Books
BOOKS
Check out our picks of this month’s page-turners.
The Reserve
Russell Banks • (Harper,
304 pages, $25 )
Woven through the rugged terrain and waterways of upstate New York between the two World Wars, the plot of Russell Banks’ latest novel is arguably as dark as anything he has written before. Yet along with the lurking sense of ominous doom and tragedy is a lush romance that underscores humankind’s capacity to embrace and, alternately, betray. The story is a jigsaw puzzle of sorts, the disparate pieces fitting together to form a sumptuous literary whole. It is the gradual confluence of these parts—political, economic, social, personal—that the reader will find so compelling. At the heart of the book is a rural artist of note—“strong and lean and hardhanded”—with decided political leanings. This husband and father becomes involved with a beautiful, unbalanced young woman who evolves into the catalyst driving the plot. Gradually yet resolutely, it builds to a climax revealed through a series of italicized interludes sprinkled through the book. Though the ending may border on predictable, the author’s writing is alive and refreshingly visual, his canvas spans continents, and his characters are sharply drawn. Respected among his peers and serious lit fans, Banks deserves an even wider audience. With The Reserve, he should seize it.
The Invention of Everything Else
Samantha Hunt
(Houghton Mifflin, 272 pages, $24)
We’re in Ragtime territory now—fact transformed into fiction. The place is a pulsating, emerging, yet still scruffy New York City at the turn of the 20th century. The figure at center stage is the Croatian-born American genius Nikola Tesla, inventor of AC current and the radio, mastermind behind early robotic science, and utter madman—with a Doolittle-like passion for pigeons. His era was a world populated by Edison, Westinghouse, Marconi, Twain, socialites and—as Samantha Hunt tells it—Louisa, a dreamy chambermaid in the hotel Tesla has been living in for years. Through alternating chapters, the immigrant visionary and the night watchman’s daughter with an imagination of her own tell their stories, coming together at intervals as circumstances develop. The framework of the book stretches from terra firma to outer space, with a time machine thrown in for good measure. Periodically, Hunt’s narrative strays a bit too deeply into technicalities; nonetheless, it is bracingly, enchantingly original.
Sit, Ubu, Sit
Gary David Goldberg
(Harmony Books, 272 pages, $24)
You might think, in a memoir of a Hollywood writer who has had bursts of success in the course of his career in television and film, that he would express more than a touch of “might have been” in its course. But Gary David Goldberg—the Brooklyn-born-and-nurtured, counterculture-influenced creator of “Family Ties,” a monster hit of 1980s TV—is a genuinely happy guy, grateful for anything and everything that has come his way in life. And his saga (subtitled “How I went from Brooklyn to Hollywood with the same woman, the same dog and a lot less hair”) underscores it. Goldberg’s up-and-down-and-up-again resume doesn’t begin to hint at the joie de vivre of the man, but his reflections—skipping joyfully back and forth across the decades—certainly do, along with the genial wit of this master of one-liners. If, until now, we’ve seen the entertainment business strictly as a heartless, bottom-line world, Goldberg’s reflections— including his depiction of Michael J. Fox and a vignette about a moment in Tom Hanks’ ascent—offer a hopeful contrast.