nonfiction

“A charmingly breezy tone marks
this warm appraisal of our addiction to stuff.”
from objects of my affection
where it will be handed over to the Gestapo, and he will get
back to the safety of his desk. But things go immediately
awry. Vogler, a callow young art expert who favors the “deep,
clean, and relatively painless cut of narrow knowledge” to the
messiness of politics or larger cultural issues—and who has
been tapped for this plum job in part because he appeared,
by sheer accident, to have expressed public contempt for a
black American athlete in the 1936 Berlin Olympics—finds
that he lacks the needed linguistic and cultural skills to navigate
languid, un-orderly, sentimental Italy. To avoid a threatened
theft or double-cross, his drivers take to rustic side
roads, a tactic that slows the pace and jeopardizes Vogler’s
deadline. Then it becomes apparent that the brothers have
higher priorities than the job at hand: romances, marriage
proposals, rivalries, a perilous entanglement with criminals.
After a series of escalating misadventures, Vogler finds himself
marooned in an Italian pastoral family life that may be
dolce around the edges, but that is also extremely dangerous.
Along the way, though, he surrenders himself both to the
adventure and to a surprising (and not quite believable) love.
The historical context is fascinating and atmospheric, but
the novel wavers between suspense and romance and never
quite convinces as either.
Hews too close to stereotype. Not bad, but mildly
disappointing.
STOLEN PREY
Sandford, John
Putnam (416 pp.)
$27.95 | May 15, 2012
978-0-399-15768-4
Lucas Davenport takes the scenic
route toward a confrontation with the
two practiced crooks who had the bad
luck to rob him.
Just as he’s leaving an ATM with
$500, the star of Minnesota’s Bureau of
Criminal Apprehension is held up by a pair of obvious meth
users, a man and a woman. Naturally, Lucas vows vengeance.
Before he can catch up with the pair, however, he and his team
will have to wade through a thicket of unrelated violence visited
on the Midwest by a trio of Mexican gunslingers. The hit
men, whom Sandford (Buried Prey, 2011, etc.) inventively dubs
Uno, Dos and Tres, first pop up on Lucas’ radar when they torture
and execute Patrick Brooks, founder of Sunnie Software,
and his wife and children. A preliminary investigation ties the
murders to a money-laundering operation that crosses the
border, and the connection is strengthened when the Mexican
government sends Inspector David Rivera and Sgt. Ana Martínez
north as observers. They end up doing a lot more than
observing because the three killers are just getting started. On
orders from their mysterious boss, Big Voice, they’re pursuing a
fortune in gold that’s gotten stuck halfway through the moneylaundering
chute and cauterizing any leaks among the system’s
conspirators while they’re at it. Despite the high mortality rate,
the procedural work is more grueling than fascinating, and the
criminals are mostly as nondescript as their monikers.
But the climactic gunfight is deeply satisfying, and the
very last line of dialogue is perfect.
THE FIRST WARM
EVENING OF THE YEAR
Saul, Jamie M.
Morrow/HarperCollins (304 pp.)
$24.99 | $11.99 e-book | May 1, 2012
978-0-06-144972-7
978-0-06-210132-7 e-book
In Saul’s second novel (Light of Day,
2005), a 40-ish man faces the lack of
passion in his life when he becomes the
executor of a college friend’s estate.
Geoffrey lives in Manhattan where he earns a living doing
voice-overs and carries on a no-strings relationship with his girlfriend.
One day he gets a call from a lawyer; his old friend Laura
has died and he’s been named executor of her small estate. When
Geoffrey knew Laura, he was at Columbia and she was at Juilliard.
She moved to Paris with her husband, fellow jazz musician
Steve, but when he died nine years ago, she moved back to her
upstate New York hometown and taught music. Geoffrey drives
up there and soon meets her best friend Marian, who also happens
to be a widow. Narrator Geoffrey announces on the second
page that he has fallen in love with Marian at first sight. The only
problem is that Marian has a boyfriend she doesn’t even pretend
she loves. Eliot runs the local hardware store and doesn’t like to
discuss feelings (readers will sympathize after hundreds of pages
of Geoffrey’s navel gazing). Marian uses their relationship to
avoid feeling the kind of passion she had with her husband Buddy.
Instead, since Buddy’s death, she has been clinging to his memory
and her grief. She and Laura bonded as “the young widows.” It
is less clear why Geoffrey has avoided emotional commitment,
although he and his gay psychiatrist brother Alex certainly discuss
their avoidance enough—at least until Alex meets and falls
immediately in love with Laura’s wayward brother Simon, whom
Laura and Geoffrey conspired to keep from attending her wedding
long ago. By then Geoffrey and Marian are talking nonstop
about their emotions. For a guy who claims to be out of touch
with his capacity for feelings, Geoffrey is the most touchy-feeling
fictional hero since Oliver Barrett IV, the main character in Erich
Segal’s bestseller Love Story.
This talky love story will turn the most romantic reader
into a curmudgeon. (New York and Tristate area author appearances.
Agent: Joy Harris)
DON’T MESS WITH TRAVIS
Smiley, Bob
Dunne/St. Martin’s (304 pp.)
