - was no simple backdrop but a living, breathing player in the tale.

Here, Kennedy's uninspired portrait of the 1990s Boston rock scene - her world, if we're to believe the jacket copy - gives the lie to a different MFA cliche: Write what you know.

GRAPHIC: Photo by Terri Ruth Unger-Pagan Kennedy: Frolics make strange bandmates.

LOAD-DATE: July 23, 1998BOOKS. REVIEW. THE EXES. BOOK MUSIC & HOBBY STORES (65%); MUSIC STORES (65%); RETAIL TRADE (65%); GAS STATIONS (65%); BOOKS. REVIEW. THE EXES. BOOK MUSIC & HOBBY STORES (65%); MUSIC STORES (65%); RETAIL TRADE (65%); GAS STATIONS (65%);

48 of 52 DOCUMENTS

May 31, 1998, Sunday, ALL EDITIONS

SECTION: CURRENTS & BOOKS; Page B14

LENGTH: 523 words

HEADLINE: BEACH BOOKS / A GHOSTLY MISSION

BYLINE: By Adam Mazmanian Adam Mazmanian is assistant editor of New York Press.

BODY:

TIME TO HUNT, by Stephen Hunter. Doubleday, 467 pp., $23.95. STEPHEN Hunter is known for writing about guns, but in truth he writes about ghosts. His hero, expert sniper Bob Lee Swagger, is haunted by history, by his mistakes and by his pride. Though his thrillers are thick with the arcana of ordnance, armament and tactics, Hunter is after bigger game.

His novels are intelligent but bear none of the identifying marks of literature, neither in slick packaging nor in straightforward storytelling. He lards his plot lines with boilerplate cinematic cliches - Donny Fenn, a likable marine, dies the very night before his tour in Vietnam is up; Swagger, his war buddy, marries his beautiful widow, Julie; years later Julie is nearly murdered by the one sniper in the world whose talent and skill rivals Swagger's own - but in Hunter's hands these appear less like obvious ploys than inevitable, mythic truths.

Even the name Swagger, suggesting loose-limbed cool, is purposefully off the mark. Bob Lee Swagger is as tightly wound as a man can be. He's a drunk who struggles daily not to drink, a trained killer whose art demands almost unimaginable precision, a master tactician, paranoid by habit and gentle only by a forcible rededication of mind. He's seen a lot of war - 87 confirmed kills in Vietnam, mind-boggling body counts in his domestic adventures - and by his lights he's seen enough. He's found the closest thing he's known to the good life with his wife and young daughter on their Idaho ranch. So of course it's not long before the ghosts come calling, bidding him back to battle.

The story begins stateside, during the Vietnam War. Fenn, a corporal assigned to funeral duty at Arlington National Cemetery, is shipped back to Vietnam for refusing to inform on a peacenik with links to his unit. The peacenik in question, Trig Carter, is a wealthy, charismatic, Harvard-bred peace organizer and an emblem of youth resistance. Fenn and Carter become fast friends, and when Fenn ponders desertion, it is Carter who urges him to return. Carter later dies in a campus explosion; Fenn meets his end while on sniper patrol with Swagger.

Almost 30 years later, when Julie is shot off her horse from across a gaping valley, Fenn and Carter return as hidden hands to guide Swagger through a dank swamp of subterfuge and indirection that leads back to Vietnam and the chaos of the home front. The plot continually builds - each answer revealing new questions and mistaken assumptions - until it explodes in a fireball of furious vengeance.

The certainty of Swagger's survival is Hunter's only misstep, and one he will continue to make as long as he wishes to maintain his lucrative franchise. Though Swagger suffers adversity and loss, and though his victory is just another chance to return to the world, there is still a lingering sense that he is too effective; that he lacks ambiguity; that not enough is at stake; that Hunter has yet to truly take his hero to the wall. For a writer of popular thrillers, however, these complaints are praise enough, a sure sign that the mechanics are honed nearly to perfection.

