I'm brushing up on my Vollman in anticipation of the publication in August of his latest novel, "The Royal Family." I've loved Vollman's "Seven Dreams" series of novels about the colonizing of America, but I've avoided his tales of skid row life under the impression that they'd be a retread of Charles Bukowski's grandiose romance with the gutter. To my surprise, I'm spellbound by both the immediacy of his portraits of skinheads, drunks, bag ladies, emergency room denizens and fetishists and by the multicolored pattern emerging, pentimento-style, beneath it all.
The Moving Toyshop by Edmund Crispin
Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates
Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris
Living to Tell by Antonya Nelson
Bodies in Motion and at Rest by Thomas Lynch
The Angel on the Roof by Russell Banks
Stork Club by Ralph Blumenthal
Experience: A Memoir by Martin Amis
Of Two Minds: The Growing Disorder in American Psychiatry by T.M. Luhrmann
Plowing the Dark by Richard Powers
Chang and Eng by Darin Strauss
American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century by Christine Stansell
Red Mafiya: How the Russian Mob Has Invaded America by Robert I. Friedman
Stern Men by Elizabeth Gilbert
The Fundamentals of Play by Caitlin Macy
American Pharaoh: Mayor Richard J. Daley -- His Battle for Chicago and the Nation by Adam Cohen and Elizabeth Taylor
Edmund Crispin's 1946 mystery pastiche, featuring his detective Oxford literature professor Gervase Fen, is something you could imagine Bertie Wooster settling down to spend an evening with. Every convention is so consciously in place it's like the locked-room mystery redone as sophisticated music-hall turn.
Richard Ford's intriguing essay on "Revolutionary Road" in the New York Times Book Review sent me looking for Richard Yates' acclaimed 1961 novel, and I was just as taken with it as Ford promised. It's the story of Frank and April Wheeler, an affluent young couple who seem to have everything and can't figure out why contentment is always just beyond their reach -- the kind of book you could call a "scathing indictment of suburbia," except that Yates is too smart and subtle to suggest any simple explanation for the problems that afflict the Wheelers and their friends. He's on to something deep and troubling about the American character that rings as true today as it did in the Eisenhower era. Yates' perfectly modulated prose is a delight to read -- and as a special bonus, Richard Ford's essay serves as the introduction to the new edition from Vintage.
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