Fall Book Quarterly

The Marriage Plot

By Jeffrey Eugenides At the Free Library, Nov. 1

Pitched somewhere between the intimate, suburban scope of The Virgin Suicides and the globe-spanning, multi-generational sprawl of Middlesex, Jeffrey Eugenides' third novel — arriving right on track to maintain his one-a-decade pace — focuses on three Brown University grads, starting on commencement day 1982, and following them through a year or so of research fellowships, grad-school applications and post-collegiate gallivanting. There's nothing exceptional about its thematic milieu (a literary novel about college life feels like a blatant cliché, even if they're actually pretty rare), and the action is largely confined to the brief span between Cape Cod and the fictional Prettybrook, N.J. Despite the smattering of Big Ideas, academic and otherwise, fiddled with across its 400 pages — semiotic theory, Christian mysticism, manic-depressive psychology — The Marriage Plot is a resolutely small, rather tame romance story. The title refers to the senior thesis of our conspicuously conventional (attractive, smart, well-bred) heroine, Madeleine Hanna, staking a somewhat feeble claim for her beloved Austen and James novels in the face of changing lit-crit tides, and also, implicitly, to Eugenides' own novel, which seemingly purports to attempt something similar. Sure, you could squint and see this as an updating of standard Victorian literary formulas — it's a love triangle, with Maddy caught between the affections of two self-absorbed, inauspicious suitors — but there's nothing particularly fresh or witty being said here about those tropes, and nothing revelatory about the way it's done. To its credit, the book is appealingly breezy, easily engaging, and full of amusing, astutely described (though occasionally tiresome — and sometimes bizarrely anachronistic) period detail, particularly in its all-too-recognizable portrayal of the era's burgeoning collegiate hip. But it's hard to shake the sense of canny craftsmanship in Eugenides' writing, and ultimately the settings (for all their exhaustively observed color) and, more damningly, the characters (for all their interests, insights, in-jokes and putative passions) rarely feel real. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 416 pp., $28, Oct. 11. —K. Ross Hoffman

The Visible Man

By Chuck Klosterman

Victoria Vick is an unconfident therapist with an unfulfilling personal life. But that's irrelevant: Chuck Klosterman's narrator is neither his protagonist nor his villain. Both roles in The Visible Man are filled by "Mr. Y__," who contacts Victoria with a special request: to help him sort out his feelings about the people he spies on via a Harry Potter -esque invisibility suit. Mr. Y__ doesn't feel guilty, per se, about sneaking into strangers' homes and quietly watching them go about their routines (a woman binges on fried chicken, exercise and weed; a man talks to his cat and routinely invites a motorcycle gang to his house to discuss philosophy) — after all, it's part of his long-running experiment on human behavior. Mr. Y__ is more interested in gaining Victoria's respect for the occasions he intervenes (adding cocaine to the woman's stash in order to curb her hunger, for example). It's a bizarre story with an ending that zigs when you expect it to zag, but what resonates most is Mr. Y__'s assertion that we're not truly ourselves, warts and all, unless we're alone. Thus The Visible Man becomes the kind of novel you think about for days after you finish reading. Would we be better — less lazy, more interesting — if we were being watched? Scribner, 240 pp., $25, Oct. 4. —Carolyn Huckabay

REAMDE

By Neal Stephenson

A reader should mourn the completion of a great 1,000-page book, miss a good one and incinerate a bad one. Put away your lighters: Neal Stephenson's latest doorstop falls squarely and heavily in that middle category. The crazy narrative hijinks that make Stephenson such great fun are certainly present: A virus plaguing the beautifully rendered world of T'Rain, a multiplayer online game, infects the computer of a rogue Russian gangster. This leads to kidnapping, illegal flights into and out of China, and lots of explosions peppering a plot that features a heart-of-gold Russian security consultant, a former-marijuana-smuggler-cum-billionaire, a beautiful Eritrean adoptee, a double-amputee Vietnam vet, a Hungarian hacker and a Chinese gold farmer, American survivalists, MI6 agents, a perky Asian firecracker of a woman with just enough English to almost plausibly hold things together, and an Islamic jihadist from Wales who's decided that industrial China is the best place to hide out. What's missing from REAMDE that's present in Stephenson's earlier works is that magical moment when you simply forget that you're reading — that moment when his fantastical and outrageous inventions and combinations become a new reality. Instead, there's a distance imposed by too many functional characters and too much exposition. His best works avoid this trap by showing and engaging, rather than telling and explaining. REAMDE is nice and thoroughly diverting; when it's over, you miss it in the same way you miss an ice cream cone after the last lick. But following a 1,000-page commitment, adjectives like "nice" and "diverting" make you wish there had been less confection and a little more meat. William Morrow, 1,056 pp., $35, Sept. 20. —Char Vandermeer

