Must-reads for Fall

Autumn brings the year's biggest books, which we await eagerly. From the hundreds of new titles that arrive on our doorstep, the LJ editors have chosen ten you should not miss. These books run the gamut: Diane Middlebrook taps into the emotional depth shared by Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes while Dubravka Ugresic seeks out the future of literature; Robert Hughes explores Goya's genius, and Julian Schnabel asserts his own painting's legacy; Michael Ignatieff is swept along by his character's self-destruction while Henry Wiencek watches a Founding Father's sense of humanity be transformed; and more. Three cresting young writers—Nalo Hopkinson, Edward Docx, and Debbie Stoller (on our cover)—add to the mix salty magic, moral inquiry, and knitting joy.

The Salt Roads by Nalo Hopkinson
(Warner. Nov. 0-446-53302-5. $22.95)
Like comedian Rodney Dangerfield, sf and fantasy don't get much respect. Though often dismissed by highbrow critics, these genres have given birth to some of contemporary fiction's most provocative and original writers—Ray Bradbury, Ursula Le Guin, Samuel Delaney, and now Nalo Hopkinson.

"I am not interested in writing realistic novels," says the Jamaican-born, Toronto-based author. "Science fiction and fantasy set my imagination free." Indeed, her first two novels, Brown Girl in a Ring, which won the Warner Aspect First Novel Contest, and Midnight Robber, earned critical praise for their unique blend of Afro-Caribbean folklore, dialects, and cultural traditions within the conventions of sf.

At first glance, Hopkinson's new book, The Salt Roads (see review, p. 207), appears to be a shift from traditional sf. A blend of historical fiction and fantasy that recalls magic realism, it follows the lives of three women of African heritage in some way inspired by the Afro-Caribbean goddess Ezili: Meritet, a Greek-Nubian prostitute in 300 C.E.; Mer, an 18th-century Haitian slave; and Jeanne Duval, the mistress of French poet Charles Baudelaire. In addition, The Salt Roads is being published not by the Warner Aspect sf imprint, which released Hopkinson's previous titles, but by Warner Books, which is marketing this hardcover (the author's first) as her breakout book.

Hopkinson credits her editor for the decision to have the bigger imprint publish The Salt Roads. "I think it was a smart choice," she comments. "This novel isn't genre fiction in the same way that some of my other books are, though it definitely comes from the same sensibility." Although she is not deliberately aiming to reach a wider audience, Hopkinson would be delighted if The Salt Roads entices non-sf readers to try some of her other works.

Hopkinson claims that this was the hardest book she has ever written, taking up two-and-a-half years of her life. "The other novels also needed research into cultural folkways and folk history, but this one was really, really big, covering three different countries and different historical periods about which I knew nothing." Having once worked as a library clerk and supervisor, Hopkinson knows the Toronto Public Library well and has high praise for its comprehensive West Indian/black history collection.

The author was especially concerned with getting the sections on Haiti right. As she explains, "The country is so often misrepresented in the media, and it has such a powerful and moving history." Drawing on Joan Dayan's classic Haiti, History and the Gods, she also had two Haitian academics read her manuscript.

The chapters on Baudelaire and Duval were inspired by an Angela Carter short story, "The Black Venus." Says Hopkinson, "Their 20-year relationship fascinated me. They kept coming back together yet would still do awful things to each other." She was especially intrigued by Duval, a mixed-race woman living in 19th-century France.

"I wanted to explore the issue of biracial women and how that complicates relationships between women, especially black women," Hopkinson observes. In fact, her original title for the novel was Griffone, a Creole term that means "high yellow," but Warner felt the title was too obscure and suggested The Salt Roads instead.

"I like the title," says Hopkinson, "because salt is so much in the book. The salt roads are literally a means of travel for the goddess Ezili from one place to another. Salt is also life, and although these women's lives are hard, they are also full of joy."

