FICTION: COMIC MEMOIR
Crazy
by William Peter Blatty
It’s hard to believe, but horror meister William Peter Blatty once had a booming career as a funny guy. In addition to his comic novels, he worked with Blake Edwards on several films, including “A Shot in the Dark,” the second Inspector Clouseau movie; he loved P.G. Wodehouse; and he was even compared to S.J. Perelman. All this came before those looming steps in Georgetown forever linked Blatty with his best-known work, “The Exorcist.”
Which makes his new novel, “Crazy,” a return to form. It’s a sweet-natured, often hilarious tale cast as the memoirs of an 82-year-old former screenwriter named Joey El Bueno. Joey is writing from a 10th-floor room at Bellevue Hospital, where the usually suspicious Nurse Bloor doesn’t raise an eyebrow at his laptop because “she has read Archy and Mehitabel and knows that sometimes even a rat can type.”
Joey is the son of an Irish beauty who died giving birth to him and an impoverished Peruvian immigrant who made his living pushing a hot- dog cart. Joey’s memoir takes us back to the year he was a seventh-grader at St. Stephen’s, on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, in 1941. That’s where he first meets Jane Bent, a street-smart, foul-mouthed transfer student from Our Lady of Sorrows. At first, Joey finds her “nuttier than a truckload of filberts,” but that changes when Jane flashes a $5 bill and suggests an afternoon at the movies.
Many hours and three screenings of “Gunga Din” later, the two seem to have become an inseparable pair. Then they part, and Joey never sees her again. Not that Jane, anyway.
I won’t say more, lest I spoil the pleasures of this lovely, time-shifting novel. Blatty has always been upfront about his Catholic faith. The opening of “The Exorcist” evokes “Lucifer upward-groping back to his God,” and “Crazy’s” poignant final pages make clear that, rather than an exercise in nostalgia, this novel is a reminder of Saint Paul’s command, “While we have time, let us do good.” Or, as Joey puts it, “What would Kurt Vonnegut do?”
NONFICTION: RACE AND RECOLLECTIONS
Reviewed by Lisa Bonos
Washington Post Writers Group
The Grace of Silence: A Memoir
by Michele Norris
Michele Norris, co-host of NPR’s “All Things Considered,” grew up being told to “rise above” racial discrimination and keep her “eye on the prize.” She didn’t realize then that her African-American parents were trying to do the same.
In her memoir, “The Grace of Silence,” Norris chases after a family secret revealed too late — that her father had been shot by a police officer in Birmingham soon after being discharged from the Navy after World War II. Learning of the incident years after her father’s death and long after other family members’ memories of the event had faded, Norris can only guess at how that incident must have haunted him for the rest of his life.
She blends the story of her childhood — and her quest to fill in its gaps — with a wider view of Southern race relations immediately following World War II, a period often overshadowed by history’s focus on the Martin Luther King era of the 1960s.
“What’s been more corrosive to the dialogue on race in America over the last half century or so,” Norris asks, “things said or unsaid?” Her struggle to answer that question becomes a powerful plea to readers to doggedly pursue their families’ story lines.
She reminds us that speaking candidly about race in America starts not at the president’s teleprompter but at our own dinner tables.
FICTION: A MYSTERY KLATCH
Reviewed by Sarah Pekkanen
Washington Post Writers Group
I Still Dream About You
by Fannie Flagg
Fannie Flagg, the author of “Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe” and a half-dozen other popular books, has filled this charming new novel with quirky characters, led by a former Miss Alabama. Maggie Fortenberry knows how to tie a scarf in 40 ways, adorns her signature with smiley faces and has never gotten a parking ticket or cursed in public.
Yet, at 60, Maggie, an unmarried real estate agent, is dissatisfied with the trajectory of her life. She’s mourning the loss of her dear friend Hazel Whisenknott, a 3-foot-4-inch burst of energy who once answered a question about her mood by saying, “I’m feeling a little more short-statured than height-challenged today.”
Although Maggie is close to the perpetually dieting Brenda, a fellow real estate agent who aspires to become mayor of Birmingham, Maggie feels she doesn’t have anyone — or much of anything — to live for.
As she painstakingly plots the details of her death, she looks for ways to make it easier on others. Not wanting Brenda to be shocked, Maggie gives her a hint, confessing that she has been feeling depressed. But Brenda wrests away control of the conversation, demanding to know if she looks “like a big fat Tootsie Roll in a wig.” Later, when Maggie asks if she has ever thought about “giving up,” Brenda wonders if she should get her stomach stapled. Why is Brenda aiming for just the mayor’s job? With this level of self-absorption, she’d be a natural on Capitol Hill!
Birmingham’s role in the civil rights movement pops up throughout the book, and its history of segregation is arguably the reason Maggie’s life began a downward spiral: Antagonism toward Alabama ruined her chance to be named Miss America. It’s clear that Maggie’s love of her hometown is mingled with quiet shame for this particular part of its past.
But Maggie gets distracted from her deadly plan when she and Brenda discover a skeleton stuffed into an old trunk and a person from her past who suddenly reappears. By now it’s clear that Maggie, who grew up in an apartment above a movie theater, deserves a bright, Technicolor ending. Readers will root for her to get one.