Post-It Note Diaries

Edited and illustrated by Arthur Jones At the Painted Bride, Nov. 19

After his New York-based Post-It Note Reading Series gained national notice, illustrator Arthur Jones took the next logical step and turned the conceit into a book. Jones' drawings accompany tales from 20 notable collaborators, ranging from musician Andrew Bird to This American Life contributor David Wilcox. In a way, it's surprising it's taken so long for someone to do it; those ubiquitous yellow squares are a perfect medium for comic panels. Jones' style is elegant: detailed but not fussy, spare when appropriate. His renderings enliven even the least absorbing stories. Yet if you're looking for laughs, Post-It Note Diaries: 20 Stories of Youthful Abandon, Embarrassing Mishaps, and Everyday Adventure is not the place; across the board, the tone tends to be dry and the payoff's more likely to be "Hmm ... " than "Ha!" The weakest pieces shoot for informative, rather than interesting, like Andrew Solomon's anthropological "Notes on an Exorcism" and Neil deGrasse Tyson's astrophysics reverie "Romancing the Mountaintop." Even the most amusing stories, like Mary Roach's "How Not to Have Sex with Nicolas Cage" and Kristen Schaal's "Miss Peppermint Twist," are oddly muted on the page. The best entries start out as one kind of story and, 58 or 72 panels later, quietly turn out to be about something else; they're the ones that provide the collection with its momentum. Somehow, all those yellow squares add up to a satisfying experience. Plume, 214 pp., $15, Oct. 4. —M.J. Fine

Damned

By Chuck Palahniuk At the Free Library, Oct. 29

Chuck Palahniuk continues on his long-standing one-book-per-year trajectory with Damned!, the adventures of a 13-year-old girl in hell. Madison Spencer has just died from a marijuana overdose — if that's even possible — and landed herself in a grimy prison cell with zillions of other damned souls settling into oblivion. As only Palahniuk could imagine such a girl, Madison is more like Rushmore 's Max Fischer than a Judy Bloom heroine (despite beginning each chapter with "Are you there, Satan? It's me, Madison"). She's simultaneously awkward and advanced, noting repeatedly that she might be dead, but she's not dumb. "Yes, I know the word tenacious. I'm 13 and disillusioned and a little lonely, but I'm not simpleminded." This strange bird may simply be the author's reincarnation of himself as a little girl: cynical, jaded, perverted and, yet, hopeful. Her hell-bound treks are laden with Fight Club 's anti-materialism mantras and the tongue-in-cheek perversions of Choke and Snuff. Really, there's nothing new here: Hell is envisioned as a place overrun by overthrown-gods-turned-demons who stalk and eat you, corporate mediocrity, painful screenings of The English Patient, telemarketers, Internet porn and a "Great Ocean of Wasted Sperm." Even Madison's coming-of-age story feels oddly typical, despite the setting: She gains self-confidence, finds a gaggle of friends, Breakfast Club -style, and triumphs over evil. Part child prodigy, part lonely soul, Madison should be the ultimate new-age heroine. Alas, she simply doesn't meet the mark. Palahniuk's journey through hell is less hellish than most of his earthly books, and reads more like a tribute to adolescence than a true pitch of death. Doubleday, 247 pp., $24.95, Oct. 18. —Meg Augustin

