1997 Pen/Faulkner Prize Recipient

The characters in most of the novels I read focus on real people living in our own real world doing mostly real things. Occasionally a writer is able to come up with that rarely truly unique addition to the world in which we live. Tolkien had Hobbits, Katherine Dunn had the freaks in “Geek Love,” C.S. Lewis had the characters from Narnia, and now Rafi Zabor brings us a talking bear who plays alto sax almost as well as his idols Sonny Rollins, Coltrane and Ornette Coleman.

“The Bear Comes Home” is a first novel by a journalist and part time jazz drummer. With all the enthusiasm and urgency that make most first novels an author’s best, Zabor has succeeded in creating a truly epic tale. Not only does he confidently navigate the bear through the emotionally turbulent struggle to fit in as a talking bear in a human’s world, he also manages to so accurately describe the pain associated with being an artist. The bear’s struggle becomes the metaphorical voyage of a person’s race to discover what it’s going to take to make life worth living.

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Steven Millhauser is a contemporary American author who writes and sees through wonderfully Dickensian eyes. His stories are filled with characters whose faces and voices become incredibly distinctive within the first few pages. With “Martin Dressler,” Millhauser follows the life and dreams of an ambitious child growing into adulthood in America at the turn of the century.

We first meet Martin Dressler in the early 1890’s as a child helping his father run a small cigar store in Manhattan. At this time New York was still a city filled with pastoral spaces, undeveloped lots, and infinite possibilities for anyone with a dream and the courage to make it real. At the age of 14 Martin leaves his father’s store to go work at a fancy hotel as a bellboy. Eventually he works himself up to assistant manager and is being groomed to eventually become the manager. But Martin’s dreams are bigger and more entrepreneurial, first opening a cigar store in the hotel lobby and then a franchise of profitable upscale lunchrooms throughout the city and Brooklyn. But it is not the money that drives him, rather it is the desire to break the mold.
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I haven’t read John Krakauer’s “Into Thin Air.” Why bother when you’ve already seen “Everest,” and the made for TV version of the same story. However, I always did enjoy reading John Krakauer’s work in Outside magazine. My favorite of his stories included a long article about a 24 year-old boy found starved to death in an abandoned school bus in the Alaskan wilderness. This article soon became “Into the Wild,” Krakauer’s Sherlock Holmesian detective job tracking down the where and how Christopher McCandless spent the last three years of his life.

This book works for a couple different reasons: Krakauer is both a good writer and a good reporter; and he has honed in on a fascinating subject with which you can’t help becoming involved with for a few hundred pages. The premise of this true story is relatively simple: an upper middle class kid named Christopher McCandless graduates with honors from Emory University, gives away his $25,000 savings and disappears from the lives of his family without a note or a phone call. A few years later he is found dead in the Alaskan wilderness, alone and emaciated. Given only a beginning and an end, Krakauer was able to piece together what seems like a seamless recounting of the time that elapsed in between.
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I have to admit to being incredibly envious of Michael Chabon. At the age of twenty-four he was both motivated and talented enough to write and a find a publisher for the widely popular and critically esteemed “The Mysteries of Pittsburgh” — a kind of post-collegiate “Catcher In The Rye” set in, you guessed it, Pittsburgh. Granted, like most first novels, it feels hugely autobiographical, Chabon uses his undergraduate experience at University of Pittsburgh and real post-graduation uncertainty as the backbone, the book is full of countless razor sharp observations about living in Pittsburgh during the early 90s. Although not exactly great writing, “The Mysteries of Pittsburgh” made it clear that Chabon was destined to deliver better and better fiction as he grew through his 20’s.
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One day a haggard and defeated looking black man appears on the Spokane Indian Reservation in search of salvation. After being picked up in a rusty blue van by down-on-his-luck Thomas-Builds-A-Fire, the man reveals himself to be none other than blues legend Robert Johnson. Traditional blues lore has it that one day Robert Johnson met the devil and sold his soul to him for the ability to play guitar at a crossroads in the Mississippi Delta. After a hundred years of being followed by a possessed guitar that will not let him be, Johnson stumbles across the Spokane Reservation as if drawn by some magical spirit.

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I rarely take the time to read non-fiction but in this fascinating look at how America became an ugly hodgepodge of strip malls and prefab houses, Kunstler traces roots of architecture from the pilgrims right on through the present. In a very readable fusion of history and social commentary, The Geography Of Nowhere discusses the building of Manhattan and the suburbs that would one day stretch across the country. Using everyone from Thomas Jefferson to Louis Sullivan to I.M. Pei, he manages to explain how it is America came to look as it does now. A great book for the cynic down on the plastification of America.