Short takes
God Lives in St.
Petersburg
By Tom Bissell
Pantheon, 212 pp., $20
Getting away from it all is an impossible aspiration for the American travelers in this vivid, psychologically acute collection of stories. They have come to central Asia hauling a load of baggage, and it's not the kind transported in the cargo hold.
In ''Aral," an environmental scientist dispatched by the United Nations to Uzbekistan is taught a lesson by a local autocrat that surpasses anything she learned on her way to a PhD. With well-crafted narrative timing, ''Expensive Trips Nowhere" gradually reveals why a young couple on a guided trek in Kazakhstan seem so edgy and upset with each other. The title story unsparingly exposes the spiritual crisis of a missionary teaching English in Samarkand, powerless to contain or conceal the corruption consuming him. In the coolly ironic ''Death Defier," a photographer who has come to Afghanistan to record the action suddenly finds himself caught up in it.
Tom Bissell's fiction has the crisp descriptive immediacy of fine travel writing, all the more impressive in that his settings are imaginative composites, uncanny dreamscapes through which his protagonists advance toward their fated appointments in Samarra.
The Perfect Hour
By James L. W. West III
Random House, 240 pp., $24.95
Nervously anticipating a reunion with his long-ago love, Ginevra King, whom he hadn't seen in 20 years, F. Scott Fitzgerald reflected, ''She ended up throwing me over with the most supreme boredom and indifference," adding with less than total gallantry, ''These great beauties are often something else at thirty-eight, but Ginevra had a great deal besides beauty."
A recently discovered cache of Ginevra's youthful letters and diaries -- excerpted here alongside a miscellany of other material -- fills out a sketchy passage in Fitzgerald's early life and, significantly for James West, a Fitzgerald scholar, provides the missing link between Fitzgerald's middle-class upbringing and the object of desire that haunts his fiction, alluring and unattainable, the girl with a voice full of money.
After their first meeting, at a party in 1915, the romance was largely epistolary, consisting of the Chicago debutante's teasing responses to her Princeton suitor's (now missing) letters. Lovely, charming, and stinking rich, Ginevra knew that her future was not with a salesman's son from St. Paul, however talented and ambitious. Nevertheless, it was she who introduced Fitzgerald to the heady world of wealth and privilege that became his Holy Grail. Both spirit and substance of her archly sophisticated letters would reverberate throughout his fiction.
Tamburlaine Must Die
By Louise Welsh
Canongate, 160 pp., $18.95
Unlike his contemporary Shakespeare, who appears to have been cautious to the point of invisibility, Christopher Marlowe blazed through the Elizabethan age on a trajectory that was daring, defiant, and accordingly brief.
As this period thriller begins, the playwright and sometime spy is dragged before the mighty Privy Council to answer for a subversive handbill that has been posted under the name of Marlowe's tyrant-hero, Tamburlaine. Marlowe didn't write it. The verse, he sniffs, is but mediocre. Besides, he has been in the countryside, enjoying the protection (and the bed) of his noble patron Walsingham. Released by the queen's enforcers, Marlowe roams the back-alley taverns and shuttered theaters of a plague-ridden and paranoid London, seeking to discover which of his double-dealing companions has betrayed him -- other than poor Thomas Kyd, whose denunciations were extracted on the rack.
This literate melodrama stops hours short of the end we know is coming -- the intriguer Marlowe's mysterious death, allegedly in a tavern brawl -- though by this point the swashbuckling poet has been subjected to so many stabbings and assaults in his search for his Judas that one more knife fight seems superfluous.
Amanda Heller is a critic and editor who lives in Newton.