Blue Nights

By Joan Didion At the Free Library, Nov. 3

Like a beautiful piece of clothing with all the stitching exposed, the architecture of Joan Didion's writing is on full view in Blue Nights. And it's in that naked display that the true magic of this memoir, covering the slow-burn death of Didion's daughter and the continued aftermath of her husband's sudden passing (detailed in 2005's The Year of Magical Thinking ), becomes exquisitely clear. This is a heartbreaking little book, covering not just the tragedy of losing a child but the inevitability of growing older and closer to death yourself. The prose is willful, the details remarkable — tea sandwiches, the morning light in Malibu and specific collections of words (a doctor's nonchalant assessment, a troubled child's temper tantrum) repeated but never quite understood. At this point in a storied career, Didion is a wily master. It feels like she had to write this thing because that's what she does, even though it was crippling and emotional for her. The way she humbly reveals that tension is tremendously affecting. In a moment of punctuation as poetry, she makes a series of statements about her increasing frailty, each followed by a colon, implying a world of unspoken anxiety. Blue Nights is also a treatise on memory, and the ways our lives inevitably lurch forward. That movement creates casualties: things, beloved homes, people, our younger selves. Didion acknowledges that she is alone and on the downward slope of life. Fortunately, her writing still has incredible places to go. Knopf, 208 pp., $25, Nov. 1. —Lee Stabert

Zone One

By Colson Whitehead At the Free Library, Oct. 31

Finally, a book that eschews the zombie genre's obligatory gore and predictable tragedy-triumph arc with a smart, well-written adventure about an average man's survival. Colson Whitehead's fifth novel follows Mark Spitz, a low-level volunteer methodically clearing lower Manhattan of "stragglers" — zombies who remain eerily stuck in place — and "skels," the more ravenous variety. Plus, of course, bodies. Like all survivors, Mark has Post Apocalyptic Stress Disorder, but his "unexceptionality" helps him adapt while the American government scrambles to save our culture with slogans, anthems and corporate sponsorships. While zombies primarily generate horror entertainment (particularly the sick thrill of shooting not-quite-people), Zone One considers bigger ideas of civilization. Even as they consider whether their tragedies were "comeuppance for a flatlined culture" or divine judgment, survivors also manage to reinvent society's rules; Whitehead makes zombies as plausibly horrific as earthquakes, tsunamis or a sudden and total lack of fossil fuels. He transcends the genre — as Margaret Atwood did for science fiction — with a mature novelist's keen literary skill and startling insight, insisting that we consider how we might react in the face of cataclysm. Doubleday, 259 pp., $25.95, Oct. 18. —Mark Cofta

Any Ever

By Ryan Trecartin

That we had Ryan Trecartin here in our South Philly backyard, and lost him, is an embarrassment. Yet letting the caged bird fly has worked magic for the now-30-year-old multimedia/installation artist, whose book, Any Ever, captures the twitchy character-driven delirium of his 2010 MOCA Los Angeles show of seven stream-of-consciousness-driven flicks spread throughout two floors. Equal parts New York Dolls, Andy Warhol's Chelsea Girls and Project Runway (if it were held in a Berlin brothel before the fall of the Wall, that is), the greasy women and inconsequential men who fill these stills reveal a brand of lonely dismay and dismal sensuality — disgusted decadence, even — till-now unwitnessed in the work of a man so early in his career. Rizzoli, 160 pp., $45, Oct. 4. —A.D. Amorosi

Life Itself

By Roger Ebert

For most of us, childhood memories can be instantly unlocked by the taste of a toasted marshmallow. But it wasn't until Roger Ebert's thyroid cancer surgery cost him the ability to eat or taste food that he uncovered a font of reminiscences. Upon recalling a glass of root beer he once drank as a child, Ebert writes in his new memoir, his brother-in-law responded, "Could be, when the Lord took away your drinking, he gave you back that memory." Often in mind-numbing detail, Ebert recounts his life — from his family's history to the menu at his favorite local fast-food restaurant. But his narrative soars with thoughts of his rivalry-turned-friendship with the late Gene Siskel ("No one else could possibly understand how meaningless was the hate, how deep was the love"); encounters with Lee Marvin, Robert Mitchum and John Wayne; and his happy late-in-life marriage. "She has been with me in sickness and in health," Ebert writes, "certainly far more sickness that we could have anticipated." Grand Central, 436 pp., $27.99, Sept. 13. —Andrew Milner

