The Shadow Year
By Jeffrey Ford
Morrow, 289 pp., $25.95
Children are the original magic realists. The effects that novelists of a postmodern bent must strive for come naturally to the young, a truth given inventive realization in this wonderful quasi-mystery tale by Jeffrey Ford.
Set in a working-class suburb in the 1960s, "The Shadow Year" more figuratively stands at the interface where the real and the surreal meet. Our guide and narrator is an unnamed sixth-grader, the middle child of three, punting his schoolwork while grappling with the messy facts of life in his loving but decidedly low-rent family. An avid reader of detective stories, the boy, led by his brash older brother, Jim, gets swept up in the action when strange occurrences begin to strike their hometown. A classmate disappears, a prowler peers in at neighbors' windows, and a sinister man in white stalks the young sleuths. Spookiest of all, the narrator's little sister tracks these events - before they happen - on a cardboard model of the town that Jim has built in the basement.
To the extent that this vivid and eccentric evocation of childhood is nostalgic, what it yearns for is a time when the woods beyond the backyard were a boyish adventurer's wilderness and his unregimented imagination the source of all the thrills he needed.
Strange Bedfellows: How Late-Night
Comedy Turns
Democracy Into a Joke
By Russell L. Peterson
Rutgers University, 272 pp., $24.95
From embarrassment of riches to mere embarrassment: The surprisingly thoughtful tone surrounding the presidential campaign suffered a precipitous decline recently, right around the time the writers' strike ended and TV comedians went back to work. Coincidence? Russell L. Peterson wouldn't think so. And who should know better than a stand-up comic turned professor of American studies?
According to Peterson, genuine political satire - a genre with substance as well as sting - is a rare commodity on American TV. Cable's niche marketing permits a few practitioners, like Comedy Central's one-two punch of Stewart and Colbert, to thrive. But the ratings-crazed commercial networks, terrified of offending anyone, exile political humor to late night and insist on a bland evenhandedness, an acid rain of nonpartisan, personal ridicule that nourishes a shallow, cynical contempt for all politics and politicians. Far from fulfilling the thought-provoking function of satire, Jay, Dave, Conan, and that perpetual caricature factory "Saturday Night Live" are the in-crowd our leaders are expected to be in with, wherever they plan to lead us.
Blessedly breezy for an academic study, "Strange Bedfellows" breaks no new ground, but unlike much of what passes for political humor, it gives us something to think about.
The Woman Who Wouldn't
By Gene Wilder
St. Martin's, 167 pp., $19.95
Gene Wilder, the lovable comic actor, has a lesser-known sideline as a fiction writer, on display in this wistful love story.
The time is 1903 and the setting a luxurious German sanitarium where Jeremy Webb, an American violinist, has come for an extended rest after experiencing a nervous breakdown in the midst of a performance. A critic has complained of a lack of emotional engagement in his playing, and in getting to know two other residents of the sanitarium, Jeremy comes to realize that this is true of more than just his musicianship. One of his new acquaintances is the playwright Chekhov, the other a sad and beautiful young Belgian woman who has been diagnosed with cancer and given little time to live. Chekhov, being real, is doomed. But for the other two inmates of this Shangri-la, love may be a stronger tonic than anything medicine can concoct.
Wilder's matter-of-fact narrative style does not so much complement the historical setting as ignore it altogether. Still, the story exudes the same sweetness that characterizes his screen persona and for all we know his real one, too.
Amanda Heller is a critic and editor who lives in Newton.
