Like a few dozen million other people, I am waiting to learn in a few days just what the point of watching six years’ worth of “Lost” was. At this point, I’m convinced it will turn out to be the world’s longest and most expensive shaggy dog story. Even so, “Lost” has been remarkably effective in getting viewers to accept that seemingly unrelated narratives are, in fact, linked in some elusive but profound way. Which is very much the feat Dan Jacobson pulls off in his 1973 novel, The Wonder-Worker
The Wonder-Worker
… was thus accompanied by omens. Within the moist, lightless crevices of Maureen Fogel’s organs of generation, two minuscule germs came together, and the result was that her entire system was convulsed with terror and wonder. As well it might be. But neither she nor Gerhard had any inkling of the significance of her cry. Nine months had to pass before they were to be enlightened.
Nine months from then, Maureen goes into labor in the newsagent’s where she works. Summoned to her side, Gerhard knocks over a small stove and part of their house burns down.
“A windy blue and white sky outside,” the next chapter opens. The nameless first-person narrator describes his hotel-like room, and tells us that he was writing. “Gerhard! Maureen! Timothy! At best they’re caricatures, cartoons, cheap satiric spooks and might-have-beens.” Apparently, the first chapter is a novel he’s writing. But then he tells us, “I wait for the doctor to arrive.”
As the next few chapters alternate between Timothy’s story and the writer’s, we learn that the hotel-like room is in Doctor Wuch’s exclusive sanatorium somewhere in Switzerland. The doctor, an older, refined man in well-tailored suits seems to have a most casual relationship with the writer, although he does stress the need to reach some level of Selbsverstehen (self-understanding). It is quite clear that there is much we are not being told by the writer.
Timothy’s story, on the other hand, is rich in small, magical details. Jacobson’s prose in these chapters is the most deftly poetic I have read in years:
The house itself seemed to remember that it was his, and made him welcome every time he returned to it. Some places inside it, however, were more grudging than others in their welcome, especially when the light began to fail at the end of every day. The kitchen was always a safe and cheerful place to be in, it was always glad to have him; the little front hall, on the other hand, contained more than a hint of menace, which not even his mother’s presence could entirely abolish. In the kitchen there was warmth and activity: pots on the gas stove, peelings and tea leaves in the rubbish bin, steam on the windows insulating the room from the darkness beyond. In the hall, the narrow staircase silently debouched strange reflections of itself on to a floor of polished linoleum; the hallstand leaned back against the wall with a trapped, desperate air, and held before it the only weapons it had, its prongs for coats to hang on. From the ceiling, much the tallest in the house, there hung a lightshade that was as copiously befringed as a lady in an eastern tale, and that looked quite capable of lowering itself and advancing in stately fashion on a boy whose back was turned.
It is not just Jacobson who animates these everyday objects. Timothy discovers that he has a magical power–the ability to project himself into objects and take on their senses and viewpoint. All he needs to do is take an object–soap, sugar, brick, brass–place his forehead against it, and close his eyes. Soon, he can spend hours inhabiting a thing such as the desk of a schoolmate who fascinates him. He wonders “what it would be like to be wind, words, a cloud, a star, a note of music, not his eye or his mother’s but the glance between them.”
Meanwhile, all is not well with the writer. “There hasn’t been a word from them all day,” he writes in one entry. “I don’t know how to fill in my time.” His father comes for a brief visit. Offered the manuscript by his son, he reads a few pages and then hands it back: “Very amusing.” He leaves advising the son to trust in Doctor Wuchs, having seen something quite disturbing.
We continue to follow Timothy’s story interspersed with the writer’s meditations until, within a dozen pages of the end of this short novel, a transformation takes place. In the space of fifteen paragraphs or so, Jacobson manages to pull these parallel narratives together just as simply and miraculously as one creates a Möbius strip from a flat piece of paper with a single twist. He does it so subtly that I went back and read the passage again just to convince myself that my mind hadn’t played a trick on me. I won’t spoil the effect by explaining any more. But in its way, it’s as stunning a moment as when Aureliano Babilonia sees the pig’s tail on his dead infant son in One Hundred Years of Solitude. And I will say that when I finished the book, I went back and read it again–and found it was as if I was reading it for the first time. It’s the kind of reality-warping experience a fan of “Lost” could appreciate.
