Editors' Spring Picks: Must-Reads from John Waters, Justin Cronin & More

Spring is nearly with us, and the spring books are already in our hands. From literary sf to a filmmaker's heroes to poetry everyone should read, we've plucked our favorites—find the two pomegranate references—just for you.

Wilda Williams | Margaret Heilbrun | Heather McCormack | Bette-Lee Fox | Anna Katterjohn | 
Barbara Hoffert | Raya Kuzyk

Girl Savior

The Passage by Justin Cronin.

Ballantine. Jun. ISBN 978-0-345-50496-8. $26.

Justin Cronin, a novelist and an English professor at Rice University in Houston, TX, is also a serious runner. “Running is my real creative time when I do my best thinking,” he says. Four years ago, his daughter, Iris, then nine years old, asked if she could go on his runs on her bicycle, and Cronin suggested they plan a novel together to pass the time. Her plot idea? Write a story about a girl who saves the world.

Cronin had no intention of writing a book. “But this father-and-daughter collusion had created something too special to ignore,” he explains. After outlining 30 pages of the story they had mapped out, Cronin discovered that he had a novel in the making—a big one that needed to be divided into a trilogy. “Saving the world was a tall order for one novel. I didn't want to go small.”

The Passage is a 700-page postapocalyptic epic about an orphaned girl who becomes humanity's last hope in the aftermath of a viral outbreak that transforms the infected into vampires. When his agent sent out a partial manuscript to publishers in 2007, Cronin had no expectations; to his surprise, a bidding war broke out, and the author sold the trilogy to Ballantine for over $3 million. Film rights were quickly bought by Fox 2000 and director Ridley Scott's production company, and John Logan, the screenwriter of Scott's Oscar-winning Gladiator, has been tapped to adapt the novel.

And the buzz continues to build. In a December 11 Entertainment Weekly column, Stephen King praised The Passage as a “don't-miss reading experience.” Ballantine, which plans an extensive traditional and online marketing campaign, has launched www.EnterthePassage.com for librarians and booksellers and will create later in the spring a site for consumers, with book trailers, maps, and downloadable giveaways. “The Passage appeals on so many different levels,” notes publisher Libby McGuire. “As we tore through the manuscript, we shared an immediate desire to discuss the plot twists and characters and to relive the reading experience. It inspired us to create a virtual world, where readers can share their reactions and get a behind-the-scenes look at the story's events.”

Known for literary, domestic fiction (the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award–winning Mary and O'Neal and The Summer Guest), Cronin briefly entertained the idea of using a pseudonym to avoid reader preconceptions. “I wanted people to come to the novel with an open heart and mind for what is about to unfold.” What excited him the most, though, about this project was the ability to tap into the books he loved. Besides the sf and postapocalyptic fiction of his youth, he cited Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove and Dennis Lehane's Mystic River, big novels that draw on the robust energy of a strong plot and feature great writing, great storytelling, and great characters.

One book Cronin chose not to read while writing The Passage was The Road, fearing Cormac McCarthy's distinctive prose style would affect his own. When he finally got to the novel, he was pleased that it was both the same and different. “It's a book about fathers and how they care for their children, which is at the core of The Passage. McCarthy's book is his, and my book is mine.”—Wilda Williams

Not So Nice

Sugar: A Bittersweet History by Elizabeth Abbott

Overlook: dist. by Penguin Group (USA). Apr. ISBN 978-1-59020-297-5. $29.95.

Little girls may be a mixture of “sugar and spice and everything nice” (I'll leave that debate for another piece!), but when it comes to global cause and effect, sugar leaves all other ingredients behind—and it's hard to find anything “nice” about it. In her latest book, Canadian scholar Elizabeth Abbott (research associate, Trinity Coll., Univ. of Toronto) traces the sugar that runs in history's veins.

A descendant of Antigua sugar producers, Abbott tells LJ that this “was the book of my heart,” recalling that it took “years to figure out what sort of book it would be.” When I suggest what it is, she accepts that it's “a sweeping narrative that links and contextualizes the stories of individuals, systems, and movements, while grounded in solid scholarship.”

