Fall 2007 Editors' Picks

Visit six notorious British sisters, a young Illinois lawyer bound for bigger things, and a zookeeper's wife in World War II Warsaw who saves more than herself. Listen to a young violinist trying to reclaim his past and a 19th-century novelist who spills her secrets. See what's happening to the graphic novel today. Hop Out of the Frying Pan and into Legends of the Chelsea Hotel. It's all here: LJ's book review editors pick their favorites for fall.

The Zookeeper's Wife: A War Story by Diane Ackerman. Norton. Sept. ISBN 978-0-393-06172-7. $24.95.

About 25 years ago, Diane Ackerman proposed to her editor at National Geographic magazine that she write an essay about Bialowieza, a primeval forest in Poland where descendants of paleolithic bison and horses still roamed freely. Instead, the writer was dispatched to Hawaii to write about monk seals, but her fascination with this pristine forest and its “living fossils” remained strong. “What I didn't know then was that I was sharing some of Adolf Hitler's and Hermann Goering's obsessions,” says Ackerman.

Through further reading, Ackerman learned about the Nazi attempt to resurrect extinct species, a process that involved looting the zoos of conquered countries. And she uncovered the little-known but remarkable story of Jan and Antonina Zabinski, Polish Catholic zookeepers who rescued over 300 Jews during World War II by hiding them in the ruined Warsaw zoo. “As I began learning their story piece by piece,” explains the author, “it was like pulling off dusty layers and being able to see the story more clearly.”

What she discovered and recounts so movingly in her book (see review on p. 147) was an act of compassionate heroism. At a time when harboring a Jew was punishable by death, the Zabinskis smuggled friends and strangers out of the Warsaw Ghetto into their villa and the zoo's empty cages. While Jan, an active member of the Polish resistance, buried ammunition in the elephant enclosure, Antonina cared for her young son, her “guests,” and a tiny menagerie that included a pet pig and a kissing, carnivorous rabbit named Wicek. In Antonina, whose extraordinary empathy for animals and human beings is evident throughout the text, Ackerman found a kindred spirit determined “to keep play, the arts, innocence, and even humor alive in a household where everyone feared the horrors and uncertainties around them. I think that takes a special kind of courage.”

With nail-biting accounts of daring deeds and narrow escapes, The Zookeeper's Wife reads like a thriller, but Ackerman was careful to stay close to the facts, drawing on Antonina's memoirs and children's books, as well as interviews she and Jan gave to Polish, Hebrew, and Yiddish newspapers after the war. “Trying to understand Antonina was a new challenge for me,” says the author. “I couldn't depend on my own impressions when [these events] took place long ago.” Ackerman repeatedly visited the Warsaw zoo and the villa where she could look out of Antonina's bedroom and—as Warsaw's Old Town had been carefully restored after the war—see the same vistas the zookeeper's wife once enjoyed. Ackerman also interviewed the Zabinskis' son and several women, now in their eighties, who had served with Jan in the Polish Underground. And she immersed herself in Poland's natural environment by visiting Bialowieza. “What I did is insinuate myself back into Antonina's world,” Ackerman explains.

Strangely, the story of the Zabinskis is not well known in their homeland, which Ackerman attributes to the Soviet-dominated Communist regime that suppressed any signs of Polish patriotism. When the book is published in Poland in a year, she believes that the events it relates will be a great surprise to many people there—and a source of pride. She hopes both Polish and American readers will learn that ordinary people perform radical acts of compassion over the world every day. “For some reason, we like to highlight the worst in human nature,” observes Ackerman, “but it's worth reminding people of the best.”— Wilda Williams

Orpheus Lost by Janette Turner Hospital. Norton. Oct. 368p. ISBN 978-0-393-06552-7. $24.95.

