Literature

Brief reviews

Comic essays, stories of teenhood and a novel about painting rocks

John Freeman

Gold: A Novel

**

Dan Rhodes

Canongate, $14

Dan Rhodes has told the story of a dog’s journey through Italy and spun 101 tales of love in 101 words. Now he has written a comic novel in which a lovelorn half-Japanese decorator spends her seaside vacation in Wales, painting rocks gold and downing pints with the locals. Rhodes is a stylish writer, and he nearly pulls off this quirky conceit—but unless readers have two hours to toss to the wind, Rhodes’ earlier work packs far more chuckles per pound.

Learning to Drive and Other Life Stories

*** 1/2

Katha Pollitt

Random House, $22.95

One cannot open a publication these days without stumbling upon a personal essay. Unfortunately, the awkward confessions outnumber the moving ones—and the finely written are rare indeed.

In this jungle of self-revelation, there is, however, a species of essay that manages to embody all three qualities. And in the past couple of years, Katha Pollitt’s imagination seems to have become its prime breeding ground.

Learning to Drive, her hilarious, elegant new book of personal essays, collects a handful of these pieces into one volume. If a book could contain awkward silences, this one could fill a cathedral with them.

Herein Pollitt admits to web-stalking her ex-boyfriend, continuously failing her driver’s test and attending a Marxist study group only to spend most of her time procrastinating on the weekly reading.

Pollitt, an award-winning poet and columnist for The Nation, knows she can’t simply dump this information onto the page and expect a reader’s natural sympathy to do the rest. Each essay is a fine-crafted piece of comic writing, with expert turns of phrase.

“Information was what I wanted from her,” she writes in a piece about befriending one of her boyfriend’s ex-lovers, “the underside of the carpet I thought I had been standing on.” A piece on feminism has this description of Iris Murdoch: “She looks a bit like an intelligent potato.”

This kind of wit is hard to come by, harder still in a writer so thoughtful. One almost wishes Pollitt didn’t have to go through such travails to deliver it to us—but, selfishly, most readers should take this book and run.

The Worst Years of Your Life: Stories for the Geeked-Out, Angst-Ridden, Lust-Addled, and Deeply Misunderstood Adolescent in All of Us

***

Edited by Mark Jude Poirier

Simon & Schuster, $15

Here is the back-to-school gift no teenager would want to be seen carrying but from which many could glean a great deal of solace. If only it weren’t so clearly intended for adults.

A great many of the writers Mark Jude Poirier calls upon here deal with sex, that being Ground Zero of those awkward years. In Victor LaValle’s “Class Trip,” a teenager’s trip to Queens’ red-light district gets him robbed. Kevin Canty’s “Pretty Judy” depicts a teenage boy starting a sexual relationship with his developmentally disabled neighbor.

There are some PG-rated pieces. Bullies appear and are dissected in memorable stories by Stanley Elkin and George Saunders. An unspeakable breach of class comes between two characters in Jim Shepard’s lovely and heartbreaking story “Spending the Night with the Poor.”

The best stories in this book, however, seem to hover between two worlds—they carry a sense of adolescence’s moral instability and its rare moments of grace, as in Rattawut Lapcharoensap’s gorgeous tale “At the Café Lovely,” a story of two brothers growing up in Thailand’s prostitution-ridden slums.

“Accelerate,” the older says to the younger in the story’s thrilling conclusion, speaking a mantra which has powered kids out of this period from Jack Kerouac onward. “This is a speedway, you know, not a slowdown.” If only we knew it were so back then.

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