Short Takes
Bottlemania: How Water Went on Sale and Why We Bought It
By Elizabeth Royte
Bloomsbury, 248 pp., $24.99
As if we needed another sign of the decline and fall, Elizabeth Royte notes the ubiquitous bottles of water sticking out of the purses and pockets of Americans as we rush off to work, to school, to the gym, and asks a simple question: Are we nuts? We consider ourselves a nation of savvy consumers. So how is it that we allow megacorporations to take what we pay for through rates and taxes - our local water supply - and sell it back to us at a vast markup in landfill-clogging bottles we must pay further to dispose of?
In this ingenious investigation into the privatization and commodification of the most common of public resources, Royte looks at the politics and economics, the hydrology, sociology, psychology, and physiology of drinking water. She stumps a bottled-water connoisseur with an exotic import: reprocessed wastewater from Singapore. She visits small towns in Maine ruthlessly drained by the Nestlé corporation, purveyors of Poland Spring. She examines (too closely for comfort) what goes into the bottles and what comes out of the tap - frequently the selfsame thing. Amiably, without haranguing or hyperventilating, this veteran environmental writer has produced what could be, assuming enough people read it, one of the year's most influential books.
Some Assembly Required
By Lynn Kiele Bonasia
Touchstone, 336 pp., paperback, $14
In the words of the poet, sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your name. That is what Rose Nowak wants once she decides that she deserves better than her philandering fiancé and her job writing instruction manuals. And so she winds up in the rather fictitious - practically mythological - village of Nauset on Cape Cod, a cozy place where everybody knows not only your name but your business, public and private, and every knothole on your family tree.
Rose finds a seaview cottage to rent, a job with the local paper, and an intriguing reclamation project in the form of Simon Beadle, a prodigal who has slunk home after hitting bottom and bobbing back up, almost literally, since our first sight of him is as a castaway drifting in the Caribbean after having tumbled dead drunk off the deck of a cruise ship. Nor is he Nauset's most unusual native son - not by a long shot.
"Some Assembly Required" totters between quirky charm on the one hand and elementary melodrama on the other before righting itself in the end. Whether there is method in this novice author's dottiness is a question only a second novel can answer. Her first is at least a happy accident.
The Lemur
By Benjamin Black
Picador, 132 pp., paperback, $13
Mystery fans eager to be served up something new by Benjamin Black (the pen name of Irish novelist John Banville), author of the lyrically noir "Christine Falls," will find that his new thriller falls several morsels short of a main course.
It is set in contemporary Manhattan, where an Irishman named John Glass, formerly a crusading journalist, is uneasily leading a life of lapdog luxury. Glass considers himself a burnout, though "sellout" may be the more accurate term. His father-in-law, Big Bill Mulholland, business tycoon and onetime CIA agent, has offered Glass a million dollars to write his biography, on the understanding that it will be fulsomely flattering. Undermotivated, Glass hires a research assistant, an unappealing young man with the soul of a blackmailer and, as it turns out, a violently shortened lifespan.
The author seems as much an alien in New York as his disaffected protagonist. The suspects in the researcher's murder - Glass's filthy-rich, archly contemptuous wife and stepson, and of course Big Bill himself - are relics from the era of Hammett and Chandler. Characterization is thin and plot twists are few, leaving us still hungry for our dinner.
Amanda Heller is a critic and editor who lives in Newton. 