Stephen Klaidman, SYDNEY AND VIOLET

I'm not sure whether the lives of Sydney and Violet Schiff could ever be the subject of a successful traditional biography, but I am sure that Stephen Klaidman hasn't written one. There's interesting material here, but it would have been better served at different length or with a different focus. There just isn't enough information about the Schiffs to make a full biographical account: after reporting everything he's been able to scrape up, including random bits of trivia, Klaidman still has to go off on various tangents about their acquaintances and the period to get the book to a paltry 236 pages. Their early lives are such a blank that Sydney's autobiographical novel is pressed into service, perhaps inappropriately, as a source of information, and in the better-documented later years "I don't know" and "must have" remain surprisingly persistent. Even given the structural challenge posed by the subject, the prose is spectacularly unfocused, and sometimes peculiarly informal; it's like reading a very long, rambling e-mail from a smart, enthusiastic friend.

Actually, make that smart, enthusiastic, and opinionated. The writers and artists with whom the Schiffs interacted loved to gossip about and abuse each other, and Klaidman feels obliged to offer a nuanced (one might say needlessly elaborate) opinion on the fairness of each salvo. Letters are the primary record of the Schiffs' relationships with the figures mentioned in the subtitle, so a good portion of the book is Klaidman describing each piece of correspondence. It's not that the letters aren't interesting. In fact, they're interesting enough in their emotional and intellectual volatility that I began to wish Klaidman had simply published them, and relevant excerpts from other writings, without his own editorial commentary. For all his small-scale opinion-sharing, Klaidman never manages to make either Sydney or Violet come to life as individuals, or to offer a meaningful overall reading of Sydney's little-known novels. The account of the modernist circle with which the Schiffs were associated is too scattershot to work as anything more than an enticement toward other, better books on the subject. Enthusiasts of the period may find one or two interesting nuggets here, but general readers are likely to get lost in a welter of names, feuds, and opinions. The book ends by quoting a letter T. S. Eliot wrote to accompany Violet's obituary, in which he expressed "the hope that some future chronicler of the history of art and letters in our time may give to [the Schiffs] the place which is their due." I couldn't tell you what that place is, which leaves me pretty confident that Stephen Klaidman, despite obvious effort and enthusiasm, is not that chronicler.

Drew Karpyshyn, CHILDREN OF FIRE

A few promising elements can't save tie-in novelist Drew Karpyshyn's unfocused and occasionally overwrought first original novel, but they do suggest that the remaining two volumes of this epic fantasy trilogy might be more worthwhile. The plot is standard-- four children born with the power to defeat the imprisoned, soon-to-escape Dark Lord-- but the novel is darker and at least somewhat less morally simplistic than that description might suggest. The characters aren't terribly well-rounded (neither, for that matter, is the world-building), but except for the Dark Lord no important figure is sneeringly evil or impossibly good, and the nature of the magic system leaves even the noble-hearted susceptible to terrible error. The novel's chief flaw is structural: it starts when the four protagonists are born, and the first half is full of redundant scenes in which tertiary characters who will soon disappear from the narrative discover the gifts of these children of fire. It's eventful and fast-paced on its own terms, but doesn't build much momentum. By the second half the overall arc of the story is clearer, though the arrival of several of the Dark Lord's demonic underlings brings out an unfortunate pulpy quality in the prose ("Cracks of thunder drowned out their foul words of evil sorcery"). Despite an action-packed final sequence the novel stops rather than reaching a real ending; one storyline in particular is awkwardly parked, separate from the main action, with a hundred pages to go. But various conflicts among the protagonists and their allies will leave many readers eager for next year's sequels, and if the urgency of the last hundred pages is maintained, the trilogy may yet recover from the awkwardness of this opening installment.

