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With such knowledge, and haunted by the memory of the sister he lost, how will Jakob Beer develop into a distinguished poet and, late in his life, a husband besottedly in love with his young wife? These are the questions that Fugitive Pieces addresses through Jakob's own words: "I try to set down the past in the cramped space of a prayer."
He succeeds, and credit goes to Anne Michaels, who created him. The author, 38, a Canadian poet who has published two volumes of verse, will try the patience of readers who expect brisk forward momentum in their novels. Her prose does not race; it hovers, insinuating its way in and around timeless mysteries. Jakob Beer never lived, but thanks to Michaels, he does now. --By Paul Gray
SLACK ON THE ROAD
The Beach
An eerie echo of Jack Kerouac's rambunctious 1957 novel, On the Road, begins to sound about halfway through The Beach (Riverhead; 371 pages; $23.95), by British writer Alex Garland, 27. The reason it takes half of Garland's moody tale for Kerouac's ghost to tap the reader on the shoulder is that the feel of the two novels could not be more different. On the Road was loony, funny, electric; The Beach is listless, pallid, drifting without object.
Each novel, in its style, captures the style of its generation, and can be read by bemused elders as a shrewd caricature of disaffected post-childhood wanderers desperate to avoid adulthood. Garland's characters are young European and American backpackers who circle like dead leaves in an eddy through the guesthouses of Southeast Asia: this month Lombok, next week or next month or in another life, Loh Liang or Zanskar. Garland writes as they travel, without emotion or opinion or allegiance. His narrator is an affectless young Englishman named Richard, who, in Thailand, comes upon a hand-drawn map that seems to locate a dimly-rumored and supposedly unreachable island beach unknown to tourists or authorities. With a young French couple, flaccid Etienne and wanly beautiful Francoise, he manages to find this Eden, whose legendary sands can be arrived at only by jumping from the top of a high waterfall.
The three jump--a dreamlike scene of letting go--and discover a commune of becalmed, largely indistinguishable migrants much like themselves. Weeks go by without exhilaration or despair. The beach dwellers fish, steal a little marijuana from an illicit plantation and work on their tans. Eventually, perhaps because everyone has read Lord of the Flies, things fall apart nastily. But even this calamity, which involves blood and dead people (the pot growers lose patience), does not touch the survivors. They grab sandals and rucksacks and move on. Richard reports all this a year later from London, where he is tethered to an unspecified job. His tone is one of mild regret, which seems to be the author's view as well, though that's hard to say. If Garland is aware that he has written satire, he gives no sign of it. --By John Skow
ANIMAL INSTINCTS
Lives of the Monster Dogs