The intoxicating embrace of a good read
The single disagreeable thing about reading books for a living is that one cannot surrender to books as one did when one had horrible jobs from which books offered the only certain escape. In those days reading was an animal pleasure, pure and unprofitable, and finding a ''good read" was the object of life. A ''good read" is a book that possesses one completely, a book that one cannot put down except to stave off for a while the terrible moment when the last page is turned. Maybe I will never feel that grip so fully again, but I can still identify books that would have done the trick before I lost my innocence.
In fiction the qualities essential to a good read are generous portions of character, character development, and plot; a palpable sense of place and material reality; reoccurrences of situations and quirks that become an inside joke between writer and reader; some seriousness -- though not solemnity -- of purpose; and, above all, consistency and follow-through. You have to trust your writer not to let you down: not change the tacit rules of the narrative or simply be sloppy. He must not disobey the laws of nature or time. He mustn't cry wolf more than once or twice, or trump up spurious motives. And he will never be forgiven for simply calling it a day, leaving a mess of loose ends at the end. An excellent example of a recent novel that could have been a good read if the author had attended to his responsibilities is ''Bangkok Tattoo," by John Burdett (Knopf, $24). The book conveys a foreign place and material circumstances extremely well. It has characters galore, some fairly consistent. It is replete with incidents and complications, but to call them a ''plot" would be going too far. The story is all over the map, literally, and its ending is implausible, inadequate, and annoying.
I turned from this disappointment to ''Country of Origin," by Don Lee, which is now in paperback (Norton, $13.95). Before I was 50 pages in I knew that I had in my hand the genuine article. Set in Japan in 1980, the novel possesses an exquisite sense of place and material detail. It also manages to sustain three fully fleshed main characters. There is Tom Hurley, an American Foreign Service officer of mixed race: half white, half Korean. Tom is callow and given to exaggerating his accomplishments and exotic origins, and, as a result, finds himself in an excruciating pickle. There is Kenzo Ota, a Japanese policeman, divorced, lonely, neurasthenic, and a master of misunderstanding. His ability to misread what's going on around him is both poignant and vastly entertaining. Finally there is Lisa Countryman, an American graduate student, also of mixed race: partly black, partly Asian, partly . . . who knows? She has come to Japan to investigate her origins and has gone missing.
The novel possesses a central core that, put simply, is the conundrum of race, of mixed race, especially. In her relationship with the world, Lisa knows that she is ''never black enough, or Oriental enough, or white enough, and everyone always felt deceived if she didn't announce her ethnic taxonomy immediately upon meeting them, as if not doing so were a calculated sin of omission, as if she were trying to pass." Lee's extraordinary astuteness of observation and skill in showing the ways the problem of race plays out are two reasons the book is so thoroughly satisfying. Others are that the novel positively teems with adroitly conjured lesser characters, and everyone's doings and foibles intersect marvelously. Ota's misunderstandings, particularly, are deftly woven in throughout, opening up wonderfully absurd little chambers in the plot. This is a splendid book and a good read of the first water.
The nonfiction good read is usually history or biography. Memoir, autobiography, and travel are, if we insist on facts being facts, branches of fiction, and the rest of nonfiction simply hasn't the power to transport most people. Two books I push relentlessly as representing the quintessence of the nonfiction good read are David McCullough's ''The Great Bridge: The Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge" (Simon & Schuster, paperback, $18) and ''Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America," by John M. Barry (Simon & Schuster, paperback, $16). Both possess the essential ingredients of their fictional counterparts in the realm of good reads: character, plot, vividly rendered material detail, and an evocation of another time and place. Both just happen to make natural forces and feats of civil engineering comprehensible to the meanest understanding and as exciting as a horse race. Both include considerations of social, economic, and political arrangements and conflicts that are dramatic and revelatory.
''The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America," by Erik Larson (Vintage, paperback, $14.95), though not quite the brilliant achievement that McCullough's and Barry's books are, is still decidedly in the good-read category. Larson tells the story of the conception of the Chicago World's Fair of 1893, and of the design and building of the ''White City," which was its material incarnation. The account follows the heroic efforts of architect Daniel Burnham and landscape designer Frederick Law Olmsted to change a swamp on the edge of Lake Michigan into an exposition that would surpass the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1889 with its galling Eiffel Tower.
The suspense is terrific as Larson describes the brutal pressure of time; the hideous interference, stalling, and dissension of various committees; the clashes of vision; the gargantuan logistical snarls; and natural disaster. Along with this, conquering all, are miracles of determination, labor, and ingenuity. This is the fair that introduced the Ferris wheel -- to say nothing of shredded wheat and Cracker Jack. Running parallel with this story is the macabre one of a serial killer, a man of such ruthless evil and cunning in every department of life that he may have no peer. Finally, Larson follows the growing delusions of an Irish immigrant and future assassin. The three narrative strands and the wealth of material detail, from the stockyards to the dinner tables of the elite, produce an extraordinary picture of Chicago at its finest and most ghastly hour. Clutching my pencil all the way, I had almost forgotten its demands by book's end.
Katherine A. Powers, a writer and critic, lives in Cambridge. Her column appears on alternate Sundays. She can be reached by e-mail at pow3@earthlink.net. 