A modern Orpheus, Mishka Bartok plays the violin so affectingly at Harvard Square's subway station that post-doc student Leela Moore is compelled to stop, precipitating their passionate affair. Because Mishka sometimes ventures secretly to a mosque where known terrorists have gathered, security agent Cobb Slaughter—still bitterly eyeing old friend Leela from afar—assumes that he is consorting with the enemy. Soon, Mishka is sucked into Middle East violence, allowing Janette Turner Hospital to offer nuanced views of post-9/11 terrorism, America's abuse of power, and the moral sense that ultimately defines this nation.

But Orpheus Lost (LJ 8/07) is not a political novel. “I'm interested in the personal, emotional response of ordinary people caught up in the convulsions of history,” explains Hospital by phone from her home near the University of South Carolina, where she serves as Carolina Distinguished Professor of English. Hospital is keenly aware of lives painfully diverted in ways most of us don't care to imagine, pointing to the Vietnam vets among her older students and her hairdresser, whose husband has been deployed three times in Iraq. Mishka, too, is an innocent enmeshed in larger events with deadly consequences; the grandson of Holocaust survivors, he has discovered that the father he never knew is a Lebanese Muslim. Hence his visits to the mosque and then to the Middle East, where he becomes the victim of torture. Significantly, it's Leela who makes the long, dark journey to retrieve him.

Having both studied and taught in Cambridge, MA, Hospital declares that she has “stood a few thousand times on the Harvard Square subway platform, and the street musicians are terrifically good.” There she found her Orpheus, though she knew her retelling of the ancient story would have a feminist inversion. “I'm trained as a medievalist,” she says, “and the only role for women in folklore and myth is to wait around.” Initially, Hospital wanted to avoid political allusions, for she had just finished Due Preparations for the Plague, a novel about an airplane hijacking. But as she acknowledges, “Current events seep into my thought processes and my life.”

As she began writing, Hospital was riveted by reports of abuse at Abu Ghraib and the Guantánamo Bay detainment camp, and her shock was ultimately folded into her work. The whistle blowers in both cases were intensely patriotic men aiming to do right, contends Hospital, and both were vilified for their efforts. “I was stunned that such a degree of hate could be called forth against someone who thought he was doing his duty,” she reveals. Australian born (like Mishka himself), Hospital became a U.S. citizen this summer, and she cares deeply about America's behavior in the world. Abuse like that reported violates core American values—values held by people she knows who have served. In the end, Cobb Slaughter, a former soldier who finally risks everything to correct a gross injustice, is for Hospital the “moral hero of the book.”

A self-described scavenger who “likes to get close to very different lives,” Hospital manages a work of considerable moral complexity by persuasively presenting multiple viewpoints. “I think the huge thing to avoid is having a didactic purpose,” she explains. “I want the reader to plunge into the emotional maelstrom of each character.” It helps that Hospital has moved frequently and can appreciate diverse ways of life. Currently, she loves living in the Deep South, home of Leela and Cobb, though at first “the culture shock was almost as great as living in a village in India.” Now she finds the hospitality contagious, and she's impressed with efforts to heal the wounds of segregation, saying, “I've never lived in such close quarters to so many brave people, black and white.” As always, it's the personal response of ordinary people caught in history's convulsions that shape Hospital's view of the world.—Barbara Hoffert

The Lost Memoirs of Jane Austen by Syrie James. Avon. Jan. 2008. ISBN 978-0-06-144369-5. pap. $13.95.

A nearly native Californian (she moved from New York at age one), Syrie James is fascinated with 19th-century British literature and especially with Jane Austen. Although a screenwriter by trade, James parlayed her own Jane-fever into The Lost Memoirs of Jane Austen (see review, p. 127), a heady historical novel.

Why did you choose to write your novel as a lost memoir?

I conceived the book as a memoir because I wanted to tell a deeply personal (albeit fictional) story—that of Jane Austen's own romance, which inspired her return to writing. I felt the book would connect more emotionally with readers if written as Austen herself might have written it. I also hoped readers would find great pleasure in the “discovery” of another work “by Jane Austen.”

The editor's foreword and footnotes put readers squarely in the realm of nonfiction. Did you worry that readers would be put off?

