“Kapitoil”
By Teddy Wayne
Harper Perennial ($13.99, 293 pp.)

Karim Issar is a gifted programmer from Doha, Qatar. It is 1999, and all hands are on deck in New York to patch shortsighted computer programs scheduled to implode when the century rolls over. Y2K is our apocalypse, and thank God there is enough immigrant talent in the world to save our bacon. Schrub Equities hires Karim to fix its programs and insure that their profitable investment juggernaut of the 90’s doesn’t skip a beat. After days of head down code juggling in their World Trade Center cubicles, the slaves of New York are released to the techno cocktail and cocaine clubs while their bosses go birding in Connecticut mansions. Oh, those were the good old days.

In a sense “Kapitoil” is a pre-9/11 novel where author Teddy Wayne assumes we all know what is coming, and so his Islamic hero’s assimilation into a bustling New York of Yankee games, limos, mosques, downtown clubs, MOMA, the F train to Brooklyn, Zegna suits, Central Park, and pizza-by-the-slice reflects a world that is no longer with us. Today Karim probably couldn’t even get a visa to visit.

Curious, Analytical, Awkward

Teddy Wayne (if the name sounds like he should be on TV, it is because he is – making videos for Comedy Central) has created a wonderful character in the gentle, curious, analytical, and awkward Karim Issar. His first novel is told in the first person diary of Karim with a voice that perfectly captures the perspective of someone new to our language and culture but committed to learning every piece of it through experience and study. Each diary entry even ends with a glossary of newly learned English words and expressions. It is Karim’s voice and Wayne’s play with language which distinguish “Kapitoil” from the long legacy of “Stranger in a Strange Land” books before it.

Schrub Equities provides Karim with a furnished doorman apartment and a WTC 88th floor cubicle in a pod with three other Y2K programmers. Two of them are single guys whose fantasy baseball banter bewilders him, and the other, a single woman named Rebecca, bewilders him because…well, because she is a single working woman, an oddity in Qatar. So he listens and emails and programs; but he is too good at programming to fill his days with rote Y2K fixes, and instead creates an algorithm to predict the hourly world price of oil based on key word news searches for acts of violence and terror, especially in the Middle East. Investing phantom money, he beta runs this program he calls Kapitoil for a week and generates a 30% monthly return – a potential goldmine for Schrub.

When Karim shares Kapitoil with his bosses at Schrub, they begin to invest real money quietly in the oil markets… and begin to make a killing. The plot turns on Karim’s sudden high profile as he is promoted, bumped big time in salary, given a private corner office, and taken under wing by Mr. Schrub himself with invitations to his Racquet Club, Yankee box, charity dinners, and Connecticut estate. His pod mates envy his American Dream success – except Rebecca, who dreams of leaving Wall Street to become a teacher and has grown fond of Karim for his innocence and kindness rather than his new found wealth. The real story of “Kapitoil” is the love story between Rebecca and Karim.

Romance 101, Arabian Style

Rebecca initiates the relationship with a shared coffee here and there. Karim’s awkwardness charms her. Gradually, they do more things together discovering common interests. This is Romance 101, except in the way Wayne makes it fresh through Karim’s language and analytical attempt to understand his feelings. “I spent Monday brainstorming our date…it was more difficult than programming in many ways because in programming if you can’t predict results, you can test out new variables and use trial and error to arrive at a solution, but with people you typically have one opportunity and their motivations and reactions are more difficult to understand, especially with females.” Karim even builds a “pros and cons” list to choose a restaurant.

They have their ups and downs, misinterpreting each other now and then or arguing over little things. Karim however analyzes every nuance. “I hypothesized that she was still upset and my predicted outcomes weren’t optimistic, so I decided to wait for her to stabilize and let her initiate contact with me when she was ready.” When they finally find themselves in bed, even then his analysis and observation never stop, “I paid attention to which actions produced no effect and which yielded a net gain, as in a boosting algorithm, and I utilized the strong ones in variable patterns so they wouldn’t become predictable, but after a period of time I merely let myself enjoy our actions, even if I wasn’t the cream of the cream partner.” Who wouldn’t want such an attentive lover?

Ultimately Karim is uncomfortable with his innovative Kapitoil being used only to make profits on global violence, and he rewrites the program to predict and prevent world disease. He falls from favor at Schrub and loses his work visa. Now comfortably attached to Rebecca, he is left with no simple solution to stay with her. They both know the relationship will have to end, but both are better because of it. As Karim says, “I was most Karim-esque around Rebecca, and to boot, I was even learning to be Rebecca-esque, which was possibly what relationships were about more than they were merely about compromise.”

“Kapitoil” is not just a novel focused on what we have lost in the aftermath of 9/11 nor is it a diatribe on the excesses of Wall Street. It is a story of young people finding their ways and each other in a world that still crosses borders and cultures, despite a global paranoid shift to prevent it. Wayne tells the story in the voice of one good man who learns how shared languages and compassion bind us together regardless of political and religious efforts to keep us apart. Long after you have forgotten his plot, you will remember Wayne’s remarkable creation of Karim Issar.

One of the most overlooked financial complications of collecting, or even buying art, is whether or not we actually own the piece we’ve acquired. Tainted provenance — or even worse — is a real problem in the art world.

Part of the art world’s appeal is attributable to the free spirited, unregulated, highly-volatile megabucks that whirl within it and the buyers and sellers who love the art — and the action. Which of course means it is rife with dealers under pressure, incapable of keeping their word (think Larry Salendar), dealers who are fully reputable and don’t know they are selling “dirty” goods (think artwork stolen by the Nazis and now back on the market), as well as crooks. (I know several former disreputable dealers who “went away” and are now back and are, as far as I can tell, still engaged in shady practices.)

What we are talking about are art crimes, which constitutes the third largest category of crime in the world.

Protect Yourself

The good news is that we, as collectors, have tools at our disposal to protect ourselves. Recent court decisions have returned works of art to former owners even after the statute of limitations has expired.