GRAPHIC: Photo by John Earle-Stephen Hunter

LOAD-DATE: May 31, 1998BOOKS. REVIEW. TIME TO HUNT. MILITARY WEAPONS (78%); SUBSTANCE ABUSE (71%); CEMETERIES (70%); BOOKS. REVIEW. TIME TO HUNT. MILITARY WEAPONS (78%); SUBSTANCE ABUSE (71%); CEMETERIES (70%);

49 of 52 DOCUMENTS

April 12, 1998, Sunday, ALL EDITIONS

SECTION: CURRENTS & BOOKS; Page B13

LENGTH: 942 words

HEADLINE: CORPORATE CAPERS

BYLINE: By Adam Mazmanian. Adam Mazmanian is assistant editor of New York Press.

BODY:

LLOYD: What Happened, by Stanley Bing. Crown, 416 pp., $25.95. CORPORATE EXECUTIVES rarely star in popular novels. As opposed to tycoons or entrepreneurs, whose eccentricities and benign psychopathologies are easily played for laughs, the bean-counting, job-cutting CEO is generally a cheap foil. He's the black heart responsible for whichever (pick from column A) calamity, tragedy or catastrophe could have been prevented with the installation of (column B) a two-cent washer, a blinking warning light or set of simple instructions and an ironclad indemnity clause. We gnash our teeth in horror and disgust at the needless (column C) carnage, destruction of natural resources or hemorrhaging stock prices, and await the arrival of our true hero - the attorney - to set things right.

This boggles the mind. A quick check of the airport bookstore best-seller lists reveals that thousands upon thousands of business travelers buy novels to chase their complimentary in-flight cocktails. And I'm not talking highbrow stuff here, or even middlebrow. I'm talking name-brand authors, embossed gold lettering and breathless blurbs provided by periodicals purchased rather more for nude pictorials than literary criticism. You read half the book, order another drink, fall asleep and catch the movie in six months. Escape, pure and simple. But if it's escapism the weary traveler is seeking, why not escape smarmy, pomaded barristers and lawsuits that hinge on obscure technicalities and due-diligence requirements? Readers can't all be lawyers. Can they?

In Japan, the novel of business is a genre unto itself. However, these mindbendingly earnest recitations of corporate strategy and power plays don't translate well and lack the profanity, gunplay and soft-core pornography American readers demand from their wealthiest novelists. "Lloyd," the very funny first novel by Fortune magazine columnist Stanley Bing (who in real life is Gil Schwartz, head of public relations at CBS), answers on all three counts, providing sexed-up, martini-addled, tongue-in-cheek escapism with nary an attorney in sight.

The story is simple; a bare-bones backdrop to the satirical rendering of corporate culture, its language and relationships. Lloyd is in his early 40s and an executive vice president with an uncertain (and seemingly inconsequential) portfolio in a large multinational corporation. When his company moves to subsume the competition in one maniacal acquisition, Lloyd is called on to play both international point man and internal ax-wielder. If he's successful, thousands of heads will roll. Lloyd is not conflicted about the ethics of the merger, merely over whether he is up to the task; any Faustian bargain he is party to was struck long before the events of the novel. However, as the merger progresses, Lloyd finds himself and his close colleagues threatened, and takes steps to sabotage the deal. As Lloyd himself puts it, "I'm all for operating efficiencies, but only when they are achieved at the expense of people I don't know and don't care about."

Whom does Lloyd care about? There's his boss, Walt, a tall, lean, graying picture of executive comportment. Though Walt is something of a father figure to Lloyd, he finds himself vying for our hero's loyalty with the younger, greedier chairman, Doug. Most appealingly, there's Ron Lemur, the 27-year-old junior executive, a 1980s-style Stoli-swigging, cocaine-sniffing young executive, updated by virtue of his Prozac prescription and propensity to uptalk.