Abbott ranges across oceans, following sugar from its native South Asia through Arab trade routes to Mediterranean countries and from thence to the colonized Caribbean, where such was the sweet tooth and hunger for profit of the Dutch and the French that they sacrificed temperate colonies (think New Amsterdam and Canada) to maintain claim to sugar-producing islands in the tropics. A few score years later, and Abbott is leading us through the St. Louis World's Fair of 1904, showing us such popular introductions as ice cream parlors, soda pop, Jell-O treats, and penny candy, not to mention the wonders of sugar combined with cocoa or the ongoing commodification of special occasions and holidays into candy fests.

Abbott's book is personal, owing both to her own expressions of response to what sugar has done and to her character sketches of men and women caught up in sugar's web. “I wanted…to bring my characters alive on the page,” she says, “and convey the complexities and nuances of the world they inhabit.” Her readers will witness sugar's crucial contribution first to the fatal geometry of the slave trade and thereafter to environmental damage greater than from any other single crop on Earth.

Yet Abbott points out that sugar can be decidedly green. Brazil, the world's largest sugar nation, has been producing sugar-based ethanol—and cars that can run on it—since the 1920s. Abbott agrees that the outlook is at least hopeful: “Sugar ethanol is quite unlike ethanol from corn. First of all, it yields 8.3 times as much energy as that expended to make it, compared to corn's mere 1.3 yield. By any measure, it's a 'green' ethanol source.”

And what of Haiti, where Abbott lived for some years? As a slave colony spun out of sugar, Haiti satisfied half of the world demand, but its early 19th-century independence brought that to an end.

I ask Abbott her thoughts about the country after the earthquake. “Haiti is in such a state of devastation, with so little left to repair,” she says, “that the reconstruction process can be really imaginative and wide-ranging. This may be—should be!—the time to consider reestablishing the sugarcane culture that was once centered in Léogane, the epicenter of the earthquake. Sugarcane grown for refinement into ethanol to replace or supplement costly imported oil would employ thousands of Haitians and help the nation toward self-sufficiency in fueling itself.”

Abbott quotes food historian Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat, who noted, “So many tears were shed for sugar that by rights it ought to have lost its sweetness.” Sugar and Sugar both will give readers a lift, and, ultimately, both offer hope.—Margaret Heilbrun

Kindred Spirits

Role Models by John Waters,

Farrar. Jun. ISBN 978-0-374-25147-5. $25.

This is not a celebrity profile in which the hack journalist contrasts her subject's penchant for gross with his empathy, as if the two don't go together. Welcome instead to a celebration of John Waters's full-frontal humanity, on unabashed display in his sixth book, Role Models. Singer Johnny Mathis, late Baltimore stripper Lady Zorro, convicted “Manson girl” Leslie Van Houten—these are the people who awe-inspire the Pink Flamingos director. And it's not about exploitation or irony.

“I look up to every person I write about because they've had a life more extreme than mine; they've had to be braver than I've had to be,” Waters explains over the phone from San Francisco.

His ardor for Van Houten's parole is moving, his obsession with Comme des Garçons designer Rei Kawakubo giddy. Don't get him started about books—Waters is a fiction fiend, with an 8,089-title personal library and a subscription to Publishers Weekly. No librarian has ever sold esoteric English women's lit as brilliantly as the Pope of Trash in Chapter 6: Ivy Compton Burnett's Darkness and Day (1951) is “an insanely inventive revision of Oedipus Rex” featuring “monstrously intelligent and all-knowing children.” Sold; heading to Abebooks.com.

Though he used libraries as a kid in the late 1950s, they seem to have frustrated more than fostered him—role model Tennessee Williams's coveted story collection One Arm had “See Librarian” status and was stored on a special shelf behind the checkout desk, so he stole it out of desperation. In bookshops, where he held down his only “real jobs,” he found taste mentors like Elloyd Hansen, the late owner of the Provincetown Bookshop, MA. With Jean Genet, Grove Press cured his book report–rooted hatred of reading. “I didn't start reading until I was a teenager, and I read to rebel,” says Waters.