The Internet offers databases that allow the cross-referencing of art auctions and databases of stolen artworks — tools that make it easier for theft victims to mount court challenges.

The ownership history of artworks has become an increasingly sensitive issue for collectors and the folks they buy from. Just because you paid for it does not mean you own it. Collectors who don’t proceed with due diligence can put their art at risk, especially if they sell the artwork to someone else.

Of the 300,000 or so stolen, missing or looted artworks listed in the Art Loss Register, an international database, more than 15% were created after 1945 – that’s 45,000 works of art, created since WWII that are out there in the world, that if acquired by one of us would make our life miserable.

In the decades I was an art dealer there was more than one occasion where a client made a layaway purchase, made the payments and never ever picked up the artwork, and as far as I knew flat out disappeared. Who owns that art? (I’m still storing some six years after closing.) Or what about important artists who consign work to a gallery and then forget about it? (Do you really think all artists have fastidious records?) The question is: Who owns this treasure? What if a dealer sells you a drawing by a major living artist who was never paid, who died, and over time the $10,000 purchase becomes worth a quarter of a million and the artist’s heir, now in college, decides to track all of Mom or Dad’s sales, and your piece is undocumented? (I see some variation of this almost weekly.) What if an heir does their homework and decides to track down the missing art and knocks on your door? Of course you are innocent(?), but what are you going to do, and what is the impact on you? Or what if the art you acquire was not a victim of shoddy record-keeping, but was actually stolen? Add the wrinkle that the reputable gallery you bought it from didn’t even know. What does this mean to you?

Art Warranties

For a collector who has acquired a work of art, having the right to ownership disputed can come as both an emotional and financial shock. Even if the collector has secured a warranty of clear legal title from the seller at the time of purchase, he may not be able to rely on it, says Lawrence Shindell, the CEO of ARIS Corp. The upstream seller may no longer be in business, for instance, or may not have assets to stand behind the prior warranty, or may be hard to pursue if he is located in a foreign country where the warranty is hard to enforce.

Meanwhile, if the collector has become a seller of the work and hasn’t sought a third-party risk transfer solution, i.e. title insurance, and if the upstream seller isn’t around to recover money from, the collector himself can become liable to his or her downstream buyer if the ownership of the work is successfully challenged and the buyer then loses his money. The buyer can then sue the collector for damages, including the price he paid for the work — as well as possible appreciation — and for his legal expenses.

The Chubb Insurance Group has coverage that reimburses legal fees up to $100,000 incurred in a title dispute for scheduled works of art. Unfortunately, this benefit does not extend to the actual value of the work if the owner is required by the courts to forfeit the piece. Courts in the U.S. will generally “balance the equities,” meaning that the due diligence the buyer performed to avoid possession of stolen art will be measured against the steps the former owner made to recover the art. Nonetheless, the burden of discovery will usually weigh more heavily on the purchaser, who, it is assumed, has the sophistication and resources to authenticate the history of a purchase.

“If you wind up on the losing side of an ownership challenge,” says Jonathan Ziss, a partner at the law firm of Margolis Edelstein and a founder of Art Title Advisors, “the result can be perfectly awful: the loss of a valuable asset, the destruction of an estate plan and the loss of a charitable donation or bequest tax deduction, perhaps years after the time for filing an amended [tax] return has timed out.”

Fortunately, there are resources available to help collectors with their investigations into an artwork’s provenance. In their understandable enthusiasm to acquire beautiful works of art, collectors should not lose sight of this sometimes challenging, but fundamental imperative.

Paul Klein works with The Briddge Group, the art succession planning firm and writes and speaks frequently on the subject.

“American Subversive”

New York writer David Goodwillie got lucky:  a terrorist bomb was discovered in Times Square barely a week after the release of his first novel, “American Subversive,” mirroring in real life his story of a domestic radical bent on non-lethal violence whose first “action” is to blow out the top floor of Barneys flagship store on Madison Avenue and 61^st.

One of his fictional protagonists, Paige Roderick, scores big as her bomb calls attention to its targeted shadowy private defense contractor Indigo Holdings.  Goodwillie, however, scored even bigger, suddenly doing interviews about his book on the front page of the Wall Street Journal.  No Scribner publicist could have orchestrated anything better.

More Blogger Than Bomber

Of course, Goodwillie only really knows about domestic terrorism what he has googled together for his novel.  In fact, he is much more similar to his other protagonist, Aidan Cole, who writes a blog for the trendy New York Roorback website.  Cole is an adrift English major who defaults into NYU’s journalism school looking for something to do, but very soon discovering that journalism is mostly doing nothing.  “They’d show up at the bar waving around their latest piece – a D-list celebrity Q-and-A, a back of the book band review, a restaurant profile in an airline magazine…The cover letters, the rejections, the research, the editing, the mailbox-checking, the disappointment, the depression, the drinking.  I could drink just fine without the rest of it.”  Instead he signs on as a paid hip and witty blogger.

“American Subversive” is told by these two protagonists in alternating first person diaries. Each reflects on the events that ultimately brought them together and then drove them apart into new identities in the underground.  It is a love story of sorts where the righteous Smokey Mountain activist Paige finds herself in the bumbling hands of the West Village “eternally hip” Aidan.  Along the way, Goodwillie dissects both the motives and earnest idealism of our “eco-warriors and anti-capitalists” and the sound-byte nihilism of our urban web-heads:  “Never has absolutely nothing been done with more style and determination than in early twenty-first century Williamsburg, Brooklyn.”

A Brooklyn Scribe

He is best at describing the world of Cole who lives in a dump (“the ballgame still on, the laptop surrounded by tortilla chips and cheap magazines, old newspapers stacked on an old chair, and the absurdly small bookshelf lacking anything substantial”) on hooker-laden Weehawken Street at the ratty end of Christopher Street, and who spends his days trolling through internet gossip and news sites for tidbits to post for his readers’ condescending amusement.