In early 1934, Malcolm Cowley, then literary editor of 
, and Rudolf Brunngraber’s 
was the first of a number of biographies he published). He dismissed suggestions that he took a narrow view in his choice of subjects. He told an 
, Carol Gelderman quotes Lady Bird Johnson–a sharper judge of character than she’s usually given credit for–on meeting him: “… polished, very Eastern. I couldn’t imagine him living or writing about life west of the Mississippi River.” “She could have said Hudson River and been just as accurate,” Gelderman adds. The Christian Science Monitor’s book critic, Heller McAlpin, had a lovely, if fainting damning, comparison for his work:
, which he originally published in 1947 under the pseudonym of Andrew Lee at his mother’s insistence. She thought it “trivial and vulgar.”
) was the first of many short story collections he would publish during his life–the last being 
(2007).
, and contributed introductions and afterwords to dozens of other books, including numerous reissues of works by Edith Wharton.
, was, in fact, his standard approach to a novel. As Jonathan Yardley summarized it in his 
, based on the life of Walter Lippmann, 
, inspired by but not entirely faithful to the story of 
(loosely taken on the careers of his Groton classmates Bill and McGeorge Bundy).
, for example, revolve around partners and attorneys in the fictional firm of Tower, Tilney & Webb. The novel 
is a series of eleven portraits of members of the Carnochan family from colonial to modern days. 
made the construct explicit in its subtitle, as did 
, which cautions the reader that it is, “Not a novel in the conventional sense,” but rather a series of sketches of another fictional law firm, Shepard, Putney & Cox. But even novels lacking these disclaimers, such as 
, 
, and 
were essentially collections of character sketches rather than strong linear narratives.
, 
, 
, and 
are all collections of biographical sketches, most of them originally published in magazines.
, which compresses the full life, cradle to grave, into an elegant 136 pages, is a dandy handbook for the reader seeking guidance through Morris’s great forest.”
–fantasizing that the duke kept on writing after his memoirs were published. “The Single Reader,” a story from 
–a successor to his 1974 memoir, 
.
, 
, and 
–originally published in Hungary between 1934 and 1940, have become recognized by a small but enthusiastic band of readers as one of the finest works of the 20th century.
Banffy, or, to use his full title, 
Webster published over 15,000 panels over the course of 40-plus years as a newspaper cartoonist. A memorial collection of his cartoons, 
dreamed about Bokhara, a fabulous city that was then more difficult to access than Tibet. I opened my eyes upon the end of not only the nineteenth century but of a second Puritan age. An epoch passed away while I was learning to speak and walk. Its influence remains as the start of memory and as a measuring rod for progress that even Edwardian survivors lack.
I couldn’t resist starting in with the most ridiculous title in the bunch: 
, by Edward Stewart. “A Super-Bombshell of a Thriller that Surpasses the Best of Fletcher Knebel and Allen Drury!” proclaims the cover. At the time, this meant something to potential buyers. Thirty-plus years later, those names either mean nothing or (in Drury’s case) great lumps of pedestrian prose.
Donald Schon’s 
represents one such intersection. I discovered it after reading 
, which is devoted to a topic I spend a lot of time thinking about on my job: how to foster a community of practice within an organization.
Being selected for the Pulitzer Prize is no guarantee of that anyone will remember your work–at least not more than ten years afterward. Take 
, his diaries and reminiscences from the 1919 Versailles Peace Conference, where he sat between President Woodrow Wilson and Wilson’s assistant, Colonel Edward House, translating the speeches and remarks of the other attendees, won the 1945 Pulitzer Prize for History. Sixty years later, the book is as obscure as, say, 
by Margaret Clapp–the 1948 winner, by the way.
Bonsal’s book opens on the eve of the Armistice and ends a little over a year later, with the Senate’s rejection of the Treaty. He worked alongside House, and later Wilson, through the preparations and initial sessions of the Conference. A veteran foreign correspondent fluent in a number of European tongues, he acted as an emissary to many of the other delegations and as a personal advisor to House and Wilson. He remained at the negotiating tables throughout most of the Conference, taking only a break of a few weeks to accompany South African General Jan Christian Smuts on a mission to Austria, Hungary, and Serbia in March and April 1919.
.
, and many of the “literary” meditations on the game, such as Donald Hall’s wonderful 
and Joel Oppenheimer’s loving account of the 1972 Mets, 
.
