Bias
A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News
Bernard Goldberg
Perennial

The premise of ex-CBS news producer, Bernard Goldberg's, "Bias," is that the news media is run by a bunch of liberals who are infecting allegedly dispassionate reporting with their leftist slant. It is a premise that he substantiates with great vigor in this book. However, almost any theory can be proven if argued with limited information: "God is dead"; "Faith is alive"; "Men are oppressed in the U.S."; "Women make $.75 on the dollar in comparison to men"; "African Americans attend college in smaller numbers than Caucasians"; "Quotas that favor Blacks are keeping Whites out of universities." All of these arguments can be made, and proven in ways that seem to tell the indisputable truth — but only if half the facts are all that gets presented. And half the facts are exactly what Goldberg presents in "Bias."

A newsroom insider for many years, who had done "a thousand stories for Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather on the CBS Evening News," Goldberg says he finally began to notice in 1996 that network (and newspaper) coverage of current events was being unduly influenced by the predominantly Democratic and liberal members of the press Ð his peers. In response to another reporter's clearly prejudiced coverage of Steve Forbes' presidential campaign, "Bernie" wrote an op-ed for the (conservative) "Wall Street Journal" blasting the TV piece in particular, and the conspiracy of liberally slanted journalists in general. Yes, the Forbes item was clearly partisan and designed to ridicule the candidate. Goldberg was right about this.

As a result of his WSJ editorial, Bernie was chastened by the CBS news staff led by anchor, Dan Rather. Bernie uses a large portion of his overall word count to disparage Dan Rather in this account. He calls him "The Dan," and likens him to fictional Mafia Don, Tony Soprano. While it is probably true that Dan Rather has an inordinate amount of power in the news business — as do all TV stars — Bernie loses his ability to be objective in relation to Rather, and uses the book as a character hit piece. He refers repeatedly to "The Dan," as if this phrase were the cleverest joke he had ever heard, and like many other anecdotes and lame witticisms he inflicts upon the reader, it makes for tiresome reading.

Getting demoted and eventually pushed out of CBS by "The Dan," left Bernie with some time on his hands to stew in his outraged juices and collect the kind of proof he believed would indict the news media. The Forbes piece was undoubtedly a fine starting place for making his argument, and Bernie builds on this cornerstone with several other subjects he believes were covered unfairly by the news. One of the issues that he takes up is the portrayal of homelessness in America. He writes that during the length of Ronald Reagan's presidency, the media aired endless stories about street people, in some kind of deluded liberal effort to blame the presence of beggars on the president. However, when Bill Clinton came into office, he claims, newspeople dropped the issue, as if all the vagrants had suddenly been housed by dint of a Democrat appearing in the White House.

Next, he goes on to illuminate his views on the coverage of touchy subjects such as childcare. Apparently studies show that children should be at home with their mothers, though the news media, he opines, full of working women and feminist husbands, will never tell the public about it for fear that their own lifestyles would become suspect. In another chapter, he writes that the media created the myth of heterosexuals getting AIDS in great numbers. "Where were all these straight Americans with AIDS? I didn't know any," he remarks. Later Bernie admits that it is true that 40% of people with AIDS are heterosexuals, but that most of those were "shooting up." The disease is not, he declares, what the liberal, gay-loving, politically correct media liked to portray as, "The Killer Next Door."

Undoubtedly, many of his points are well taken. Children probably do better with a parent at home to care for them. (The conservative Dr. Laura Schlessinger convincingly preaches this doctrine daily on her ABC radio talk show.) AIDS does infect more gay men than it does heterosexuals. Even homelessness did not end with the Clinton ascendancy. Are these examples enough reason to believe that the news media has been taken over by leftists? A quick perusal of Fox news, where the right-wing, pit-bull, Bill O'Reilly presides nightly, might dispel that belief. Listening to AM radio, and its plethora of Republican pontificators, led by Rush Limbaugh, would also cause one to question whether the media was in the hands of neo-Commies.

