Books

Nothing to Be Frightened Of
By Julian Barnes
Alfred A. Knopf, 244 pages, $24.95

I’m borderline obsessed by Philip Larkin’s poem “Aubade.” It’s a pitiless meditation on death; a frank confession of fear; a swift rebuke to religion (“That vast, moth-eaten musical brocade”); and a weary recognition that despite the dread moment of personal extinction, life will go on—dawn will come again:

Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.

I’m particularly hung up on the word “rented.” We live in a rented world—and the landlord, alas, can evict us without any notice whatsoever.

In Nothing to Be Frightened Of, his own meandering, book-length meditation on mortality, Julian Barnes calls “Aubade” Larkin’s “great death-poem.  read more »

Stories
By Doris Lessing
Everyman’s Library, 696 pages, $26

Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature as he neared 70, George Bernard Shaw dismissed it as a lifebelt thrown to a swimmer after he has reached the shore. When Doris Lessing got her Nobel last fall—at 88, the oldest person ever to win it—her reaction was as dismissive, saying that she had won “every other bloody prize.” As a writer who had been publishing one book after another for nearly 60 years, Ms. Lessing had long since triumphantly reached the shores of literary success. And in a very real sense, the literature Nobel, notable for ignoring so many of the best writers (starting with Tolstoy in its first 10 awards!), needed her to ornament it far more than she needed it to put a final stamp of approval on a remarkable body of work.  read more »

The Subprime Solution:
How Today’s Global Financial Crisis Happened,
and What to Do About It
By Robert J. Shiller
Princeton University Press, 196 pages, $16.95

Different year, different boom, same Cassandra.

Robert Shiller, the Yale economist who borrowed Alan Greenspan’s phrase “irrational exuberance” for the title of a 2000 book predicting the collapse of the dot-com bubble due to fatally flawed “boom thinking,” has applied the same theory to the short-lived, 85 percent run-up in real estate prices between 1997 and 2006. Repeatedly invoking the Great Depression, he argues that as a corrective, policy makers need to “think and act on the scale of New Deal-era reformers.  read more »

Devout fans of Marilynne Robinson—those still astonished, nearly three decades later, by the poetry of Housekeeping (1980), and those who made the Pulitzer Prize-winning Gilead (2004) into an unlikely best seller—will be thrilled by Home (FSG, $25), which is essentially a second serving of Gilead, though a trifle less intense, softened by the gentle presence of a female protagonist. We’re back in Gilead, Iowa, in the mid-1950s, and we’re as drenched as ever in religion; once again there’s a father figure who’s a preacher, and a complex father-son bond—but this time there’s also Glory, a 38-year-old daughter who’s come home to care for her father, and ends up caring for a black-sheep brother who’s drifted home, too.  read more »

American Wife
By Curtis Sittenfeld
Random House, 558 pages, $26

With American Wife, Curtis Sittenfeld has deftly crossed an extraordinarily high wire: She’s written a book in the voice of a someone we all know, and we come out of it thinking not about whether she got it right but rather why it seems here and there just the tiniest bit wrong. This may sound like a backhanded compliment, but I mean it as a straightforward one. A poorly executed version of the novel would grate with each false note, causing you—O.K., me—to scribble furiously in the margins: THIS is wrong, THIS is unbelievable, THIS is stupid.  read more »

The Spy’s Bedside Book
Edited by Graham Greene and Hugh Greene
Bantam, 252 pages, $12

While Graham Greene and his brother Hugh were compiling The Spy’s Bedside Book, a medley of vignettes of spycraft drawn from fiction, memoirs and historical documents first published in 1957 and now reissued just in time, it seems, for the return of the Cold War, they stumbled upon the deep explanation for why tales of espionage cast so strong a spell over their readers: "I wonder how many would be able to detect truth from fiction in this anthology," Graham writes in the introduction, "if the editors had not printed the names of the contributors.  read more »

Trick or Treatment: The Undeniable Facts About Alternative Medicine
By Simon Singh and Edzard Ernst
W.W. Norton, 352 pages, $25.95

The yearly global expenditure on alternative medicine is $77 billion. To put that number in perspective, consider that the National Institutes of Health 2009 budget for H.I.V./AIDS research is not quite $3 billion, and that Croatia’s gross domestic product is about $51 billion. Granted, if you believe that back-cracking and pin-pricking, energizing lotions and herbal potions actually work, then it’s not unreasonable for the spending on such remedies to exceed a European country’s G.D.P. But in that case—at least according to Simon Singh and Edzard Ernst, authors of Trick or Treatment—you’re a sucker.  read more »

Epilogue: A Memoir
By Anne Roiphe
Harper, 214 pages, $24.95

Reading the opening lines of Epilogue, Anne Roiphe’s memoir about the death of her husband, I felt the same exasperation that I experienced upon learning, also via memoir, that Katha Pollitt can’t drive a car. Ms. Roiphe, apparently, doesn’t know how to open the locked door of her own apartment: "For the 39 years of our marriage, my husband always pulled out his key and opened the door when we returned from an evening out. During the day I left the door unlocked. We had a doorman." (Is it possible that over the span of four decades, Ms.  read more »

Hot, Flat and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution—and How It Can Renew America
By Thomas L. Friedman
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 438 pages, $27.95

There’s always been a Jekyll-and-Hyde quality to Thomas Friedman’s work—one moment he’s smart and decent, the next smarmy, belligerent and glib. The three-time Pulitzer Prize winner has one of the more irritating styles in American punditry, combining regular-guy banalities, endlessly repeated neologisms and subtle condescension (such as when he refers to Doha, Qatar, as a city "you may have never heard of"). He opines against the destructive insanity of Israeli settlement policies in the West Bank, then urges an even more destructive and insane American approach to the Arab world.  read more »

Summer’s almost over, but that doesn’t mean we’re ready to go back to school, back to work, back to the shriek and clank of the city.

Paul Auster’s Man in the Dark (Henry Holt, $23) is set in the "great American wilderness"—or anyway Vermont—and strains, late in the game, to strike a cheery note, but it’s basically dark (see the portentous title) and urban in character, a striving, unhappy, crowded book that wants to do more than it does. A pastoral idyll it ain’t.

Mr. Auster has been trying for decades to squeeze emotional zing into his cerebral concoctions—he succeeded best in Leviathan, 16 years ago.  read more »