FICTION

54
Wu Ming
(translated from the Italian by Shaun Whiteside)
Harcourt, 2006

If 54 were an animal, not a book, it would be a giraffe, because it is often said that a giraffe looks as if it were designed by committee.

The five Italian writers who publish together under the moniker of Wu Ming (Mandarin for "no-name") believe a work of art should be judged on its merits, without reference to its creators. Multiple-author fiction is so unusual, however, that press interest has scuppered their half-hearted plea for anonymity, and details about them are easily found on the Internet. 54 is their second project (after Q, published in English in 2004) and, despite plots of different lengths and styles, a dappled consistency, and more false starts than the Kentucky Derby, it still manages to look adorable while covering a lot of ground at decent speed.

The novel wriggles with plots that do, sort of, knot together, like a child's first attempt with shoelaces. A hotbed of partisans gather in a Bologna cafe; a lovelorn bartender sneaks into Yugoslavia to find his Communist father; Lucky Luciano transforms Naples, an Allied base, into the epicenter of the heroin trade; and everywhere political ideologies, the former driving forces of societal change, are being supplanted by drugs, money, and the cult of celebrity. Cinema has become "the dream factory of the free world … its conscience and its imagination."

Then, onto the pages of 54, steps Cary Grant. In fiction, as on film, his arrival warms the cockles of your heart. Here, at last, is a man who can sort out all this falderal; a man's man, woman's man, man about town, with no need of garters as his socks "wouldn't dare slip down his calves." He is "the perfect prototype of Homo atlanticus: civil without being boring; moderate but progressive; rich, certainly, even extremely rich, but not dry, and not flabby either."

Grant's lackluster film career was about to be revitalized through Hitchcock's divine intervention, but only after, in Wu Ming's fictitious tall tale, he agrees to a request by the British and American governments to visit Yugoslavia incognito, and use his renowned proletarian sympathies to woo Marshal Tito away from the "Reds" by evoking their shared respect for self-reinvention and French cuffs.

While planning this escapade, Grant takes umbrage with the doppelganger chosen by Her Majesty's Secret Service to deflect the press's attention, not due to the second-hand-car salesman's Quebecois vowels or tubby physique, but to his terrible taste in ties. Classier than James Bond, Grant represents the apolitical individual, above laws and beyond borders, who would become a role model for both people and policy for the rest of the century—globalization personified in perfectly pressed pants.

Wu Ming embody that peculiarly European brand of intellectual, who argue eloquently about radicalism while (probably) wearing handmade designer shoes—socially conscious and hip. Let's give thanks for their risky experimentations, for their willingness to talk politics and pepper their work with allusions, for giving us an excuse (as though one were needed) to watch To Catch a Thief and North by Northwest all over again, for satirical fiction as sprawling, complicated, and contradictory as Europe itself. You'll never meet another giraffe quite like it.

—Susan McCallum-Smith

FOOD WRITING

Gastronaut
Stefan Gates
Harcourt, 2006

Those who have wondered (and surely someone has) how many people eat fingernails, hair, and other corporeal detritus now have a published reference book: Gastronaut by Stefan Gates. The British food writer and BBC producer surveyed five hundred people about their auto-cannibalistic habits, and then went the extra mile to evaluate the health effects of each one. Earwax, for example, is "safe to eat … but extremely dangerous to harvest as the eardrum is extremely delicate." That's good news for the fifty people who admitted in the survey that they had sampled the stuff.

Thus is the tone of the book, which alternates from revolting to laugh-out-loud funny. This strange collection of essays, recipes, and lists seems to exist mainly so Gates can write about taboos both social and culinary. His best work covers culinary history, which he researched well and recounts in an easy, smart, conversational manner. He gathered recipes from Mesopotamia, Rome, and Lapland. He got them from royalty—King Richard II of England's blancmange and Elvis' beloved fried peanut butter and banana sandwich.

At the end of each section are his eclectic choices of music to cook or eat by. These little jewels are worth the price of the book. Toffee fondue tastes better while listening to "mullet rock," he writes, "such as Manfred Mann's ‘Blinded by the Light,' Starship's ‘We Built This City,' Foreigner's ‘I Want to Know What Love Is,' Van Halen's ‘Jump,' and Peter Frampton's ‘Show Me the Way.'" For monkey gland steak, dust off your vinyl albums of Captain Beefheart's Safe as Milk or Trout Mask Replica.

The monkey gland steak recipe represents Gastronaut's major flaw: Gates' reliance on grotesque schoolboy humor. The opening photo for the headcheese section of a man holding a severed pig's head made me skip the section entirely. A section on flatulence followed by a journal of the author's "Personal Journey into Extreme Flatulence" was just overkill.

If you're willing to wade through the gratuitous perversions, you might enjoy Gates' unusual foray into the culinary world. When he's funny, his humor is the dry, British kind that made Monty Python such a hit. And he does know his way around a kitchen; the monkey gland steak ("gland" is really a slab of steak sirloin) was easy to prepare, attractive on the plate, and delicious. Gates is someone to watch in the hope that he will turn his talents toward illuminating food history and away from breaking wind.

