On Sunday: Bechdel's mom, Theroux's Africa and Mantel's Cromwell

Our book critic David L. Ulin can't say enough about Alison Bechdel’s 2006 family memoir “Fun House.” In his review of Bechdel’s latest foray into graphic novel memoir, “Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama," Ulin says that anyone who hasn’t read “Fun House” should “drop everything and get a copy right away.”  “Fun House” is on his short list along with “Maus,” “Persepolis,” “American Splendor” and "very few others of the greatest works of graphic literature.” “Fun House” dealt with the writer’s father and his untimely death: In her latest memoir, Bechdel turns her attention to her mother. But dealing with mom, Ulin writes, is a bit trickier. The reasons why make for a compelling read in this week's Sunday Arts & Books coverage.

After her wildly successful “Wolf Hall,” which was awarded the 2009 Man Booker Prize, Hilary Mantel is back with "Bring Up the Bodies," another novel about the Tudor dynasty in England and the diabolical Thomas Cromwell. “The good news,” writes our reviewer Martin Rubin, “is that it is more than the equal of its predecessor when it comes to intensity and drama.” Also, this week our YA review “Gilt” by Katherine Longshore has a distinct Henry VIII feel. Susan Carpenter says the book “reads like a more literary version of ‘Gossip Girl' overlaid onto 16th century England.”

Craig Claiborne’s name is largely forgotten in the world of food and, according to our Food Editor Russ Parsons, that’s a shame. While most people would recognize the names of his influential contemporaries James Beard and Julia Child, Clairborne, the longtime food editor and restaurant critic of the New York Times, has largely faded into obscurity. But Parsons notes “if any one person can be said to have created the modern American food world, it is he.” He reviews a new biography of Claiborne, “The Man Who Changed the Way We Eat” by Thomas McNamee.

Paul Theroux is widely traveled and deeply thoughtful about the intersection of the First World and the developing world in his novels and travel books. So it isn’t surprising that he would  journey back to Africa for his latest novel “The Lower River.” The book concerns Ellis Hock, a Massachusetts-based man of a certain age. His wife has just discovered warm, intimate messages written to other women on Hock’s phone, which brings an end to their 30-year marriage. So Hock chucks it all and disappears, not telling his family where he’s going. His destination is Africa, specifically Malawi, which is where he lived and worked as a Peace Corps volunteer in the 1960s. That’s the set-up, but our Carolyn Kellogg writes that the book about escapist fantasies is less than it might seem.

More after the jump.

Surprised by a trilogy: Hilary Mantel on her Tudor saga

So much of today’s publishing industry, especially in the categories of young adult fiction and fantasy, is interested in the three-book deal. Trilogies reign; trilogies are the norm.

But when you hear that a novelist like Hilary Mantel, winner of 2009's Man Booker Prize for the novel "Wolf Hall," is extending that novel’s subject matter — the world of Henry VIII as seen by his counselor Thomas Cromwell — to three books, you may wonder, has she been bitten by the trilogy bug too?

Not exactly.

"The development of the trilogy wasn’t driven by fashion and wasn’t a marketing ploy," Mantel says in a recent email exchange. She has just published the second book of the series, "Bring Up the Bodies," which Martin Rubin reviews for The Times. "It was more a series of shocks."

Mantel says the first shock was that her publisher was even interested in the topic — "a Tudor politician with an evil reputation and no discernible glamour" — and then by their encouragement to explore this world. She found herself delving into Cromwell’s thoughts and being confronted by the forceful presence of Cardinal Wolsey, a character she says she "intended to sweep … out of the narrative quickly. But then he began to talk and I sat listening."

As "Wolf Hall" took shape, Mantel realized her material was so rich and complicated that a single novel couldn’t contain it. And then, as she worked on "Bring Up the Bodies," which follows Cromwell in the years of Anne Boleyn’s dismal plunge from throne to chopping-block, it happened again. She says she realized the story would require a third book.

"I didn’t know what I was dealing with till I was actually in the process of writing," she recalls. "You can research all you like, but the material doesn’t come to life till you try to reimagine it for the reader."

Writing historical fiction, she adds, poses challenges that are different from writing contemporary fiction.

"It is so different from writing a contemporary novel," says Mantel, whose novels fall into both categories. "There, you are totally in control of your inventions, even though some of the control may be exerted subconsciously. But with a historical novel, the knowledge you acquire sets the agenda, and you must be open to surprises."

Does being open to surprises include being open to … a fourth book? Not in this case.

