Liars and Saints

 Harlan Coben was not a voracious reader at Amherst College. (His classmates included David Foster Wallace and the future superstar Dan Brown.) Coben was not "groomed" to be a writer; his parents liked books, but they didn't push an agenda. When Coben tries to explain the source of his ambition, he recalls a high-school classmate who was murdered. The apparent killer--another teenager--simply disappeared. Coben also recalls that he lived near a site for the storage of nuclear missiles. (This was close to the Livingston Mall.) And one of Coben's neighbors was a wealthy mafia kingpin--a man responsible for several murders. These bits of data floated around in Coben's head. And he became a writer. Coben offers life advice--as well as writing advice--and he sometimes offers advice that seems to fall into *both* buckets. Don't whine. Be curious about the world. Don't hesitate to make things up. Bad writing often seems like throat-clearing. There is a tendency t...

 Some friends are planning on, or moving toward, a second child, and here is my letter to those friends. I can't generalize, but I think that having two children means that you almost never leave the house with all the supplies you need. I'm routinely stunned to discover that a crucial--THE crucial--supply is still back on my desk, on the second floor. That supply could be: the zoo pass, the functional car key, the speech-and-communication notebook, the driver ID, the cell phone. I think, once you accept that you will always be unprepared, the actual moment of discovery ("God damn it!") is a bit less irritating. It seems to help me to "draft" various events, in my head. If there is a doctor visit, I try to envision my own behaviors before they happen. So, if the visit falls apart, I may have choices to fall back on. I understand, more and more, that parenting is about "making implicit things explicit," and I'm surprised how hard this is. For ex...

A novel succeeds--or fails--because of its characters. Hats off to Harlan Coben, an occasional favorite of Janet Maslin's, for inventing some memorable characters in his new bestseller, "Run Away": -Simon, a dad who has lost his daughter, apparently to a cult. Simon is smart but he makes mistakes--so it's easy enough to identify with him. In the first scene, we watch him scoping out the homeless drug dealer who seems to have brainwashed his now-missing daughter. Unwisely, Simon punches this man. (We all can relate.) The scene is caught on YouTube, and it becomes something it really isn't, for millions of viewers: a story of a smug rich min assaulting a harmless poor kid. And so Simon's fate is sealed; he is doomed to a difficult future, or at least a difficult span of three hundred pages. -Simon's high-powered lawyer. She understands precisely how minds work, and how often there's a gap between perception and reality. She offers Simon an over-price...