Stitch 'n Bitch: The Knitter's Handbook by Debbie Stoller
(Workman. Oct. 0-7611-3258-9. $23.95; pap. 0-7611-2818-2. $13.95)
With one sweater, Debbie Stoller—editor in chief of neofeminist magazine BUST—launched a generation of young American knitters. With her second book, Stitch 'n Bitch (see review, p. 164), she may very well convince the world of the joys of needlework. At once an in-depth introduction to knitting and a cultural document of its recent resurgence, the book grew out of Stoller's desire to see feminism, which she considers "an ever-evolving puzzle," in a new way.

In 1999, while crossing the country via train on a book tour for The BUST Guide to the New Girl Order, Stoller decided to kill time with an old project. The unfinished sweater (one arm, actually) carried serious baggage: childhood memories of fumbling with needles, her discovery of women's lib, and, as an adult, her frustration whenever she engaged in her Dutch foremothers' craft.

That day, however, Stoller had a breakthrough that led to an obsession: her fingers fell into a rhythm, the needles started tapping, and the sweater took shape before the train rolled into Portland, OR. Back home in New York City, she noticed the polarized reactions of onlookers and friends.

"Often, it was 'Cool! I want to learn.' But a lot of people also thought that it was weird that I, an outspoken feminist, would be into something like knitting," Stoller says. "That made me question why this craft had such a bad rep. I come from generations and generations of women on my mother's side who were needlecrafters and never rejected it out of some false sense of feminism."

Inspired by the efforts of Riot Grrrls and gays and lesbians to rethink the idea of "women's work" in the 1990s, Stoller founded an informal knitting circle—Stitch 'n Bitch—so that she could indulge in her obsession and teach the craft to twenty- and thirtysomethings.

"Even three years ago, so few people were knitting, and the ones who were you couldn't necessarily identify with—middle-aged or retired women, excellent though they are. I wanted to find younger people who would have the time to get together on a weekday night."

Stoller also began writing about knitting in BUST, and soon other urbanites started wielding needles in offshoots of their own. (The trend has even crossed the pond—next time you're in Europe, check out the Zurich and Aberdeen "chapters.") Today, the Craft Yarn Council of America estimates that the number of knitters under 35 has more than doubled since 1998. Stitch 'n Bitch is tailor-made for that audience, boasting 40 hip and wearable patterns, from a Coney Island Fireworks Scarf to a Queen of Hearts Bikini. The designers, everyday women whom Stoller found via the net and word of mouth, recount the origin of their passion in sidebars in the book.

Often showcased by hipster models in Crayola-brite spreads, these designs will certainly pull in browsers. They'll stay, though, because of Stoller's clear directions and attention to detail. For each stitch (e.g., knit, purl, pick up lines), Stoller offers a practice pattern and close-up; a diagram of a yarn label, examples of needles, and tools of the trade are also covered. As a result, young and old, novice and expert, male and female will all find some knot for thought.

"In the past couple years, I've definitely seen knitting go from something that was pretty embarrassing to something that people are proud of," Stoller muses. "I don't care what anyone says. That has got to be good for feminism."

The Calligrapher by Edward Docx
(Houghton. Oct. 0-618-34397-0. $24)
The lacerating tale of a disaffected young Londoner. A commentary on the absence of considered belief. An elegant embodiment of John Donne's poems. Edward Docx's The Calligrapher is all this and more, which may explain the acclaim it received upon appearing in Great Britain last May. Now, this daring first novel is poised for success stateside (see review, p. 205).

Anyone dipping into the richly textured text might wonder about its source. Ask Docx, and he'll refer you to Angelina Jolie's tattoos. In a roundabout way, they suggested an occupation for his hero, Jasper, who spends the novel transcribing Donne's Songs and Sonnets. Before the tattoos, however, came Docx's desire to sort out his frustrations with a society that seems to have lost clear conviction.

"I wanted to give voice to the first adult generation of the 21st century," explains Docx by phone from his London home. "By that I mean a thinking person who is faced with the fact that religious belief is eroded, the political system is eroded, and the value of art is eroded. My generation is scared of a vocabulary which allows you to say this book is good, this painting is bad." Consequently, insists Docx, people often don't know what to think and pluck wildly inconsistent beliefs from the air, heading off to the recycling center in their fuel-hungry SUVs. Jasper is seriously disturbed by this doublethink, all the more because he sees it in himself.