As was stated before, Goldberg only presents half of the story in this poorly written, self-serving diatribe. The other half of the story might contain the information that most of the media he writes about is owned by conservative corporations that censor what news is presented. All one has to do is remember the last presidential election, where the news media used every opportunity to remind Americans how boring and taciturn Democratic candidate Al Gore was — rather than to explain his policies — to wonder just how liberal a slant there really is in mainstream news. By not examining both sides of any issue, Goldberg never makes a convincing, case for blanket liberal bias in the media. After reading this semi-literate book, it is surprising CBS news did not get rid of him years earlier for his flimsy grasp of storytelling — if nothing else.

Appeared in "Boy, are my arms tired!" March 2003 © Suzanne Rush 2003

Eyesores
Eric Shade
University of Georgia Press

Winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction, "Eyesores" is a collection of eleven separate, yet fractionally interconnected stories set in fictional Windfall, Pennsylvania. Windfall is a town that has refused to die but instead lies rusting somewhere out of sight of the highway that passed it by. The people in this town, too, refuse to die. They live their chiefly stagnant lives, working as manual laborers, marrying early, cheating on their spouses and getting drunk. What they don't seem to be able to do is escape this place on that elusive highway — though the need to flee and live fully, somewhere beyond the bounds of this rotting town, is palpable in almost every story.

The collection of bleak yet compelling tales in "Eyesores" begins with one about a down-and-out guy who joins a crew of other losers who are supposed to dismantle the local drive-in theater at the behest of the owner — the only man in town with any money. There is a sinister quality from the very first description of the locale that leads the reader, not in vain, to believe that only tragedy can come from the combination of desperation and power tools at the deserted former screening site.

Shade has a gift for describing the lives of adolescents whose most life-affirming acts include pushing stolen property off of abandoned bridges, or successfully concluding their first sexual groping. In some stories, these adolescents have grown into men who can't hold on to jobs or relationships, and have spiritual lives largely devoid of introspection.

The two most compelling stories in the collection somewhat break this mold of internal emptiness. The first is "The Heart Hankers," about a man so insecure that he leaves his wife and creates disaster for himself long before she has stopped loving him. He spend the rest of his days, now a devout Christian, trying to win her back by broadcasting sermons and heartfelt apologies directed at her on the local radio station. As in all these stories, there is no happy ending.

The other standout is "The Last Night at the County Fair," about an adolescent boy living with his mother and stepfather. Our protagonist, Darren, has planned to go with a friend to meet some girls and possibly experience his first sexual encounter at the fair. At the last minute, his milquetoast stepfather, Don, is forced to chauffeur the boys there. He first surprises the two by allowing them go off on their own so they have an opportunity to pursue their glandular impulses. This they do with some success, and quickly enough to catch their ride home. On the drive back, stuck in a traffic jam, they get their second surprise when Don the downtrodden, turns into Don the dynamic. He goes out onto the highway and unexpectedly lassos an errant bull, clearing the road for everyone. Darren is never the same after this night — nor is Don.

These stories, and others, like the notable "A Final Reunion," illustrate Shade's skill in illuminating all the banal-yet-life-changing wonder in a seemingly unremarkable slice of life. "Eyesores" is a book that reminds everyone who moved away, why they did.

Appeared in "Boy, are my arms tired!" March 2003 © Suzanne Rush 2003

The Seven Sisters
Margaret Drabble
Harcourt

When her fortieth birthday came around, my Mother said she "didn't mind". When it was time for 50, she took it in her stride. However, 60, to hear her tell it, was a depressing turning point. "That's when I knew I was old." When there is much less time to pursue the dream than there is to regret its elusivity, the silver years can seem bleak, indeed. That, too is what sixty-something Candida Wilton, believes. Well into her last age, she has lost her husband and home to a younger woman and her children to indifference. Now she lives in a tiny London flat, in seedy Ladbroke Grove, with little to sustain her but her will to live on.