The editor's foreword is almost entirely fiction but designed to be perceived as fact, so I am delighted that you thought of it that way. I see the footnotes as an enhancement, rather than a distraction, as many readers might be familiar with Austen only through the films of her novels. Because this book is Austen's private journal, it had to be written entirely from her perspective, and since so many of the characters are real, I thought readers would enjoy learning of their fates (something Jane would not have known). References to personal events, customs, and social conventions of the era might be unclear without an explanation. Also, I thought it would be fun to make allusions to Austen's body of work, enticing readers to seek out or reread her books.

Your version of Austen's life is so convincing. What influenced you?

According to her sister, Cassandra, Jane met a mysterious gentleman while on holiday at a seaside resort, the only man Jane ever truly loved. Then, shortly before she died, Cassandra went through Jane's letters, burning most of them and excising portions of others. On rereading Austen's surviving letters, I noticed a gap from January 1809 through April 1811. What happened during those missing years? It was entirely possible that Jane had had a secret love affair—a relationship so intense that it allowed her to write about emotions that she had, allegedly, never felt, a relationship that Cassandra conspired to keep secret.

Mr. Ashford, Jane's beau, is a wonderful character. Did you draw upon Austen's characters to create him?

My goal was to create a love interest who was truly Jane's equal in intellect and temperament and worthy of her admiration and passion, a man who could influence her life and her return to writing but at the same time would not take away from her own fiercely independent spirit. If Mr. Ashford resembles anyone, it's Emma's Mr. Knightley, combined with the charisma of Willoughby in Sense and Sensibility—although I hope readers will find him more interesting, charming, sexier, and far more passionate than either of them!

What is the enduring appeal of Jane Austen?

Readers are drawn by the brilliance of her writing, her superb narrative technique, and her humor. Austen's stories are comedies in the old-fashioned sense of the word: they are about the restoration of social order. Her novels deal with topics of enduring interest: voyages of self-discovery, family relationships and obligations, society's rules, and minute observations of human nature. But most important, at the core of each story is what people risk when they fall in love.

If you met Jane Austen today, what would you say to her?

I'd advise her to retain a good solicitor and collect her royalties for the past 200 years. Then I'd ask who the mysterious “seaside gentleman” really was.—Bette-Lee Fox

The Case of Abraham Lincoln: A Story of Adultery, Murder and the Making of a Great President by Julie M. Fenster. Palgrave Macmillan. Nov. ISBN 978-1-4039-7635-2. $24.95.

“When working on this book,” Julie Fenster recalls, “I happened to speak at a school and was asked what sort of people I like to write about. I said I preferred obscure, unknown people. That way, I'm bringing fresh stories to readers. A student asked, 'What obscure person is your next book about?' I said, 'Abraham Lincoln.' The kids roared with laughter.”

But Fenster wasn't contradicting herself: “The thing is…Lincoln was basically unknown in 1856. That's how he's treated in the book.” Relying on contemporary sources, she takes us to a town on the prairie 151 years ago, population 7250 “and only about 15 blocks square”—Springfield, IL, where “an everyday lawyer” named Abraham Lincoln lived. “He was not a general, not an elected official, not a statesman,” Fenster reminds us. He lived in Springfield, riding the district and circuit courts, from 1837 to 1861, when he moved on.

With Fenster, we “tail Lincoln for nine months of 1856” so that we can “pause over the bits that make up the rhythm of a life,” she explains. Fenster allows us to encounter tempos we hardly recognize—townspeople flocking to a political speech that will last two or three hours—and events that deliver a familiar shock—a blow to the head, a dead body, evidence of poison, the stir over who'll be brought to justice.

At the time, through the crisis of slavery's spread, the splintered Whig Party was giving way to new supporters (and a new name). Fenster turns this political evolution into bracing history played out in local meeting halls and newspaper offices. Meanwhile, over on Springfield's Monroe Street, blacksmith George Anderson was murdered, and Lincoln ultimately participated in the trial. “Amid the many debt-collection and trespassing cases that Lincoln handled, we have this case,” says Fenster. “Lincoln's legal work was neither philosophical nor sanitized; when need be, he was in the gutter or the alley.” Yet his involvement proved crucial to both the trial's verdict and the national rise of the Republican Party.