His ex-girlfriend has just exposed his love life in her New York Times dating column, although he admits she is not far off the mark.  He is easily distracted by those “fine-boned MFA students from the New School, confident and ambitious and impossibly busy doing nothing at all…and wild-eyed Brooklyn artists with ink sleeves and lingering habits who seemed to never give a fuck about anything, and, it turned out, really didn’t give a fuck about anything.”  It is no wonder that the fair-haired mountain girl Paige wins his heart when a couple of anonymous emails and a little sleuthing lead him to her.

Shades of The Weather Underground

Goodwillie is not as good in describing Paige’s terrorist world with its endless paranoia, planning, and secrets.  He draws heavily on the historic exploits of the Weather Underground – and even creates a key character who, after thirty years on the lam from bombings in the seventies, comes out of disguise to help mastermind the Barneys bombing.

Still, his chronicle of Paige’s progression from the Seattle WTO protests of her youth (“We looked so scary, dressed head to toe in black, our faces covered with bandannas, but really we were a bunch of Goths and neo-hippies.  We were nineteen and twenty.  Half of us were only there to cut classes.”) to methodical and serious terrorist (“Here was one last chance to embrace that grand idea that things could get better, that they would get better, if we set out to make them so.  What was the alternative?”) is a believable counterpoint to Aidan’s inconsequential goings on.

The plot has all the drive of a thriller as the terrorists’ success at Barneys ratchets up their desire to take on a bigger target:  a media company headquarters.  Aidan finds himself in cahoots with the now disillusioned Paige as they join the old Weatherman to try to abort another bombing that clearly threatens lives.  Their most radical colleague has become enamored with the weapons rather than the ideals.  He reflects on his first action: “And the bomb, it went off without a hitch.  The timer, the wiring, everything worked perfectly.  Did you see the hole in the building?  It was really…beautiful.”   History reminds us that an idealist with a bomb may be our most dangerous citizen, and Goodwillie illustrates this with his well-paced conclusion.

Bigger Issues

“American Subversive” ambitiously tackles the big issues.  It is more than just a terrorist thriller or a clever itemization of our shallow follies and disjointed times.  Goodwillie is looking for a path that is wide enough to carry our load – our portmanteau of idealism AND disenchantment, loneliness AND love.

The first step is always self-understanding, and Aidan and Paige both find enough of it to divert themselves from their self-destructive ruts.  As Aidan says, “We were a tough lot to teach.  We only listened to ourselves…it’s not the time to sit tight.  No, it wasn’t.  I’d been sitting tight my entire life.”

As to whether this understanding is enough to create a new path, Goodwillie remains ambiguous.  He leaves a sort of compromise perspective to Aidan:  “Look, I’m not saying we’ve perfected anything here, but, hell, half the rest of the planet’s in flames.”  Maybe Goodwillie knows something about terrorism after all.

“Blockade Billy”

Stephen King owns the book world.

When he wanted to publish a nice fat hardcover book like “Under the Dome” – weighing in at just over 1000 pages and listing for $35 – Simon & Schuster laid out two million of them in the first printing along with 25,000 “limited” editions and an “unlimited” electronic book edition.

When he wanted to bypass any publisher at all, he posted the serialized novel “The Plant” on his website.  When he wanted to do a comic, Marvel stepped up and sold several hundred thousand copies of a graphic version of his “Dark Tower” series.  When Amazon released the Kindle, he sold them an exclusive electronic version of “Ur.”

If he ever wants to write a 140-character story, I suspect he will Tweet it.  What Stephen King wants to do, he does.

Blockade Billy

So it is gratifying that what King wanted to do this year is a baseball novella “Blockade Billy” and to give exclusive first edition rights to Cemetery Dance Publications, a small, independent publisher in Baltimore specializing in horror and suspense books.

Cemetery Dance, as its part of the deal, has agreed to restrict distribution of its 10,000 printing of “first editions” to direct on-line consumer sales on its website and to independent bookstores.

If you want the dust-jacketed $25 hardcover with special interior artwork by Alex McVey, you better hurry to your local non-chain bookstore in person and hope it has not sold out like the ones on Cemetery Dance’s site.  Otherwise you can wait until the end of May for a mass market Simon & Schuster version.

Stephen King

Why should you want this little 112 page book?  Let’s hope it’s not just because you are a Stephen King fan. King, a long time Red Sox fan who, no surprise, gets great seats for any Fenway game he wants to see, has written a book that captures the soul of baseball – its characters, its language, and its drama – and has the inevitable King twist at the end.

A Beautiful Book

The beauty of this small press first edition lies, in part, in its dust jacket and interior artwork. A special retro William Blakely shrink-wrapped baseball card alone may make it a valuable collector’s edition.  But for readers of books, the true beauty lies in the story.

George “Granny” Grantham narrates “Blockade Billy” in the unmistakable voice of the old ballpark rat that he is.  Now living in a “zombie” old folks home where “virtual bowling” and Polka night are the only action he sees, Granny can hardly wait to kick back and share his memories. “Mr. King”, the narrator, has come to him to get the straight dope about the 1958 season when the New Jersey Titans fielded the mysterious, crowd thrilling catcher William “Blockade Billy” Blakely.  Perched on a chair in the Common Room, Grantham can hardly wait to tell his story…”an awful story, of course, but those are the ones that last the longest.”

Spring Training

He begins with spring training, as all baseball begins.  The Titans suddenly lose both of their catchers: the starter to the hazards of drink; his skinny backup to broken limbs when he tries to tag big Ted Kluszewski rolling into home plate.

Starter Johnny Goodkind, was one of those old school players who “hit damn near .350 that spring, with maybe a dozen ding-dongs…but he was also a heavy drinker, and two days before the team was supposed to head north and open at home, he ran over a woman on Pineapple Street…Johnny Goodkind’s career in baseball was over before his puke dried.”  With little time and no catcher, the Titans call their Davenport Cornhuskers farm team to send up anybody who can hold down the plate until they can trade for a real catcher.

Anyone who grew up reading his dad’s “Baseball Joe” library (like my brothers and I did) knows that all good baseball stories start with a rookie out of nowheresville who sets the team on fire.  “Blockade Billy” is square in the middle of that tradition.