Alone, for the first time in her life, separated from family and what few friends she has, Candida could have faded to ashes and been blown away long before anyone noticed. However, Margaret Drabble has another destiny in mind for the heroine in her latest novel, "The Seven Sisters." Candida is going to live. Initially, only in dribs and drabs. Taking a classics course on Virgil, joining a health club in the neighborhood and buying a laptop computer to keep her first diary since attending the boarding schools of her youth. This is little from which to construct a life, but it is enough to keep her from fading away.

Written in the form of a diary, the reader is privy to Candida's world only through her own eyes. Yet, what remarkably insightful eyes they are. After a disagreeable visit with an old friend, she remarks: "I sometimes think that Schadenfreude becomes a serious affliction for many of us as we grow older. We long for the illnesses and death of others. This is not pleasant, but I fear it may be so." In reference to keeping her journal, she says: "Self-pity is a seductive emotion. One day soon, I'm going to read through this diary and weed out all the passages contaminated by self-pity. If I recognize it for what it is. Which, of course, I may not. It deludes as well as seduces."

Drabble uses her well-honed skill at creating beautiful language and marries it to ruthless perceptiveness, to create, in Candida, a fully-fleshed woman of the third age. At one point, Candida's friend, Julia tells her, " Human beings weren't really mean to live so long. We weren't designed to age we do. We ought to have been killed off long ago, by predators, or scarcities or natural calamities. That's what happens to other species. Other animals don't age as we do." Yet, Drabble's heroine finds an alternative to the death's head reflected in her mirror. She finds the courage, or more correctly, the hope, to soldier on. At sixty, to her surprise, she discovers a life more full than any she could have imagined at twenty.

Appeared in "Boy, are my arms tired!" March 2003 © Suzanne Rush 2003

William Mulholland and the Rise of Los Angeles
Catherine Mulholland
University of California Press

Catherine Mulholland wants to set the record straight: William Mulholland, the man who engineered and built a man-made river that brought life-sustaining water to arid Los Angeles, is not Noah Cross — the incentuous and unscrupulous water pirate from the movie, "Chinatown." On page four of her biography about her grandfather, "William Mulholland and the Rise of Los Angeles" she says of his life story:

"This saga deserves renewed scrutiny, as in recent years the popular media, relying upon old rumors and hearsay, have increasingly presented this water story as a tabloid yarn of water thievery and crooked land deals. One fictional and melodramatic movie, "Chinatown" (1979), has come to be regarded by the uninformed as a kind of documentary work on the history of Los Angeles, while others who hold the city in disdain see the film as a clever parable on the greed and ambition of an upstart town." Or, more succinctly: she is not her Mother's sister.

That may well be the case. Her seemingly well researched and documented account paints a portrait of a man who cared for little but the welfare of his adopted city and his own personal integrity. On the other hand, a simple fact check would have revealed to the author that "Chinatown" was released in 1974, not 1979.

Mulholland was an Irish immigrant who arrived in Los Angeles during the late 1800s. He worked various menial jobs until he landed work with the city's privately owned water company. Like a character from a Taylor Caldwell novel, the destitute Mulholland rose from laborer to head engineer through a combination of hard work and self-education. Moreover, his work led him to develop the twin passions that would color every aspect of his life: to bring water to his desert city and to wrest the control of that liquid gold, and the power derived from it, from private hands and create a publicly owned utility to manage it. Angelenos have him to thank for the Department of Water and Power, which kept them from paying the same outrageous prices for electricity that the rest of the state was subjected to during the Enron-induced power crisis of 2001.

