Joyce Carol Oates conjures a troubled teen - Arizona Daily Sun

Books & Authors

B6 — Sunday, Feb. 2, 2014

Arizona Daily Sun — azdailysun.com

Joyce Carol Oates conjures a troubled teen BY JOHN WILWOL

Cressida can be cruel. She’ll snip threads on her older sister You may wish, from time to Juliet’s cashmere sweater, time, that you could “shivering with elafeel like a teention” at the prospect ager again. “Teenage of its ensuing, inexknees?” you think. plicable unraveling. “Sign me up!” But then She can be jittery. you run into someone Around family aclike Cressida Mayfield. quaintances, she was The delicate heart of once struck with “a Joyce Carol Oates’ kind of claustrophomoody, marvelous new bia, conjoined with novel, “Carthage,” anthrophobia — her 19-year-old Cressida fear of other people, reminds you that those trapping her with ‘CARTHAGE’ teenage knees come at By Joyce Carol Oates their eyes, making a a price: You’d have to claim upon her.” Ecco, $26.99 suffer through all those Tragically, Cressida teenage emotions again to get feels unlovable. She believed — them. she knew — her devoted parents’ Newsday (MCT)

“love for her was a kind of pity, like love for a crippled child, or a child dying of leukemia.” And now, poor Cressida is missing. She was last seen on the night of July 9, 2005, in the company of Cpl. Brett Kincaid, a disfigured, traumatized Iraq War vet, who had until recently been Juliet’s fiance. He is found the next morning, “incapacitated in his Jeep Wrangler, that appeared to have skidded partway off ” the road inside a forest preserve near Beechum County, N.Y., the fictional Adirondack setting of Oates’ 2012 novel, “Mudwoman.” It looks as though there’s been a struggle — bloody scratches on Brett’s face, bloodstains in the

Jeep — but the former soldier’s mind is shredded from the prior evening’s mix of cheap alcohol and psychoactive meds. He remembers nothing. So the people of Carthage, led by Cressida’s fiercely steadfast, hopeful father, are blindly combing the wilderness. They hope it’s a rescue mission. They fear it’s a recovery mission. Oates is a writer whom the legendary New Yorker writer A.J. Liebling would admire: She writes more often than the handful who write better, and she writes far better than the few who write more often. “Carthage” can be subtle. In a drawing, Cressida mockingly depicts her family over and

over, in tribute to M.C. Escher, to show how “earnestness, repeated, suggests idiocy.” Later, Oates conjures flesh and blood. Imprisoned men “so furious with sexual longing and rage,” throw “themselves against the bars of their cells, thrusting their arms through, stretching out their fingers as if they wanted to grasp, grip, shake and throttle, tear into pieces.” But perhaps Oates’ finest, most haunting skill is the way she can peg our weaknesses without judgment. “Always,” she writes when Cressida perceives a rejection, “you believe that those whom you adore will adore you.”

Novel takes on parenting gone horrifically wrong BY JOY TIPPING

memoirs, 2005’s bestOne must wonder how selling “Smashed: Story that mom-daughter reFeeling overwhelmed by of a Drunken Girlhood,” lationship is doing since all the, you know, cheer in which she the publication in the air this time of recounted nearly of Zailckas’ first year? Wishing for a little killing herself novel, which is doom, a little gloom to through binge surely one of balance things out? Have drinking as a literary history’s I got the book for you, teen, and 2010’s most chilling and I mean that in a most “Fury,” a plunge indictments of complimentary way to the into the nature bad moms. author. of anger, both Zailckas has Koren Zailckas’ fiercely her own and a dark writing disturbing “Mother, others’. style that’s hard Mother” is, under no cirHer mother to get used to ‘MOTHER, MOTHER’ at first but will cumstances, a book that comes under By Koren Zailckas quickly draw you should read when considerable you’re feeling depressed, criticism in both Crown, (384 p, $24) you in, to the or you’re kind of hating memoirs; in point you feel your mom, or you feel the interviews, Zailckas has like you’re right inside need for some light chick- said she’s since realized her mind. And you might lit. It is, however, one of that she understands want to get out, thank you the most profound and her mother better now; very much. Nevertheless, insightful books I’ve enthat, as she said in a 2010 you’ll keep reading till the countered about mother- interview with online site wee hours because she’s child relationships when smithmag .net: “She just just that great a writer. they go devastatingly loved me in a way I hadn’t Her occasional biting wrong — as in horrific, been able to understand. humor helps leaven the mental-illness-inducing Her upbringing meant she quiet horror of the story. wrong. only knew how to express There’s no parental Zailckas is also the affection in a very limited ax-wielding here, no author of two excellent way.” mommy-dearest inciThe Dallas Morning News (MCT)

