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Turning out the lights on the old New Yorker
Was it Utopia? Camelot? Paradise? Or does the possibility exist that, as fine as it once was, it was still just a magazine?
By Gavin McNett
[02/17/00]

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"Fasting, Feasting" by Anita Desai
Unhappy Indian families are unhappy in their own way, too, the author demonstrates in this Booker Prize finalist.
By Sylvia Brownrigg
[02/17/00]

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"Black Girl in Paris" by Shay Youngblood
A breathless novel traces the footsteps of Langston Hughes and James Baldwin, but sidles around the topic of race.
By Gaiutra Bahadur
[02/16/00]

It's how they take you anywhere
A Rudyard Kipling story is all I need to transport an after-school classroom of rowdy 9-year-olds.
By Beth Kephart
[02/16/00]

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"Nobrow" by John Seabrook and "No Logo" by Naomi Klein
A self-revealing reflection on the sick fixations of the media elite stalls out. Is a guerrilla war enough to wake them up?
By Austin Bunn
[02/15/00]

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Inversions By Iain M. Banks Pocket Books, 343 pages Fiction Buy this book at B&N.com The Wasp Factory By Iain M. Banks Futura, 184 pages Fiction Buy this book at B&N.com Excession By Iain M. Banks Bantam Spectra, 499 pages Fiction Buy this book at B&N.com

Banks began his career in 1984 with "The Wasp Factory," a claustrophobic novel about a cruelly dysfunctional family. Variously confined -- to a madhouse, to a small island off the coast of Scotland or by their own warped intentions -- the family members struggle to express themselves by controlling one another's fate. Their self-realization takes dangerous forms: murder, arson and worse. The narrator, a lonely adolescent who enjoys burning wasps and blowing up bunnies, claims to have murdered three children, two of his cousins and one of his brothers. The methods he used are ingenious if incredible: hiding an adder in a boy's prosthetic leg, tying a girl to a huge kite and letting her blow away. He describes the murders matter-of-factly, though with a tinge of pride, as if any sensible person in similar circumstances would have done the same thing if he'd thought of it. Compared to his surviving brother, an asylum escapee who burns dogs alive, the narrator considers himself the sane one.

While it's bone-chillingly weird, "The Wasp Factory," one of more than a dozen novels by Banks, takes place on Earth and follows the familiar laws of physics. He also writes science fiction. These novels -- the ones I've read, at least -- share with the "literary" books their author's twisted imagination and his fascination with deliberately inflicted pain. Yet because the conventions of science fiction are so much odder than those of straight fiction, Banks' science fiction books seem more conventional. In them, he wraps his psychological concerns in crisp, imaginative prose, suspenseful plots and plausible -- or at least enjoyable -- technology.

Readers who like spaceships, worm holes and intrusions from other dimensions might want to start with "Excession," a 500-page sprawl with the obsessive structure of a paranoid fantasy. The Culture, a loose hegemony of societies made up of biological and machine-based individuals, is alarmed to discover an excession -- a small oval object that seems to have come from another dimension. Worried that the intruder intends to take over the universe, the Culture sends in its crack intelligence team, a club of Minds -- immortal spaceships who wisecrack and conspire like a chatroom full of insomniacs. Word leaks out, war starts and the plot gyrates, showcasing Banks' obvious delight in teasing his characters.

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