Catherine Mulholland uses the bulk of this 400-page tome to tell the story of the building of the Los Angeles aqueduct. Though she alludes to the idea that the building of this cement river has long been surrounded by controversy, she does a masterful job of exonerating her grandfather from any perception of malfeasance. Yes, she shows repeatedly, there were land grabs and people in-the-know who made a killing on real estate as a result of the building of the waterway — but her grandfather was not one of them. Yes, it is true that the Owens Valley's farmers lost the means to irrigate and now live in a dust bowl instead of a verdant paradise — but her grandfather believed that the good of the many outweighed the good of the few.

Controversy aside, the story of the building of the aqueduct is astounding both because of its audacity and its ultimate success. Mulholland conceived and built a means for transporting water for hundreds of miles, across a desert, with little loss of life, almost a century ago — an accomplishment for which he deserves the accolades he has been accorded. Like the Romans before him, he saw and he conquered. What's more, he did it within budget, without slave labor and created a system that still stands and works.

Catherine Mulholland is a gifted writer. Her use of language is beautifully spare and lightly tinged with humor. Whether or not one believes that her grandfather was the squeaky clean, do-gooder she portrays, her book on this man and his spectacularly singular act — an act without which there would be no megalithic Los Angeles as we know it — is an important literary addition to the city's historical record, and a lively read to boot.

Appeared in "Boy, are my arms tired!" February 2003 © Suzanne Rush 2003

Red Lobster, White Trash and the Blue Lagoon
Joe Queenan
Hyperion Press

Here's the premise: Joe Queenan, film, television and book reviewer, has, despite his profession, kept his consumption of popular culture to a minimum. He is part of, what he considers, the cultural elite. That means, no Brady Bunch, no Billy Joel, no Stephen King, no Sizzler, and surely no, "The Osbournes". He decides, in the service of journalism, to "throw off the mask of the urbane sophisticate and plunge headfirst into the culture of the masses." "Red Lobster, White Trash and the Blue Lagoon," is Queenan's report on his odyssey into the world of the hoi polloi.

Queenan is a gifted writer who is at his most amusing when skewering the awful, the stupid or the merely mediocre as seen through the electron microscope of his jaundiced eye. His journey into schlock begins with catching a matinee of the abysmal, yet long-running Broadway behemoth "Cats". "To give you an idea of how bad 'Cats' is, think of a musical where you're actually glad to hear 'Memory' reprised a third time because all the other songs are so awful." During his bottom-feeding along the great white way he subjects himself to three separate performances of "Victor Victoria". The first stars Julie Andrews, the next features the a macabre turn by Liza Minnelli in the title role, and the last — because Queenan can't get enough — is a denouement performance with Raquel Welch incongruously playing the androgynous lead role. "Watching these postmenopausal show-offs executing kicks designed for Bebe NewirthÉ made my stomach turn. It was like watching your mom vamp it up on top of the piano."

Cannibalized Hollywood on Broadway was only the beginning for Queenan in his 18-month-long investigation of tripe. There was pop music. About a John Tesh concert he says, "With his shopworn, lounge-lizard stage gestures, eviscerated salsa compositions, and studied reveries, Tesh was a human Cuisinart of every hack musical stunt, effecting a strange synthesis of various mongrel styles where half the songs sounded like generic background music for promotional videos. (Dayton, Ohio — On the Move!) and the other half of the songs sounded like retreads of Mason Williams' sixties hit 'Classical Gas'."

Meanwhile, on the literary front, he read the lesser classics ranging from "Men are from Mars, Women Are from Venus," to the works of Tom Clancy to "The Bridges of Madison County," He slogged through a notable litany of supermarket selections during his vigil, all of which he finds atrocious. He takes particular glee in lancing the boil that is Joan Collins' erstwhile literary work. "Collins is a thrillingly inept writer who in this case has crafted a semiautobiographical potboiler about a slutty TV star whose life is ruined by the media. Chockablock with ludicrous little Gallicisms ('moi aussi' 'viola' 'malheureusement' 'cherie') that give Collins a chance to show off her sixth-grade French, the novel is not even vaguely readable."