Although Granny warns us that “this ain’t no kids’ sports novel,” we can see King winking in the background knowing that with all the illustrations and heroic story line, it is exactly that.  It’s just not for kids.  When the rookie Blakely prepares for his first game catching star pitcher Danny “Doo” Dusen, Granny advises him “if he shakes you off, don’t you dare flash the sign again.  Not unless you want your pecker and asshole to change places after the game, that is.”  Did I mention? This is not a kids’ novel.

Billy Earns His Spurs

That first game set the fans on fire.  Billy proves farm boy tough (or dumb as dirt) when he blocks the plate on his first play at home and sends the charging runner ass over teakettle with a bleeding Achilles tendon.

No one quite knows what happened to the tendon, but the crowd begins to call the new kid “Blockade Billy.”  And he can hit too, even against Boston’s ace Dave Sisler.  As Granny recalls, “So Dandy Dave throws a get-me-over fastball right down Broadway and the kid loses it in the left field bleachers.”

The first month of the season is just more of the same as the Titans roll.  “Blockade Billy” continues to hit, and more importantly, to stop nearly every play at the plate, solidly blocking the runner and then “a tag on on the back of his neck just as gentle as Mommy patting oil on Dear Baby’s sunburn.”

Meanwhile, the Titan pitching ace Doo mops up the opposition. “His fastball hopping, his curve snapping like a whip…Just wave the stick and take a seat, fellows.” Late in May, the umpire makes a bad call and Granny rips into him with a mouthful of ballpark cursing and gets tossed. Doo lets his anger trash his control and the crowd roars “Kill the ump.” And so it’s time for the Stephen King twist.

The Stephen King Twist

Anxious-to-please, farm boy Billy takes the crowd’s exhortation a little too literally. And certain events transpire. The exploits of “Blockade Billy” are stricken from the official record books. They live only in the stories of old-timers like Granny Grantham, who shakes his head and concludes his interview with Mr. King with a line that might fit every great ballplayer who put on the spikes:  “That kid was the real thing, crazy or not.”

A Gift

Stephen King, who can pretty much do whatever he wants with his writing, has given us all a gift in this fine book. Richard Chizmar and his four employees at Cemetery Dance Publications have done all they can to present it to us in a fine fashion.  “Blockade Billy” is a gift to small publishers and independent book people everywhere because it reminds readers that, although they can get “content” pretty much anywhere, a real baseball story still belongs in a real baseball book that is sold in a real bookstore.

“The Lake Shore Limited”
By Sue Miller
Alfred A. Knopf ($25.95, 270 pp.)

“The play’s the thing…” and you know how the rest goes.  These are Hamlet’s words to describe his plan to gin up some special lines for the local troupe to put in their play so that he can watch for a reaction from Claudius confirming his part in the murder of Hamlet’s father.  Sue Miller’s dramatic new novel “The Lake Shore Limited” also very effectively uses the eponymous play within her novel to elicit telling responses from her characters, but she also subtly uses it to address the craft, nuance, and power of writing.  While she hardly needs this clever device to tell a damn good story, it illustrates the depth and complexity of what is her best novel yet.

“The Lake Shore Limited” is the story of several couples whose lives intersect in the happy-go-lucky character Gus, who as the novel opens is already dead – killed as a young man in one of the ill-fated planes from Boston which crash the World Trade Center in the 9/11 horror.  Miller, however, is not really interested in Gus’s story.

Her story is about those he left behind, and more importantly, those who are just plain left behind from all the various separations that life throws at us.  We suffer with a death of a loved one, of course; but perhaps of greater impact can be the loss of children to their own lives, or loss through divorce, or loss by disabling illness, or even the loss from an empty relationship when there is no real physical loss at all.  “The Lake Shore Limited” is about the changes which these events of life force upon us.

The novel is told in sections focused on each of the inter-related characters.  His sister Leslie, so much older than Gus, takes him in when their parents divorce and essentially abandon them.  She and her stable physician husband Pierce live in rural Vermont.  Sam, an architect, is a widower and father of three estranged children who becomes close to Leslie while building his own second home near her in Vermont.  Billy, a playwright, has made many bad choices in men and enjoys, for awhile, an easy-going relationship with Gus.  Rafe is a middle-aged, moderately successful Boston actor playing the lead in Billy’s play, “The Lake Shore Limited,” while caring for his cancer-ridden wife.  In a reunion of sorts, they all appear at an early preview of the play.  It is this ensemble nature of the novel that allows Miller to peel the proverbial onion and present the complexity of all of these relationships.

Perhaps the most interesting is that of Billy and Gus, for she is about to tell him that it is over when the 9/11 tragedy happens.  She understands this separation is necessary while working alone at her office one day:  “It was kind of a dump…The paint was old and there were water stains on the ceiling.  But it was private.  It was quiet…Most of all, there was not Gus…This is what she loved, this, being alone, being sentient only for herself.  She didn’t want Gus noticing things, admiring her, ignoring all that was unpleasant about her, insisting on his version of who she was.”

But she never gets to tell him, and in fact never tells anyone of her planned breakup.  When he is killed, she is suddenly free without having had to break his heart.  Faced with disposing of his personal belongings in their shared apartment, she says:  “There was so much of Gus’s life she didn’t know.  Who would take care of all this?  Who would it belong to?  Who would dispose of it?  Who was in charge of Gus now?”  It is not until she writes her play about a terrorist bombing of a commuter train in Chicago that she can shed these troubling feelings of dishonesty and guilt.

Each of Miller’s characters brings a different perspective to the play.  Leslie and Pierce drive to Boston to see it and to have dinner with Billy and their single friend Sam in hopes he and Billy will connect.  The play moves them, and they talk about it during intermission, they talk about it at dinner afterwards, and they talk until Leslie “wasn’t sure she wanted to listen to them offer their notions about the play anymore anyway.  It was something she needed to think through herself.”