And, well, Lloyd cares mostly about himself. He's something of a cipher, or maybe he's so relentlessly shallow that there isn't much to know about him beyond his sensual appetites - beer, food, sex - and his strategies for achieving their gratification. His character comes across best in the many color charts and graphs (the book is more extensively illustrated than a Hardy Boys novel) Bing provides as a counterpoint to the text. They project such crucial relationships as "Lloyd's Income vs. Overall Happiness," "Suit Size as a Function of Income / Vodka Consumption" and "People Lloyd May Scream at Without Fear of Reprisal, 1980-1998." Amusingly, Lloyd himself is illustrated with a wide head, slightly receding hairline, thick, black eyebrows and a wry line of a mouth, all conveying more than a conspicuous resemblance to the salient features of Bing's jacket photo.

In addition to his business travails, Lloyd is enmeshed in a sticky romance. Though he loves his wife, Donna, and their children, Bob and Nora, he can't resist earthly delight in the arms of his colleague Mona. If most of Bing's satirical targets are absurdly testosterone-fueled (he aims his rapier at fathering, golf, casual business attire and premium beer with equal, if at times excessive, panache), then Mona is a male fantasy of a female executive. Her "teeny-tiny" miniskirts, "glowing" bosom and proclivity to inner-office dalliance reduce somewhat the gravity of her degrees from Harvard, Wharton and MIT. She is even illustrated in the nude, holding a phone and a notepad. Not that any of it is meant to be taken seriously; it's just that, like fishbowl-size martinis, cigar-appreciation monthlies and baseball caps worn backwards, the appeal may be limited among women.

Though the plot careers unsatisfyingly out of control (occasioning the bit of gunplay that will no doubt cinch the film option), readers won't mind a bit. On balance, the pleasures of this wickedly comic, on-target send-up of hardball company politics and obfuscated corporate euphemism more than compensate for the often bloated set-pieces and quickie ending.

GRAPHIC: Illustration From the Book- Suit Size. As a Function of Income/ Vodka Consumption

LOAD-DATE: April 12, 1998

50 of 52 DOCUMENTS

March 1, 1998, Sunday, ALL EDITIONS

SECTION: CURRENTS & BOOKS; Page B14

LENGTH: 783 words

HEADLINE: HIS OWN WORST ANOMIE

BYLINE: By Adam Mazmanian. Adam Mazmanian is assistant editor of New York Press.

BODY:

AN UNDERACHIEVER'S DIARY, by Benjamin Anastas. Dial, 147 pp., $15.95. THE WORD "underachievement" entered the pop psychology vernacular well before the days of Ritalin on demand, before even the banning of certain Bart Simpson T-shirts by jittery elementary school administrators. If there's a single culprit for the ubiquity of the term, a case can be made for the 1967 parenting guide "Bright Child, Poor Grades" by Barry and Patricia Bricklin. But we might as well blame Holden Caufield or the Prodigal Son for all the good it would do. Our will to pathologize any sort of deviance that smacks of moral defect is far too strong to resist. After all, at parent-teacher night who wouldn't prefer to hear that his child is depressed, anomic or bored rather than just plain slow or lazy?

Benjaman Anastas' first novel is a send-up of the psychology of under- achievment - and the culture that bought into it. William, the narrator, has been underachieving since infancy. He was slow to lift his head, a late talker and fearful of eliminating into the commode. "Frustration," he complains, "was my constant companion during all my early years." He was born to well-off parents in Cambridge, Mass., in the late '60s, a time he recalls with the clever conceit of an arch and perfect memory. The list of maladies Anastas forces his protagonist to endure - among them mumps, frostbite, measles, lice, chicken pox and eczema - would make Edith Wharton blush.

His chief foil is not anxiety or illness, however, but actualization, in the form of his twin brother, Clive. After three years of trailing his gifted brother at walking and talking, William outperforms Clive on a battery of standardized tests. Though his parents are encouraged, William interprets his score as the catalyst of his long-awaited martyrdom: "Progressive society had deemed me guilty of something unforgivable, and saw to it that I would suffer for squandering my talent, privilege, an early access to such enlightened ideals."

