Clinton’s memoir isn’t the only top title

Summer is often a quiet season for big-name books, but not this year. The biggest title is also the largest: Bill Clinton's 957-page memoir, "My Life," which had a Harry Potter-esque release, Would-be buyers weren't stopped by early negative reviews, with some actually camping out to buy an early copy, and certain bookstores opening at midnight on the day of release.

But don't let the fuss over "My Life" overshadow some of summer's other top titles. David Foster Wallace and David Sedaris both have new books out, and both live up to their reputations. The late John Gregory Dunne's final novel is a toothy thriller, if a bit crowded with tertiary characters. And two young authors make a striking debut with the much-talked-about "Rule of Four." Who said summer was a slow time for books, again?

The past, in color

Abrams

We think of the past in black and white, sometimes in sepia. And why not? Pre-World War II movies, family snapshots, early television programs were all in black and white, and if we weren't around to remember these times on our own, the faded media become our memories.

Much of what you'll see in this book is gone from our world — general stores, juke joints, the Vermont State Fair sideshow advertising a four-legged woman ("Not in a bottle! Not a trick!").

"Bound for Glory: America in Color, 1939-43" (Abrams, $35) collects dozens of color photographs taken by the Farm Security Administration and Office of War Information with newly available Kodachrome film.  And the rarely seen colors shine forth from the page — the bricky reds and deep greens of a grocery store in Nebraska, the hot pink of a circus dancer's outfit, the rich browns and yellows of stacked wheat against a cloudy blue Pennsylvania sky.

The photos are, in turn, touching, funny and educational. One shows a family, clothing stained with work, gathered together for supper in their New Mexico dugout home, enjoying homemade biscuits so flaky they put KFC to shame. You want to walk into the photo of the inviting Lincoln, Neb., Grand Grocery Co. ("Oranges 1 cent! Four pounds of apples for a quarter!"). Much of what you'll see in this book is gone from our world — general stores, juke joints, the Vermont State Fair sideshow advertising a four-legged woman ("Not in a bottle! Not a trick!").

A photo opposite the title page shows a lonely, old-fashioned car making its way down a curvy canyon road. If the car wasn't an out-of-date style, the photo could have been taken by me two weeks ago on a trip up the California and Oregon coasts -- the landscape, the sky, the colors all look so familiar. So much has changed, yet so much, as "Bound for Glory" reminds us, stays forever the same.    —Gael Fashingbauer Cooper

Under the Big Top
Cathy Day's first fiction collection, "The Circus in Winter" (Harcourt, $23) depicts the sleepy town of Lima, Indiana, where the Great Porter Circus made its off-season home from the Civil War through the 1930s.

Harcourt

The cast is not only the expected assortment of freaks and aerialists; the otherworldliness of the circus injects itself into Lima's bloodlines for generations. Deep into the book, Day refocuses outward to the circus's descendants, while still holding our interest: here, for example, is Laura, the granddaughter of an elephant trainer, who nurses a powerful wanderlust.

Day shifts her attention chronologically backward and forward through a century of small-town life, her prose moving as deftly as skilled fingers covering every note on a piano. We see the gaudy murals on the walls of Wallace Porter's clapboard house both at their creation (a lonely wife hires a railroad-car painter for the job, and he later breaks her heart) and at their ultimate destruction by whitewash decades later at the hands of a bereaved mother.

Often what is punished in Lima is not simple evil but inaction, inattention, and untruth to one's self.

This is a series of latter-day fairy tales, each of which could stand on its own, but is made more intriguing by the intersecting sets of characters. Laura's overprotective mother Mildred reappears as a baby rescued by a rowboat from the upper story of a flooded home, and again yet later as a frigid 16-year-old bride. But it's no bedtime Disney fare. Like the Brothers Grimm, Day chronicles terrible grief, unrequited passions, and fitting revenge; her characters are real humans who sweat and lust. One vignette begins with a caveat that applies to the work as a whole: "Be warned. This isn't a pretty story."

"The Last Member of the Boela Tribe," for example, illustrates how even the well-meaning lies we tell to protect others are still insidious things with far-reaching consequences. Often what is punished in Lima is not simple evil but inaction, inattention, and untruth to one's self. Day's tales are at turns tragic, but magically told and sparingly ornamented with wry humor. Escapist summer reading has rarely hit so close to the bone.    —Kim Rollins

‘Coal Run’ mines for gold
Tawni O’Dell’s follow-up to her best-selling novel “Back Roads” (an Oprah book club selection) will not disappoint. “Coal Run” (Viking, $24.95) tells the story of Ivan Zoschenko, the son of a Western Pennsylvania coal miner who returns home as an adult after a long absence. He believes he’s come home for revenge, but perhaps what's really drawing him are his own feelings of guilt and complicity.