D. F. Lewis, HORROR WITHOUT VICTIMS

Horror Without Victims is the latest original anthology from D. F. Lewis, whose previous titles The Horror Anthology of Horror Anthologies and The First Book of Classical Horror Stories I've also reviewed. This new volume, like its predecessors, is an uneven but rewarding read, in which great, polished stories sit alongside work that needed a bit more editorial intervention before seeing the light of day. There are, however, no absolute failures; the lowest points are muddled and stylistically awkward but not embarrassing. And the high points, if lower than in previous volumes, are comparable to what you'd get in big-name volumes.

As with Lewis' previous anthologies, the theme is in the title. "Horror without victims" is more abstract than "horror with horror athologies" or "horror with classical music," and as such the stories are more varied, though certain forms recur: horror that has no victims because its targets are depressive enough to welcome desolation, horror that has no victims because some things are disturbing despite the absence of harm, horror that has no victims because people invite what happens to them. Sometimes it's a little hard to tell how the stories fit the theme. Author's notes would have helped here, but there are none, nor is there an introduction or a list of contributor biographies; I wish Lewis would move toward including these things in his anthologies. They're non-essential, yes, but they contribute to the sense of polish.

I don't feel like being harsh at the moment, so I'm going to pass over discussing the stories I didn't like and focus on those I did. (If you really want negativity, leave a comment and I'll tear into something.) The anthology starts strongly with John Howard's "Embrace the Fall of Night," which like so much of his work is elegant philosophical horror, a monologue about the cosmic, the cold, and the inevitability of entropy. Patricia Russo's "For Ages and Ever" is perhaps the best of several "welcoming-to-horror" stories, a stylish second-person meditation on rules and freedom, with a surrealist edge. "Like Nothing Else" by Christopher Morris is an effective variation on a familiar theme of transgressive science fiction. In "Scree," Caleb Wilson takes us to a strange place where nightmare logic defies the attempt to find normality. Wilson has a particular gift for unexpected narrative turns that aren't superficially scary, but re unsettling on a deeper level.

Several fine short pieces near the end of the volume mean that it leaves us on a high note. Michael Sidman's "The Yellow See-Through Baby" is a quirkily funny yet poignant story about a childhood milestone, while Tony Lovell's "The Callers" is a subdued but surprisingly effective psychological piece about loneliness, decline, and uncertainty. "Still Life" by Nick Jackson is more a prose poem than a story, but a fine one, and in "You in Your Small Corner, and I in Mine," Bob Lock offers a twist on horror without victims that, though in retrospect it's obvious, I didn't see coming. Looking back at the anthology, which I read over a long period due to various demands on my time, I'm surprised anew at how varied it is, and how many of its stories I liked at least a little. There are really only a couple whose removal would actually improve the anthology, which isn't a bad ratio at all. Whatever their skill level, the writers Lewis selects for his anthologies almost always have worthwhile ideas, which is more than I can say for a lot of technically competent but hopelessly derivative professionals. Horror without Victims is an unusual anthology that makes up for its deficits with a range of enjoyable stories.

The editor supplied a review copy of this book.

Corey Mead, WAR PLAY

Corey Mead's dry but serviceable overview of the use of video games in various aspects of military recruitment, training, and medical treatment is marred by a disinclination to engage in critical thinking about the consequences of these new trends. After reviewing the history of educational and technological innovation within the military, he turns to more recent developments, from the professionally-developed recruiting tool America's Army to increasingly elaborate training simulations to programs designed to help traumatized veterans come to terms with post-military life. At times the accounts are repetitive, a bombardment of Army acronyms and very similar quotes about the benefits of video game use, but the book is too slim for this to become a serious issue. The absence of any real analysis on Mead's part is more significant.