"So, one more, (really only one more), ‘The Mirror & The Light,’ " she says. "I already know enough about it to say that I will be able to bring the story home in one book, which will end with Cromwell’s abrupt fall and his execution in the summer of 1540."

RELATED:

Review: "Gilt" by Katherine Longshore

Paperback writers: Vintage early Mantel

Review: "Winter King: Henry VII and the Dawn of Tudor England" by Thomas Penn

-- Nick Owchar

Photo: A portrait of Anne Boleyn, second wife of Henry VIII. Credit: Getty images

 

 

On Sunday: John Irving, Elizabeth Gilbert's great-grandma in kitchen

John Irving’s 13th novel, “In One Person,” appears at an interesting time. On Tuesday, North Carolina voted to ban same-sex marriages and civil unions. On Wednesday, President Obama stated that he was in favor of same-sex marriage. The timing of Irving's release is as remarkable as the subject matter of his novel. “In One Person"  concerns the life of Billy, the bisexual narrator who tells the story of his life as a “sexual suspect.” Our critic David Ulin notes that it takes a lot of "guts" for "a mainstream novelist to embrace sexual politics in this culture.” His review leads our coverage in Sunday Arts & Books.

Carolyn Kellogg reviews Madeleine Albright’s “Prague Winter: A Personal Story of Remembrance and War, 1937-1948,”  the former Secretary of State's memoir of growing up in Prague and learning, years later, that her family was Jewish and that many of her ancestors had perished in the Holocaust. Kellogg writes that “the stories of their fates form the emotional core of the book, but the threads are slim.” Albright tells the story of World War II from the Czech point of view, certainly a different tact from the standard U.S. or English-centric vision of the conflict.

Lynell George has roots in New Orleans, so reading her pieces on the Crescent City are always a pleasure. Her essay this week is on the Historic New Orleans Collection, an organization committed to preserving the region’s vibrant culture. To that end, it's  publishing “The Louisiana Artists Biography Series,” dedicated to telling the life stories of some of the great artists of the region. Its latest book, written by Ben Sandmel, is “Ernie K Doe: The R & B Emperor of New Orleans.”

Elizabeth Gilbert’s “Eat, Pray, Love” was a runaway bestseller in 2006. Now, she reaches into her family’s history for “At Home on the Range,” a cookbook by her great-grandmother Margaret Yardley Potter that Gilbert has helped get back into print. Gilbert offers an introduction to the work, which had a single printing in 1947. Potter was a food columnist for a newspaper in Wilmington, Del., and Noelle Carter writes that this book is both “delightfully humorous and remarkably insightful.” 

More after the jump

Festival of Books: Robert Crais on his crime-fighting duo

It's no secret that Robert Crais has admired Raymond Chandler ever since picking up a copy of "The Little Sister" as a young teen. He shared that moment of discovery with Los Angeles Times film critic Kenneth Turan during a Sunday afternoon session at the L.A. Times Festival of Books.

"Chandler was my gateway drug," he told a large crowd in USC's Bing Theater. "I was digging for stuff in a used bookstore, and I came upon 'Little Sister.' I fell in love with Chandler that night. I fell right down the rabbit hole of crime fiction."

Like Chandler, Crais has been after something more than chunking away money in an annuity account with a string of successful novels (18 to date) featuring Elvis Cole and Joe Pike. He also chronicles the neighborhoods and communities of L.A., and this adds a solid spine to all of his Cole/Pike stories, which started with "The Monkey's Raincoat" in 1987.

On Sunday: Luis J. Rodriguez's memory bank, and Dwight Eisenhower too

Luis J. Rodriguez has a vast and interesting resume: former gang-banger, literary icon of Chicano letters and now, as Times staff writer Reed Johnson notes in his interview with him, "distinguished-looking 57-year-old grandfather with a silvery goatee and a companionable paunch." But that's not all he has: He has memories, and they are the stuff of two books -- cautionary tales to a new generation of youths. Though his books often name names, he heaps the toughest criticism on himself for the life he lived before he knew a better life. His latest memoir, "It Calls You Back," was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award in the autobiography category. His story leads our coverage in Sunday's Arts & Books section.

At the other end of the spectrum is "Eisenhower In War and Peace," the massive biography of the key World War II general and two-term president by Jean Edward Smith. His book, writes reviewer Wendy Smith (no relation), is critical of Eisenhower as a war strategist but is also a "measured but fundamentally admiring account" of his long years of public service. In the end, our reviewer writes, "Eisenhower proved himself to be precisely the kind of leader America wanted and needed at the time."