$25.99 | May 8, 2012
978-1-250-00119-1
In this debut novel, Ben Travis, a
lowly state senator in Texas, has stumbled
into the job of governor.
Travis’ predecessor died in a crash,
and the line of succession wobbled down
to him. But as ill-equipped as he is to
take charge of the Lone Star State, the ardent conservative isn’t
at all shy about leading the fight for secession after discovering
a dirty federal secret. A rancher whose luck at business rescued
him from abject failure, Travis is a handler’s nightmare but the
common man’s dream come true. He says what’s on his mind,
even when there’s nothing there, doesn’t mind offending the
easily offended and thinks nothing of dropping in on powermad
liberal President Michael Leary unannounced. This after
stumbling—and slipping and sliding—on a federal pipeline illicitly
running beneath a state highway. Armed with an obscure
state’s rights agreement with Texas signed by President Lincoln,
Travis rallies secessionists in the face of the disorganized, golfdistracted
president’s dirty tricks. The action culminates with
federal troops on the Oklahoma-Texas border and Travis counting
on a pilot named McKill to fly him past fighter planes to
the White House. The supporting cast includes Damon Cole,
a conservative black politics professor with thousand-dollar
shoes and two-cent nerves; Adam Wexler, a computer geek
who specializes in stealing historical documents; Walt Thompson,
a hugely popular right-wing radio host; and Travis’ daughter
Paige, a leftist justice department worker whose fling with
Wexler complicates matters a bit. In bringing a humane point
of view to the pitched election-year conflict between liberals
and conservatives, this novel couldn’t be timelier. As a bonus,
Smiley smoothly mixes in bits of history about Texas politics
and culture. A freewheeling political satire that does for politics
what Texan Dan Jenkins’ antic fictions did for golf and football.
Smiley’s first novel disproves the notion that conservatives
can’t be really funny.
OBJECTS OF MY AFFECTION
Smolinski, Jill
Touchstone/Simon & Schuster (320 pp.)
$24.99 | May 1, 2012
978-1-4516-6075-3
If things are not people, then why do
they seem to matter so much A hoarder
and organizational expert clash in this
light, amusing novel from Smolinski (The
Next Thing on my List, 2007, etc.).
Lucy Bloom, author of Things are Not
People, a book no one seems to have read, is ironically bereft of
possessions. Aside from her beloved red Mustang, Lucy has
sold her home and its contents, using the proceeds to put her
teenage son, Ash, in rehab. Admirable, but now Ash won’t speak
to her and somehow she lost her boyfriend, Daniel, along the
way, too. Broke and lonely, Lucy lands a dream job: help Marva
Meier Rios clear her house of clutter in 52 days, and she’ll have
enough cash to get back on her feet. Of course the reclusive artist
makes the job impossible, forcing Lucy to debate the merits
of every fork, candlestick and flamingo-shaped umbrella holder.
Under pressure from Marva’s son to get the job done, not to
mention pressure from the gorgeous Niko to take a break, Lucy
surprises herself by asking Daniel for help. Just as Lucy tries to
help Marva de-clutter her house, so Daniel helps Lucy de-clutter
her memory. Lucy and Marva must accept that things may
not be people, but people do bind themselves to their things
with memories and emotions. Only after Marva confesses the
big secret of her life—the secret that has bound her past emotions
into all of the objects in her home—is she able to let go of
the clutter and begin anew. And Lucy may have let go of a lot of
things, but she hasn’t released the memories—some true, some
misremembered—that bind her to Ash and Daniel.
A charmingly breezy tone marks this warm appraisal of
our addiction to stuff. (Agent: Kirsten Manges)
THAT’S HOW I ROLL
Vachss, Andrew
Pantheon (224 pp.)
$25.95 | Mar. 20, 2012
978-0-307-37994-8
Life is tough. It’s tougher when you’re
on death row.
In his newest whodunit, Vachss (The
Weight, 2010, etc.) combines his trademark
black humor with his longstanding
concern for children and their well-being.
The result is a strikingly original character named Esau Till,
born with a “spine thing” that has kept him from standing on
his own for all the 40-plus years of his life. Esau has a genius IQ
and a sharp sense of justice, if a vigilante one; no being bullied
on the schoolyard or in life for him. Indeed, he has a skill that
is very much in demand in the rough redneck quarters in which
he moves—he makes a mean bomb. What keeps Esau motivated
on this unforgiving planet is his younger brother Tory-boy,
Lennie to his George, who is beyond simpleminded and is constantly
in some mischief or another—dangerously involving the
local neo-Nazi contingent at one point. Esau and Tory descend
from a fellow known locally as the Beast, who made a sport of
incest and murder until receiving his comeuppance, and they’re
not what you might call model citizens. Even though Esau does
a fine job of clearing the streets of criminals, if often on behalf
of other criminals, he’s also worked his way through the catalog
of civil offenses and felonies. For his trouble, we find Esau in the
pen awaiting the final needle, telling his tale to pass the time.
Vachss structures his novel as a sort of loose, episodic confessional
that builds the story stone by stone, strewing the landscape
with bodies (“Before he could open his mouth to ask a
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