The casual reader might not immediately associate man-about-town Jasper with Donne, but Docx immediately recognized the similarities: "Donne just didn't believe in the political system that was around then, he didn't believe in the religious framework, and he was sick to death of bad plays and bad art." Furthermore, like Jasper, who leaps from woman to woman until he is stopped midair by the beauteous Madeleine, Donne had a bouncing heart, and in verses stitched flawlessly into the text, he is seen agonizing over his inconstancy in both affection and belief. Docx regards such changefulness as a problem for contemporary society, yet he doesn't think that it can—or should—be fixed. "It might be that inconstancy is part of our vitalizing spirit and that by solving it we cancel ourselves out," he concludes.

A practiced journalist whose columns have appeared in the London Times and the Independent, Docx did not come to the task of writing a full-length novel unprepared, but he found the issues if not different then much intensified. "The problems of writing a long piece are the same as those of writing a short one, except that they are magnified by the number of pages," he allows. "Suddenly, an aside might be two pages long, and you are wondering, 'My god, have I lost my reader?' "

There's little chance that Docx will lose readers, if only because of his stylish prose. He writes in a deliciously evocative manner, at once word-conscious and exact, that links him with favored authors like Fitzgerald and Nabokov. "I really, really reject the position of modern fiction, which is antistyle," he proclaims heatedly. "Style is morality, style is truth."

The big issues obviously matter to Docx, which may be why he's so pleased with the early reception of his novel here. As he sees it, "The American voice is still able, as in [Don] DeLillo and [Philip] Roth, to write high, human tragedy–type stories, while Europeans seem a bit cowed." But not Docx, who is clearly up to a British Pastoral or a London-set Cosmopolis—written in his own engaged style, of course. For that, readers must eagerly await his second novel.

An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America by Henry Wiencek
(Farrar. Nov. 0-374-17526. $30)
The great American subject of race is at the center of Henry Wiencek's National Book Critics Circle Award–winning The Hairstons: An American Family in Black and White, and, as the author recalls, it informed his interest in next writing "a book about slavery in the era of the Founding." When his agent proposed that he instead write a biography of George Washington, Wiencek was reluctant, certain that there was "nothing new to discover about him." Then came the dramatic announcement in 1998 of DNA test results proving that Thomas Jefferson had fathered a child by one of his slaves, Sally Hemings, quickly followed by a similar story alleging that Washington had also had a child, West Ford, with a slave. "That fascinated me because it seemed to indicate a strong possibility that Washington had black kin, if not a black son," says Wiencek. "It opened a whole new psychological dimension and a new path for fresh research."

An Imperfect God is both a life of Washington and an exploration of early American slavery. It investigates how a man born to the Virginia plantation system could end up dramatically rejecting it by freeing his 124 slaves at the end. The story of the President's last will has long been known but not the lifetime of thinking that preceded it. "The facts about Washington's struggle against slavery had to be buried [by earlier writers] because they challenged the myth of an innocent past," Wiencek argues, pointing out how Washington's "moral development" was in fact the very opposite of Jefferson's: "Washington began as an enthusiastic slave master, grew to hate slavery, and acted to end it. Jefferson began as an emancipator, fought against the 'wicked' (his word) injustices of the slave system, devised plans to end it, but gradually embraced slavery for reasons we do not yet fully understand."

While finding his way to an honest, modern admiration for Washington, Wiencek freshens the moral horror of the slavers' landscape in which his subject lived. "It was a great challenge to write about Washington and slavery," Weincek tells LJ, "because I tried not to whitewash the past, but I also had to guard against setting myself up as a prosecutor. The other part of the challenge is that the more you study Washington the more you admire him; you have to struggle to keep your objectivity."

After exhausting all the available historical research, Wiencek ended up unconvinced by the story of Washington's paternity. What he produced instead is a totally original consideration of race and our elusive first President. "The documents neither confirm nor deny the oral history. It's a question of character. My aim, which I hope I achieved, was to judge Washington and his era by his standards and not by mine."