Of course, Queenan needed some sustenance to keep up his stamina on this seemingly endless trek through the muck. This is where the Red Lobster comes in. While he may founder in other parts of the book where he strains to keep up his acerbic viewpoint, he is laugh-out-loud funny when reviewing restaurants.

"The Red Lobster was a consummate bad experience. It wasn't just the Huey Lewis & the News ambience, it wasn't just the absence of mozzarella sticks from the menu that day, it wasn't just the party of twenty-nine seated next to us complaining about the service, it wasn't just the Turtles singing 'Happy Together,' overhead, it wasn't just the absence of root beer from the menu that day, it wasn't just the titular head of the party of twenty-nine incessantly referring to different members of his entourage as 'landlubber,' and it wasn't even the way those social-climbing townies gave my son and me the once-over as we came through the door. No it was definitely the food. The food tasted like baked, microwaved reheated, overcooked, deep-fried loin of grease. Admiral's Feast, my ass."

After eating the most tasteless meals, watching the lamest musicals, undulating to the sophomoric sounds at a Kenny G. concert and learning to despise Adam Sandler films, all described with a delightful tone of horror, Queenan takes an unfortunate turn. Perhaps he had a word count to meet as part of his book contract and needed to pad. This is the only excuse for his making the editorial decision to use the last third of the book as a sort of "Days of Wine and Roses" addict's story. Here he admits, unconvincingly that he has so succumbed to the lure of crap that even when visiting Lourdes, France he can't shake the need to watch subtitled "Banacek" reruns on TV. Of course, if he does write as many articles for Movieline magazine as he claims, it may be true that mediocrity already had enough of a toe-hold in his soul that all he needed was one more sip of the bad brew before it overwhelmed him and pulled him into the gurgling abyss.

At this point in the tale, because now he can't seem to help himself, he soldiers on to Las Vegas, Nevada, to view the alarming spectacle of David Cassidy in EFX. Then, it's off to Branson, Missouri for a gag-fest at the Osmonds' theater. In the end, he makes one last pilgrimage to get a bit of the hair of the dog that originally bit him by seeing "Cats" one last time. "'Cats' really was the worst thing on the entire planet. Which, considering the planet's overall record in this area, was quite a statement. This was suffering, and I didn't want to suffer anymore. What's more I didn't have to suffer anymore."

By the time Queenan has hit bottom, the jokes at the expense of those who make a success in the arts without actual taste or talent, had worn thin. Queenan will presumably spend the remainder of his life watching films, reading literature and listening to music that have high-falutin redeeming qualities — and only eating in restaurants that are eminently rated in Zagat's Guide. While Queenan waxes poetic in Movieline and worries about whether or not he is becoming Andy Rooney, the rest of us can get back to the guilty pleasures of wolfing down hamburgers and zoning out to John Grisham adaptations on cable. "Red Lobster, White Trash and the Blue Lagoon," is a chiefly enjoyable and clever book that went on a bit too long.

Appeared in "Boy, are my arms tired!" January 2003© Suzanne Rush 2003

Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo
By Hayden Herrera
Harper & Row, Perennial Publishers

Salma Hayak fought, and won, a long battle to bring the life of Mexican painter Frida Kahlo to the screen. That appealing bio-pic was finally released this past autumn. The Kahlo story was a property that had been coveted, with good reason, by other actresses like J-Lo and Madonna. One hopes that their concurrently released films — a remake of "Swept Away" (Madonna) and a remake of "Cinderella," called "Maid in Manhattan" (J-Lo) — will console them. If not, perhaps another wedding or two will.

The book on which this adaptation of Kahlo's life is based, "Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo," was first published in 1983. In an era epitomized by glittering shoulder pads and the glorification of greed, this woman's life, typified an earthier drama — one which combined both shimmering fame and endless personal pain — and it became something of an alternative touchstone for Ô80s feminists and artists alike. In light of this recent film version, which glosses over much of the historical misery with vibrant costumes and aggressively-thespian monologues, it is a fine time to take another look at Hayden Herrera's bestseller to get a sense of what Frida's life might really have been like.

