C4


S BOOK WORLD NEW IN PAPERBACK by Nora Krug


sophical Baby (Picador, $16), is that “practically everything you say turns out to sound like a greeting card.” But that hasn’t stopped Gopnik, a philosopher and a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, from having a lot to say about them. “Many profound questions about human nature can be answered by thinking about children,” she explains, in- cluding those “about imagina- tion, truth, consciousness, and also identity, love, and morality.” That’s a lot of profundity for some very small shoulders (and some might say it has the ring of a greeting-card platitude). But Gopnik mines science and philos- ophy to illustrate, effectively, how many of the central qualities of children — imagination, lack of inhibition, curiosity — help us un- derstand human nature. She ex- plains, for example, how imagi- nary play and early learning


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he problem with writing about children, Alison Gop- nik admits in The Philo-


about cause-and-effect foster the “evolutionary advantages” of be- ing able to “think about future, past, and present possible worlds.” And those “noes” of the terrible twos? Maybe not so ter- rible: “Being able to say ‘no’ and ‘uh-oh,’ ” she writes, “immediately puts you in the world of the counterfactual and the possible — the road not taken, the possibility that isn’t real.” In other words, childish negativity primes us for the capacity to change and grow for the better. Such insights may offer little practical help to the parent struggling with a child’s tantrum, but understanding the young mind may be the most valuable step toward figuring out how to manage it. At age 27, Christopher R. Beha found himself in something of an existential crisis — feeling not only detached but also detached from his “sense of detachment, alienated from [his] own alien- ation,” he explains in The Whole Five Feet (Grove, $14). He’d sur- vived Princeton and cancer, had recently gotten a promotion at a job he didn’t love and broken up with a girl he still loved. His debt


Insights into the very — and not so very — young


was mounting, his novel re- mained unpublished, and he’d moved back into his parents’ Manhattan home. “This attack, such as it was,” he writes, was “not wholly unexpected.” But rather than seek solace in the kind of things that make for racy mem- oirs — drugs, sex, alcohol — Beha finds a far more wholesome rem- edy: the Harvard Classics, a 51- volume anthology also known as the five-foot shelf, that comprises works by the likes of Plato, Cer- vantes, Emerson and Martin Lu- ther. In “The Whole Five Feet,” Beha chronicles the year he spent im- mersed in these volumes. Part memoir, part Western-literature survey, the book is less gimmicky than its premise suggests. Beha’s initial romantic notions — read- ing and ruminating while sipping wine at a Manhattan cafe — are interrupted by real life: the death of an aunt and his own illnesses.


“The one common feature of all these books,” he concludes, “was precisely the fact that they kept sending me back into the world.”


From our previous reviews


Ward Just revisits the inner cir- cles of Washington, D.C., in Exiles in the Garden (Mariner, $14.95), a novel about a senator’s son who chooses journalism over politics. Jonathan Yardley, who included the book on his 2009 favorites list, praised its subtle and sensitive portrayal of a father, a son and the city that shaped them. As a family gathers to mourn its


patriarch, its dysfunction is laid bare — to darkly comedic effect — in Jonathan Tropper’s novel This Is Where I Leave You (Plume, $15). Carolyn See suggested the book as a worthy diversion “on a dreaded family holiday.” Kate Walbert weaves the per- sonal and the political in A Short History of Women (Scribner,


$15), a family saga told through the lives of five generations of its female members. Valerie Sayers called the book “a witty and as- sured testament to the women’s movement and women writers, obscure and renowned.” Former Book World editor Ma-


rie Arana “draws on her knowl- edge of Peruvian culture and poli- tics” in Lima Nights (Dial, $15), a compelling novel about an un- likely couple that “shows us how easy it is to deceive ourselves and others when following a forbid- den path of sex and love,” wrote Frances Itani. Lit (Harper, $14.99), Mary


Karr’s third memoir, “is a story not just of alcoholism but of com- ing to terms with families past and present,” according to Valerie Sayers. Ron Charles described Colson Whitehead’s “wise, affectionate novel” Sag Harbor (Anchor, $15.95) as “a kind of black ‘Brigh- ton Beach Memoirs’ ” that’s “spiced with the anxieties of be- ing African American in a culture determined to dictate what that means.” Wildflower (Random House,


$15), by Mark Seal, tells the story of Joan Root, “an extraordinary adventurer,”


environmentalist


and filmmaker who died mysteri- ously in Kenya in 2006, according to Rachel Saslow. In K Blows Top (PublicAffairs,


$14.95) former Post writer Peter Carlson “does a marvelous job of recounting” Nikita Khrushchev’s 1959 visit to America, “one of the most outlandish episodes in the annals of Cold War history,” ac- cording to Jacob Heilbrunn. Woody Holton’s biography Abi- gail Adams (Free Press, $18) stands out in its portrayal of the wife of President John Adams “not as a forerunner of modern feminism but as an 18th-century woman making the best of a diffi- cult situation,” wrote Rosemarie Zagarri. Psychoanalyst Adam Phillips and historian Barbara Taylor re- veal “the complexity of a simple- seeming virtue” in On Kindness (Picador, $13), according to Mi- chael Dirda.


krugn@washpost.com


Krug reviews paperbacks monthly for The Post.