Her Husband: Hughes and Plath; A Marriage by Diane Middlebrook
(Viking. Oct. 0-670-03187-9. $25.95)
By now the story of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes has become a part of literary lore, given a proper and purposeful heritage in journals, letters, and books of poetry—for the most part edited and published by Hughes himself. Although Hughes declined to preserve his six years with Plath (1932–63) in an autobiography—which surely would have enhanced the enduring legacy of Plath's genius he believed so vehemently to be creating—others could not help but be taken by this dramatic relationship and have sought to answer the questions still lingering after Plath's suicide. Enter Diane Middlebrook, who has gone past the sensationalism to the chemistry between Plath and Hughes and its ultimate impact on their writing (see Review, p. 167).

According to Middlebrook, a biographer, critic, and poet as well, she was first compelled by the likes of Anne Sexton and Plath because they were "women artists who turned their talent into a real established literary or artistic prominence." Her fascination with Plath eventually led her to the second floor of Emory University's Robert W. Woodruff Library in Atlanta to peruse a recently acquired collection of Hughes's papers. There she found a copy of Howls and Whispers, a book Hughes wrote on his years with Plath and published in a limited edition. (His posthumous poetry collection, Birthday Letters, also addresses Plath.) Middlebrook saw Howls and Whispers as "a beautiful monument to Plath," she tells LJ, and she was soon "entering into the labyrinth of the question of why this book was made."

Just as it was poetry that drew Plath to Hughes one night in 1956, so it was a poem in Howls and Whispers ("The Offers") that drew Middlebrook into their literary lives, giving her a key to understanding just what they meant to each other. "They were still turning into artists when they met," Middlebrook explains, "and their partnership was a success because of their ability to promote in each other such eloquence." The hopeful young artists could not foresee the sorrow to come, but, as Middlebrook comments, "they were in a dynamic arc, and it had a tragic outcome that usually gets projected on him."

So, is Hughes responsible for his wife's suicide, as many have posited? "I don't blame Hughes for her death, I blame depression," Middlebrook says. "I don't see Plath as a victim in any way, and I don't see her as crazy. In a funny way I think that she actually fulfilled every ambition that she had, so I wish she hadn't died so young."

No Angel by Penny Vincenzi
(Overlook. Oct. 1-58567-481-8. $26.95)
One of the rare birds of publishing, Penny Vincenzi is a world-famous Brit (with more than four million copies of her 11 novels sold internationally) who is virtually unknown in the United States. That may be a thing of the past as soon as Peter Mayer, the intelligently independent publisher of Overlook, brings to U.S. readers Vincenzi's World War I publishing family saga starring the decidedly independent Celia Lytton. Set in New York and London, No Angel readily crosses the pond, something Vincenzi tells LJ she has long awaited. For Vincenzi, the transatlantic plot makes this a particularly appealing book to introduce her to the U.S. audience, as does her partnership with a smaller publisher. "I have been absolutely overwhelmed by [Overlook's] energy, determination, and creativity," she says. "Something about David and Goliath comes to mind." If all goes well, No Angel could be the beginning of a long and happy affair, as it is just the start of the author's "The Spoils of Time" trilogy. So far, so good: No Angel has garnered raves (see review, p. 211) and is a main selection for the Literary Guild in October.

Charlie Johnson in the Flames by Michael Ignatieff
(Grove. Oct. 0-8021-1755-4. $24)
Not all readers want a book that makes them confront the tragedy of someone else's war. Michael Ignatieff's second novel (after the 1993 Booker Prize–nominated Scar Tissue) does just that, but with the rapid-fire pacing of a modern thriller and the escalating emotions of Graham Greene's best. So while readers will run headlong into sticky issues and come to know that no war is an island, they will also get caught up in the protagonist's obsessive hunt for justice.

Charlie Johnson is a veteran war correspondent covering tensions on the Kosovan-Serbian border in 1998. To show up their younger competitors, he and cameraman Jacek venture into dangerous terrain for proof of guerrilla activity—and watch as a woman who hid them from a surprise patrol is set afire before their eyes.