Billy, however, doesn’t really fully understand the meaning of her own play until Rafe’s weeping expression of the last line.  She recognizes that the craft of writing is more than just writing, as she tells Sam when they are alone at the end of the dinner:  “I mean, I wrote it, of course.  I even wrote how I wanted him to say it.  But in the end, it’s just a word…And he said it perfectly.  Wonderfully…It was so clear to me all of a sudden.  A revelation.”

Just as Rafe’s reading helped Billy understand her play, her words helped him understand his own feelings for his dying wife and her seemingly endless need for his care.  “It was of a whole to him, like that.  He felt as he said Gabriel’s lines that he was truly understanding them.  He had the sense of being Gabriel…accepting the implications for him of [his wife’s] fate, whatever it was to be.  Accepting the randomness of terror’s reach into her life as his fate.”

The play’s the thing which allows Miller to expose and explore the complicated emotional struggles of her characters.  It shows how great writing brings on good thinking and ultimately self-awareness.  By the end of the novel, her characters understand that although they have in some way been left behind, they can still go forward again.

Billy finds an old picture of Gus among his things and reflects:  “Gone, of course, because of death – Gus’s terrible end.  But gone, too, because of life, because of the alterations of time, the reshaping of the self over the long years…No more Gus.  No more Billy either.  Not as they were then.  Taken away – by death, by life, inexorable life.  Billy felt tears at the back of her throat, but she didn’t yield to them.”

“So Much for That”
By Lionel Shriver
Harper ($25.99, 433 pp.)

Who doesn’t dream of retiring with a million dollar IRA and then moving to some island where the living is cheap, the air smells of spices, and the sun always shines? Shepherd Knacker has it all planned out in the opening of Lionel Shriver’s new novel “So Much for That”. His airline tickets are in hand and bags packed. All he has to do is convince his wife and son to go along; and if they won’t…well, he is prepared to go it alone.

For thirty years he has lived frugally while his Brooklyn handyman company, “Knack of all Trades,” put the gentrifying houses of Prospect Park back together. When he sells the company at age fifty, he has his million dollar nut locked in a conservative Merrill Lynch account. He is well-prepared to leave his rental house in Westchester filled with the stuff of a modest American life and the short term job he took with his company’s buyer in order to keep his health insurance.

Knacker’s wife Glynis is distracted when he confronts her with his pitch for a hasty departure to the island of Pemba off the Tanzania coast. “I can’t keep sitting in traffic listening to NPR on the West Side Highway,” he says. “I must have forty different ‘passwords’ for banking and telephone and credit card and internet accounts, and forty different account numbers, and you add them all up and that’s our lives.” But his wife has a surprise of her own: her doctors have just confirmed that she is in the advanced stages of mesothelioma, a rare and lethal cancer, and will begin a long and painful course of chemotherapy the following week.

For the next 400 pages, Shriver drags us through the painful details of what happens to an ordinary guy when one piece of serious bad luck after another strike. The tickets to Pemba go in the trash. Instead Shep begins the tiresome duties of hospital appointments, doctor consultations, growing isolation from friends and family, and, of course, the endless check-writing, hassles with insurance companies, and applications for special experimental treatments.

Within months, Shep’s life falls off a cliff. He knows that “in relation to Glynis, there was nothing to look forward to. Nothing. While friends would never have described Shep Knacker as irksomely sunny, his view of life did fall on the optimistic side, or so he thought until forced to contemplate a future where not a single cheerful event lay on the horizon.” And that is only the situation with his wife.

His father falls downstairs at home and must be moved to a private nursing home where he contracts a nasty infection common to nursing homes. It shows no sign of healing as he slides downhill. Not poor enough for public nursing homes, his father’s bills now run to $8000 a month – which, of course, Shep pays.

His deadbeat and self-centered sister loses her illegal rent-controlled sublet in Manhattan; so, of course, he lets her move into their father’s house which otherwise might have been sold to help pay his monthly bills.

His best friend and handyman colleague goes into deep debt on a whimsical penis enlargement surgery which he hoped would save his marriage. The surgery is botched, his genitals are deformed and unworkable, and only more uninsured surgery might restore them…he takes a kitchen cleaver to his penis and then blows his brains out. Shep, of course, takes in his friend’s wife and daughters (one with a rare lifelong congenital disease that will kill her before age fifteen and the other suffering depression likely due to her obesity).

It’s hard not to be reminded of Elvis’s version of Red Foley’s “Old Shep,” for surely if there is a heaven, “there’s one thing I know, Old Shep has a wonderful home.” With the load Shriver puts on his back, Shep Knacker makes those of us who whine about the flu and the lousy stock market look like pikers. The guy should have gone to Pemba while he could.

Early reviews of “So Much for That” have praised Shriver’s novel for its unflinching look at our health care crisis. (Shep’s fall is carefully measured out with chapter headers that list the falling balance of his Merrill Lynch account.) Shriver dramatically illustrates insurance companies from hell, co-pays on everything (“You’re out five grand before you’re reimbursed a dime”), co-insurance on top of co-pays that amount to twenty percent of the total bill, “(“and that’s in network”) that peg doctor re-imbursements to the cost of a housecall in 1959 “and stick you with the shortfall.”

“According to my calculations, Glynis’s medical bills for all these treatments already come to over two million dollars. So what exactly did we buy? How much time?” he asks. Her doctor answers: “Oh, I bet we’ve probably extended her life a good three months.” He stares him right back: “No, I’m sorry, Dr. Goldman, they were not a good three months.”

As sharp as the health care criticisms are, they are only a part of Shriver’s bigger picture of life’s often unpredictable batterings. Even if every dime of every medical calamity in the novel were 100% paid by insurance or the State, the devastation to Shep’s life and well-being would have been nearly the same. There is nothing pretty about what can happen to any of us when our daily lives, simple plans, and modest dreams are turned upside down by compounding bad luck. Shep’s persistence in doing what’s required rises to the level of heroic as he continues to wipe his wife’s butt, fix dinners she doesn’t eat, deal with his children’s indifference, visit his weakening father, and on and on . . . all while his dream of a happy island retirement goes down the toilet.

