The Mayor's Tongue; The Legend of Colton H. Bryant; Interpreter of Maladies

Nancy's "Abraham Lincoln Book Club" post has been hanging out there for weeks. Not everything I've been reading recently is public humanities-related, but I thought I'd mention a few, just to keep things rolling. So to speak. Something for me, something for work, something for my book club.

First is Nathaniel Rich's The Mayor's Tongue, a new first novel by the 27-year-old senior editor of The Paris Review. This is the kind of novel I like--conceptual, philosophical, intertextual, etc. (ask me about Stephen Marche's ambitious Shining At the Bottom of the Sea). It is really two stories, one of a young man on the trail of The Great Writer (also on the trail of his love); the other of two elderly gentlemen, one of whom must trail the other back to the land of their past. All roads lead to Italy in this book, pleasantly enough. A kind of fabulism or magical realism comes to the fore early, and, as the book evolves, it gets tricky, with failed communication, translation, interplay of reality and storytelling the apparent themes. I enjoyed it, as expected, but someone is going to have to explain it to me. Sometimes just going along for the ride is good enough; you don't have to know where you have been. If you have book groups that enjoy experimental or alternative fiction, this might work. Stephen King blurbed it; "brimming with brio," he said.

Next was Alexandra Fuller's The Legend of Colton H. Bryant, similarly, a very new book, Wyoming-based, about the life and death of an oil-rig worker. The author is famous (I am told), the book is getting attention, and I hated it so thoroughly that I took detailed notes and wrote a lengthy review. Kim has wisely suppressed the review, since she's trying to get Fuller for our book festival next fall. I'll be long-gone by then, at Tengboche Monastery in the Khumbu, writing my Three Jiggers of Gin. If you promise not to pass it on, I'll share the review with you. It was great fun to write. It's an awful book.

Third was Jumpha Lahiri's 1999 Interpeter of Maladies, our book club selection for the month. Whenever it is her turn, one of the women in our group always chooses something outside our comfortable Euro-American box--always to our edification. (I, on the other hand, always choose something I have already read). Interpreter of Maladies is a collection of short stories of contemporary Indian culture and its Diaspora. If you have a reading and discussion theme on world lit, cultural globalization, etc., this book would be a good choice. It is engaging, well written--she is one of those writers that makes writing look easy--and full of interesting, enlightening, and discussable material. It has a bit of a "welcome to my world" feel throughout, but Americans need to experience other cultures and especially their perspectives on us. As a friend says, it would be a disgrace if, having globalized the world, we failed to globalize ourselves.