BESTSELLERS Publishers Weekly HARDCOVER FICTION 1. The Invention of Wings. Sue Monk Kidd. Viking ($27.95) 2. First Love. Patterson/Raymond. Little, Brown ($26) 3. The Goldfinch. Donna Tartt. Little, Brown ($30) 4. Sycamore Row. John Grisham. Doubleday ($28.95) 5. The First Phone Call from Heaven. Mitch Albom. Harper ($24.99) 6. Command Authority. Tom Clancy. Putnam ($29.95) 7. Cross My Heart. James Patterson. Little, Brown ($29) 8. Fear Nothing. Lisa Gardner. Dutton ($27.95) 9. Lost Lake. Sarah Addison Allen. St. Martin’s ($25.99) 10. Standup Guy. Stuart Woods. Putnam ($26.95)

HARDCOVER NONFICTION 1. Duty. Robert M. Gates.Knopf ($35) 2. Super Shred. Ian K. Smith. St. Martin’s ($24.99) 3. Things That Matter. Charles Krauthammer. Crown Forum ($28) 4. The Doctor’s Diet. Travis Stork. Bird Street Books ($25.95) 5. Killing Jesus. O’Reilly/Dugard. Henry Holt ($28) 6. The Body Book. Cameron Diaz. Harper Wave ($25.99) 7. The Daniel Plan. Rick Warren. Zondervan ($24.99) 8. David and Goliath. Malcolm Gladwell. Little, Brown ($29) 9. Grain Brain. David Perlmutter. Little, Brown ($27) 10. George Washington’s Secret Six. Brian Kilmeade. Penguin/Sentinel ($27.95) — McClatchy-Tribune News Service

Amazon debuts new Christian imprint for faith-based books BY JAY GREENE The Seattle Times (MCT)

SEATTLE — While Amazon.com moves aggressively into all sorts of new businesses — everything from grocery delivery to infrastructure computer services — it’s not slowing its onslaught into its original business: books. Amazon on Thursday launched its 15th book imprint, Waterfall Press, which will specialize in Christian fiction and nonfiction titles. In a news release, Amazon said Waterfall’s nonfiction books will “aim to provide spiritual refreshment and inspiration to today’s Christian reader,” and its fiction will include romance, mystery and suspense titles. Wa te r fa l l ’s s l a te o f releases include Mark Buchanan’s “The Four Best Places to Live,” due out next month, Cherie Hill’s “When You Need a Miracle,” due in April, and Jay Hein’s “The Quiet Revolution,” due in June. The imprint will release shorter content as well. Amazon’s M ichiganbased Brilliance Publishing, which publishes titles in print, e-book and audiobook formats, will publish the Waterfall titles. Amazon said several of the titles, including “The Four Best Places to Live” and “The Quiet Revolution,” will be released in

collaboration with Christianity Today, a publishing business centered on the eponymous evangelical Christian periodical. “Brilliance has over 12 years of experience serving the Christian market as audiobook publisher of some of the most successful Christian authors writing today,” Mark Pereira, Brilliance’s president and publisher, said in a statement. Amazon has tapped Tammy Faxel, who works for Brilliance Audio, according to her LinkedIn profile, to run the editorial operations at Waterfall. Faxel has spent 30 years in the Christian publishing industry. Brilliance also offers selfhelp books under its Grand Harbor Press imprint. Grand Harbor recently published “We Will Survive: True Stories of Encouragement, Inspiration, and the Power of Song,” a collection of stories by singer Gloria Gaynor about how her disco hit “I Will Survive” helped listeners through tough times. Waterfall adds to the collection of genre publishing imprints that include Amazon’s Thomas & Mercer mystery, thriller and suspense titles; its 47North science-fiction, fantasy and horror books; and its Montlake Romance novel imprint.