Shriver has such sympathy for her beleaguered hero that she can’t let her novel end on a hopeless note. Shep and his fractured family finally do get to Pemba, although their arrival is less a triumph than a slight uptick of good fortune. Shep Knacker had realized his dream. “For years people had warned him that there was no escape…He would get bored. He would get lonely. He would crave company of his own kind…They were full of shit. It was great.”

“Next”
by James Hynes
Little, Brown & Company
($23.99, 308 pp)

Kevin Quinn has recently turned fifty.  His girlfriend thinks she might be pregnant.  Kevin has lived in Ann Arbor all his life and now is an editor (the only editor) for the publications division of the Asian Studies department.  On a whim he has applied for an editing job in Austin and has been invited for an interview.  On a one day there-and-back trip, he flies out of Detroit the day a terrorist attack in Glasgow’s subway fills the terminal’s TV screens.   He meets many people, connects with several, but is still very much alone in his own head as the day goes by.

Sounds like a real nail biter, huh? Well, not exactly. But James Hynes’s new novel “Next” is a book to be reckoned with.  As the story of one day in a man’s life, it asks comparison to Joyce’s mighty “Ulysses” with today’s Austin filling in for Dublin in the early twentieth century.

Quinn walks the hot streets of Austin sweating and clothes array much as Bloom walked Dublin, both consumed by erotic thoughts about the women they see and the one back home, both subconsciously looking for a family and a son. Hynes’s sharp language finds no detail too small to capture, no contemporary reference too commercial, no sex fantasy too pornographic.

He can’t pass up a scene in Gaia, an upscale grocery, where he observes a “whole-food jihadist, an überfoodie, a lean boy with biceps and wispy beard, wearing a green Gaia T-shirt and matching ball cap.”  He follows a sharp dressed woman with “a bust like a figurehead and an ass like two dogs fighting in a sack.”  He recalls accompanying a girl in the eighties to a political action meeting:  “Some nuclear freeze, pro-Sandinista, fuck Reagan kind of thing.”

Arriving four hours early for the interview, Quinn ventures out into the streets of Austin where he follows several women, drinks several iced teas in coffee shops, falls off a pedestrian walkway, eats Mexican lunch with a woman surgeon who has patched up his cuts after his fall, buys cheap slacks to replace those torn in the fall, and eventually finds his way to the 52^nd floor of the skyscraper where his interview takes place.

During all this ambling about, we learn all there is to know about him.  “…he’s an underachiever in every way he can imagine, professionally, personally, financially…[who] has no problem admiring a good-looking young woman…a standard-issue middle-aged man, [who] normally doesn’t walk around like a cartoon wolf, his eyes bugging out of his head, his tongue scrolling on the floor.”

By the time he gets around to his interview, Quinn has relived much of his past and come to the conclusion that perhaps he doesn’t really want to leave his girlfriend or Ann Arbor after all.  He has mused about countless music groups going back to his days working in a record store when it was always playing “fucking Bob Seger or J. fucking Geils…or fucking Jethro Tull’s ‘Aqualung’.”  Cirque de Soleil, he thinks, “was what entertainment would have been like if the Soviet Union had won the Cold War, fantastically fit but facelessly interchangeable performers in revealing outfits doing spectacular but meaningless stunts for a mindlessly bedazzled audience.”  The terrorists who set off these musings continue to confound him.  “Who bombs Glasgow…who knew Glasgow even had a subway system?”

As Quinn exits the elevator for his interview on the 52^nd floor, he notices not only the attractive receptionist, but also the expansive view of the city out the floor-to-ceiling windows.  At this moment Hynes wrenches what little plot there is in “Next” out of its morass of middle-aged angst and creates an action sequence worthy of some Bruce Willis movie.  Having worked his way through 300 pages of amusing social commentary, Hynes shifts on the fly, and we are right there with Quinn as he reconsiders his life and ponders what he might have done differently if he had had a child earlier in his life.

“I’d gladly have given up all the pointless things I stupidly thought made my life worth living,” he writes to his imagined son, “I’d have laughed with you and lost my temper at you and burst into tears at the sight of you and begged fate or God or the universe to deal you a better hand…and I’d have done my best to make sure you turned out okay, that you had a good start in life, because I’m here to tell you, kiddo, there’s nothing certain about it, and you make all the preparation you can and then hope for the best.”

Midway through “Next” I found myself thinking that Hynes is a pretty funny guy who would be a great travel companion. “Next” may or may not be another “Ulysses” but it is meaty enough that I wouldn’t mind going back and reading it again.

“Why Translation Matters”

Academic lectures are usually snoozers in person.  They can be even worse when transcribed into a book, the intent of which is usually to satisfy the surprisingly still prevalent “publish or perish” mandate for academic success (the “perish” part being dramatically illustrated recently by the infamous Amy Bishop shootout at the University of Alabama-Huntsville). Once in a long while a miracle happens, and we are treated to a presentation that holds together as a book and also entertains and enlightens.  “Why Translation Matters” by Edith Grossman is such a miracle.

Grossman is a professional translator, best known for her 2003 translation of “Don Quixote” (although she has a substantial shelf of other translations including the works of García Márquez, Vargas Llosa, and Ríos.)   In 2008 she delivered these lectures at Yale and, when the Yale University Press decided to publish them in book form, she wrote a third section on the difficult craft of translating poetry.

Grossman is clearly a champion of her profession. She calls it “a much-maligned activity that is often either discounted as menial hackwork or reviled as nothing short of criminal.”

“I can think of no other profession whose practitioners find themselves endlessly challenged to prove to the world that what they do is decent, honorable, and most of all, possible,” she says.

It is this passion that most elevates Grossman’s book from the usual academic jibber-jabber.  She uses her Yale podium to have her way with publishers, book critics, fellow academics, xenophobic politicians, and a reading public which so hates translations that publishers rarely put the translator’s name on the cover of the book lest a potential reader discover that Cervantes really didn’t write in English.