Frida Kahlo was born in Mexico after the turn of the last century to a German-Jewish father, and a Mexican mother. She was a child of revolutionary Mexico, and this fact would always color her politics and personal life. Kahlo began prep school at a time when girls were not encouraged to seek higher education. She was whip-smart, spunky, talented and uninhibited in her display of these unfeminine characteristics. As a teenager, she had decided to pursue a career in medicine, when an almost unfathomable accident changed the course she had set. Riding through Mexico City one afternoon, the bus she was on collided with another and she was impaled by a steel pole. It entered her side and exited through her vagina. Vertebras were crushed, her leg and foot were mangled and her pelvis was broken.

This accident would inform, if not define the rest of her life. Relegated to body casts for the next couple of years, she began painting. Though necessity dictated that she needed to earn a living to help her family and pay medical bills, she discovered, once out of bed, that she was not suited to the menial pursuits for which she was trained. So, she took her paintings to Diego Rivera, the preeminent Mexican painter (and Communist) of his era — and a man she had long admired — and asked his opinion about her talent. This was the second defining act of her life, or, as she describes it, "her second accident". For this meeting would begin a stormy, life-long love affair with this famous man, old enough to be her father.

In time, Kahlo married the womanizing artist and began a life as wife and caretaker to Rivera. She embraced his politics, his art, his lifestyle and his corpulent torso with her typical gusto. Rivera, the flamboyant fellow traveler and muralist favored painting public art, because he believed that art was for "the people" and should be displayed for the many in communal spaces, rather than shown to the few in elitist galleries. His works, extensively described in the book, are filled with depictions of triumphant workers and vividly glorify the Mexican peasantry. As the political climate swung from left to right in Mexico, Rivera lost his public commissions. This prompted an expeditious trip, with Frida in tow, to the temporarily more politically lax, United States, to paint a series of murals in San Francisco, Detroit and New York. His work at the newly built Rockefeller Center and subsequent firing by Nelson Rockefeller for adding Lenin to a mural, are legendary.

Becoming the wife of a famous man brought Kahlo much acclaim. As a couple, they were internationally feted by the leading social, artistic and political figures of the 1930s-40s. Yet Rivera's non-stop work schedule and pathological need to have sex with countless other women, left ambitious Frida with plenty of time to pursue her own artistic visions. Her painting began in earnest during her stay in the US.

It was then, after a disastrously failed pregnancy, that she began to develop the surrealistic style for which she would be remembered. Her highly personal work consisted mostly of self-portraits, which externalized her mental and physical pain. She is at the center of many of her works, displaying wounds and dripping blood. Author Herrera, describes and dissects these paintings in frustratingly minute detail throughout the book. While his interpretations may lend some insight into the motivations of the artist, the length of these academic asides bogs down the linear narrative in a manner that makes one long to skip on to the next interesting incident.

While her personal fame increased with the acclaim resulting from her work, it did so in direct proportion to the dissolution of her body and marriage. When she wasn't in the hospital or recovering from one of her numerous operations, Kahlo managed to travel to the US and Europe on her own, to show and sell her paintings. That she managed to travel so frequently, much less paint, when she was so tortured is remarkable. While Herrera describes her copious consumption of alcohol, he never seems to make the connection between that and her physical suffering.

If she found surcease from pain in booze, she also found it in the company of other women. If Rivera could paint, so could she. If Rivera could be a dedicated communist, so would she be. If Rivera could sleep with other women — including her sister — she would, too. (She also slept with other men; most famously Leon Trotsky when he came to Mexico seeking political asylum.) Anything Rivera could do, Kahlo could do, if not better, at least limpingly enough to compete.