It's not so much that he's unwilling to question the military's use of video games (though tellingly the great success of America's Army gets a full chapter while the failure of Full Spectrum Warrior is relegated to a footnote) as that the issues he raises are all functional rather than moral. He'll ask whether certain training tools work in achieving military objectives, but not whether those objectives are justifiable. Unacknowledged questions abound. Is it acceptable to target adolescents for military service using a video game that, however superficially realistic, cannot capture the nature of actual military service? What does that do to their understanding of the nature of wartime violence, especially in an age when drone warfare kills people at the push of a button? Mead quotes a couple replies to such questions by military sources, but doesn't mention the obvious fact that they're dodging rather than answering. He's plainly more comfortable with the therapeutic games than with the violent ones, but rather than follow that discomfort and write a complicated, searching book, he's produced an account the military itself might have written. It's all true, and worth reading if you don't know the subject well, but it could have been so much more.

Julian Barnes, LEVELS OF LIFE

I don't know whether I would call Julian Barnes' new book a collection of linked essays or a monograph, but I do know that I admired it very much. At first I was hesitant: it begins with a decent but rather workmanlike account of early ballooning and aerial photography that only (ahem) rises to the level of art near the end, in considering how these new hobbies changed human attitudes toward religion and human endeavor. A second section, more short story than essay, recounts a love affair, of sorts, between Sarah Bernhardt and Frederick Burnaby, both of whom once went up in balloons; it's a reasonably charming evocation of devotion and desire on the part of two colorful characters, but it doesn't add up to much, and is easily the least relevant chunk of the book. Happily, the third and longest section redeems the first by tying the metaphors of ballooning into a succinct, devastating memoir of grief. Barnes grasps what so many writers do not, that death, "that banal, unique thing," is not easy to write meaningfully about, its very familiarity rendering its intensity almost impossible to capture. The brevity of this account works to its benefit (indeed, despite only running about 60 pages of large print, it may be slightly too long). Barnes moves briskly but devastatingly through his own loss, describing scattered experiences that combine to create a web of references, bringing order to the chaos of memory and allowing humor to leaven the intensity (he critiques the phrase "lost his wife to cancer," juxtaposing it with "We lost our dog to gypsies" and "He lost his wife to a commercial traveler"). The experience of the book, defined by the unexpected connections and callbacks, can't be captured in a review. It's not that Barnes has new insights into grief; I don't think there have been any of those for a very long time. But his style has a disjointed yet organized poetry that brings home the weight of grief, how it hits over and over like waves on a shore. This book will only take an hour or two to read, and at that length, it's almost certainly worth your time.

Luke Barr, PROVENCE, 1970

A gift for sprightly narrative non-fiction enlivens Luke Barr's account of several famous food writers, including his great-aunt M.F.K. Fisher, in France in 1970. They ate together, enjoyed the countryside together, and gossiped together, often about each other. It's all a bit too highbrow to be considered "dirt," but there's certainly enough sniping and snobbery to fill out an episode of a reality TV show. Conflicts within the group weren't merely a matter of pettiness, though; they also reflected different approaches to French and American cooking, preferences for hybridization and utility (Fisher, Julia Child, James Beard) vs. authenticity and difficulty (Richard Olney, Simone Beck). It's not hard to tell whose side Barr is on-- if we hadn't already guessed from his being related to one of them, the choice of names in the subtitle would give it away-- but he's clearly made some effort to be judicious, and clearly respects the principles, if not the individuals, on the opposing side.

The subtitle also promises "the Reinvention of American Taste," but doesn't really deliver: to the extent that it has occurred at all (I think well-to-do writers like Barr often lose sight of how most Americans continue to eat), it had already been created by these key players at the time they arrived in Provence. Fisher and Child were at points of professional or intellectual transition, yes, but the significance of that was more personal than national. And it's on the personal level that Provence, 1970 succeeds, as a romantic portrait of colorful characters exploring their passions in a picturesque setting. Barr tells the story well, balancing light biographical detail with charming incident and fascinating descriptions of culinary methods. An epilogue describing Barr's own visit to Provence is a fine piece of writing on its own merits, but somewhat jarring attached to the historical material. One wonders if it wasn't included in part to pad out what is not a physically substantial book. In any case, this is delightful reading. I wouldn't necessarily recommend it to those utterly unfamiliar with the people involved-- there isn't enough background to give readers who know nothing about the period a sense of just what was at stake and where everyone was coming from-- but if you're already an admirer of Fisher, Child, Beard, Olney, or Beck, this is an excellent window into the social world of the people who brought French cooking into the American mainstream.