“In the United States and the United Kingdom only two to three percent of books published each year are literary translations,” she laments. In Western Europe and Latin America, the number is anywhere from twenty-five to forty percent.  Publishers who insist translations don’t sell and book critics who don’t, or don’t know how to, review them are “a product of intransigent dilettantism and tenacious amateurism.”

Grossman’s penchant for engaging in verbal sparring with the literary establishment can be fun, and we all like nothing better than watching an academic catfight. But Grossman makes a good case for her angry frustration and an even better case for “why translation matters.”

In our Post-9/11 world where we build real walls to keep out illegals and metaphorical walls of regulations to keep out legals, a better understanding of other cultures is sorely needed.  She states it in simple terms:  “As the world seems to grow smaller and more interdependent and interconnected while, at the same time, nations and peoples paradoxically become increasingly antagonistic to one another, translation has an important function to fulfill that I believe must be cherished and nourished.”

As for the “English-only” zealots, she points out that any language that becomes isolated from others dies a slow death.  “The more a language embraces infusions and transfusions of new elements and foreign turns of phrase, the larger, more forceful, and more flexible it becomes as an expressive medium,” she writes. “The clear consequence is the sheer vibrancy and flexibility of the language and its huge, constantly expanding, wonderfully contaminated, utterly impure lexicon.”

“Why Translation Matters” is not all academic vitriol.  Grossman takes considerable time to discuss the nuances and challenges of translation.  With interesting examples she makes a strong case for translation as an interpretation of context more than the literal transcription of words.

She points out that the original author must “translate” his imaginative vision into his own “slippery, paradoxical, ambivalent, and explosive” language, but then the translator must translate this again into a second language “just as elusive, just as dynamic, and just as recalcitrant as the first.”

It would have been a pleasure to hear Grossman deliver her thoughts in person; I can imagine her finger pointing and her voice rising, but also hear the quiet of her recitation of a 17^th century sonnet in its original Spanish and in her English translation.

Absent that, this compact little book is more than adequate.  The next time I want to grouse because a menu is only in Spanish, I will keep my mouth shut and enjoy the challenge of learning something new about the food, and language, of the world.

“The Three Weissmanns of Westport”
By Cathleen Schine
Farrar, Straus and Giroux ($25.00, 292 pp.)

Miranda, one of the three Weissmann women in Cathleen Schine’s new novel, runs a one-woman literary agency specializing in the memoirs of the woe-is-me crowd. They are a needy bunch requiring lots of attention, and Miranda jokingly refers to them as her “Awful Authors.” Every one “had always overcome something ghastly and lurid, something so ghastly and lurid they had to write a ghastly and lurid book recounting every detail of their mortification and misery.”

When the world discovers that several indeed live quite normal lives, lawsuits, talk show exposes, and internet chatter ensue and Miranda’s business, income, and credibility are gone. As if that were not bad enough, her parents are getting divorced after 50 years and Miranda finds herself living with her mother and sister in a small cottage in Westport, Connecticut.

It was not exactly an idyllic marriage, but in the mind of Betty Weissmann, it was at least a satisfactory one.  Her husband Joseph was infatuated with a younger woman (ironically named Felicity), but preferred the gentler excuse of “irreconcilable differences,” about which Betty muses, “Of course there are irreconcilable differences.  What on earth does that have to do with divorce?”

Betty and Joseph have lived in their large Central Park West apartment long enough that their initial $5000 investment is worth millions, but Felicity has her eye on the place. On his lawyer’s advice, Joseph “evicts” his wife.  She is taken under wing by her wealthy Cousin Lou who offers her free occupancy of the small beach front cottage in Westport which he is holding vacant for future “beautification” (i.e. a teardown).  With bankrupt daughter Miranda in tow, Betty leaves the city with a few precious belongings and moves to the suburbs.

Not one to leave her sister and mother destitute and ashamed, their librarian sister and daughter Annie decides to sublet her flat, move in with them in Westport, and commute to the city for her work.  They would need her:  “Annie was far better at worrying in general, and worrying about money was one of her specialties…the nonprofit world seeming to take its mandate seriously and to apply it rigorously to its employees.”   And so Schine sets up this contemporary version of “Sense and Sensibility” mashed up with “Little Women”…but her novel is so much better and more than that.

As the Weissmanns acclimate to their new small town life with their intractable personalities banging into each other in the little cottage, Schine indulges her fine-tuned ear for what unfairly is often called “domestic comedy.”  Cousin Lou throws frequent parties, but Westport is not New York.  Betty is bored.  A friend notes:  “If you have to be in exile, you could do worse;” upon which she reflects, “How lucky to have friends who understand what she meant rather than what she said.”

In order to escape further into her own thoughts, Miranda buys herself a kayak “which was a bright, shiny red.  Miranda’s life vest was orange, and the black of the clingy kayaking clothes she’d gotten contrasted nicely, giving the whole, according to an admiring Betty, the appearance of a tropical fish.”  Hopelessly impractical, she nearly drowns in high waves in her first voyage only to be rescued “by a God with the imagination to drop her into the embrace of an Adonis.”  And thus she falls giddily in love with a divorced, unemployed actor twenty years her junior.

Even the ever-practical Annie has her own romance with a much older famous poet who comes to read at a Library function and sweeps a whole room full of women off their feet.  They were women “like the lost boys of Africa, but they were not boys, they were women, older women, still beautiful in their older way, still vibrant in their older way, with their beauty and vibrancy suddenly accosted by the one thing beauty and vibrancy cannot withstand – irrelevance.”

Schine brings a great deal of humor to this whirl of late life romance, despair, and stubborn hope.  The Weissmanns, despite their own sparring, are a loyal family quick to support each other as they navigate a growing cast of characters disengaging and attaching to their lives.  Her plot takes many twists, throwing up equal moments of sober loneliness (“‘I feel like I’m buried alive,’ Miranda said one morning.”) and their witty rebuttals (“‘Better than being buried dead,’ said Betty.”).