It is understandable that so many famous women have vied to portray her life. Kahlo makes sense as an icon for the 20th century woman with her amalgam of male and female characteristics. In her pursuit of masculine activities, Kahlo was ahead of her time. In her slavish devotion to her philandering husband, she was a product of her era and gender. In her triumph over adversity, she is the perfect subject for drama.

After reading the book, one wonders if a female author would have recounted this life story differently. Certainly, the movie, the making of which was spearheaded by two women, lends a theatrical gloss to Kahlo's tribulations and does not contribute any significant new insights. In this Hollywood-Hayak version, we are shown that Kahlo may have spent four decades in pain, yet the suffering remains secondary to the victory of her life as epitomized by fame, fortune and good looks. In Herrera's book, however, we are shown that Kahlo's pain was the wellspring of everything she created as an artist and a woman. She did not ignore her pain to power through, she used her pain to create sympathy, love and art. In the end, his version remains the more psychologically viable of the two.

Appeared in "Boy, are my arms tired!" November 2002 © Suzanne Rush 2003

Refugees from Hollywood
Jean Rouverol
University of New Mexico Press

If the House un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) had known that those filmmakers they blacklisted in the 1950s spent the majority of their time worrying about au pairs, ponies for their kids and other domestic concerns, they would have ended the political persecution long before they did. In her endearing book, "Refugees from Hollywood," Jean Rouverol gives us an insider's look at the lives of several families of expatriate screenwriters who, like she and her husband, Hugo Butler, fled the USA for Mexico, rather than go to jail for their varying associations with the Communist party.

In Rouverol's memoir, the stresses of writing under pseudonyms and making ends meet in a foreign country take a back seat to folksy remembrances of picnics, day trips and the foibles of her six children. From her perspective, finding good help was far more vital than joining a good study group. She is a mother first, and an irresolute dissident second

The first section of her memoir briefly details the Butler's backgrounds, writing careers and escape from Hollywood in 1950 with fellow screenwriter Dalton Trumbo and his family. As she tells the tale, she and her husband joined the Communist party because of their beliefs, but stayed mainly because of the pleasant, attendant social whirl.

The remaining bulk of the book examines the day-to-day intricacies of raising their family during a decade-long stretch in Mexico City. It is in this section that she hits her stride as a parent and a writer. She intersperses memories of childbirth, adolescent first dates and the Butler's extended-family friendships with other political refugees, with short tales about the difficulties of making money and staying ahead of the law.

Rouverol's memory is excellent when it comes to the exotic menus devised by their live-in maid, Ramona, but sloppier when it comes to vital moments in HUAC history. This is not necessarily a fault. Most people remember the incidents that made them happy and block the tragedies. She is remarkably honest about these lapses.

Though one gets the sense that there are stresses on this family not felt by their "Happy Days" counterparts living state-side, in the end, this book reads more like a cozy Little House Behind the Iron Curtain than it does a tale of difficult exile. One can tell by her emphasis on domesticity that she must have created a haven for her children — one where they rarely felt the pain of their banishment. Further, Rouverol leaves one with the feeling that despite the difficulties, these were the happiest years of her life.

Appeared in "Boy, are my arms tired!" November 2002 © Suzanne Rush 2002

The Giant's House
By Elizabeth McCraken
The Dial Press

The "other" is as hidden in some people as it is obvious in others. Yet, however cloaked by normalcy — regular hours, habits of cleanliness or complacency — otherness will, like fowl of any kind, flock to its mate. This fundamental principle is the keystone of Elizabeth McCraken's peculiar love story, "The Giant's House."

Peggy Cort is a 1950s Cape Cod librarian who takes an interest in James Carlson Sweatt, a boy who suffers from a rare disease, which causes gigantism. By age 12, he is six feet tall. By the novel's end he is nineteen and over eight feet tall. Peggy is, in the grand, literary tradition of librarians, a spinster. She has been passed over by love. Not because, like James, she is misshapen or unattractive, but because by some gift of mind she is too contemplative, too self-absorbed or self-aware to surrender herself to the compromises necessary to yield adult union. "The rest of the world fell in love, and the physics baffled me. I could see it happen — God knows, all around, I saw the falling couples — but I did not understand the emotional gravity that allowed their descent," she admits.