News has never hit home like this before. Though Charlie returns home to his wife and daughter in London, he feels compelled to go back to Belgrade and track down the innocent's killer, a renowned colonel. For all his character's feelings of guilt and revenge, though, Ignatieff insists that he is not trying to make a point. "In fiction, there is no message. The book is about Charlie and what happens to him. It's driven by the plot, not by any ideas that I might have," he says (see Review, p. 208).

Currently director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard, Ignatieff has written plenty of nonfiction with hard-hitting opinions (e.g., Virtual War: Kosovo and Beyond). And like Charlie, he has firsthand knowledge of the Balkans after doing broadcasts from there for the BBC and Channel 4 Television in the 1990s. But if his latest novel is political, it is only so in a superficial sense.

Throughout, the author plays on both sides of the fence, and part of the suspense derives from trying to figure out where you stand on Charlie. He sees his cause as righteous, but the colonel, portrayed with impressive sleight of hand, would leave the impression that the bumbling American is to blame. Ignatieff himself is more concerned with what it is like "being at the end of your tether, being so shocked by an atrocity that it drives you crazy."

In fact, Ignatieff doesn't think he's ever written about war in its moment—it's the consequences and casualties of conflict that he ponders here as in his nonfiction. "Scar Tissue was about male self-destruction, so I must have a thing about that topic. But believe me, [my latest] is not autobiographical," says Ignatieff. "I don't have a self-destructive bone in my body. I'm just curious what it would be like to really screw up." That inquiry has resulted in a page-turner that relies on an emotional response to mesmerize. A horrifying moment spins out of control, pulling readers in and driving Charlie over the edge. Ignatieff's current and future fans will go that distance.

Thank You for Not Reading by Dubravka Ugresic
(Dalkey Archive. Nov. 1-56478-298-0. pap. $13.95)
Victor Hugo once said of those living in exile, "You are flung away, but you are not set free." This is especially true of writers. Not only does living far from home compel them to face the sudden futility of the mother tongue, but they must reevaluate the very meaning of their work. It is from this fragile standpoint that Dubravka Ugresic, who left her native Croatia for political reasons a decade ago and resettled in Amsterdam, presents her latest collection (following the acclaimed Have a Nice Day and The Culture of Lies). In it she addresses the meaning of literature, its relationship with the fickle publishing industry, and the wobbly future of the literary writer.

"We live in a nonreading age," says Ugresic. The award-winning novelist and cultural critic here laments a distance between the writer and the reader that has little to do with how many books are sold. "I learned that being published doesn't mean being read, and being read doesn't mean being understood." As Ugresic observes, fame has little to do with merit, which instead goes to the Market (with a capital M) as the sole arbiter.

Still, it would be simplistic to label this collection a critique of publishing when it is so much more. What emerges here is a portrait of the critically acclaimed but still struggling writer toiling to accept the consequences of popular literature, which she neither consumes nor values. This writer compares worlds, old and new, and sadly concludes that the drive to sell far exceeds the drive to understand and that there is an arresting similarity between the socialist realism of the former Soviet Union and the ambition of Western publishing to create products with a common appeal.

Indeed, Ugresic sees the impulse to tailor writing to readers' tastes as a great threat to literature, arguing instead that the treasure of any book can be found only when it is approached unknowingly. "When I was a child, a local librarian gave me a book to read about an insect without telling me it was a well-known story by a well-known author. And thank God she didn't. How else would I have been able to discover its wonder on my own?"

Most of the pieces in the collection are essays on the verge of becoming stories—or stories on the verge of becoming essays. And it is precisely this clever balance of fact and fiction that makes the work as a whole at once insightful and enjoyable. "I am most at home mixing fiction and nonfiction," explains Ugresic, who admits that, ironically, this risky technique makes her chance of being published or understood even smaller.

Ugresic, who is already working on another book, strives to remedy this conflict between creation and commerce simply by continuing to write, even if only a small group of readers cares. "Literature does have a future: my students."

Goya by Robert Hughes
(Knopf. Nov. 0-394-58028-1. $40)
The author of the best-selling art histories The Shock of the New and American Mirrors, Robert Hughes has offered his robust insights on art since the mid-1970s. As a critic, he has identified a veritable colony of naked emperors, but he also has his heroes, as he proves in his new life of the Spanish master-painter, Francisco Goya y Lucientes (1746–1828).