I think it was in the long-gone Filippi’s Books in Seattle that I came across the 
, a collection edited by Charles Einstein first published in 1956. It’s a big magazine-sized volume with nearly 400 pages of prose, poetry, photos and illustrations from the first 100 years of American baseball, and it’s a goldmine for any fan of good writing on baseball.
two years later. It included one of the best demonstrations of respect from the players themselves–an introduction by Ted Williams, still taking the field back then.
. This might be the best of the three, since it had the advantage of pulling from both the classics and a new generation of sports writers, which included Roger Angell, Jimmy Breslin, William Price Fox, George Plimpton, and even John Updike.
. Whoever came up with that bright idea would probably have argued that Colonel Sanders should call his restaurants Hot Dead Chicken. Einstein himself considered it the best of the four in terms of content:
(itself a pretty fine anthology) called it, “baseball literature’s finest monument.” Einstein himself twice culled from the books to produce yet more anthologies–
–and 
. A prolific writer, Einstein also contributed one of baseball’s better novels–
–and one of its better biographies, 
, from 1979.
Simon and Schuster published at least seven other Fireside books on sports and games, including:
, edited by Irving Chernov & Fred Reinfeld (1949)
, edited by Oswald Jacoby & Albert Morehead (1957)
, edited by Raymond Camp (1959)
, edited by W. C. Heinz (1961)
, edited by Jack Newcombe (1964)
, edited by David F. Woods, 1964
, edited by Allison Danzig & Peter Schwed (1972)
These were not at all like my mom’s cookbooks. These were cookbooks written for men by a guy without a shred of doubt about his studliness. What cookbook written by a woman would put “Meat” at the front, on the very first page? And lead off with, “How to Make Real Corned Venison, Antelope, Moose, Bear and Beef”? The last is just a concession to the little ladies, I’m sure. The author, 
(which failed to spark a wave of D-I-Y critter stuffing); 
; 
(move to Alaska; zap fish with car batteries or bags of quicklime); 
(with such handy tips as, “Be Careful to Avoid Touching Synthetic Cothing with a Gasoline Lantern”); and the ode to marital bliss, 
. Although his catalog business went bust in 1981, he kept beavering away for over ten more years, mostly inventing inventions such as a Rube Goldberg-esque process for refining petroleum, before hitting his last carriage return in 1994.
“Opening this book is like clicking on a switch: at once we hear the electric hum of talent,” Stanley Kauffmann wrote in his New Republic review of Irvin Faust’s first book of fiction, 
. And if there’s one characteristic of Faust’s work, it’s energy. For over 45 years–30 of them working nights, weekends, and vacations while holding down a regular job as a a high school guidance counselor–Faust has written some of the liveliest, noisiest, most vibrant prose published in America:
(1966), about a college professor who suffers a psychotic breakdown over the Cuban Missile crisis and goes blasting off around the country on thrill-seeking spree. Of Faust’s most commercially successful book, the 1971 novel, 
, Elmore Leonard wrote (in his introduction to the 1983 Arbor House reissue, 
As he told Don Swaim in a 1985 interview (available on the 
, however, a casebook for practitioners, was based on his doctoral research and early experience as a guidance counselor. Faust once told an interviewer,
In the title story of 
, which Jerome Charyn called “a curiously humorless book”–it usually sparkles with invention and passion.
, recounting how his original concept for the film–largely faithful to Faust’s story–was transformed into a pandering, pointless mess by the manipulations of Avco Pictures executives and others.
novel (1973)
novel (1975)
novel (1980)
short stories (1985)
novel (1994)
It pains me to start 2010 with two pans in a row, but few books have disappointed me as much as Vance Bourjaily’s little-known 1986 novel, 
The last shows that Walton’s kept a discriminating filter on her list. Of Steig Larson’s novels, which someone nominated, she writes, “These are a stupendously successful non-genre best sellers. The opposite of obscure.” I’ve seen them on the end caps of airport bookstores in Belgium, Spain, the U.K., and the U.S. in the last two months: definitely NOT neglected.
Although he began by calling the book “one of his [Bromfield’s] most remarkable achievements,” after devoting about four times as much text to a recap of the novel’s plot with only an occasional dig, Wilson then dismissed it as, “a small masterpiece of pointlessness and banality.”