Fenster's rhythms have Twain-like timing. For example, when Lincoln's law partner William H. Herndon “wrote to a friend about Senator Stephen Douglas, 'You may think I hate the man. I can say I do not; yet I do loathe him,'” Fenster adds, “at least he cleared that up.” While her Lincoln is affable and much admired, he was, she writes, “a friend to everyone, a best friend to no one.” Fenster further explains that, “for all of his approachability—in person or in history—there is a dignified reserve. So I think it's refreshing to see him, at one point, hurl a pot of hot molasses against a fence in anger. That made me like him more.”

Her book reminds us that this was Abraham Lincoln in his prime, doing what he spent most of his adult life doing, while feeling political ambitions stir and hoping for personal and professional rewards to come. “After all, he didn't know how his life was going to turn out,” she says. Her narrative is a page-turner without grandiloquent statements or dark adumbrations of the tragedies with which Lincoln is inescapably entwined. Fenster knew they weren't necessary.—Margaret Heilbrun

Smut Vol. 1 from the editors of Nerve.com. Chronicle. Jan. 2008. ISBN 978-0-8118-5983-7. $15.95.

There comes a time in every editor's life when she doesn't want to read about guns, germs, steel, or the American healthcare system. Sometimes, an editor just wants to tickle her brain and libido. Thank the book fairies, then, for Smut Vol. 1, a thoroughly satisfying sampler of erotic literary fiction from Nerve.com, which again proves that imagination is the greatest turn-on. Nerve editor in chief Michael Martin here talks sex in fiction and culture.

Summarize the ideal Nerve.com short story.

It's unflinchingly honest, has character and plot development, avoids cliché, and contains a level of detail that is evocative on a sensory level. It also happens to be about sex.

How difficult was it to decide on the crème de la crème of ten years' worth of fiction?

It was tough—there was a lot of back-and-forth within the office and with the publisher. Generally, the book is intended to be a sexy experience, and we've published a lot of stories about sex that are dark or oblique and not particularly sexy. Writing about sex is difficult, sure, but I think no more so than writing well in general. Not enough good writers tackle it, mostly, I think, because of fear: of exposure, of embarrassment. I've read so many novels recently where things are proceeding toward sex, and there's this sort of cinematic lights on, jump-cut to the next scene. That has to stop.

Why do we need fiction that deals with sex?

Why do we need fiction that deals with food? Sex is universal, wonderful, and at times not so great, and it deserves to be addressed just as directly and “legitimately” as anything else, without the coding and mechanics of erotica.

What's the sexiest novel of 2007 so far?

Jane Smiley's Ten Days in the Hills. Unflinching and real and just anatomical enough.

Any advice for someone trying to pen a killer scenario of coitus?

What people get wrong: falling back on clichés. Pretentious or purple prose. General dishonesty. Honesty at the expense of everything else: too much play-by-play without character or plot development. Achieve the opposite, and you'll have a killer story.

The anniversary of Marilyn Monroe's death just passed. Is she a positive sexual icon or is she dated, irrelevant?

I have trouble separating Marilyn the icon from the reality of her story, or at least what we understand the reality to be. She was sexually confident, a rebel who took control of her sexual agency, and Nerve supports that. On the other hand, she was the victim of herself, the trappings of celebrity, and the limitations Hollywood puts on performers and women especially. Unfortunately, Lindsay Lohan has taken her place there. On a nonnarrative level—considering simply an image of heat and class—I'd probably join countless men's magazine editors in anointing Scarlett Johansson the new Marilyn.

True or false: Libraries are inherently sexy places because they're full of people seeking knowledge.

I'd love to say that any place where knowledge is rife and encouraged is hot, but it's more about the idea of membership cards—there's something very 1970s key club about that—and quiet, dark corners. There's a corner in every library that seems like the most isolated corner of the world.—Heather McCormack