His parents do their progressive best to accentuate young William's suffering. They send him to alternative schools, make him undergo psychoanalysis and force-feed him Ravi Shankar. He survives childhood to attend a British-style boarding school, where he endures the kind of ritual abuse one expects in such settings. He also takes his first ill-fated steps toward romance, "pioneer ing a romantic avant-garde where nothing started, in the moonlight, would ever finish, and the greatest love, or kiss, would be the one that never grew beyond its promising beginning . . . " And then it's off to college, where he meets Natalie, his maladroit, unfaithful, alcoholic girlfriend (who is the gem of the book), and writes, as his senior project, a book of aphorisms comprising a theory of underachievement. He bounces around San Francisco (joining a bizarre cult that provides the novel's sole plot point) and New York, before abandoning his diary in a fit of pique.

Anastas is at his best lampooning the 1970s with clever asides. Dragged to a nude beach by his parents, he moans, "Could Hieronymus himself have painted such a picture of the end of civilization, complete with garbage in the sand, painful sunburn, and Indian tapestries?" He describes his mother as "like many New Englanders . . . practical to the point of being fashionless." Without the barrage of quips to break the monotonous exposition, "Diary" would be a bit of a chore, with its prolix hum of low-grade regret and steady beat of literary and cultural allusions.

This is the difficulty with the task Anastas takes on. Making an amusement out of an emotionally crippled, supremely selfish loser, when that same unfortunate is telling the story, provides the opportunity for all sorts of interesting literary tricks. But there is also the risk that it will just be annoying, in much the same way that emotionally crippled, supremely selfish losers are when you're forced to deal with them at family gatherings.

As far as slim literary works of self-absorption go, Dostoevsky's "Notes From the Underground" comes to mind as a worthy model. Dostoevsky's narrator is so loathsome, and so self-loathing, that the appeal, beyond his value as a psychological study, was in seeing how low he could sink; to see how picayune the ritual deconstruction of the minutiae of his daily life could become.

Unfortunately, William isn't nearly that detestable. Failing that, he's not that likable. Failing that, he isn't so true to life that a generation of underachievers will take him as an exponent of their own sufferings. We're left, then, with a second-rate comedy of bitterness with just enough wit to see its readers through.

GRAPHIC: Photo by Marion Ettlinger- Benjamin Anastas

LOAD-DATE: March 2, 1998BOOKS. REVIEW. AN UNDERACHIEVER'S DIARY. CHILDREN (76%); EDUCATION (72%); PARENTING (72%); BOOKS. REVIEW. AN UNDERACHIEVER'S DIARY. CHILDREN (76%); EDUCATION (72%); PARENTING (72%);

51 of 52 DOCUMENTS

January 4, 1998, Sunday, ALL EDITIONS

SECTION: CURRENTS & BOOKS; Page B14

LENGTH: 778 words

HEADLINE: THE SMALL PRESS / A FEW HAPPY ENDINGS

BYLINE: By Adam Mazmanian. Adam Mazmanian is a member of the New York Press editorial staff.

BODY:

UNDER THE RED FLAG, by Ha Jin. University of Georgia Press, 207 pp., $22.95. THE PHYSICAL and political geography of the stories in Chinese-born author Ha Jin's new collection may be foreign to an American audience, but the literary territory will be familiar to anyone who's read "Winesburg, Ohio." Ha Jin, 41, left China in 1989, after the Tiananmen Square uprising, and now teaches English and creative writing at Emory University, and indeed his writing style is as much informed by the economies of Raymond Carver as by his youth during the Cultural Revolution of the mid-1960s.

His stories explore daily life in the small town of Dismount Fort, an aptly named agrarian backwater. In the old days, it was a way station for Chinese soldiers traveling to Korea, much as American troops might use North Dakota as a staging area were we to invade Manitoba. Despite frequent appearances by Communist officials and Red Guards - the youthful militants who zealously enforce the mandates of the Cultural Revolution - the bleak political realities take a backseat to the more ancient rule of small towns: Things are not always as they seem.