The modern world has "no equivalent to his greatness as an artist," says Hughes of Goya. "Maybe not even as a man. Our talents are mean, slight, puffed-up, and mediocre by comparison." Goya's art is singular, argues Hughes, because it was "fed by the old, black Spain of cruelty and superstition. He did not believe in witches and devils, but his art could hardly have functioned, let alone acquired its deep, tidal power, without them." Goya also speaks to us now as "the first artist to see war as it really is and record it in his immortal series of etchings, Los Desastres de la Guerra."

The Goya book was to be the last leg of a three-book deal Hughes signed with Knopf in the early 1980s: the other two were The Fatal Shore, his masterly history of Australia's settlement; and Barcelona, a wonderful social history of that old city. The Goya project, however, daunted him for years. "I adored Goya and was fascinated by him, but I wasn't sure I could handle the detail of Spanish society which any discussion of him would have required." Beyond that, Goya himself was intimidating. "His character was hard to 'get a handle on'—the brilliant and skeptical 'man of the people,' not a risen peasant but not by any means a man of noble birth either, ebulliently democratic in temper and yet remarkably good at moving among kings…."

Hughes found his way back to Goya only after nearly dying in May 1999 in a car crash in Western Australia. During his five weeks in a coma, Hughes was tormented vividly in dreams by his elusive subject, Goya himself, wearing a bullfighter's jacket. After nearly seven months in hospitals, Hughes slowly returned to work with a new determination "to try and penetrate [Goya's] life and character before I died."

As Hughes told LJ, his own terrible experience may have been "in a disagreeable but perhaps necessary way a help to the book" when it came to understanding the maladies of Goya's later years, as the old painter "fought his way through" deafness, depression, and "bouts of near-madness." But, Hughes quickly adds, "I would never be so foolish as to project myself on Goya. He was one of the great arguments for the human race, like his contemporaries Beethoven or Dickens, distinguished by his immense breadth of sympathy. Obviously, I am not such a creature. But a cat may look at a king."

Julian Schnabel by Julian Schnabel
(Abrams. Dec. 0-8109-4633-5. $75)
An artist's monograph, with its critical assessments, glossy color plates, and bio-résumé, just hasn't been a priority for Julian Schnabel. A prolific, gusty painter, he made his name in the late 1970s with his large-scale paintings on broken plates and has continued to paint and sculpt loudly since then. As he says by phone before dashing off to Spain one July afternoon, "Some artists like to have lots of books, but sometimes it's nice not to have to look back and rehash everything."

With Schnabel's recent successes directing feature films (Basquiat; Before Night Falls), critics have come out once again to admire or dismiss his efforts, focusing on his Godfather-like personality and lush living quarters. But not until now has there been a comprehensive book on his work.

This is not, however, your typical monograph. Everything is here—installation views, photos from the artist's own life, the plate portraits, and Johnny Depp in drag. It's more a visual, stream-of-consciousness epic than art history; or, as Schnabel says, "It works like a film, with fast-forwards and flashbacks."

There are no essays and no biographical sketch, leaving viewers to wander through the pages without words to guide or distract them. "It's a picture book," says Schnabel. "I don't want to tell people how to look. So many times books are like retrospectives, like nailing a coffin shut, but here I tried to keep everything in the present."

"Julian put it together himself," says Abrams editor Richard Olsen. "He did it by hand, laying the images out on a 20' table in his studio. He storyboarded the whole book, editing it down to about 400 images."

Olsen concedes that working with Schnabel was not always easy. For instance, in keeping with his aesthetic the artist wanted the cloth on each book to be washed and faded, so it would look old. "I had to tell him, we're not talking about 2000 copies, it's 12,000," says Olsen. Schnabel finally agreed to let it go. Still, the book retains some of its "artist's book" feel. As Schnabel says, "I tried to get something else rather than just reproduce all the paintings and stuff—to get something new out of it, to be making something, not just recording something."