Book review

Very few of us could evade accusations of pretension if we quoted Faulkner in everyday conversation. The characters conjured up in Lorrie Moore’s fiction are granted an exception, though not always solely by virtue of their earnestness. In her novel I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home, which traces a journey toward a final burial in the American South, allusion to As I Lay Dying is particularly apt. Moore has made a name for herself as one of America’s masters of the short story, with her inimitable style on display ever since her first work of fiction, “Raspberries,” was published in 1977. In this, her first novel for fourteen years, she once again wields her wordplay playfully and powerfully, striking a balance between levity and gravity.

In some ways, the world of George VI and his consort Elizabeth, the future Queen Mother, from 1936-52 was very different from how we envision that of today’s British royal family; its rituals seem to belong to an era of Jurassic antiquity. In George’s day, Britain was still a global power, and its monarch ruled over both an empire and an elaborate court system with a “Page of the Backstairs” and a “Yeoman of the Pantry” — not to mention a fully staffed, oceangoing yacht — at his disposal. His coronation in May 1937 was as protracted as that of any maharajah. The Edwardian braid and sashes on display during more recent military pageantry look sadly Ruritanian by comparison. In other ways, their lives resonate more clearly with our own.

Jonathan Eig’s new King: A Life (KAL) is the first comprehensive biography of the black civil rights hero to appear in more than thirty years, and it will succeed my own Bearing the Cross (BTC), published in 1986, as the standard account. One normally does not review a book one’s blurbed — I’ve called it “a great leap forward in our biographical understanding” — nor where one’s actively aided the author’s research and read his manuscript multiple times. But comparisons between KAL and BTC will be legion, so highlighting the three most significant ways in which the two biographies differ will be a service both to the thousands of readers whom Eig’s volume should attract and to students of King’s life more generally.

The heroic age of polar exploration gave birth to epics as grand and as harsh as the landscapes in which they unfolded. And, as in all the best epics, their protagonists are often of interest not only for what they do, but also for who they are, or, in the case of the Arctic adventurer — “explorer” is too confining a word — Vilhjalmur Stefansson (1879-1962), who they pretend to be. Stefansson is the “villain” of Buddy Levy’s Empire of Ice and Stone: The Disastrous and Heroic Voyage of the Karluk, a tale that reads like an unusually grim, remarkably gripping Edwardian imperial yarn.

No Australian woman has ever won the Booker Prize — and yet in the stylish genre called Outback Noir, women reign supreme. Of these, the queen is Jane Harper. Her 2016 debut, The Dry (successfully filmed with Eric Bana), marked the start of a new kind of detective fiction that has gained an international following. Some of this may be due to the way we love this version of Down Under. Forget about Sydney, Melbourne or Perth. Portraits of small societies where embattled individuals get swallowed up by the big bad bush, parched or flooded, give an apocalyptic, Mad Max edge to a distinctly Australian setting. Arthur W.

Pamela Anderson cites Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces as the template for her memoir, Love, Pamela. The pop literary critic’s analysis of mythical heroes famously inspired George Lucas’s Star Wars. As Lucas deconstructs the heroes of western literature, Anderson dismantles the banal Madonna/whore template that has dominated tabloid coverage of her life. Unfortunately, Anderson supplants one boring motif with an even more tedious one: the archetype of the celebutante victim.

Book reviews should be like Car & Driver: flip over the page to a concrete, plainly written piece — no writerly words or literary drivel — by someone who’s test-driven the book and punched up a nuts-and-bolts guide. The reader should get a look under the hood: polished steel and chrome cylinders. Does it hum? Vroom, we’re off the races. I say this because I’m reporting on a prototype I’m afraid of driving: an advance reader’s edition, uncorrected, not for sale or quotation. I can’t rev this baby for you, or even kick the tires, but here goes.

When J. Edgar Hoover died in May 1972 at seventy-seven, he had been director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation for forty-eight years, ever since progressive attorney general Harlan Fiske Stone had promoted the then-obscure twenty-nine-year-old Justice Department bureaucrat in 1924. With fewer than 400 agents, limited responsibilities, and a reputation badly tarnished under a corrupt previous attorney general, what was then called the Bureau of Investigation offered modest prospects. Still, the new boss set out to clean house, institute stringent hiring standards and impose a culture of science-based crime-fighting on his federal agents. One new hire in 1928 was Clyde A.