KLMNO


WEDNESDAY, JULY 28, 2010


LITERARY CALENDAR 7.28 | Marie Arana, a writer-at-large for The Washington Post and a Kluge Distinguished Scholar at the Library of Congress, discusses her latest novel, “Lima Nights,” at Politics and Prose Bookstore, 5015 Connecticut Ave. NW, 202-364-1919, at 7 p.m.


In ‘Sad’ world, everybody’s watching book world from C1


ire from growing too brittle is Lenny’s earnest voice as he strug- gles to fit into a world that clearly has no more use for him. (Raise your Wii if you know what I mean.) He opens his diary with


the declaration that he’s fallen madly in love with a grim, ano- rexic Korean woman named Eu- nice Park. Much younger, in- finitely more hip and completely in sync with the glittery e-cul- ture, Eunice is a well-educated woman with a major in Images


and a minor in Assertiveness. She’s a sad, anxious poster child for “The Shallows,”


Nicholas


“This book could transform the way we understand presidential campaigns. The Obama Victory...could force a major shift in the fi nancing of campaign coverage.” — Thomas B. Edsall, The New Republic


Carr’s new book about what the Internet does to our brains. Len- ny’s diary entries are inter- spersed with her e-mails written in a futuristic Internet patois, which allows us to follow the su- per sad trajectory of their love story as the United States col- lapses. Like “Chronic City,” Jonathan


Lethem’s dystopic vision of a near-future New York, Shteyn- gart’s novel is light on plot but studded with hilarious and sometimes depressing details of our culture’s decay. He’s blended the competing nightmares of Sa- rah Palin and Nancy Pelosi to imagine the worst of both worlds, ruled by a bu- reaucratic monster called the Bipartisan Party. It hardly feels like any distance into the future at all when Eunice cries, “Oh, what has happened to us, Lenny?” Mega-corporations


like UnitedContinen- talDeltamerican and ColgatePalmoliveY- um!BrandViacom- Credit dwarf the gov- ernment’s


power;


health care, education and transportation have been privatized with disastrous ef- fects; citizens live at the mercy of gyrating currency and credit markets; the poor and the old are deported to make room for ex- clusive Lifestyle Hubs. The United States is a crumbling police state, buried in debt to the Chinese (as if) and stuck in a crippling war with Venezuela (get ready, Hugo!). Our last futile hope is a rousing new marketing campaign: “Together We’ll Surprise the World!”


But Shteyngart’s most trench- “Smart, groundbreaking


and full of surprises… Sharply written and brilliantly documented, this is the book


for anyone interested in politics.” —Andrea Mitchell, NBC News


“The best analysis of a presidential election in 60 years...A game changer


for scholars, pundits and strategists.” —Samuel Popkin, author of The Reasoning Voter


NOW AVAILABLE WHEREVER BOOKS ARE SOLD WWW.OUP.COM/US


1


ant satire depicts the inane, hyp- er-sexualized culture that con- nects everybody even while de- stroying any actual community or intimacy. This may be the only time I’ve wanted to stand up on the subway and read passages of a book out loud. In these pages BlackBerrys have evolved into something called an äppärät, an irresistible multipurpose device for shopping, scanning and “ver- balling” our pornographic lives in real time over the “Global- Teens” network. Only the young- est children actually speak be- fore “retreating into the dense clickety-clack äppärät world of their absorbed mothers and missing fathers.” Privacy, of course, is as quaint as a Victrola — sexual preferences, credit rat- ings and cholesterol levels are broadcast nonstop — and every- one continually rates everyone else on an 800-point scale for personality and sexiness in the most salacious terms imagin- able. I’m tempted to “friend” Facebook founder Mark Zucker- berg and “message” him these scenes one by one. Most of the story swings on gallows humor aimed at anyone


You can smell


Shteyngart sweating to stay one step ahead of the decaying world he’s trying to satirize.