Vikings Books

The book unfolds like a mystery told over the course of one week as Ivan waits to confront Reese Raynor, a childhood friend who’s just getting out of prison for almost beating his own wife to death. While he waits, Ivan drinks heavily, crashes on his sister’s couch, remembers his past, and gets to know his hometown and family all over again.

O’Dell lets Ivan become a complex character. Once a former football star who’d signed a contract with the Chicago Bears, his dreams were suddenly, and quite literally, crushed. Now, he’s a broken man who wonders what’s become of his life.

The town is a perfect reflection of who he’s become: Full of people who no longer know what to dream. From his childhood caretaker who lost his innocence in Vietnam to his former best friend who now finds himself mired in an unhappy marriage. The town also lacks any sense of purpose as the mining industry has dried up and now all that’s left are its smoldering remains. 

With this satisfying read, O’Dell successfully avoids the sophomore slump.  —Paige Newman

Stylish ‘Dress Your Family’
It’s hard not to love a good David Sedaris story and his new book, “Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim” (Little, Brown; $24.95) has many. Once again, Sedaris takes us into the world of his family and his life in Paris with longtime boyfriend Hugh.

Little, Brown

The best stories in this collection are those about his siblings. His sister Lisa, we learn in “Repeat After Me,” has grown so paranoid about her brother writing down everything she says, that she prefaces all personal stories with, “You have to swear you will never repeat this.” Youngest sister Tiffany, we find out in “Put a Lid on It,” removed her own braces when she was 14. In “Rooster at the Hitchin’ Post” we learn that brother Paul isn’t afraid to stand in his underwear and eat leftovers out of the trash. Sedaris is great at expressing the combination of love, befuddlement, protectiveness and impatience that most of us feel toward our siblings. It will have you thinking back to some of the crazier things your own brothers and sisters have done and how strange it is that people who are related can think and act so differently from each other.

There are some great laugh-out-loud passages throughout the book, whether Sedaris is being worried about being mistaken for a pedophile in a hotel or trying to figure out the best way to drown a mouse. Sedaris is first and foremost a storyteller and these stories always have a remarkable oral quality — they are definitely meant to be read aloud. Once again, Sedaris does not disappoint.    —P.N.

Borderline
The cover of Ken Ellingwood's "Hard Line: Life and Death on the U.S.-Mexico Border" (Knopf, $25) features an actual American highway sign that those of us in the northern part of the nation have only seen in photographs. Its message is simple: It shows a man and a woman, heads down, hair blowing in the wind, running and dragging with them a small child. The sign is to warn drivers along the U.S.-Mexico driver that desperate border crossers might dash in front of their cars. It's a blunt reminder of a problem most of us are  oblivious to, but that those living near the border have to face every day.

Pantheon

If you approach the book with no strong feelings either way, you may find your sympathies swaying from side to side as you read. It's easy to feel your heart go out to the desperate Mexicans, some of whom have family in the U.S., others who just long to make a new life. Many pay hundreds of hard-earned dollars to "coyotes," unscrupulous smugglers who may or may not get them successfully across the border, and who never seem to pack enough water for the dangerous desert journey. Yet it's also easy to put yourself in the shoes of the frustrated and understaffed border patrol, or the ranchers who find their fences destroyed, their animals' water tanks drained.

Governmental and personal attitudes are forever at war, whether with border-patrol officers who are themselves children of parents who crossed illegally, or with a church group who put water jugs out in the desert to try and save lives of migrants on the run. (In the end, many migrants steered away from the free water stations, believing they were traps.)

Ellingwood, himself born in the border town of Laredo, Texas, covered the border from 1998 to 2002 for the Los Angeles Times. He's absolutely the right person to describe this complex situation for which there are no easy answers. That said, the book starts slowly, and it's hard to imagine anyone without a vested interest being able to hang with the political minutiae that fills the early going. The book eventually gathers steam, and by the time Ellingwood relates the horror of a 2001 incident that left 14 would-be immigrants dead in the Arizona desert near Yuma, readers will be rapt.    —G.F.C.

Presidential tome
Bill Clinton's "My Life" (Knopf, $35) is exactly the kind of book I wish one of my parents would write — but just for the immediate family to read. Only a devoted child could be absorbed by some of the details in Clinton's 957-page book, which includes details on the former president's childhood neighbors, early classmates, and anecdotes about bee stings and library habits from a lifetime ago. The detail is, in some parts, amazing, and in others, grossly lacking. While Clinton goes on endlessly about long-forgotten political issues that cropped up when he was governor of Arkansas, major life events, like the plans for and birth of his only child, are given less than two full pages.

