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"Florida"
The folks who pick National Book Award finalists took a dose of criticism last year for their five selections, and Christine Schutt, one of the lucky authors, has taken some shots of her own. Schutt's Florida is one of those books that makes you angry for reading it. It's short, 156 pages, cuts quickly from scene to scene, and at times breezes through what seem like years - important years - in the life of the main character: Alice Fivey. But Schutt also manages to do in those 156 pages what many authors fail to do in longer works: render in a truly lyrical and poetic way the lives of a half-dozen people living out ordinary years with ordinary failings. The story focuses around a 7-year old girl - Alice - who is shuttled back and forth among relatives while her mother sits in mental facility. Her father had died years earlier. The relatives who are left to raise Alice seem like the ones you would try to avoid at a family gathering: materialistic in many ways and all with a knack for bad-mouthing people behind their backs. In between Schutt sprinkles a couple of kinder folks - like Alice's longtime "driver" Arthur - who work to pull the story back to a moral center. Stacked against books that did win the National Book Award (like Saul Bellow's Herzog or Joyce Carol Oates' Them) Schutt uses a writer's most important weapon - language - to paint thought pictures rather than tell a heavy story. (Sure, a little girl seeing her mother hauled off to a mental home after her father dies should read like a heavy story, but Florida doesn't punch you in the gut.) It's a good book and worth reading. Schutt is a master of the English language, which is never an easy job. And when you finish you'll want to read it again, if only to see if you missed what may have been, should have been, a deeper story. And if only to see if your anger is misplaced on such a lyrical work. By Ed Moltzen · 2 May 2005
Gilead
Gilead, which just picked up a Pulitzer Prize, has been drawing some very good reviews. This is, essentially, a representative sample. By Ed Moltzen · 17 April 2005
A Vast Left Wing Echo Chamber
But the new information he presents (Anti-Bushers "found" a confidential PowerPoint presentation by Karl Rove on how to win the election that freaked them out and sparked them to action; Specific numbers that show Farenheit 9/11 wasn't nearly as successful across the country as Michael Moore had many believe, etc.) is richly detailed enough to make York's book a compelling read. What's hard to figure out, though, is how serious the right should take the threat from the left. York paints a picture of a hopeless echo chamber of Air America Radio, America Coming Together, George Soros, Michael Moore and others that simply never convinced a majority of Americans to get rid of President Bush. York digs in strongly at the hypocrisy of the network of anti-Bush 527 organizations that primed the biggest money machine in political history, after spending years trying to rein in Big Money Politics. And he does it with a straightforward, calm writing style. In the end, York makes it easy to understand why the MoveOn crowd and its friends need to be kept front-of-mind in the political world: their aggressive, free-spending, anger-driven, Hitler-comparing playbook will certainly be tweaked by the 2006 and 2008 elections, but it's an infrastructure that is going to stick around and keep getting smarter. Now, if only that playbook contained actual policy proposals that went beyond the "No," and captured the imagination of a few million more Americans, the Republicans might find cause for panic. And York might find the topic for another book. By Ed Moltzen · 8 April 2005
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