fusty enough to still be reading novels — or, worse, reviews of novels. Eunice is horrified by Lenny’s devotion to his smelly old books: “I was so embarrassed I just stood there and watched him read which lasted for like HALF AN HOUR.” Her friend texts back: “Maybe you guys can read to each other in bed or something. And then you can sew your own clothes. HA HA HA.” Of course, the rest of what we might call literary culture is a shambles, too. In the New York Lifestyle Times, bits of political analysis are sometimes dropped into the stories about new prod- ucts, and the nightly news is de- livered by a naked muscleman being sodomized. Perhaps the saddest aspect of this “Super Sad True Love Story” is that you can smell Shteyngart sweating to stay one step ahead of the decay- ing world he’s trying to satirize. It’s an al- most impossible race now that the ex- hibitionism of ordi- nary people has lost its ability to shock us. Just try coming up with something creepier than mid- dle school girls wearing shorts with the word “Juicy” across their bot- toms, or imagine a fashion line cruder than FCUK (Shteyn- gart comes close). His description of friends getting to- gether after work to text other friends is taking place today in every D.C. restau- rant. And how can you parody the TV news coverage when George Stephano- poulos has already presented a straight- faced report on


Lindsay Lohan’s obscene finger- nail stencil? The only bulwark against de-


spair, Shteyngart suggests with a nod to Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach,” is our fidelity to those we love, the persistence of affection on a darkling plain lit only by giddy advertisements. What a tender, haunting moment, late in the story, when Lenny finds an old copy of “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” and actually tries reading it to Eunice in bed, as her friend once joked he would. It’s a brilliantly apropos novel to pull down from his an- tique Wall of Books, but is it still possible to comprehend Milan Kundera’s rich, existential story about the search for meaning during the Prague Spring? May- be. The best satire is always grounded in optimism: faith in the writer’s power to gibe and ca- jole a dormant conscience to re- form. And if that doesn’t work, well, the future really isn’t very far away after all, and we should listen to Lenny’s ever-younger boss: “Brush up on your Norwe- gian and Mandarin.” charlesr@washpost.com


Charles is the fiction editor of Book World. You can follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/roncharles.


Alexander McCall Smith


TARA MURPHY Tales of the city


CORDUROY MANSIONS By Alexander McCall Smith Pantheon. 368 pp. $24.95


by Eugenia Zukerman


tive Agency,” Alexander McCall Smith seems to be exploring new genres. He recently pub- lished a stand-alone novel, “La’s Orchestra Saves the World,” about a World War II romance with a musical background. Now, with “Corduroy Man- sions,” set in contemporary Lon- don, he cooks up a delicious story that seems part Restora- tion comedy and part Victorian novel, tossed with a dash of mystery and a dollop of satire. “Corduroy Mansions” is like the cloth of its title — comfort- able, easy, homey. Illustrated whimsically by Iain McIntosh, these short chapters or vignettes evoke the serial magazine writ- ing of another era. Character names, too, seem to be ahomage to British writers of the past — Swift, Fielding, Dickens — who were fond of descriptive appel- lations such as Roger Thwack- um, the nasty tutor in “Tom Jones.” In “Corduroy Mansions,” an “oleaginous MP” is named Oedipus Snark; his putative girl- friend is Barbara Ragg; there’s a writer named Errol Greatorex; and a neighbor, Miss Oiseau, who has “a thin, reedy voice.” The story begins with William Edward French, a widower, 51, self-described as “average height, very slightly overweight . . . no distinguishing features. Not dangerous, but approach with caution.” A wine dealer, William lives in Corduroy Man- sions with Eddie, the adult slack- er son he dearly wishes to off-


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he prolific author of four popular series, including “The No. 1 Ladies’ Detec-


load. Marcia, a caterer, has an unrequited taste for William and therefore also wishes to remove Eddie from the scene. She has a key to William’s flat and tries to entice him with her cooking. Sometimes he comes home to discover “a plate of only-the- tiniest-bit-soggy chicken vol-au- vents, or cocktail sausages im- paled on little sticks, like pupae in a butterfly collection.” Filled with charming eccen- trics, “Corduroy Mansions” is like a small 18th-century village with big 21st-century angst and insecurities. Thrown into this mix are four young women who share a flat on the floor below William, along with Basil Wick- ramsinghe, an accountant, and assorted non-residents. There’s also a vegetarian dog, Freddie de la Hay, a former “sniffer dog at Heathrow Airport,” who is brought in by William to scare off his canine-phobic son. Ber- thea Snark, Oedipus’s psycho- analyst mother, who hates her son (“I’ve been visited by dreams in which I have done something terrible to him”), features importantly, as does her brother, the ditzy Terence Moongrove. The discovery of a possibly


stolen Poussin painting provides a McGuffin, as does a manu- script written by a yeti (a.k.a. the abominable snowman). McCall Smith, a master of weaving the many strands of his complex sto- ries together, does so here with supreme virtuosity. He satirizes the manners and mores of his characters and their society but, as always, remains deeply affec- tionate toward his flawed cast. And so, Dear Reader,will you. bookworld@washpost.com


Zukerman is a flutist, the author of four books, artistic director of the Vail Valley Music Festival and founder of ClassicalGenie.com.


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