Margaret Drabble, THE PURE GOLD BABY

The cover copy would have you believe that the subject of Margaret Drabble's new book is motherhood, but though that's certainly a topic of interest in this rich, wide-ranging novel, I'd say a bigger issue in The Pure Gold Baby is change. Drabble's first novel was published exactly fifty years ago, when she was in her early twenties, which is not so far off from the characters and the historical moment with which this novel begins, and the narrator offers a steady stream of reflections on how different the world was at that time. The force of that difference is made especially evident by contrast with title character Anna, the mentally-challenged daughter of protagonist Jess, who is much the same in her forties as she was in childhood. Jess delayed a possible career in anthropology to become a single mother, and when Anna's difficulties became evident, the delay became permanent. Both are happy with their conjoined lives, at least to the extent that Anna's emotional state can be determined. But the possibility raised by the Plath quote in the title, of a darker side to their relationship, is one of the undercurrents beneath the novel's placid surface.

The narrator is another member of Jess' social circle, bright young things of the 1960s literary and intellectual world. Too smart to be cheaply nostalgic, she is nonetheless all too aware of how the physical world of her youth has disappeared, and of how beliefs and practices have developed over time, especially in terms of how an implicitly white, male, and psychologically stable elite relates to women, racial minorities, and the mentally ill. There may be a few too many of these "We wouldn't have called it that then" asides, but in the main Drabble strikes a good balance between reflection and other forms of thematic momentum, using the narrator's crisp recollections to remind readers, as only an elder (but not yet "elderly") novelist can, of how much things change within a single lifetime. She describes the characters-- poets, producers of TV documentaries, charity executives-- in a way that evokes that time and place without creating a caricature; it's a group of people, not an over-elaborate portrait of an era, and the course of the narrative is shaped by credible events rather than contrived dramas. A deep, humanist sympathy is evident throughout, an awareness of universal frailty that's never soppy or morally feeble. Drabble understands the tragedy of growing old, of not being able to control one's body or mind. There may be ambiguities in Jess and Anna's relationship, but it's not due to any failing in either of them; it's simply the nature of our imperfect capacity to connect with one another.

There are novels that succeed by examining a single theme, character, or situation in ruthless clarity, and there are novels that succeed by tangling several issues in a way that reflects the complexity of life as it is actually lived. This is one of the latter. It would take many more words than I'm prepared to write to explain how this novel weaves together care homes, Dr. Livingston, Pearl Buck, and a doctor who specializes in bladder ailments. But I should emphasize that the flow of the narrative is so natural these intellectual concerns never feel shoehorned in, or like work. Drabble is unafraid to be flatly expository where necessary, allowing her to cover simple material more succinctly than the unnecessary application of "show don't tell" would allow. The result is a novel of three hundred pages with the richness of an epic, punctuated by dry asides ("Air terrorism has had some small beneficial side effects, and the habit of carrying resealable plastic bags on one's person is one of them") and tangential pieces of elegant or moving description. I say that this is a novel about change, but really that's not true: there are books that not "about" anything but the world and characters they describe. In that sense, then, this is a novel about how certain aspects of the 21st century look to London academics and writers who lived through much of the 20th. It can be read and enjoyed simply as a story about a group of characters, but its real power is as a compendium of linked observations on past and present, health and illness, change and stasis. Some readers may be put off by the lack of an obvious narrative or thematic focus, but I for one prefer such complexity to overly-detailed elaboration of overly-familiar themes. The Pure Gold Baby was my first Margaret Drabble novel, and it won't be my last.