This being Waters, however, he also awards role-model status to outsider pornographers Bobby Garcia and David Hurles, “who are driven in a way,” he says, “that is close to art. The only porn that turns them on is their own.” Our hero is at his smut-talking best here, sharing his boyfriend ideal (“blue-collar closet queen”) along with tales of extreme sexual neurotics like Ed Savitz (do not google him before breakfast, kids).

The collision of the eloquent and the profane is probably the best reason to read this quasimemoir-cum-how-to, aside from its deeper philosophy: judge not lest ye have the whole story, indulge your inner pervert (within reason), and read, for the love of Divine.

Waters puts it another way: “I believe in the opposite of original sin. I don't believe anybody is born guilty or evil.”

Glory-hole-lujah. Amen.— Heather McCormack

Dangerous Fruit

Eating Pomegranates by Sarah Gabriel.

Scribner. Mar. ISBN 978-1-4391-4819-8. $25.

After British journalist Sarah Gabriel realized her mother's ovarian cancer was hereditary, she tested positive for a mutation to the BRCA1 gene. As prevention, she had her ovaries removed but a year later was diagnosed with breast cancer. Gabriel talked to LJ by email about her wonderful memoir (bit.ly/arsFtz), a poignant and personal look at the predetermination that directs our lives and how we deal with it while living to the fullest.

The U.S. health-care system is in shambles, but your own treatment under England's National Health Service (NHS) seems extremely positive, even if certain tests were not standard practice.

From the moment I was diagnosed with breast cancer, I couldn't have had better treatment, both from my surgeons and my oncologists. The picture is more complicated, though, in terms of prevention. Because the National Institute of Clinical Excellence is tasked by the government to weigh up costs and benefits and decide what therapies—scans, drugs, etc.—should be freely available under the NHS, certain screening tests or treatments are not yet authorized for particular cases, despite their having been proven to be more effective.

After testing positive for a gene mutation, I made the decision to remove my ovaries…. [Rather than] undergo bilateral mastectomy…I was advised by [my] genetic clinic to have annual mammograms to protect against my risk of breast cancer, which stood at 85 percent. At the time of diagnosis in March 2006, I had not been offered the best screening method—MRI—nor had I been informed of the dismal record of mammograms for women such as myself…. I felt wild that for the sake of a £400 scan my children might be left without a mother…. While there is a great deal to be grateful for in the NHS, there is also much to improve.

Genetic testing is still a tricky area for most women with a family cancer history. In hindsight, would you have preferred not to know?

I watched my own mother die of ovarian cancer when she was 42, leaving behind five children…. I was 44 when my Grade III, aggressive, and fast-proliferating breast cancer was diagnosed. It is as if this deadly gene just switched itself on…at around the age of 40.

The only chance we have against these deadly mutations is knowledge, but knowledge is hard. Who wants to make the decision to remove breasts or ovaries prophylactically? There is a bit in the gospels where Christ says, “Take this cup from me.” Testing positive for a genetic mutation can leave you in this place.

Each of my two daughters has a 50/50 chance of having inherited a mutation on the BRCA1 gene. By the time they reach their mid-thirties, perhaps scientists will have developed more reliable early screening tests for ovarian and breast cancer. I am hopeful that some cancers will be preventable via medicine, or nutrition, and that more refined treatment will target cancers more precisely and with less devastation.

Telling your daughters about your situation was one of the hardest decisions you had to make.

[My husband and I] did the best we could under the circumstances.

Getting cancer is like being dumped by the most enormous wave and roiling about on the seabed for a while. When you wake up again out of the water, your face smashed down in a heap of wet shingle, you twiddle your toes and realize there's still a bit of life in you. At that point, you could start examining the details and think: if I'd only done this or that differently, it all would have been better. But really, you know you never had that much choice. The whole thing was bigger than you, bigger than your ability to control.—Bette-Lee Fox