winter READING
E
very year, selecting the few books that we’ll review in
the annual Winter Reading section is a challenge. We
have to pick early, so we don’t always know what we’ll
want from the fall publications; we have to pick widely
so we don’t overload on young adult fiction, historical
fiction, food-centric nonfiction or whatever else we’ve
been heavily reading during the year. This year, we’ve managed to sus-
tain a fairly regular books column, meaning some things we might have
included here (Oregon Book Award fiction finalists, for example), have
already been reviewed in EW’s pages. We’ve written about Harry Potter
and the Deathly Hallows and Alex Ross’s The Rest is Noise; we’ve
reviewed debut novels, nonfiction love letters to lost magazines and new
books from UO professors such as Lauren Kessler and Ehud Havazelet.
But we can never get it all, much as we’d like to (though we’re not quite
finished; check next week for one last 2007 books column and a few
last-minute gift suggestions!).
Winter Reading, then, isn’t exactly a best of the year reading list;
instead, we like to think of it a bit like the way Douglas Wolk explains
the comics he chose to discuss in his engrossing, entertaining Reading
Comics: They’re just some of the books we found interesting to read,
review and, hopefully, discuss. We hope you’ll find a few things of inter-
est in here, too. — Molly Templeton
fiction
Fire Water Burn
prisoner in order to stop the madness is
the “hinge of the novel, its heart of dark-
ness, and the rest of the story’s events
radiate from that point, forward and back-
ward in time, with an impressive symme-
try.” This two-part structure allows
Johnson to frame the war in its dominant
tropes: unable to withdraw, unable to
advance and doomed to repetition (the
very definition of hell).
The story proper follows freshman CIA
operative William “Skip” Sands as he is
sent to the jungles of Southeast Asia to
work for his uncle, Col. Francis X. Sands,
who commands a small brigade despite
the fact he’s retired from the U.S. military.
Skip researches local folklore for his uncle
— who believes war is “90 percent myth”
— while his patience and patriotism are
slowly corroded. Tree of Smoke collects
the myths of that era, boils them in a pot
and adds dashes of Apocalypse Now!, The
Quiet American and a host of other literary
references to make this searing, violent
novel a work of strange beauty — with
knowing winks. — Chuck Adams
TREE OF SMOKE by Denis Johnson.
Sparkling in the Cold
FARRAR, STRAUS & GIROUX, 2007. HARDCOVER, $27. WINNER, 2007
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION. A NEW YORK TIMES BEST
LET THE NORTHERN LIGHTS ERASE
YOUR NAME by Vendela Vida. ECCO, 2007.
BOOK OF 2007.
HARDCOVER, $23.95. A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2007.
The Vietnam War gets its first great
postmodern treatment in Denis Johnson’s
sprawling, cautionary epic Tree of Smoke.
The author of Jesus’ Son, the widely
praised minimalist collection of short sto-
ries about junkies and thieves, brings us a
maximalist novel that begins with John F.
Kennedy’s assassination, crescendos with
the Tet offensive and gently recedes from
this tumultuous time period to a coda set
in the corporate cool of 1983. It is as dar-
ing in its structure as in its ambition.
As Laura Miller correctly observed in a
review for Salon, a scene where army
grunts torture a Viet Cong prisoner
because their sergeant was injured and a
colonel must intervene and execute the
Vendela Vida doesn’t waste any time.
Her second novel begins with a young
woman on a plane that’s landing in Helsinki.
When the driver of the shuttle that takes
her to her hotel calls, she feels only relief
that it’s not her fiancé. What brings this
woman, Clarissa, so far from her New York
home is carefully and quickly revealed: The
day of her father’s funeral, she found that
he wasn’t her biological father and that her
fiancé had known this for years. Feeling
betrayed and rootless — her mother left
when she was 14 — Clarissa took off for
Finland, the home of the man whose name
was on her birth certificate.
In the cold, far north of Lapland, Clarissa
finds the Sami priest she thinks is her
16 DECEMBER 13, 2007
father, and she meets a young reindeer
herder whose aunt, a healer, takes her in.
