2 of 4

5. The Final Solution. Michael Chabon (Fourth Estate). Pastiches of Sherlock Holmes are a dime a dozen, and while the good ones are delectable I tend to avoid the genre. What Michael Chabon has produced is not only a brilliant homage to Holmes and his creator—a story set in 1944, imagining the great detective as a very old man—but the single most accomplished work of fiction I read this year, joyful and sorrowful in full measure. First published a year earlier in The Paris Review, this novella brims over with great talent exuberantly put to work. (The audio version, read by Michael York, is superb.) A review is coming in our May/June issue. And speaking of matters Holmesian, have you checked out The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, edited by Leslie Klinger (Norton)? The two-volume slipcased set includes all the short stories; the longer tales in the canon will be gathered in a single volume to be published in 2005, completing the set.

6. The Finishing School. Muriel Spark (Doubleday). This little novel—really a novella too; why not call a spade a spade?—got mostly lukewarm notices from American reviewers, some of whom even suggested that the length of the book alone made it suspect. Others used it as a point of departure to talk about Spark's books that Really Matter. What a pity. This marvelously deft and enigmatic tale centers on a very precocious young novelist—still a teenager—and his jealous teacher. It has all the qualities that make Spark Spark, above all the irreducible strangeness. (Speaking of novellas, did you see the wonderful Shanahan cartoon in the Christmas issue of the New Yorker?)

7. Florence of Arabia. Christopher Buckley (Random House). As a very funny writer and the son of a very famous man, Christopher Buckley is doubly disqualified from being taken seriously. He is certainly among the most underrated novelists at large these days. His new book, as good satire always does, eludes the familiar political categories. Set largely in a fictitious Middle Eastern kingdom with a strong resemblance to Saudi Arabia, it offers a bracing contrast both to the careful banalities of the Bush Administration and to the tiptoeing interpreters of the "Arab world." Wonderfully entertaining, yes, but the story comes with a wicked punch that leaves the reader unsettled.

8. Ira Foxglove. Thomas McMahon (Brook Street). McMahon, who died in 1999 at the age of 55 from complications after surgery, was a scientist with an endowed chair at Harvard University. He was also a marvelously idiosyncratic novelist. To the three novels published during his lifetime—Principles of American Nuclear Chemistry (yes, that is one of his novels—a fictionalized account of Los Alamos, among other things), McKay's Bees, and Loving Little Egypt, all reissued in paperback a year ago by University of Chicago Press—we can now add a fourth, written 30-odd years ago (we're told) and discovered by his daughter among McMahon's papers. It's the story of a winsomely eccentric inventor and a love story, too; and it features a trans-Atlantic flight by blimp. (It's also the most suited of all McMahon's books to be made into a movie; I hope someone good takes that on.)

9. The Undressed Art: Why We Draw. Peter Steinhart (Knopf). This book by a naturalist and writer reminds me of a certain kind of piece from the heyday of the New Yorker, combining reportorial virtues with the leisurely manner of a confident essayist, inspecting a subject from this angle and that, unrushed yet unflaggingly interesting. Steinhart has been writing less and drawing more, he says, so we're fortunate that he has taken time to write about drawing: its continuing primal appeal despite its marginal place in the current art scene, its typical life-cycle (blooming in childhood and then quickly fading), above all its invitation to pay attention to the world, to the human figure, to faces, to the visibility of the invisible. The book includes drawings by various artists; a few more of these would have been even better. (And it has been lovingly designed by Gabriele Wilson—no relation, I hasten to add. Visit a bookstore and take a look at the dust jacket, one of the best designed of the year.) A review is coming in B&C.

next page... |  2 of 4

share this page

December (Web-only) 2004, Vol. 48