The most overtly political story is "Wind and Clouds Over a Funeral." Commune chairman Ding Liang promises to bury his mother just before she dies. But the government has prohibited the burying of the dead, for fear of a land shortage, and cremation is the new law of the land. Ding's political rivals are all too willing to let the interment take place, so they can take advantage of his violation to unseat him. After bending to pressure and cremating his mother, Ding is faced with both the recriminations of his son, who considers the promise binding, and an unflattering article placed in the local newspaper by his rivals, insinuating that a son who broke his promises to his mother couldn't be much of a man.

Ding eventually outflanks his rivals, but at the expense of the truth. A story appears in a large regional newspaper that portrays Ding's mother as a patriot who refused burial despite her family's urgings. This account silences Ding's critics, and has the ironic effect of earning Ding the respect of his son, who learns that cunning can be more of a virtue than rectitude and that language can manipulate and alter reality - important lessons, not just for the young Communist, but for the budding storyteller as well.

In "Sovereignty," farmer Liao Ming is asked by Leng, his neighbor, for the stud services of his prize black boar. Liao is reluctant, because Leng had previously contracted with a rival whose big foreign white boar was threatening to put Liao out of business. When Liao arrives at Leng's spread, the white boar has already conducted his business with Leng's sow. As if sensing his master's anger, Liao's boar begins to fight with the larger, white boar. At first blush, this seems to be an overtly symbolic representation of the conflict between the small farming community of Dismount Fort and the distant, totalitarian government, but in fact the story is a good deal more clever. After the fight is broken up, Liao's pig bites Leng's son, taking off a good chunk of his thigh. The story ends with the boy bleeding, perhaps to death, Liao skulking home and Leng vowing revenge. The moral here is first that a town with one pig is more peaceful than a town with two, but more importantly, that neighbors try to put one over on each other - no matter what sort of government is in power.

The most touching story in the collection is "New Arrival," in which Ning, an ex-prostitute, and her husband, Jia, take in the 2-year-old child of a rising officer who has been transferred. Ning is infertile, and her husband, frustrated by their lack of children, seeks solace in the arms of other women. The child proves so delightful, and such a handful, that Jia mends his ways. Though Jia purchased Ning out of a brothel, the child makes them more of a family than many we meet in Dismount Fort.

Several of Ha Jin's stories have happy endings. To the American reader of contemporary short fiction, this stands out as the most unfamiliar strain of his writing, but a welcome one. Few writers have the ability to portray good times persuasively, and fewer still choose to do it. That said, Ha Jin also does justice to the unhappiness that, sadly, prevails in Dismount Fort. His stories set forth, among other trespasses, mob violence, gang rape and murder, making the stories at times quite unpleasant, though never a chore. Ha Jin's literary reputation will stand on his deep understanding of human nature, and not merely as a chronicler of a specific and dark time in human history.

GRAPHIC: AP Photo- Ha Jin

LOAD-DATE: January 4, 1998

52 of 52 DOCUMENTS

December 29, 1997, Monday, NASSAU AND SUFFOLK EDITION

SECTION: PART II; Page B27

LENGTH: 925 words

HEADLINE: FROM THE HAZE, A FUTURE EMERGES WITH NO CURRENT

BYLINE: By Adam Mazmanian. Adam Mazmanian is a member of the New York Press editorial staff.

BODY:

BUNNY MODERN, by David Bowman. Little, Brown, 215 pp., $21.95.

DAVID BOWMAN is the sort of freewheeling, high-handed writer critics like to compare to some other, more well-known writer "on acid." At first blush, his second novel (after "Let the Dog Drive") seems so promising that one is tempted to reach for the blotter and join in the fun. About two-thirds of the way through, however, the hallucinations grow weary and a suspicion creeps through the haze that the brown stuff at Woodstock might have been a more inspired choice.

"Bunny Modern" is set in the New York City of (roughly) 2019, and though it contains elements common to such near-future dystopias as David Foster Wallace's "Infinite Jest" or Jeff Noon's "Vurt," it is, at bottom, a love story. Instead of a world of hyper-advanced technologies, Bowman envisions a technological retreat. Electricity has ceased to work, due to an event he names the Morphic Aberration. Lights and television are a thing of the past. In the absence of fax machines, carrier pigeons, genetically resurrected by The Sharper Image, fill the skies above Manhattan with sheets of bird droppings so thick that pedestrians carry umbrellas during peak business hours.

