The Uncommon Reader: A Novella
Alan Bennett
Farrar, Strauss and Giroux
U.S. hardcover, 1st American ed.
ISBN 0-374-28096-7
128 pages; $15.00

One hates to say too much about this charming bauble of a book for fear of impinging upon the fragile spell it casts. One can say simply that it is a tale of how history might proceed were Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom to become a dedicated and very good reader. What would she read? Where would she get her books? How would her staff react? How would her subjects react? What would the prime minister do? Would she scribble in the margins? Would she proselytize about reading? Would she begin to write?

There is no booklover who would not love to find this little tale in his Christmas stocking or as one of her Hanukkah gifts. You may find that the recipient is absent from the dishwashing after a holiday meal, reading this beautiful little soap bubble by the fireplace, utterly engrossed, but won’t it feel good to know that your gift was so happily received?

The Great Man
Kate Christensen
Doubleday, 2007
U.S. hardcover, first edition
ISBN 0385518455
320 pages; $23.95

The greatest irony of The Great Man that it isn’t really about a great man at all, save incidentally. Rather, this novel is about three women who have a relationship with the same man – who, while important to and loved by all of them, never knew or even tried to know the essence of any of them. Getting to know the three of them as they see themselves is something we get to do in this engrossing, witty treasure of a book.

The spark that ignites the book is that two biographers are simultaneously researching the painter Oscar Feldman, the “great man” of the title. Feldman was a painter known for his female nudes – both for painting them and for bedding them. He never ventured into abstraction or any other form of modern art, but stuck solely to representational paintings of the female body. He was opinionated, stubborn, and a complete shit toward women, no matter how much he admired their physicality.

Oscar was married to Abigail, the mother of his only son, the deeply autistic Ethan. It is never clear whether or how much Oscar loved Abigail, or whether she was merely a deep pocket to keep him in food and shelter while he developed his art. Certainly Abigail loved him, but the greater love of her life seems to have been her son, whose care consumed her life. There is evidence that perhaps Oscar had a deep, abiding, unexpressed and unexpressable love for her that was somehow divorced from sexual passion. Perhaps their marriage was oddly happy. And perhaps that is why Abigail does what she does when the biographers come around.

Oscar’s longtime mistress was Teddy, a secretary in the law firm that took care of Oscar’s legal affairs. Teddy is the mother of Oscar’s twin daughters, for whom Oscar never provided a penny in support. In fact, Oscar did not leave Teddy so much as a single painting when he died, and she found out about his death by reading the obituary page in the New York Times. Teddy never wanted Oscar’s support, because she deeply valued her independence. She had a passion for Oscar, clearly, but it seems almost to have been an intellectual passion more than any other sort – not a cool commingling of minds, but a hot, fierce passion that erupted into sex more often than not, a love of argument that contained a heat and light that is rarely depicted in literature. She now lives in genteel poverty, and takes great pride in making do.

Oscar’s sister was Maxine, now a woman in her mid-80’s, who is also an artist. She is, perhaps, a greater artist than Oscar ever was, but she has never received the recognition that Oscar did. Certainly no one is working on her biography. Her work is abstract, cerebral, and her palette limited to black and white. Her work, like Oscar’s, hangs in museums around the world. But she has reached old age without wealth, without a partner, and with precious few friends. She is grumpy and defensive, including of Oscar’s reputation, but also extremely competitive with her famous brother, even after his death. And there is a secret about Oscar that she is protecting, although she seems to be yearning for the secret to be revealed.

The probing of the two biographers leads to dramatic changes in the lives of all three women. It is a delight to see older women – in fact, old women, women well past the point where we would call them middle-aged – portrayed as having passion for life, sexual passion, plans for their futures. They form new friendships, meet new men, reassess old relationships, reassess their own lives. These women are thoroughly alive and do not intend to stop living before they die. There is not a one of them I wouldn’t like to meet and befriend. There is not one of them I do not intend to emulate, each in a different way.