dents with wire hangers or other obvious abuse. But there is definitely horror as we follow the twisted tale of Josephine Hurst, whose life seems at first the ideal of perfection and control, like a balloon filled till it’s too full, just waiting to burst. In Josephine’s family, her 12-year-old, possibly autistic son Will (diagnosed by Josephine, who fervently believes in her own medicinal and psychiatric skills) garners the most attention because of his disability. Oldest daughter Rose runs off with a boyfriend. Younger daughter Violet experiments with Eastern philosophy, drugs and fasting, earning her a trip to the psycho ward. Dad Douglas retreats to alcohol and pretty much disappears from the story. Through all of this, including a suspicious incident that brings child-

protective services calling, Josephine struggles to maintain her illusion of composure. Sharp-eyed Will notices when the little touches that define Josephine start to go awry: “A small but undeniable thing. The toilet-paper roll was on backward. His mother was very vocal about her preference for the ‘over’ orientation” (it was the manufacturer’s intent, she argued; the pattern was printed on that side). For reasons Will couldn’t quite explain, seeing its tail brush the wall made his blood run cold.” Your blood will go frigid too, especially when you get to the Shirley Jackson-worthy denouement. Zailckas is a writer to watch and treasure. But remember: not when you’re wishing your mom had kept her opinions about your holiday-dinner plans to herself.

‘Under the Wide and Starry Sky’ examines romance of Robert Louis Stevenson, wife BY JOY TIPPING

trance: Wearing a black velvet jacket, an embroidered felt smoking cap, a red sash, It’s hard to believe it’s been 6 1/2 years white linen pants and high boots, “He since the publication of Nancy Horan’s walked quickly to the house, pausing to best-selling debut, “Loving Frank,” a consider each of the two doors. Rejecting riveting tale centered on Frank Lloyd both, he chose the open window. With Wright’s lover and muse, Mamah Borth- the grace of a high jumper, he threw one wick Cheney, that remains long leg and then the other over vividly fresh in my memory. the windowsill and hurled himIn her new novel, “Under the self into the dining room.” Wide and Starry Sky,” she once His friends call Louis the again takes a deep, discern“Great Exhilarator.” Fanny, ing dive into a famous man’s 10 years older than Louis but life by focusing on a significant young in heart and mind, love interest. Once again, I was couldn’t help but notice. enthralled. The admiration is mutual, but Horan has been credited with their love builds slowly. Once inventing this popular subgenre the sparks rise to flames, Fanny of literary fiction; since “Loving divorces Evil Husband and ‘UNDER THE WIDE marries Louis, who begins tinFrank,” we’ve had “The Paris AND STARRY SKY’ kering with “Treasure Island” Wife” (Hemingway), the recent By Nancy Horan “Mrs. Poe” (Edgar Allan Poe) when Fanny’s son Sammy asks Ballantine, $26 and many, many others along him to “tell me a pirate story.” the same lines. But few writThe Stevensons’ way was ers are as masterful as she is at blending rarely easy. Louis battled with both his carefully researched history with the writing and his health, barely escapnovelist’s art. ing death from maladies related to weak In the case of “Starry Sky,” which was lungs. Money was always a problem, just named as the latest pick for the even after Louis’ books began selling. Today Book Club, Horan aims her autho- Fanny suffered from bouts of what sound rial laser at Scottish writer Robert Louis like migraines and bipolar disorder. She Stevenson and his lover and eventual envied Louis’ literary success, and she wife, American Fanny Van de Grift Osresented his friends who, she believed bourne. (with some cause), treated her as an As the story begins, Fanny, a married outsider. woman with three young children, is Horan’s prose is gorgeous enough fleeing her cheating husband to study art to keep a reader transfixed, even if the in Europe. story itself weren’t so compelling. I kept “It’s one of the few respectable ways re-reading passages just to savor the a woman can leave a rotten husband,” a exquisite wordplay. friend tells her. Even the smallest characters, includBoth Fanny and her daughter are taling the nonhuman ones, rate full range ented painters, and Fanny also aspires to of personality. Modestine the donkey, a writing career. Louis’ companion on one of his wilderDenied admission to their chosen ness trips, is a creature I would happily school in Antwerp because they are, admit into my own family. horrors, women, Fanny and Belle (and Henry James and John Singer Sargent Fanny’s two sons) move to Paris and make cameo appearances. (If you want study art while living on bare bones. to see why Fanny felt shoved to the side, Then the youngest child, preschooler just Google Sargent’s 1885 “Robert Louis Hervey, dies of scrofulous tuberculosis. Stevenson and His Wife,” in which she is Overcome with grief and needing a cheap shown cloaked, at one edge of the frame.) escape, the family moves to Grez-surToward the end, as Louis struggles Loing, a Bohemian riverside colony. with what would become his masterThere Fanny meets not one but two piece, “Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Scots named Stevenson: Bob (Robert Hyde,” it’s intriguing to draw compariLouis’ cousin), introduced as wearsons between his “duality of man” theme ing “trousers that ended at the knees, and the polarities of his and Fanny’s restockings with red and white horizontal lationship. She had brave physicality and stripes, and a smirk.” an oft-troubled mind; he was physically Robert Louis — called Louis or Lou weak but always mentally acute. Togeth— makes an even more remarkable ener, they were brilliance personified. The Dallas Morning News (MCT)

