Short Takes
The Bastard of Istanbul
By Elif Shafak
Viking, 360 pp., $24.95
Author Elif Shafak was charged with the thought crime of "denigrating Turkishness" for bravely exploring in this novel the Great Turkish Unmentionable: the Armenian genocide of 1915.
Where to begin approaching a densely populated story in which folkloric whimsy and historical tragedy meet over the comedy of the kitchen table? The eponymous "bastard," Asya Kazanci, is a young Turkish woman of mysterious paternity who has grown up in a smothering household of women. "The men of this family are cursed," she matter-of-factly informs a visitor. "They don't survive." The visitor is Armanoush , the novel's deus ex machina, a half-Armenian American and stepdaughter of Mustafa, the lone male of the Kazanci family, who long since immigrated to Arizona. Naively, she has come seeking Armenian history in Istanbul, the last place on earth likely to acknowledge it. With an awful inevitability, what one character calls the "compulsory amnesia" afflicting the Kazancis about family truths, just as it afflicts the Turks about national ones, begins to crumble.
This is only Shafak's second novel in English, and her ambition outruns execution. Sensual imagery bumps up against tediously didactic passages, and the parallels between personal and national neurosis seem forced. If anything, her characters were better off with their blinders on, a moral Shafak surely doesn't mean to extend to her blinkered countrymen.
Don't Make Me Stop Now
By Michael Parker
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 276 pp., paperback, $12.95
"A couple wretched in love, in a car, on an interstate." So begins one of the penetrating stories in this collection by Michael Parker, a quick flash of insight revealing a relationship as if by lightning strike. This particular couple will become even more wretched, owing to a fundamental incompatibility, as the story progresses.
They are not the only characters in these pages undone by relationships, whether ongoing, defunct, or entirely illusory. A disaffected husband arranges an impulsive rendezvous with the woman he thinks he ought to have married instead, only to find she has no intention of accommodating his fantasies. A discarded wife coping ineffectually with her husband's defection makes a clumsy attempt to get even. An elderly black widower comes to terms with loss, isolation, decline.
Love hurts, a lesson Parker's characters learn over and over. His ironic, minutely calibrated distance from them allows us to indulge in the occasional superior smirk. But banal as their pain may seem, it's still their pain, and it still aches, a moral Parker's humanity, as much as his convincing emotional realism, never lets us forget.
On "The Wealth of Nations"
By P. J. O'Rourke
Atlantic Monthly, 242 pp., $21.95
Judging, no doubt correctly, that most of us have not read Adam Smith's "The Wealth of Nations," the satirist and best-selling contrarian P. J. O'Rourke helpfully digests it for us: Cliffs Notes with attitude.
Smith believed, according to O'Rourke, that "economic progress depends upon a trinity of individual prerogatives: pursuit of self-interest, division of labor, and freedom of trade." As to the division of labor, O'Rourke is clear about his own job, which is "to make quips, jests, and waggish comments." His tools are the two volumes of Smith's 900-page tome, which O'Rourke uses to beat his usual bugaboos over the head: politicians, intellectuals, The
O'Rourke looks to the 1776 classic of laissez-faire economics to provide a patina of pedigree for his modern brand of "greed is good" libertarianism. Whether this exercise is an intellectually respectable one is for experts to determine. Amateurs will be fitfully engaged by its condensations and renovations. More consistently charming is O'Rourke's biographical sketch of Smith, who may strike a chord with capitalist swashbucklers in his philosophy if not in his lifestyle. The quintessential absent-minded professor, Smith lived quietly in Edinburgh with his mother.
Amanda Heller is a critic and editor who lives in Newton. 
