"The Poisonwood Bible"
By Barbara KingsolverHarperFlamingo; $27.95.
Redemption, guilt, death, Christianity, family and Africa. These are the topics of Barbara Kingsolver's newest novel, "The Poisonwood Bible." It is a big, fat, satisfying story, successful from first to last, her best book yet.
Kingsolver's parents, she says in the preface, were medical missionaries to the Congo. They were different in every way from the parents in this book, she says. But they brought her, when she was young, to a place of wonder.
Her fictional missionaries are a Baptist minister and his wife, who take their four daughters with them to the Congo. The story is told, in alternating chapters, by the four young girls. Their voices are charming and authentic.
In the past, Kingsolver had a distressing tendency to moralize, to explain to the reader, who already knows, how unfair the white Europeans have been to the native peoples of the world.
She's restrained herself in this novel. Even the father in this book, the obnoxious moralizing minister, is adored by one of his daughters. He is not completely a cardboard character.
And his children have good hearts. They are, to various degrees, in love with God's world.
- Susan Whitney (Deseret News)
"Outside Lies Magic"
By John R. Stilgoe
Walker; 200 pages; $20.
Think of this book as a sort of mirror-image Zen guide. Where the guide would instruct you to live in the present, the book trains you to see the present as layers of past. Where the guide would call on you to turn inward, the book's advice (and opening line) is "Get out now. . . . Go outside."
"Outside Lies Magic: Regaining History and Awareness in Everyday Places" is the operating manual for John R. Stilgoe's life enterprise of accounting for the whole of the human-contrived, American landscape and, in the process, revealing our inescapable links to each other and the past.
Stilgoe's greatest accomplishment has been to help make landscape a legitimate focus of cultural study; to show that it is an object whose examination can reveal important truths about society. He has done that by portraying it as the product of natural and human forces beyond any one generation's ability to control and therefore as a layered synthesis of the nation's entire history.
The author's principal argument for getting up now and going outside is that it is the antidote for "the trap of the programmed electronic age so gently closing around so many people at the end of the century."
- Peter G. Gosselin (The Boston Globe)
"The Complete Stories"
By Bernard Malamud
Noonday/Farrar-Straus & Giroux; $16
Most of the 55 tales in Bernard Malamud's "The Complete Stories," now available in paperback, focus on Jews of amazing variety, laboring or wandering under the weight of conscience.
Whether grim dramas of workaday existence or ruminations on the meaning of love, the best stories meld the allegorical and the everyday and brim with ethical concerns, from the burdens of capitalism to the enormity of the Holocaust.
"There must be many readers who will be grateful to `The Complete Stories' for prompting a return to Malamud," Walter Good-man wrote in the New York Times in 1997. " `Is morality a necessary part of fiction?' one of his characters asks. The answer, in Malamud's revelatory work, remains a resounding yes."
- Scott Veale (The New York Times)