Maupin’s ‘The Days of Anna Madrigal’ about coming home What makes “Tales of the City” so resonant is Armistead Maupin’s ability to draw broad, human lessons from the particularity of his characters’ lives. Now, Maupin has chosen to end the series again with “The Days of Anna Madrigal” (Harper, $26.99) a work that is less about departure than coming home. Featuring the full complement of “Tales” regulars (with the exception of Mona, who died in the 1984 novel

“Babycakes”), the book is an elegy — for San Francisco, for its characters, for a way of life. “Her days were full of such small surrenders,” Maupin writes of Mrs. Madrigal, now 93 and only marginally mobile, “so why make a fuss over them? You could see them as loss, or you could see them as simplification. His daughter Mona would have called this an act of faith, this Zen letting-go of familiar pleasures. Anna chose to

think of it as leaving like a lady.” That sense of mortality is in the atmosphere of “The Days of Anna Madrigal,” a novel about coming to terms. It follows the standard “Tales” formula of shifting from character to character, although it is not, for the most part, a formulaic book. Rather, Maupin is interested here in aging, in contraction, in what happens as things shut down. —By David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times

THE ROMANCE READER ‘Her Callahan Family Man’ BY LEZLIE PATTERSON McClatchy-Tribune News Service

Perhaps the best thing to say about this book is that it’s the second to last in the series. Honestly, this series is getting a little old. The biggest problem is that the actions of the main ‘HER CALLAHAN characters really just FAMILY MAN’ By Tina Leonard make no Harlequin, $5.50 sense. They meet with their evil uncle on a regular basis, the same man who has kidnapped them, shot them, stolen from them, threatened them and has made two generations of their family live in fear, and sent many into hiding. But they just talk to him and whine for him to stop, and tell him things like “you don’t understand the spirit of the land.” You’re kind of on his side when he laughs at them. Still, once you’ve started reading you’re somewhat oddly addicted, just to see what stupid things the Callahans will do this time, and there is this need to make sure that the series really does eventually end. In this story, Jace discovers the woman he’s been “secretly” seeing is pregnant — with twins, because Callahans don’t have just single children. Sawyer is the niece of a neighbor that the family was suspicious of for a while, which meant they were suspicious of Sawyer as well. That didn’t keep them from hiring her as a bodyguard to keep the family’s children safe, however. Of course as it turns out, Sawyer is quite trustworthy, and loyal to the Callahans. While romance readers are quite forgiving of twists in plot lines that don’t make a lot of sense (as long as the romance is good) these are a little too difficult to ignore. Maybe it’s because the series has been going on too long. Just hope the author doesn’t decide to continue the saga with all of the babies that have been born during this series. HOW IT STACKS UP Overall rating: 2 of 5 hearts. It’s just hard to read and follow, and the series has just gone on too long. The romance is awkward, and it’s all just annoying at this point. Hunk appeal: 10-minus. Jace is a good guy, but like his brothers, just does some inexplicable things. Steamy scene grade: XXXX. Explicable. Happily-Ever-After: Good. Very, very predictable, but perhaps one of the few redeeming qualities of these books. The best part is knowing the final book in the series, “Sweet Callahan Homecoming” is due out in April. ALSO THIS WEEK “Natural Born Charmer” by Susan Elizabeth Phillips (2007, paperback) 5 of 5 hearts. This is a superbly written, engaging and funny classic by one of the premier authors of romantic comedy. Dean is a star quarterback of Phillips’ fictional NFL team, and during the offseason he’s driving to his farm in Tennessee for a quiet vacation of reflection and deep thinking. Then he sees a two-legged beaver walking down the road. And that should really tell you all you need to know about the book. The “beaver” is Blue, who has had a really bad day — well, few days actually. She ends up accepting a ride from Dean, which results in her sharing Dean’s rather bizarre vacation. And that leads to ... well, it’s a romance story. Use your imagination. It’s just simply a wonderful book, worth re-reading and definitely a must if you’ve never read before. And if you haven’t and you do? You’re welcome.

Lezlie Patterson is a former columnist for The State newspaper in Columbia, S.C. Readers may send her email at [email protected].