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| Malcolm Gladwell, Eclectic Detective The themes of this collection are a good way to characterize the author himself: a minor genius who unwittingly demonstrates the hazards of statistical reasoning. feeds.nytimes.com |
Black Water Rising by Attica Locke | Book review Oil an murder mix on a Texan bayouSome novels never quite recover from the brilliance of their opening chapters. The screenwriter Attica Locke's debut is one of them, but it's still a powerful and skilfully constructed conspiracy thriller – Chinatown without the air of despairing fatalism.We're in Houston, Texas in 1981, not long after Reagan's installation in the White House. Jay Porter is a struggling lawyer with a strip-mall practice that mostly handles minor personal injury claims. Short on cash but determined to mark his pregnant wife Bernie's birthday memorably, he hires a rickety old barge belonging to the cousin of one of his clients and takes her on a moonlit cruise along Houston's Buffalo Bayou. All is calm – until suddenly they hear a woman's scream, then gunshots, then the splash of a body hitting water. Instinctively, Jay dives into the murky river and emerges clutching a distressed but alive white woman whose refusal to tell him anything about what has happened to her he attributes – mistakenly – to her fear of his blackness.Actually, her reticence echoes Jay's reluctance to get involved. He's only too familiar with "the long, creative arm of Southern law enforcement": in his youth he was a Black Power activist who narrowly avoided being imprisoned on a trumped-up charge of conspiracy to murder. So he and Bernie drive the woman to the nearest police station and leave her at the door. For anyone else, that would be the end of it. But when Jay learns that a man was indeed killed near the bayou that night, he feels compelled to dig deeper. He even returns to the scene of the crime, as if he himself had committed it.The plot unfolds against a backdrop of rising oil prices and union unrest. Houston's black longshoremen are threatening to strike, and Jay's father-in-law, an influential minister, wants him to represent a young man who claims he was beaten up by a port official. Jay isn't sure, and Locke makes us feel the force of his uncertainty, his reservations about the value of intervening even when he knows it's the right thing to do. He's a tortured soul with a "sensitive, almost exquisite sense of the world as black and white", as any African American would be who had grown up in a place called Nigton – a shameful contraction which speaks for itself – and heard repeatedly as a child the story of how his father died when a white hospital refused to treat him after he had been kicked in the head by rednecks.The black water of the title is, of course, oil, and it's no surprise when Jay's investigations link the murder to the corrupt practices of Big Petroleum. Locke has an extraordinary gift for reinvigorating tired thriller conventions. The ransacked apartment; the sinister man who shadows the hero and warns him at regular intervals to forget his quarry and go back to his family; the eccentric journalist who has to be persuaded to help the hero out with crucial information – all are present and correct, but the writing is so attentive to depth as well as surface, and to the swampy atmosphere of a city where everyone has their AC ramped up to the max, that we don't care.Locke lingers on the port strike, but then it is the catalyst for Jay's political reawakening. Where she's less successful is in her depiction of Houston's mayor, a white woman Jay knew (and loved) when she was a student drawn to black politics. A cynical exemplar of radical chic, Cynthia Maddox failed to support Jay when he stood trial, then disappeared, resurfacing years later as a petite powerhouse of Reaganism. She's a fascinating type but no more than that, and it's hard to understand what Jay would have seen in her, or why she continues to exert such a hold on him.The ending lacks the punch of the beginning, but leaves plenty of room for a sequel. Jay is a compelling character who coheres despite his contradictions. It would be a pleasure to meet him again.Fictionguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Creative whiting As the season's first flurries of frozen ice crystals provide God's way of telling you to stay indoors with a good book, it's an excellent time to plough through our quiz on literary snow feeds.guardian.co.uk |
There's more to Tolstoy than War and Peace Although his huge stature derives almost entirely from two mighty novels, there are a lot of other books to recommendThis is the anniversary year for Tolstoy's death – a century ago he fled his ancestral home, Yasnaya Polyana, and went on the road with a friend (his private doctor) to become a kind of wandering monk. He died only a couple of weeks later, in a remote railway station called Astapovo. He was estranged from his wife of nearly five decades, cut off from all of his children except one daughter, who had become a devoted "Tolstoyan". It was a strange end, and the story itself was (to me) so compelling that I wrote a novel about it, The Last Station, in 1990. It has now been made into a film, with Helen Mirren as the Countess and Christopher Plummer as the great man himself.Needless to say, the anniversary is going to draw a lot of readers to Tolstoy. This is certainly a good thing. I would assume that most readers who have read Tolstoy seriously will know the important novels, War and Peace and Anna Karenina. These are certainly masterpieces that rank among the great works of western European literature. I go back to them myself every few years, just to sink into their worlds, which are endlessly informative, stimulating, and convincing. I love these books.But there is a vast shelf of books by Leo Tolstoy, and these contain some very intriguing and much less widely read works. It's not, as popularly thought, that Tolstoy abandoned writing fiction after Anna Karenina. The Death of Ivan Ilych is a late piece of writing, or relatively so, and it's as good as anything Tolstoy ever wrote: a vivid account of the dying process, as harrowing as anything I have ever read. He also wrote any number of wonderful late tales that read a bit like folktales, but they are self-assured, vital, unforgettable. I like especially a very late tale called "Alyosha Gorshak". And then, indeed, there is a fine historical novel, Hadji Murat – not a book easily bypassed by anyone seriously interested in Tolstoy's accomplishment as a writer.Tolstoy became a kind of prophet in his old age, during the last few decades. He turned to Christianity, but he did so with a twist. It was his Christianity. That is, he had a vision of Christ that did not include supernatural trappings. He learned New Testament Greek and spent a great deal of time rewriting the Gospels, taking out the miracles, all the supernatural bits. He saw Jesus as a great man who had a special relationship with God, and he spent decades elaborating this idea in essay after essay. The Kingdom of God Is Within You is a whole book that puts forward his ideas on Jesus, faith, God, pacifism, and the moral life. I myself collected bits and pieces from his last four decades in a new volume out from Penguin Classics called Last Steps: The Late Writings of Leo Tolstoy.This volume also contains some of Tolstoy's later writings on vegetarianism, sex, and literature. Oddly, Tolstoy wrote a very long essay – almost a small book – on Shakespeare only a few years before he died. It's a deeply eccentric book but still fascinating. Tolstoy hated Shakespeare because he didn't take a stand. He could see things from endless viewpoints. There was no moral centre, or so Tolstoy believed.Isaiah Berlin once wrote an essay called "The Hedgehog and the Fox" where he classified Tolstoy as a hedgehog because he was devoted to one big idea. That idea was God. Tolstoy was saturated in the idea of God, and he felt the presence of God in all things. In a sense, Tolstoy had an Oriental viewpoint here: he was deeply versed in eastern philosophy and religion, and he really combines that sense of a pervasively interconnected, timeless world with western ideas of God. I would direct readers who want to know more about Tolstoy to these later essays – especially the religious ones. It was not for nothing that such figures as Gandhi and Martin Luther King looked to Tolstoy as a kind of moral hero, a man in touch with the inner workings of the spirit.Tolstoy was a writer who could not write a line that did not come from a deep centre. He wrote with power and conviction, and his work is everlasting.Leo TolstoyFictionClassicsJay Pariniguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Long March In Joshua Ferris’s second novel, a successful Manhattan trial attorney is afflicted with an uncontrollable compulsion to leave his desk and trek for miles. feeds.nytimes.com |