Knopf

If you're perusing a copy of "My Life" at the bookstore and it conveniently keeps flopping open to page 773, there's a reason. That's the page upon which Monica Lewinsky makes her first appearance, but it's hardly in-depth. At one point, Clinton says he "met with her alone again for about 15 minutes." Met with? Is that what the kids are calling it these days?

At one point, Clinton says he ‘met with [Lewinsky] alone again for about 15 minutes.’ Met with? Is that what the kids are calling it these days?

Clinton makes a somewhat half-hearted attempt to explain away his scandals with references to his troubled early life (with a father he never knew and an abusive and alcoholic stepfather). Like other abuse victims, Clinton says he was able to conduct separate lives — one as the model politician, one as a man seemingly working as hard as he could to destroy his family life over sexual dalliances.

Yet for all that, Clinton's book has long stretches where it is compellingly readable. His early life did influence him, even if the "separate lives" thing reeks of excuses, and he lived a remarkably downhome early life for a man who would rise so far. Parts of the section on his presidency are truly compelling, others read as if he's just putting everything down, fearing nothing is unimportant enough to be left out. (The Associated Press review of the book reports "It's like being locked in a small room with a very gregarious man who insists on reading his entire appointment book, day by day, beginning in 1946.")

Those who liked Clinton and long for the days when a stained dress was the biggest issue facing the nation will excuse the rambling and awkward treatment of his scandals, and those who excoriate him will find plenty to support their positions, too. If you've managed, somehow, to stay neutral about the man, you'll find both good and bad in the book as well.    —G.F.C.

Dunne’s farewell
John Gregory Dunne opens his final novel, “Nothing Lost” (Knopf, $24.95) with the discovery of the corpse of Gar Parlance, a middle-aged, black, easygoing wanderer, found with a bullet in his skull and flesh flayed from his body.  Accused of this senseless, seemingly race-motivated homicide are two young men, one of whom is fortunate enough to have a fantastically wealthy supermodel, Carlyle, for a half-sister.  Carlyle brings in our quasi-omniscient narrator, queer Jewish attorney Max Cline ("queer" being Cline's preferred term) and former victim-advocate, now sell-out, Teresa Kean for the defense. 

Knopf

“Nothing Lost” is not the story of merely this crime, but of many: college linebacker “Jocko” Cannon is accused of dragging a sophomore girl down a flight of concrete stairs; a wife uses documents stolen from her husband’s desk to further her own political agenda.  The story sprawls so far that Dunne had to invent a whole new midwestern state (“South Midland”: flat, corrupt, and football-obsessed) to contain his characters’ secrets; the cast is a vast assortment of public figures with overlapping histories and interlocking rivalries.

The Parlance prosecution is spearheaded by the troubled J. J. McClure, who is the unfaithful half of a power couple; his wife, Congresswoman Poppy McClure, would be a caricature if it were not for the real-life far-right zealots that clearly inspired her.  As a convicted murderer faces the electric chair, Poppy advocates, in a televised interview, a return to “The guillotine, like the French did before they got all squishy.” Many of the personae who creep and bluster their way through the pages are barely on this side of parody; everyone’s got a shady past involving a child-star birth mother who died a bag lady, or a vault of homemade pornography, and even the most suspended of disbelief can’t stay aloft through it all.

Although this is a toothy thriller, its overarching weakness is that it is too crowded with tertiary characters, often diverting the reader’s attention to no good end.  Dunne repeatedly introduces players who appear to be future key figures, only to abruptly discard them just as they become interesting.  A career prosecutor, Maurice Dodd, gets six pages of backstory, including how he lost his arm in Vietnam, only to (on the seventh page) die instantaneously of anaphylactic shock.  Had such superfluous detours been discarded, the handful of compelling protagonists would be better displayed.     —K.R.

Approachable ‘Oblivion’
David Foster Wallace's new short-fiction collection, "Oblivion," (Little, Brown, $26) will be a approachable volume for those intimidated by the heft of his phone-book-sized manifesto "Infinite Jest." Although Wallace is often upbraided for his wordiness, when one delves into his prose, it's difficult to find any single adjective that seems extraneous. The elimination of any detail would deny the very complexity of the situations he wishes to communicate. He moves in concentric circles away from his point, but inexorably spins back towards it.