—Robin Reid

FICTION

The Prisoner of Guantánamo
Dan Fesperman
Knopf, 2006

Espionage novels rely on ever-changing geopolitics to keep them from becoming staid. The end of the Cold War marked the end of Cold War spy-novel clichés played out in Berlin or Prague. Instead, a new background for global conflict has materialized, complete with a cast of rogues waiting to be thwarted. The most memorable authors of the genre practice a kind of mimicry that reflects the anxieties of their era. John le Carre's elegant early novels laid out the stark nature of the spy game with literary aplomb, a high-stakes chess match involving flawed men and grim pawns well-suited to the post-war world. The works of Robert Ludlum, even as they clung doggedly to a rigid formula, exuded a certain breathless paranoia that mirrored America's post-Vietnam unease as the Soviets acquired proxy states in Africa and Asia; damaged heroes ran around European capitals and Third World outposts chased by faceless adversaries, desperate and trusting no one.

Now there's a new face to the enemy, a new ideology, and a new way of waging war. Against this backdrop, Fesperman, a former reporter for The Baltimore Sun, sets a rather ordinary thriller that regrettably makes scant use of the fresh setting.

The novel opens with ex-Marine Revere Falk, an Arabic-speaking FBI agent assigned to interrogations at the naval base in Guantánamo Bay, finding himself embroiled in a murder investigation that throws his professional and personal life into limbo. As suspicion of treason falls on him just a few pages in, he quickly learns to trust no one. The paranoia trope is common in the espionage genre, yet here the mistrust and deceit seem vague, lacking weight. Further muddling the story are Falk's relationship with a female Army interrogator and the arrival of his former platoon leader. Pam, his romantic interest, emerges as barely more than a cipher who offers a few breathless respites for Falk. Ted Bokamper, the ex-commanding officer, further confuses the plot; he speaks frequently of his powerful patron deep in the bowels of Foggy Bottom, while manipulatively working to further his own agenda. Ted flashes a certain dangerous charm on occasion, but unfortunately his character's lack of depth prevents any real tension from forming. Soon enough, the story devolves into a morass of Cuban spies, homicidal Army officers, hazy government officials, and know-nothing CIA agents chasing after Falk. Sadly, it can't escape the confines of the genre.

Which is a shame, because the best thrillers find a way to break free from the espionage novel's limitations without sacrificing the crucial element of suspense. Frederick Forsyth's Day of the Jackal and The Odessa File nourish a steadily growing momentum culminating in well-deserved climaxes. In the World War II-set The Eagle Has Landed, Jack Higgins builds sympathy for the hero by layering ethical ambiguities onto an already taut story. Fesperman's story does attempt to put a human face on the new enemy (or victims, depending on your politics), but the Arab prisoners serve as misleading figures, MacGuffins of a sort. While the story explores their living conditions, motivations, and indefinite status as enemy noncombatants, it does so almost perfunctorily. Another writer might have used them as examples of the war on terror's sordid nature; here, they make brief appearances as exotic backdrops and then fade into the wings of the plot.

Fesperman should be applauded for writing a novel about timely events and concerns. Even as the hooded Abu Ghraib figure has assumed iconic status, the questions surrounding America's conduct in the war on terror still remain vital. One wishes, though, that Fesperman might have created a more compelling lens through which to examine these issues.

—Michael Paulson

SHORT FICTION

Reverse Negative
Nathan Leslie
Ravenna Press, 2006

Let me first declare myself an unrepentant cheerleader for the short-short fiction format. Like third-party candidates and novellas, I think that what flash fiction has to offer—directness, ingenuity, freshness—is sadly underappreciated by the general public. Plus, it's delightful to indulge in a story that can be read in the time it takes to microwave a meal. Nathan Leslie's Reverse Negative shows both the strengths and weaknesses of the form: inventiveness, intense focus, and the occasional story that is compressed into an artificially small space.

Though there are no official rules for flash fiction, most enthusiasts of the form cite a one- or two-thousand word limit and the author's intention for the story to be read in one quick sitting. Reverse Negative doesn't self-identify as flash fiction, but this collection is undeniably swift, and many of the stories included would fit even the strictest flash definitions. Its 179 pages sprint through fifty-eight stories, most clocking just three or four pages. Quite a few show an impressive, mature precision. "The Girl with Silver Hands" offers a disorienting and unpredictable anti-fairy tale. A babysitter seeks a deeper sort of fair play with "A Small Gesture." In "The Nomad," a son tries to explain the manifestation of his father's grief.

For their brevity, though, sometimes the meaning is too tightly packed. A second reading of the collection untucked some of the character nuances that escaped me the first time through. The best of these stories—the ambivalent parenting of "Magazines," a poison-cultivating wife in "The Greenhouse"—limit themselves to a moment or two, and give more insight into these characters' lives than many longer pieces would.

Condensing the writing heats and pressurizes the elements that remain, like the explosion behind a bullet. A story can actually have greater emotional force for being confined, so the few stories here that creep into six and seven pages feel not more complete, but less. Pressed between other deeply affective moments, these extended passages read like sketches for longer stories that were kept short merely for appearance's sake.

Some of Reverse Negative's most satisfying moments come when the bounds of content and form are pushed simultaneously. In "Brauner's Muse," a flipbook narrates its own progression from line drawing to full-color character, with confusion about life's purpose and designer that should be familiar to everyone. In "General," a couple's life is described through "he says something, then she responds" generalities that rise to express an archetype of real love, longing, and regret.

There is a fascinating imagination at work in this collection. But there are moments when the work tires, like a runner in a long race. "Tree Climbers," "First Date," "The Distant Land," and a scattering of others are surprisingly predictable explorations of familiar motifs.

With Reverse Negative, Leslie has added several excellent stories to the short-short fiction genre. But for newcomers, also exploring one of the numerous multiple-author collections may be a more inviting introduction to the form.

—Dan Gudgel