Time is at the essence of Susan Carpenter's review of the hot new YA talent Lissa Price and her novel "Starters. Another foray into a dystopian world, this telling, by debut author Price, is about a genocide that kills everyone between the ages of 20 and 60, leaving only the very young and the very old. And the very old with means are able to rent the bodies of nubile teens and control them through a neurochip. You can imagine the consequences (or not). Carpenter calls this "dystopian sci-fi at its best."

"At its most challenging" may be the best words to describe the new novel by Hari Kunzru, "Gods Without Men," which our book critic David Ulin reviews this week. In this work involving several overlapping stories taking place across decades and centuries, the desert becomes a magnet for many hoping to piece together a fallen world. And the central dilemma of each is understanding what we can and cannot know.

More after the jump ...

This Sunday: Spring books preview, Anne Lamott and jazz

Spring may be more than two weeks away, but we are getting a jump on the season this Sunday with the Arts & Books section’s “Spring Arts Preview.”

Carolyn Kellogg offers a listing of the leading book events in Southern California coming up in the next three months. That list includes Jonathan Lethem, Joan Didion, Rachel Maddow with Bill Maher, John Irving and The Times' very own Book Prize ceremony and Festival of Books, April 20-22 at USC. In a separate story, Kellogg also previews some highly anticipated books coming in the spring: Think Toni Morrison, Richard Ford, Anne Tyler, Jonathan Franzen and Robert Caro.

Book critic David Ulin talks to Anne Lamott about her latest memoir, which is a logical sequel to her extremely popular parenting journal "Operating Instructions." Her new book, “Some Assembly Required: A Journal of My Son’s First Son,” connects the dots with her earlier work and moves it forward with Lamott’s new perspective as a grandmother.

Another anticipated book for the spring is “Half-Blood Blues,” Esi Edugyan’s jazz novel that was a finalist for the Man Booker Prize in 2011 and has been released in her native Canada and finally here. Our reviewer, staff writer Chris Barton (who provides most of the jazz coverage for The Times), writes that Edugyan’s book is pitch perfect in its depiction of musicians looking for the authentic life.

More after the jump

This Sunday: The smartest person in the room and 'Cuckoo's Nest'

In her review of John Matteson's “The Lives of Margaret Fuller,” Laura Skandera Trombley poses an interesting question: “What must it have been like always to be the smartest person in the room without any of the privileges accorded to men?”

That's what Fuller continually had to contend with in a circle that included Emerson, Thoreau, Poe, Hawthorne and Horace Greeley. The newspaper editor and reformer Greeley hired her to become the New York Tribune’s first literary editor and then the paper’s first foreign correspondent. Emerson asked her to serve as editor of his transcendentalist journal the Dial. Less charitably, Poe considered her a “busybody” and an intellectual anomaly of her sex. Skandera Trombley, an eminent Twain scholar and president of Pitzer College, offers a long-overdue look at one of the more interesting intellectual figures of 19^th century America.

It’s hard to believe that 50 years have passed since Ken Kesey’s “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”

was first published.  And now it's back again in an anniversary, hard-cover edition with the original jacket art. Carolyn Kellogg knew the story of the book and the popularity of the movie starring Jack Nicholson and Randall Patrick McMurphy. But until now she hadn't read the book and wondered if it deserved all the hype it has received. You can find her verdict in this Sunday's coverage.

Times book critic David Ulin reviews Nathan Englander’s short story collection “What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank,” noting that much of this work involves the “tension between the religious and the secular, between the American setting of much of this work and the more elusive textures of Jewish life.”  Englander shows his range and skill, tilting “toward the magical realist or, more precisely, toward the tradition of Jewish fable writing as embodied by Isaac Bashevis Singer and Sholem Aleichem.”

More after the jump

The year in review and Mt. Everest too

So, not to be outdone by the actual calendar, we are getting a jump on the end of the year this Sunday with our review of 2011. In a notes-on-the-year-essay, our book critic, David L. Ulin, finds it heartening that a couple of brick-and-mortar book businesses are exploring some interesting strategies to thrive in a world captivated by the digital imperative. He also offers a thoughtful list of his 10 favorite books of the year. Murakami’s there, so is Lethem, but you may be  surprised by some of the others.

Our weekly book review coverage includes Richard Rayner’s review of the compelling "Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory and the Conquest of Everest” by Wade Davis. World War I saw the obliteration “of almost an entire generation of young men,” Rayner writes, and a few of the hearty souls that survived decided to test their mettle against Everest, the great unconquered foe.  Those climbing expeditions in the early 1920s captivated Britain and much of Europe looking for a positive human experience to replace the fog of war. 