Christensen’s writing is strong and elegant. Her viewpoint wanders from woman to woman, sometimes without warning, so that in one paragraph you’re seeing the world from Teddy’s eyes and in the next from Maxine’s. Seeing the same scene through different eyes – the pride Teddy has in a meal she has assembled, for instance, as seen through the eyes of one of Oscar’s biographer’s – enhances every description (and Christensen’s food description’s are especially gorgeous, leading me to believe that her earlier book, The Epicure’s Lament, is probably very tasty; it’s now on my list).

This book belongs on your shelf next to such volumes as Susan Minot’s Evening and Michael Cunningham’s The Hours. I’m surprised not to find The Great Man on the New York Times list of notable books of the year; it’s that good. You’ll definitely find it on mine.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist
Mohsin Hamid
Harcourt, Inc., 2007
U.S. hardcover, first edition
ISBN 0-15-101304-7
192 pages; $22.00

In the wake of 9/11, a few thoughtful people, in addition to being angry and sorrowful, wondered why “they” hate us. What had America done to inspire such hatred? Why would anyone wish to kill innocents? Perhaps knowing the answers to those questions would help prevent future attacks.

Mohsin Hamid can’t answer those questions completely, but he does give us some insight into the thinking of those living in the Middle East and Southeast Asia in the excellent short novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist. An immensely troubling book, The Reluctant Fundamentalist is the story of a young Pakistani man, known to us only as Changez, who studies at Princeton and captures a high-paying, high-profile job at a financial services firm in New York upon his graduation. Ultimately he returns to Pakistan, where he meets an American man and invites him to tea, over which he relates the story of his life.

The tea, which precedes a meaty dinner followed by a too-sweet dessert, is somehow filled with menace, though it is never entirely clear from whence the menace originates, until, perhaps, the end of the book – and maybe not even then. The waiter is rather too attentive and a bit threatening, making the nameless American uneasy. The American is a large man who insists on sitting with his back to the wall and seems to be carrying a gun. He is very closed-mouthed, leaving Changez to carry the conversation by himself.

Changez’s background in Pakistan is one of genteel poverty – or, if not exactly poverty, of belonging to a failing aristocracy, where money is never in abundance but honor is, perhaps, overly so. Thus, when Changez is at Princeton, he works hard to support himself, but in three different jobs where he will be unnoticed – in odd corners of the campus, for instance, like libraries few people frequent. In the summer following his graduation, he goes to Greece on the strength of a sign-on bonus with his high-flying finance firm, and falls in love with the beautiful and wealthy Erica. Erica seems to return his affection, but she is troubled by a death that she still grieves with all her body, soul and mind.

Changez throws himself into his work, and excels. He seems set to become the golden boy at his firm, and is on assignment in an exciting locale – the Philippines – when terrorists strike the World Trade Center.

I was in my room, packing my things. I turned on the television and saw what at first I took to be a film. But as I continued to watch, I realized that it was not fiction but news. I stared as one – and then the other – of the twin towers of New York’s World Trade Center collapsed. And then I smiled. Yes, despicable as it may sound, my initial reaction was to be remarkably pleased.

Your disgust is evident; indeed, your large hand has, perhaps without your noticing, clenched into a fist. But please believe me when I tell you I am no sociopath; I am not indifferent to the suffering of others….[W]hen I tell you I was pleased at the slaughter of thousands of innocents, I do so with a profound sense of perplexity.

And so begins the unraveling of Changez’s carefully constructed life. He begins to question America’s exercise of power from a point of view foreign to any American – from that of one who is subject to American power, who can be thrust into war by America (in this case, a war engineered between India and Pakistan by American politicking) without having any voice in the decisions leading to it. He begins to wonder why he is seeking money and power foreign to his traditions and his people, and why these things matter to him and what he is really about. Yes, he loves New York in a way that few New Yorkers can really understand, but does he love Lahore, his home city in Pakistan, more dearly? What are his true obligations? What is patriotism, and what does it mean in the wake of the attack on the Twin Towers?

The Reluctant Fundamentalist is a short and powerful book. It will make some people very angry. It will make other people very self-righteous. It will make most everyone think.