And, in her self-imposed exile from every-
one she knew before, she finds both ques-
tions and answers. Let the Northern Lights
Erase Your Name is a literary cousin to
Diana Abu-Jaber’s Origin, which also con-
cerns a woman in search of her own histo-
ry in a cold, beautifully evoked setting. Vida
is more concerned with the people than the
place, though. While Abu-Jaber painted icy,
gray portraits of upstate New York, where
her protagonist searched for a murderer
and herself, Vida’s Clarissa notes the red
frostbite scar on the face of Henrik, who
helps on her quest, and the movement of
the hands of Eero, the man she thinks is
her father. As Clarissa explores the story of
the year her mother came to this small
northern town, when the indigenous Sami
protested the building of a dam that would
flood one of their towns, her own tale over-
laps with her mother’s in ways even more
difficult than the burden of family and the
habit of running away. Vida writes with clar-
ity and grace, giving us an aching, lost girl,
not always sympathetic but always grieving,
always searching. Her small book has a
coolness that’s not the product of distance,
though it’s something like it; isolating her-
self in an isolated, frozen land, Clarissa puts
space between herself and the things she
both wants and fears to know. But it’s a
space that somehow serves to pull a read-
er in, a suggestion of warmth in a land of
ice, snow and memory. — Molly Templeton
place. In Thomaston, a town in upstate
N.Y., parents work, and often work over,
their children; 40 years later, the children’s
paths will cross again. The book seeming-
ly weighs in on the side of small-town life
with occasional jaunts to other places, for
the characters who end up the happiest
(and, of course, still alive) stay where
they’re planted. They don’t up and flee to
Paris and Venice; they don’t pursue their
large dreams; they don’t do anything but
try to live the best and most honest way
they can.
Or do they? Sarah and Noonan are
both painters, but only Noonan has fame.
In fact, Noonan never painted a thing until
he escaped the dye-stained stream of
Thomaston, where the tannery has been
poisoning its residents slowly and surely.
And Sarah, whose artistic gift, readers are
given to learn, is quite large, remains most-
ly content with teaching the occasional
high school art
class. Meanwhile
Lynch, jovial and
sentimental, writes
about his past in a
way that both
shines a light on
his parents’ mar-
riage and obscures
his emotions and
some of his less
honorable actions, which we nevertheless
discover as Sarah and Noonan weigh in.
Russo’s plot goes off the rails about 75
pages from the end of the lengthy book,
which encompasses almost all of Lynch’s
life; it’s as if he thought Lynch somehow
needed more explanation while the story-
line needed another character. Neither is
true, and the melodrama of the Noonan
narrative thread ends with a whimper as
Lynch and Sarah soldier on. From Lynch’s
point of view, things are pretty much just
fine, but we know his reliability has its lim-
its. We also know that parents damage
their children in various and sundry ways
and that the next generations already
show damage and partial recovery, all
based around the corner grocery.
— Suzi Steffen
Mr. Hooper Lives Upstate
BRIDGE OF SIGHS by Richard Russo.
KNOPF, 2007. HARDCOVER, $26.95. A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK
OF 2007.
The thing about writing in the first per-
son is that it’s very challenging to give any
kind of outside view on your character.
Perhaps the most famous 20th century
first-person work, Lolita, reveals its narra-
tor’s untrustworthiness early on and never
looks back. But in Richard Russo’s new
work, his first novel since the Pulitzer
Prize-winning Empire Falls, he alternates
first-person chapters in the voice of con-
venience store owner Louis C. (“Lucy”)
Lynch with third-person chapters about
Lynch’s two main touchstones: his some-
time-friend, Robert Noonan, and Sarah
Berg, who has been married to Lynch for
years. Russo chronicles the small class
differences in mostly white, blue-collar
towns like no one else, and in Bridge he
also writes brilliantly about the ways chil-
dren learn to become adults in such a
The Graces, Revealed
THE GREAT MAN by Kate Christensen.
DOUBLEDAY, 2007. HARDCOVER, $23.95.
In Jacob’s Room, Virginia Woolf con-
structed the young man of the title by hav-
ing a variety of characters talk about him
and around him. He’s not there, and dis-
covering why opens up a vision of loss