FICTION: VIOLENCE’S IMPACT
The Color of Night by Madison Smartt Bell
In his latest novel, “The Color of Night,” Madison Smartt Bell takes a dark look at violence in the United States and its effect on the country, the culture and individuals.
His narrator, Mae, is a blackjack dealer in a Nevada casino. Mae, who is distant from her co-workers and friendless, spends her nights wandering the desert behind her trailer, rifle in hand, and malevolent memories and persistent questions filling her mind.
When she isn’t in the desert, Mae is obsessively watching recorded footage of the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center, which shows her old friend and lover, Laurel, surviving the carnage.
The shock of seeing Laurel sends Mae down a twisted and dangerous memory lane, one that is filled with pain, torture, rape and life as part of the Manson family.
From her horrendous childhood, with what she calls the “Mom Thing” and an older brother who schooled her in the ways of pain, Mae was more than ready when Charles Manson came calling. Bell paints Mae’s dangerous days in the 1960s when “The People” provided her with a sense of family and of fitting in.
Mae finds the pictures of 9/11 thrilling, sparking the old sense of anarchy she once lived with.
But when she finally contacts Laurel, she finds that her old flame is now a sedate, middle-aged woman who has no desire to renew old ties.
Mae has trouble believing the changes in Laurel, who seems to have drifted so far from their violent past.
In his acknowledgments, Bell says he has always said his work “is dictated to me by daemons. People probably think that’s a figure of speech, maybe this book will prove it literal.” Certainly Bell takes the reader on a twisted journey, but Mae is both believable and fascinating — and the trip is thrilling.
Mary Foster, Associated Press
NONFICTION: ASTROBIOLOGY
First Contact: Scientific Breakthroughs in the Hunt for Life Beyond Earth by Marc Kaufman
I had a terrifying dream a few nights ago involving nematodes living deep, deep underground in the hot rocks miles beneath my house. The nightmare was particularly vibrant because I had just learned that such creatures really do live there. For this new knowledge and my subsequent loss of sleep, I blame Marc Kaufman and his new book, “First Contact.”
Life underground might seem a strange place to start a book about the expanding new field of astrobiology, but modern astrobiologists are trying not just to find life elsewhere in the universe but also to chart the extremes to which life on Earth can go. Underground? Check. Inside microscopic water bubbles in glaciers? Yes. In arsenic-rich pools? Why not? Life, as anyone who has ever tried to disinfect his kitchen can testify, is a tenacious thing.
It is this tenacity that leads many of the scientists whom we meet in the book to feel that the existence of life throughout the universe isn’t just possible but inevitable. You might be surprised to read, then, that there is no agreement on the answer to what sounds like a simple question: What is life, anyway?
This lack of agreement doesn’t slow scientists down; neither do the setbacks and controversies and arguments that follow anyone who dares to make claims about extraterrestrial life. Kaufman journeys to a telescope high in the mountains of Chile with an astronomer hoping to prove he has found life on Mars, in the form of the methane respired from microbes. He revisits the scientists involved in the decade-old claims that there are microbes in Martian meteorites and lets them argue that some of the claims that sounded outrageous 15 years ago are now generally accepted; and he treks into the Australian outback with a former chemist who is now one of the premier finders of planets around other stars and who last year announced the discovery of a “Goldilocks” planet, where conditions were just right for liquid water — and thus possibly even life as we know it (subsequent observations have failed to confirm the planet’s existence). Mike Brown, Washington Post Writers Group
FICTION: COMING-OF-AGE EXPLORATION
You Know Who You Are by Ben Dolnick
“You Know Who You Are,” Washington-area native Ben Dolnick’s second coming-of-age novel, is the story of Jacob Vine. We see him first at 10, searching for his lost cousin and trying to hold on to the love of his more accomplished older brother. By the end, he’s graduated from college and living in a renegotiated family.
Jacob’s early life in suburban D.C. is the most nuanced and precise section of the story, providing a complex glimpse into the inner life of a young boy about to jump, arms flailing, into young adulthood. The preteen Jacob, a middle child, falls “in love” with his male friends, in the company of whom he learns how to masturbate and fantasize. His mother’s illness unstitches the once tightly sewn family, leaving their father, who moved “like a retired athlete in the site of his former glory,” and the Vine siblings as islands in a sea of grief. Jacob’s first girlfriend is wooed by the tragedy unfolding at home. In fact, his mother’s impending death is his “most important asset,” Dolnick writes, “a dark glow behind his silhouette.” Their first stabs at love are fodder not often seen from a teenage boy’s perspective.
But when Jacob leaves home for the fictional Lodwick College — not even his third choice — and develops passions other than of the heart and body, the story loses strength. As the pace speeds up to meet the needs of the novel’s ambitious time span, characters come and go, their outcomes unclear. Jacob’s keen examination of his most vulnerable adolescent feelings dissipates, rendering his college life generic. He’s still in search of the right girl, but the story trades intimacy for catching up with plot when Jacob leaves Lodwick for a predictable post-college life.
Dolnick’s secret power — if only novelists were superheroes! — is his mastery of observation. His descriptions can be intricate, clear and witty. For his next project, here’s hoping that his deftly drawn characters have the chance to grow up.
Jennifer Gilmore, Washington Post Writers Group
