Review by Breanne Boland March 22, 2007 Issue

Hardcover bestsellers can be like flares — bright for a moment, disappearing the next. These five books, past bestsellers all, have stayed popular past their debut, and can currently be found in trade paperback.

The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri
Lahiri, the author responsible for the Pulitzer Prize-winning book of short stories that is Interpreter of Maladies, leapt into the novel with The Namesake, which has spawned a film just now in limited release. Like her short stories, this book concerns itself with Indian immigrants and difficulties within families and between generations. Also like her short stories, almost every sentence is a jewel, and the mood of each scene — be it the depths of sadness, soaring happiness, or crippling awkwardness — is so potent it hangs on you for days, like smoke.

Gogol Ganguli is the son of Indian immigrants and the book follows the three of them over a 25-year span. Saddled with an unlikely name, Gogol struggles to fit into the world around him, stumbling through romance, alienation, uneasy acceptance, and his love for his family. Lahiri crosses cultures and viewpoints, making a story left slightly less satisfying by its nonlinear structure, but what we’re given is great. There are far worse things to say about a novel than, “I wanted more.”

My Sister’s Keeper by Jodi Picoult
The high concept of this book could easily make the characters serve the author’s inclinations, but Picoult is so good at juggling characters and situations that even if these people were sitting in a room thinking, rather than going through a difficult and complicated situation, it’d be enthralling.

Thirteen-year-old Anna was the opposite of an accidental birth — her parents chose her from a Petri dish of embryos specifically to be a genetic match for her older sister Kate, who has struggled with leukemia for most of her life. However, after being poked, prodded, and sampled throughout her life, Anna is now expected to donate a kidney to her ailing sister, which sends her to a lawyer seeking medical emancipation. It’s a generally fabulous read until the last 15 pages, when Picoult pulls a twist ending that undermines the rest of the book. Read the paperback version — it makes less of a dent in the wall when you chuck the book across the room after reading the last page.

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
It’s remarkable to see such a precise and accomplished writer as Didion address something as slippery and elusive as grief. Days after her only daughter became seriously ill, Didion’s husband of almost 40 years died suddenly. Didion lived and worked with her husband, also a writer, to the point that they spent nearly all their time together.

The adjustment would be sharp and devastating for anyone; Didion chronicles her struggle and her exploration in a way that seamlessly mingles her orderly mind and prose with the wild irrationalities that come after such a loss — the magical thinking, as she gently puts it. Mixed with her experiences and recollections are quotes and excerpts from the other writings that she naturally turns to in order to make sense of the insensible.

The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson
The 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago brought enough innovations and inventions to fill a several books — the widespread use of electric light, for instance, or the debut of the Ferris wheel, or the birth of Pabst Blue Ribbon. Larson does a fine job in relating just how much this World’s Fair changed the world as we know it, but chooses to humanize the story by telling it from the point of view of two somewhat forgotten but hardly insignificant characters: Daniel H. Burnham, the architect who orchestrated the construction of Centennial Park; and H.H. Holmes, con artist, swindler, and prodigious serial killer.

As Burnham races to complete the white city, working against time, technology, and expectations of failure, Holmes uses the lure of the World’s Fair to his advantage. His victims were primarily young women drawn to the lights and glamour of the Fair who then disappeared inside the building he owned just outside of the city, a house designed for death that was, in ways, no less remarkable than some of the structures being built by Burnham for brighter purposes. The Devil in the White City packs history, human interest, and horror into one well-written volume.

A Man Without a Country by Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut’s hallmark, aside from his ludicrously divine way with satire, is his voice and his point of view. It’s not hard to think of him as an infinitely wise child, or a character in a Greek tragedy — someone who has a clear sense of justice and truth but who knows how futile it is to tell the world the way things should be. The ultimate wise fool.

In the last several decades, he’s funneled this quiet exasperation into fiction, for the most part. This brief book distills many of his themes and ideas into a series of short essays, punctuated by his simple and often brilliant drawings and handwritten pages.

I enjoy earlier and later Vonnegut equally, but his naked melancholy, undisguised by characters and foibles, is an even denser and more satisfying meal. Savor slowly and leave time to reread it.

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