Liars and Saints

  * "Mercy Street," by Jennifer Haigh . A campus novel is any novel that has people coming out of broader society and meeting socially, over and over, in a small, quirky, non-domestic sphere. Haigh's brilliant idea is to set her new campus novel at an abortion clinic. A counselor, Claudia, observes girls with enviable socioeconomic profiles; also, she observes girls who don't have a prayer. To relieve stress, she visits her drug dealer, who happens to serve (additionally) an anti-choice activist (an activist familiar to Claudia). I couldn't predict where all this was headed, and I enjoyed "being in Claudia's mind." * Sandra Boynton: Boxed Best Sellers . Here is how one book begins: "Behold the armadillo, with his armadillo nose." I think that's not to be surpassed. * "Oscar Wars," by Michael Schulman . It's not clear to me that anyone needs or wants 500 pages on the Academy Awards. (I know this book has blurbs, but good wr...

They drove east through the desert towns: Hesperia to Victorville to Barstow to Yermo, past the dusty bed of Soda Lake, dry now, a ghostly crater waiting for rain. The route was familiar, a memory stored in his bones. The return trip, Sandy had driven in every condition--exhausted, panicked, blind drunk, sick with shame. But the eastbound journey occurred, always, under controlled conditions. They'd left L.A. at three in the afternoon. YOU'RE CRAZY, said Myron Gold, whose car he'd borrowed this time. IT'S THE HOTTEST PART OF THE DAY. But the timing was no accident; it was part of the protocol: rolling into Vegas at first dark, slipping away (this was the hope) before dawn. Vegas at noon would look stripped and diminished, like a Christmas tree in daylight. It was no place he wanted to see. This extraordinary paragraph opens "A Place in the Sun," a story by Jennifer Haigh. Little bombs, deposited, awaiting a chance to be detonated. Who are "they"? ...

For a certain kind of teenager, a small town is a prison. For another kind, it is a stage. At sixteen I was one of the prisoners. Bakerton High was, to me, the world itself: an arena where great events were decided; a theater only in the sense that Vietnam had been, to American generals, a theater of war. The actors were boys and girls who'd grown up alongside me, the athletes and beauty queens who'd blossomed early and fierce. I worked evenings and weekends at Keener's Diner, and on Friday nights after football games, they filled every booth: the girls I envied and the boys I crushed on, coupling and recoupling like square dancers. Having none of my own, I marveled at their inexplicable self-confidence, these playmates who'd fingerpainted with me in kindergarten, now inhabiting new adult bodies with effortless aplomb.  This is the start of Jennifer Haigh's story "Favorite Son." The speaker is looking back on her adolescence from a distance; we might i...

People around me aren't breathless about Jennifer Haigh, and they should be. If only for "Baker Towers." I've read "Faith" and "Heat and Light," and those books didn't do a great deal for me, but "Baker Towers" is clearly a success. A story involves a leap from an Ordinary World to some kind of Enchanted World. For the family at the center of "Baker Towers," the leap seems to involve a death. A Polish man in Western Pennsylvania dies young, and his wife is left to raise the kids. She is Italian--her English is shaky, and she isn't fully comfortable among Polish-American neighbors--and she maybe doesn't have time, or energy, to keep a close eye on each one of her children. And so the imperfect children--imperfectly raised--try to cope with what life has given them. One stumbles into a bad marriage with a woman who drinks too much and who simply can't take an interest in Bakerton. This child--the oldest son, th...