Short Takes

Liberty
By Garrison Keillor
Viking, 257 pp., $25.95

Garrison Keillor's Midwestern Never-Never Land, Lake Wobegon, has seen many stirring Fourth of July celebrations, though few perhaps as dramatic as the one when Clint Bunsen was a boy, when a distant tornado rained three dozen bowling balls onto the parade out of a blue sky. But we digress. And, really, how could we do otherwise with Keillor, the Prairie Home absurdist, pointing the way?

Clint, now a pompous burgher of 60 and Lake Wobegon's Independence Day impresario, finds himself hard-pressed to top his masterpiece of the previous July, spotlighted by cable news as the quintessential small-town Fourth. Worse, Clint is not in a celebrating mood. He's tired of carping townsfolk who fail to recognize his managerial genius, tired of his sputtering marriage and his struggling Ford dealership. An illicit romance leaves him carrying a torch for the saucy gal who will be carrying a torch herself as Miss Liberty in the parade. Is she the ticket to California and liberation that Clint has been promising himself for 40 years?

Keillor is in his element, gazing down on Clint with ironic benevolence as the holiday pageantry - the Living Flag, Uncle Sam on stilts, the Fabulous Frisbee Dogs of Fergus Falls, and all the rest - implodes in glorious bursts of farce while CNN's cameras roll.

The Men in My Life
By Vivian Gornick
Boston Review/MIT Press, 224 pp., $14.95

For feminists of Vivian Gornick's wave, the case was clear-cut: Men were free to do and be whatever they wanted, and women were not. Thirty years of living and reading, of course, have taught her that things were never so simple, that men, too, must struggle with obstacles beyond their control, an insight developed in these literary-critical essays.

Gornick explores the role of the racial outsider embodied in very different ways by V.S. Naipaul and James Baldwin. She recalls how Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, through the sheer force of will and artistry, pushed the Jewish experience from the margins into the mainstream of American culture. By contrast, the generalized male melancholia pervading the well-made fiction of Raymond Carver, Richard Ford, and Andre Dubus leaves her, she says, with "the taste of ashes" in her mouth, unpersuaded and unmoved.

As for wrestling with demons of personal rather than cultural or social origin, Gornick commemorates with harrowing insight authors such as the anthropologist Loren Eiseley, trapped in an enveloping loneliness, and the Victorian neurotic George Gissing, who stubbornly "continued to experience himself as poor and alone" even when reality unobligingly foisted success upon him.

When I Grow Up
By Juliana Hatfield
John Wiley & Sons, 330 pp., $24.95

Deep songs, fragile singer. That is the image Juliana Hatfield has cultivated since she joined her first rock band, the Blake Babies, as an insecure Berklee College freshman in the late 1980s, and she continues to cultivate it in this intriguing memoir. "At heart, I am not a rock and roller. . . . I am a librarian, a birdwatcher," she writes, establishing her shy-girl alienation from the Live Loud, Burn Out Young scene that has been her habitat for so many years.

It's a schizoid ethic, the pop music code. The art sustains you, but the business will kill you. Hatfield casts a cold, even bitter eye on the soul-sucking life of the itinerant entertainer: the mind-dulling road trips, the constant performance pressure, the stink of cheap motel rooms and the squalor of rock clubs seen by daylight, as musicians see them; the perfidious producers, the needy fans, the strung-out companions. The road is no place for adult relationships, and Hatfield has the psychological scars to prove it.

She's in a healthier place now, she tells us, quietly writing and recording, though her persona largely remains that of a grown woman preserved in the amber of post-adolescence.

Amanda Heller is a critic and editor who lives in Newton.