King of the Badgers

By Philip Hensher

The compulsively readable King of the Badgers opens with a young girl going missing in Hanmouth, England. But Philip Hensher's shrewd multi-character novel is no detective thriller. Rather, it's a smart, stinging satire about the town's peculiar residents and their odd behavior: There's David, an overweight gay man; his phony boyfriend, Mauro, a drug/sex/money-hungry Italian; an overextended married couple; and an artist who assembles pornographic collages. Although his intersecting stories of neighbors and strangers go off on tangents, Hensher provides many engaging, intimate and intricate details about love and relationships. His characters are all connected — not just by Hanmouth, with its omnipresent closed-circuit cameras, or by romantic and financial despair, but by their secrets. Everyone is hiding something hinky — or kinky — and they're all under constant surveillance. In chronicling these lives of shame, Hensher has written a shrewd black comedy of manners that uncannily shows how people are their own worst enemies. Faber & Faber, 448 pp., $26, Sept. 13.—Gary M. Kramer

That Is All

By John Hodgman

The first thing fans of John Hodgman's Complete World Knowledge series will want to know about its final installment is, what are we getting 700 of this time? Adding to his canon of long-ass lists, Hodgman here conjures up "700 Ancient and Unlistable Ones." These gods, beasts and generally epic avatars have obnoxious names that were never intended to be pronounced by humans. Hodgman suggests, "If you wish to read them aloud, I recommend investing in a good set of prosthetic face tentacles." Some examples include "Manou-Carhartt, The Denim-Skinned," and "Anlo-Tet-Maturath, Whose Neck Veins are Disgustingly Visible." Hodgman has always walked a fine line between absurdist comedy and pure gibberish, and That Is All is no exception. Yet this time around, there seems to be an even finer poetry to his nonsense. Hodgman knows that when it comes to ridiculous mumbo-jumbo, what you say is never as important as how you say it. He has both an oddly evocative sensibility as well as an ear for the musicality of language. Expect this tome of Complete World Knowledge to take its place next to its predecessors on the coffee tables of 24-year-old liberal arts grads everywhere! Dutton, 368 pp., $25, Nov. 1. —Ryan Carey

From This Wicked Patch of Dust

By Sergio Troncoso

Tales of young families struggling to build a better life are nothing new. Yet Sergio Troncoso breathes fresh air into the American assimilation story. Born on the border with sharp eyes and ears for his surroundings, Troncoso brings us forward from 1966 to the present day. We watch kids maturing and moving away from the Mexican traditions their parents hold dear: The daughter who partied wildly in Juarez during high school reverts to devout Catholicism in college and finally settles in Islam, where she finds she is once again an immigrant, welcome but never quite fitting in; the letters home from the son whose reserve unit was activated for Iraq seem to lead inevitably to a sealed coffin in the wicked dust of Texas; and the youngest son, who shares Troncoso's Harvard education and devotion to writing, is congratulated by his siblings for the way he can combine all their stories and spin a new one. This story is recognizable as their own, yet it's also wholly universal. University of Arizona, 320 pp., $17.95, Sept. 1. —Mary Armstrong

Norman Granz: The Man Who Used Jazz For Justice

By Tad Hershorn

Jazz has always looked somewhat askance at popular success. Norman Granz, founder of Verve and several other jazz record labels and the wildly popular Jazz at the Philharmonic concert and record series, has therefore always been a controversial figure. He not only embraced success but, more uncommonly, often achieved it. The son of immigrant Russian Jews, Granz found his niche in late-night jam sessions in L.A. and New York beginning in the late 1930s. He took that concept from smoky nightclubs to concert halls, putting greats like Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Ella Fitzgerald and countless others onstage, beginning at the Philharmonic Auditorium in L.A. He toured the world under the "Jazz at the Philharmonic" moniker long after that original home became uneasy with his rowdy, racially mixed audiences. JATP divided critics from day one: Yes, it brought jazz a steady paycheck and a degree of respectability, but it also presented a lowest-common-denominator picture of the music as near-athletic blowing sessions, rewarding the loud and showy over the subtle and intelligent. Tad Hershorn's thorough biography comes down squarely on the side of Granz, though admitting that his brash personality did him no favors. His strongest argument is for Granz as a civil-rights bulldog; whatever one might think of his musical tastes, his insistence on non-segregation policies in his venues and decent pay and proper respect for his musicians was unerring and bold. University of California Press, 496 pp., $34.95, Oct. 17. —Shaun Brady