Betty’s divorce makes its way through the courts, Miranda’s young lover heads for a Hollywood role in the soaps, Annie’s poet doesn’t call back, but life goes on in Westport.  It is not, however, the life any of them had expected or imagined in their youthful dreams.

Annie might be speaking for all three of them:  “Her life struck her as a mistake, not in a big, violent way, but as a simple error, as if she had thought she was supposed to bear left at an intersection when she should have taken a sharp left, and had drifted slowly, gradually, into the wrong town, the wrong state, the wrong country.”

“The Three Weissmanns of Westport” makes its own gradual way off course from its historical antecedents into a very contemporary landscape of choice and happenstance, but unlike Miranda’s “Awful Authors,” Schine writes not to fabricate a world so bad that surviving becomes a triumph, but to imagine lives which, even as they draw to an end, find opportunities for hope…and if not happiness, at least humor and goodwill.

“Just Kids”
By Patti Smith
HarperCollins ($27.00, 279 pp.)

“This one has the magic.”  With this phrase Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe would collaboratively designate the successes in their lives.  It could refer to his best photo in a contact sheet, the best of her poems, the best song, the best drawing, the best cheap clothes, the best studio or apartment, even the best lover for the other.

It also applies to Smith’s terrific new book “Just Kids.”  Way more than a memoir, “Just Kids” is foremost a love story – but it is also a history, a guide to the arts of the 70’s, a tribute, even a fashion lesson.  Smith covers so much ground with so much detail with such fresh language, humor, and observation that this may be her most significant work in an improbable life of significant achievements.

A tall, skinny waif of a girl from South Jersey, twenty years old and broke after her bus fare, Smith arrived in New York with only dreams and her mother’s gift of white wedgies and a fresh waitress uniform.  “I drew, I danced, and I wrote poems.  I was not gifted but I was imaginative… No one expected me.  Everything awaited me.”  But the friends she had hoped to stay with had moved, and she spent her first night on the stoop of their Brooklyn walk-up.  This auspicious start proved to be only the first of many nights, weeks, even years of scrambling for food and a stable place to sleep.

One night in Tompkins Square Park, after a so-called science fiction writer had offered dinner in exchange for she knew not what, she was rescued by the beautiful Robert Mapplethorpe. He was tripping on acid but had it together enough to whisk her away from danger. They wandered the streets of the East Village and eventually stayed at a friend’s apartment, discovering they were a match – both aspiring to be artists of some sort, both shy and hungry, both readers – and becoming lovers.

It is this love match that is at the heart of “Just Kids”. It tells how together Smith and Mapplethorpe anticipated and fed each other’s needs, whether it was literally feeding and sheltering themselves or finding art supplies, cheap books and records, outrageous clothes, and an occasional subway ride to Coney Island.  She got steady work at Scribner’s book shop and he made art.  Then he would find a new cheap place to live in exchange for his cleaning and painting it while she wrote poems and sketched.  They got by and finally finagled their way into the smallest room in the Chelsea Hotel.

The Chelsea is a storied hotel from that era. Many artists and musicians lived and died there; many reclusive crazies called it home; but no account captures this time in the late 60’s, early 70’s quite like Smith’s.  When she and Mapplethorpe moved in, they started anew.  “I left behind…rolls of canvas splashed in umber, pinks, and green, souvenirs of a gone ambition.  I was too curious about the future to look back…I said good-bye to my stuff…There’s always new stuff, that’s for sure.”

Although the hotel was crawling with celebrities, Smith was less entranced than was Mapplethorpe, who had the greater ambition. Andy Warhol and his entourage of beautiful men and women beckoned.  While Mapplethorpe explored his ambiguous sexuality, Smith was still finding her medium: words, music, or sketchpad – or all three.  “I don’t even know what I’m doing, but I can’t stop doing it,” she writes.  “I’m like a blind sculptor hacking away.”

Back at the Chelsen, she could inadvertently bump into Grace Slick in at the adjoining El Quixote restaurant or find herself in Joplin’s room, but she was hardly star-struck.   “I sat on the floor as Kris Kristofferson sang ‘Me and Bobby McGee,’ Janis joining in the chorus.  I was there for these moments, but so young and preoccupied with my own thoughts that I hardly recognized them as moments.”

Smith and Mapplethorpe vowed to support each other no matter what. Despite their drifting apart ­– he to a bevy of wealthy, gay patrons and she to Sam Shepard, among others – they were loyal and in love until the end.  The times were heavy with the loss of their peers (e.g. Hendrix, Joplin, Morrison, Jones). Smith knew the risks.  “[They were] taken down, the stardom they so desired just out of reach, tarnished stars falling from the sky….They were ahead of their time, but they didn’t live long enough to see the time they were ahead of.”

Finally, Mapplethorpe too went to a painful, premature death with Smith there at the end: “’Patti, did art get us?’  I looked away, not really wanting to think about it.  ‘I don’t know, Robert.  I don’t know.’  Perhaps it did, but no one could regret that.  Only a fool would regret being had by art; or a saint.”

A sad end to an intensely loyal love had not, however, pre-empted artistic success.  He lived long enough to see her poetry and music performances carry her to her own kind of sainthood, and she was there when famous galleries displayed his iconic photographs of her alongside those of himself.

There love was symbiotic.  “Robert was concerned with how to make the photograph, and I with how to be the photograph.”   Perhaps neither would have made it alone.  Smith’s “Just Kids” contains the moments of happy freedom as much as the moments of struggle and pain.  It is a story of life lived in service to art, but a full life nonetheless – one that recognizes “that there is no pure evil, nor pure good, only purity.”

As Mapplethorpe’s personal things are auctioned after his death, she concludes:  “Why can’t I write something that would awake the dead?  I got over the loss of his desk and chair, but never the desire to produce a string of words more precious than the emeralds of Cortés.”  With “Just Kids,” she has put that “string of words” in our hands, and it is indeed precious.  “This one has the magic.”