Book review

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.

Stephen Amidon’s Locust Lane begins late at night, with a dog run over by an alcoholic fund manager. Patrick is well over the limit: “He didn’t need another item in the overladen shopping cart of guilt he was pushing around.” He vacillates, and then scarpers, setting up the novel’s themes of addiction, accident, power and privilege, and how far people will go to save themselves. Questions of nature and nurture abound: does monstrous behavior pass down the generations, or is it learned and acquired? And what lengths will communities go to in order to protect their own? Locust Lane is a street in the town of Emerson. It’s a tony neighborhood, whose vast, spotless houses contain apparently equally spotless WASP-y families, insulated by centuries of accumulated wealth.

After sixteen years of silence, Cormac McCarthy has literally written a novel and a half. That’s the good news. Perhaps less-good news is that about half the longer novel depicts conversations between a mad person and an imaginary deformed imp called The Thalidomide Kid, while all of the half-novel is a dialogue between the same mad person and her psychiatrist. The unequivocal bad news is that quite a lot of both is about quantum physics, by way of ruminations on the Manhattan Project and a JFK conspiracy theory: an unholy trinity of literary red flags. I do not mean to dissuade anyone from reading a rare new work by one of America’s finest living writers. Parts of The Passenger and its “coda,” Stella Maris, are very funny. Parts are even brilliant.

There is a famous (and, I fear, apocryphal) story about Bono at his most messianic at a U2 gig in the early part of this century. Pausing between songs, he clicked his fingers meaningfully. After doing this a few times, he said, with utmost gravity, “Every time I do this, a child in Africa dies of starvation.” Most of the audience nodded in sympathy, but one man in the front row had a better response. “Well stop fucking doing it then!” Bono’s response was not recorded, but the finger-clicking soon disappeared from his repertoire of stadium show gimmicks. It is reasonably easy to see why Bono — and, by extension, U2 — are so reviled.

In April 1930, the nineteen-year-old Edda Mussolini married Count Galeazzo Ciano, aged twenty-seven, after a brief courtship in which love appears to have played little part. Her father, Il Duce, wanted the magnificent occasion to be not merely the wedding of the century but a grand, almost royal, demonstration of fascist might and a celebration of fecundity. Edda, his beloved firstborn, was to stand for everything that was best about fascist womanhood, while the groom was to carve out the path of “the new Italian man.” These were the glory years, and thousands of schoolchildren sent poems and cards with angels in advance of the occasion, which the Papal Nuncio attended with a present from the Pope.

Perhaps the defining moment of the posthumous collection of diary excerpts from the late actor and director Alan Rickman comes around two thirds of the way in. Rickman has recently played the villainous role of Judge Turpin in Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd, an undertaking he describes with what readers will have come to recognize as his signature combination of angst and actorly obsession ("I can only sense the crumbs, dandruff, dirt under the nails.") At last, the film is finished, and is premiering in London. Rickman’s general mien of detachment ("there is a deep introspection during these days…a feeling of being marginalized by shallow minds") is temporarily interrupted by an impertinent journalist, who asks him at the premiere, "If you were a pie, which flavor would you be?

In Folk Music, Greil Marcus has captured an entire world of the creative and cultural development of the artist known as Bob Dylan in a single book. Marcus not only tells a Bob Dylan biography through the study of seven songs, he also creates an autobiography of his own long career as a writer on music and America — as well as a rich history of American folk songs and the new life they engendered as Dylan sat down to write his own. How does Marcus do it? I’ve often wondered as I’ve read him in the past. This time, I have no answers at all, only admiration and respect. It is far from unusual for other biographies of Dylan — and there are a shelfful — to tell you more about the biographers than their subject.