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Christie for Christmas
Desperate for more Agatha Christie? Now there are two "new" mysteries by the late queen of clues.
By Jacqueline Carey
[12/23/99]

Interview
Twilight of a feminist
Susan Brownmiller talks about the golden age of ideology and when it's OK for a woman to be a sex object.
By David Bowman
[12/22/99]

Reviews
"When Bad Things Happen to Other People" by John Portmann
A new look at Schadenfreude forgives us that nasty vice, but doesn't let us have much fun with it.
By Mary Elizabeth Williams
[12/22/99]

The love that dare not squeak its name
Even as a child I suspected I had something special in common with Stuart Little.
By David Rakoff
[12/21/99]

Dear Mr. Blue
It's too late, baby
My husband finally quit drinking so I wouldn't leave him, but now I can't imagine ever letting him touch me again.
By Garrison Keillor
[12/21/99]

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By Polly Shulman

Dec. 23, 1999 | Connie Willis, curmudgeon, book addict and philosopher, writes with a devil on one shoulder and an angel on the other. Like her literary ancestor G.K. Chesterton, another philosopher wit, she's fascinated with paradoxes of good and evil. Her twin advisors have various names: chaos and order, the past and the present, comedy and tragedy. But which is the angel and which the devil? In her world, the forces of dissolution may well turn out to be agents of a benign fate.

Bellwether By Connie Willis Bantam/Spectra, 247 pages Fiction Buy this book at B&N.com Miracle and Other Christmas Stories By Connie Willis Bantam, 328 pages Fiction Buy this book at B&N.com Doomsday Book By Connie Willis Bantam/Spectra, 578 pages Fiction Buy this book at B&N.com To Say Nothing of the Dog By Connie Willis Bantam, 493 pages Fiction Buy this book at B&N.com

Take Flip, the pierced, tattooed mailroom clerk at HiTek, a corporate think tank, where Willis' 1996 novel "Bellwether" takes place. Grudging and aggressively incompetent, she tosses a monkey wrench into the research of every scientist in the company. At least, that's how it seems to Sandra Foster, the narrator. Sandra, a sociologist, is trying to discover how fads start (in particular, hair-bobbing in the 1920s). Flip foils her at every turn, trashing her carefully arranged clippings or mis-delivering important packages. Yet if not for Flip, Sandra might never have met chaos researcher Bennett O'Reilly, and the two might never have started on their singularly fertile collaboration.

In a sly bit of satire, Willis pokes fun at her own themes. Sandra collects bestsellers, looking for new fads. Here she comments on one book called "Led on by Fate":

Its premise was that everything was ordained and organized by guardian angels, and the heroine was given to saying things like "Everything happens for a reason, Derek! You broke off our engagement and slept with Edwina and were implicated in her death, and I turned to Paolo for comfort and went to Nepal with him so that we'd learn the meaning of suffering and despair, without which true love is meaningless. All of it -- the train wreck, Lilith's suicide, Halvard's drug addiction, the stock market crash -- it was all so we could be together. Oh, Derek, there's a reason behind everything!"

Except, apparently, hair-bobbing.

Whether through inadvertence or preordination, Flip leads Sandra and Bennett to a breakthrough about the self-organization of chaotic systems (such as women's hairstyles). Actual chaos theorists may roll their eyes, but the insight has the delightful neatness of a mystery plot sprung by a master.

Willis creates a miniature version of "Bellwether" in her new book, "Miracle and Other Christmas Stories." For the most part, these are a little too heart-warming, as good Christmas stories should be. Like "Bellwether," the title story takes place in a stuffy corporation. Willis delights in poking fun at bureaucracies. The Flip figure, however -- a familiar Christmas character disguised as a young man in a Save the Whales T-shirt -- is not surly, but aggressively helpful. He's going to give the heroine her heart's desire, whether she likes it or not. Readers know long before she does just what that desire is -- the sweet but nerdy Bennett figure, of course.

Next page | Who wins, God or death?