Little, Brown

"Mister Squishy" goes inside a snack company's focus group, looking past the comforting, atavistic pleasure of the convenience-store sponge cake the corporation manufactures (packaged with an impish mascot a la Hostess's Twinkie the Kid), and into the rote, inhuman process by which such products are created and tested. "Butter-redundancies" are "injected by a high-pressure confectionery needle." Outside Mister Squishy's offices, a mysterious figure with suction cups at his knees and hands scales the building, gecko-like. In "The Soul is Not a Smithy," the thin veneer of order in a fourth-grade classroom is gradually peeled away by the all-seeing, distractible eye of its elementary-school narrator. The civics teacher, copying the Bill of Rights onto the blackboard, begins to scrawl KILL THEM instead, and the students at first do not even seem surprised.

Wallace's visions are, at their core, horror stories.

"Good Old Neon," is the monologue of joyless yuppie Neal, at long last driven to kill himself when he realizes, with some repulsion, that his obsession with his own fraudulence is not only insoluble but a laughable cliche. In the conclusion to this truncated account of Neal's demise (in signature DFW style, the narrator dies in a footnote, and the story proceeds without him) Wallace reveals that Neal was inspired by a golden-boy classmate who inexplicably chose death over his beautiful-on-paper life, reimagining the young man as a sympathetic sociopath.

Wallace's visions are, at their core, horror stories: not the pulpy, genre tales of werewolves or bloodthirsty clowns, but of the malevolence and hopelessness behind studiously blank faces and clean panes of glass.    —K.R.

Following the Rule
Critics have compared "The Rule of Four," by 1998 Princeton graduates Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason (Dial Press, $24), to everything from Donna Tartt's "The Secret History" to "The DaVinci Code."

Dial

Similarities with Tartt's excellent 1990 "Secret History" include a campus setting and protagonists who are almost too brainy for their own good, fascinated with the trappings of a dead world. And like "The DaVinci Code," the characters in "Rule of Four" are trying to uncover an ancient secret that's been hidden for centuries. In this case, the secret involves the mysteries of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, a (real) Renaissance text that is the thesis topic for one character and which was the lifelong obsession of another's late father.

The young authors, so fresh from campus, do a nice job of sketching in Princeton's ivy halls and vaunted traditions for those of us who went to less prestigious colleges. And the numerous puzzles of the Hypnerotomachia are entertaining mind games (but don't expect to solve them on your own unless you're intimately familiar with, say, ancient Florentine units of measurement).

But "Rule of Four" has trouble distinguishing its many, almost all male, characters. Of the four main characters, the one most sharply drawn, Charlie, is not one of the two who get the most ink. And two Hypnerotomachia scholars who play important roles in the book are almost interchangeable — I continually confused the two.

Say what you will about "The DaVinci Code" as a brainless thriller, at least the issue at the heart of its mystery — whether or not Christ and Mary Magdalene were a couple — is a big one. Why should we care if the Hypnerotomachia's mysteries are solved or not? So Paul can get his thesis turned in on time? (Granted, we are told that there are hidden masterpieces buried somewhere in a watertight crypt, but the thesis is more the book's focus.)

There's eloquent writing in "Rule of Four," and while I can't recommend it wholeheartedly, I'll be eager to see what Caldwell and Thomason, friends since age eight, come up with next.    —G.F.C.

And the home of the brave
Booker Prize-winning author James Kelman’s latest book, “You Have to be Careful in the Land of the Free” (Harcourt, $25) is a strange trip inside the drunken mind of our main character, Jeremiah "Jerry" Brown. A Scottish immigrant who has lived in America for 12 years, Brown is now preparing to head home. He has one last night to kill and doesn’t want to spend it cooped up in a hotel room with only his thoughts. Instead, he spends it in various bars, and those thoughts he’s trying to avoid are only amplified with alcohol.

T

Harcourt

his book can be challenging to read. It’s all written in a Scottish dialect, so that even seemingly normal sentences are written like this “I stared eftir her. I know I was staring although at first it didnay register. But see yersel as ithers see ye.” What’s nice about the dialect is that it grounds you firmly in Jeremiah’s consciousness. But because there are also no chapter breaks, you may find yourself feeling a bit trapped in Brown's head.

The book is a series of reminiscences about his time in America (or as he calls it “Uhmerka”) and his semi-disastrous relationship with his ex-girlfriend and his daughter (the “wean” as he calls her).  Though Sept. 11 is never mentioned directly, it’s always in the background. For a time Brown works as an airport security guard in the “alien-extraction” section of the airport, and throughout the book people are forever asking for his identification. Because of his subversive politics, Brown carries a Red Card rather than the coveted Green Card.

This is not a story of redemption or one where the main character learns a great lesson. We start with a drunken loser and end with one, but the journey is fascinating.    —P.N.

Gael Fashingbauer Cooper is the Books Editor and Paige Newman is the Movies Editor at MSNBC.com. Kim Rollins is a writer living in Seattle.

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