At first, she merely befriends this gargantuan boy, who stirs her cauldron of simmering emotions her in some inexplicable way. She suggests books, visits him when he is ill with excruciating growing pains, and convinces herself she is just nurturing his mind. However, as the years pass, and James flowers into full adolescence, she begins to occupy a more significant place in his life. By now, she has insinuated herself into every aspect of his existence.

"Some days I wondered why James tolerated me, a comparatively old woman of thirty-one, when he had those teenagers. Other days I knew why: he felt, if not older than the kids, at least significantly different. Maybe those days — the days he seemed sadder, the days he'd talk so long I wouldn't leave for hours — were the times he remembered that he was going to die sooner than they were."

Peggy watches with some jealousy as he struggles through his first crush. Yet, it is to her that he turns, as the clock ticks on his short life, for romance. Though she has denied this aspect of her feelings for James, when he finally makes his bumbling attempt to woo her, she is as just unable to couple with him, as she has been to join with a peer. When he proposes to her on a trip to New York, where he is the featured act in a traveling circus, she says: "Something in my heart turned, like the latch in the catch of the adjoining door, not open but ready."

Despite McCraken's poetic language and piercing insights, this story — essentially about love and love lost — feels chilly to its core. While emotional stasis may be Peggy's truth, the novel may not appeal to those who prefer a more agreeable character trajectory. Nevertheless, for others, "The Giant's House," will touch that soft place behind the ice where we harbor the circus freak within.

Appeared in "Boy, are my arms tired!" November 2002 © Suzanne Rush 2003

White Teeth
Zadie Smith
Vintage International (Random House)

Zadie Smith's debut novel, "White Teeth," is an enlightened examination of three cultures over the course of three generations. It is a story of science vs. religion. It is a depiction of the battles between men and women; the young and the old. It is a glimpse at shadowy traditions illuminated by the brilliant white light of the 21st century. Mostly, it is a wildly clever and funny book.

"White Teeth", follows the life of Archie, a middling-kind-of-working-class man in London. He is the type of person who decides all of life's great questions by flipping a coin. But despite his white-bread normality he marries a Jamaican woman, sires a mixed-race daughter, Irie, during his late middle-age and is best friends with Samad, a Pakistani would-be philosopher.

Samad is everything Archie is not. He is complicated, driven, religious, educated. Yet, there are just as many similarities that bind them in their common exasperation as divide them culturally. Samad is a lowly waiter, has had his children during late life, and like Archie, squanders the greater part of his leisure time at a local pub.

Clara, Archie's wife, who has escaped the strictures of her Jehovah's Witness past, and Alsana, betrothed to Samad as a child, both married to older men, forge a friendship of their own. Their children, Irie and Samad's twins, Magid and Millat, represent the third generation and the one on which the plot pivots.

The outside world beckons the women and children with the same vigor that the past holds Samad. Samad, like an old man, laments the loss of traditions that immigrants have always encountered in new countries. In this regard, he views his boys' English assimilationist tendencies as dangerous. So, he devises a means to save one of them (all he can afford). Irie and Alsana try to save the other. What ensues is both tragic and hilarious.

Smith is a fine storyteller. She captures her characters through the use of dead-on dialogue ("innit?), witty asides and recounting honest foibles in a ruthless-but-kind fashion. Though one suspects that Irie may be her fictional alter ego, the lack of resentment towards the parental figures in the book, and the light touch that typifies her prose, elevates this book from the many depressing confessional first-novels churned out in graduate writing programs each year. Come to think of it, "White Teeth" stands on its own merits alongside any novel.

Appeared in "Boy, are my arms tired!" June 2002 © Suzanne Rush 2003