In a related development, human sperm no longer wend their way toward eggs after copulation, but retreat like skittish soldiers. Babies, therefore, are at a premium. Armed ninja-trained nannies stand guard over the city's dwindling stock of infants. The nannies are all of necessity addicted to the drug Vengeance, a snortable white powder that enables them to be protective of their charges while inhibiting emotional attachment. Baby boomers: allegorical resonance alert!

The book opens with the narrator, a middle-aged failed child actor named Dylan - something of a burnout after four divorces - watching as a young couple attempt to make off with an infant. The nannies spring into action. There he first sees his love interest, Clare, as she skillfully pursues and ventilates one of the kidnappers without harming the baby.

Dylan is gifted with a form of second sight, which allows him access to Clare's thoughts. This is a clever touch, as he's able to convey her character - driven yet somehow lacking direction - without sacrificing the first-person perspective. He also characterizes his readers. We're all young women, he assumes, about Clare's age, caught up in the lit-wear craze - fashion modeled after characters in 19th-Century literature. The style, it seems, extends to baby names, so instead of being Jennifers, Shannons and Katherines, he calls us Ishmaels. This is not only a deft comic touch, but a clever narrative strategy as well - by addressing a fictive audience contemporaneous with the events of the novel, Bowman avoids the pitfall of overexplaining every last aspect of his future world.

When Clare is assigned to a family in New Jersey, Dylan follows her in his thoughts. He is there in spirit when Clare and the baby, the preternaturally charming Soda Lindy, bond emotionally despite chemical precautions. Dylan makes no secret of his desire to bond with Clare himself. He follows her (in person, not mentally) from Alphabet City to Rockefeller Center as a late-night jones sends her off in search of Vengeance. When he approaches her after she's copped a bag, she beats him senseless with an empty champagne bottle.

Despite the rocky start, it becomes apparent that they have more in common than mutual attraction. They share the suspicion - correct, as it happens - that Soda is no ordinary child. The baby is 40 years old, and the bizarre timing of his birth (can't divulge it here) and his inability to age are directly linked to the disappearance of electricity and the sudden unwillingness of sperm to live up to their special purpose.

It is at this point that Bowman's narrative acid wears off. There is a lengthy scene in the nanny company's Rockefeller Center offices in which owner Kathleen Keegan, desperate to protect Soda's secret, confronts Dylan and Clare at gunpoint. Their conversation is rambling and circular, possessing all the dramatic tension of a high school production of "No Exit" - and some of the same structural elements, too. When the scene is ended by the sudden (if not entirely unexpected) restoration of electricity, Dylan sees, upon leaving the office, a glowing red exit sign. This ought to be funny, but it's not. It elicits instead the sort of weary-relieved sigh one might cough up at the unsatisfying punchline of a long and particularly meandering joke.

Bowman takes special care to tie up all his scattered plot points, but the result is forced and muddled. As set pieces, the ninjananny scenes are sharp, funny and well-rendered. Dylan's little asides are catchy and surprising. When the lights come back on, and residents come out to share in the moment, Bowman writes, "We New Yorkers are like moths. If we had wings, we'd rise as one and beat our bodies against all this narcotic light." Moments like these, unfortunately, are all too few.

"Bunny Modern" reads as though there's some grand but inaccessible scheme lurking behind the plot. It might make sense on the drawing board, but on the page it collapses under its own weight. Despite his obvious gifts as a writer, and an extraordinarily inventive mind, Bowman lacks control over his material. Though there are a lot of fine comic moments, the cumulative effect is half-again too cute, and lacking in substance. Imagine a more clever Tom Robbins with the usual amount of acid.

GRAPHIC: Photo -David Bowman

LOAD-DATE: December 29, 1997