(4 of 5)
The definitive novel on the chaotic collision between reader and creator remains Nabokov's Pale Fire. But Duncker, 45, who teaches at a Welsh university, turns Hallucinating Foucault into something more than an academic thriller. And the questions she leaves unanswered are of more than academic interest. --P.G.
ROOTED IN THE PAST
Naming the New World
A black man arrives on a slave ship 300 years ago, knowing one English word: "Nigger." It is, or might as well be, his New World name. But Niger, the river, is his origin, his blood flow, which Calvin Baker, 24, a writer for PEOPLE magazine, traces through generations to the brackish wash of present time. Naming the New World (St. Martin's Press; 118 pages; $18.95) is a writer's gamble, a brief, fast-changing swirl of prose sketches, prose-poetry, and poetry standing naked. Such a recitation--it could be chanted, to drum beats, in an evening--might dissipate in artiness. The view here is that it stands solid and speaks the author's mind.
Baker writes of blood, mixed now with white; slave rebellion; slave capture. "Me, Ezra, and Mamma was all hid in a tunnel behind the wall of the cabin when light flashed between the slits in the board..." A few pages and generations later, a young American black man, well dressed, we assume, money in his pocket, we assume, watches poor blacks in the Caribbean and thinks, "I wanted a connection to these people, wanted to share pots of curried goat and warm lager in Trenchertown because I was one of them." Imagining: "Black people gonna rise up." Knowing sheepishly: "The whole time just an advertising executive on vacation."
Then later, the same man, with real trouble now, not the borrowed kind, makes a jail visit. His junkie brother, guilty of a senseless killing, has managed to kill himself by driving a hypodermic needle into his heart. Rage, love, disgust, self-loathing--there are the beginnings here of a dozen strong novels to come, bound by racial memory of the slave ship: "At night I hear their voices, huddled close to each other. The memories beat louder and louder against my skull. Above it all, I hear the wailing, see the water." --J.S.
OFF TO A FAST START
Necessary Madness
Gloria Burgess, 30, is an american who has recently lost her husband Bill, an English painter, to leukemia. She lives on in London with her admirably behaved eight-year-old son and tries to imagine how she will endure her grief and bereavement. One answer knocks on her apartment door shortly after Bill's death: Jascha Kremsky, a sculptor and an acquaintance of her late husband's and, it turns out, a widower who lost his wife and daughter in a car accident several years earlier.
In other words, not many surprises turn up in Necessary Madness (Putnam; 212 pages; $21.95), a generic weeper with a happy ending. But the novel has enjoyed brisk prepublication chatter, impressive sales of foreign rights and a movie deal thanks to an interesting fact about its author: Jenn Crowell, now a college sophomore, was 17 when she finished the manuscript.