Deputy books editor Nick Owchar offers a  Q&A with Philippa Gregory on the challenges of writing history as history and history as fiction, in this case the English Wars of the Roses.  Wesley Bausmith looks at “Identify: Basic Principles of Identity Design in the Iconic Trademarks of Chermayeff and Geismar” and finds that firm’s creations have “left some of the more lingering impressions of contemporary graphic design.”  Susan Carpenter is back this week with another trip into the world of YA books with “Planesrunner,” an adventure in parallel worlds from sci-fi novelist Ian McDonald. And we also have our weekly bestsellers list.

Two shopping days are left before Hanukkah and six before Christmas, and you still don’t know what to buy for the book lovers in your family? Our handy holiday books and gift guide still offers some good options. Check it out.  

Sadly, Christopher Hitchens died Thursday of cancer at 62. It would be hard to name another voice in contemporary letters who made it such a firm practice to go his own way and often against the conventional grain. If you missed Elaine Woo's obituary of Hitchens, please take a look.  David L. Ulin checks in with a thoughtful appraisal of Hitchens' work. 

As always, thanks for reading.

-- Jon Thurber, book editor

Photo: George Mallory and Andrew Irvine as they prepare to climb the peak of Mt. Everest in June 1924.    Credit: Associated Press

Steven Brill brings 'Class Warfare' to school

 
As teachers across the nation are returning to their classrooms, Steven Brill is drawing a lot of attention -- and a lot of flak -- for the provocative portraits of educators and U.S. education in his new book "Class Warfare: Inside the Fight to Fix America's Schools." You may have even heard  him on CNN, CSPAN, NPR and plenty of other media outlets in the last two weeks, talking about his book's prescription for alleviating the system's problems. 

The founder of CourtTV and The American Lawyer magazine (among other things), Brill asks why, in chronicling the efforts of administrators, educators and reformers across the nation, has the U.S. education system turned into an "obstacle to the American dream rather than the enabler"?

Among the answers his book offers is this: There are plenty of exceptional teachers, but plenty more who fall well below the mark and are protected by "the most lavishly funded and entrenched bureaucracies in America (fourteen thousand school districts) supported by an interest group -- the teachers' unions -- [with]...money and playbooks every bit as effective in thwarting public interest as Big Oil, the NRA or Big Tobacco."  

It's enough to make you nervous as you meet your child's teacher on the first day -- is my child getting one of the good ones? -- but Brill's approach is bound to make readers anxious for a different reason. The problem with any book that indicts an entire system, whether you're talking about education or human rights or cancer research, is that it's bound to overlook many bright spots and individual success stories that are out there.

Mom's bathroom reading, in the Owchar house

Back at the end of the shelf containing all the books I’ve read in my life, there’s a worn-out paperback with yellow pages called “By Love Fulfilled” by Noreen Nash. How is it that I read a book by one of the 1970s queens of romantic historical novels? A simple three letters.

Mom.

My mom’s a devoted student of English and French history -- in some other world, with more educational support, I'm sure she would have become a successful professor of European history. Her enthusiasm for books kindled my own and has been a connection we’ve always shared, aside from our blood, aside from my being a part of her.

As a kid, I can remember reading what she left in the bathroom wastebasket. It wasn’t a wastebasket used for trash: She kept books there for, well, you know, those times when you need a book.

And that’s where “By Love Fulfilled” came in. I still remember my, er, regular visits to read about Nostradamus’ dire prediction that a French king would meet tragedy in a joust and how his dread prophecy comes true; and the terrible punishment a jealous husband takes on his adulterous wife -- he cuts off her nose -- and the way, nursed to health in a convent, the wound heals and her appearance is somewhat restored, though she’s not a ravishing beauty anymore. One night at the dinner table, I asked my mom about the nose-cutting scene and she gave me a startled look.

“You’ve been reading my book?” she said.

She didn’t scold me, though -- I think she forgot that the book included some racy scenes, but that’s OK, I was a kid and skipped those parts anyway. Instead, she started talking about royal houses and ancient lineages and wouldn’t stop. Little by little, as I finished the book, each night our dinner conversation was full of talk about kings and queens, and to this day I still bring up the book to her sometimes -- it’s a special little reminder of the unexpected ties that bind people.

So, this weekend, after our usual family gathering for Mother’s Day, I think I will serve her an after-dinner cup of coffee, sit down beside her and then ask a simple question, “So, Mom, how did Nostradamus know that the joust would go so badly?”

I want to see what she says. I can’t wait. No one else in the house will understand what I’m talking about, of course, but she will. She’s my mom.

-- Nick Owchar