Published in The New York Times: January 8, 2008
All the stories in this lively collection are portraits, mainly of human beings, though a monster with an identity crisis, a giant in search of love and a puppy in need of a home put in appearances as well. While the stories vary widely in quality — a few are dazzling, many are simply well crafted, a handful are embarrassingly slight or contrived — they come together to provide a kind of lesson in fiction writing.
Pic of Zadie Smith by Roderick Field
Whether they are old-fashioned narratives, playful improvisations or comic-strip-like tales told in pictures, these stories force us to re-evaluate that old chestnut “Character is destiny.” They remind us that an individual’s life is itself a narrative with a beginning, a middle and at least the intimations of an end. And they showcase the many time-honored techniques that writers use to limn their characters’ predicaments, from straight-up ventriloquism to the use of unreliable narrators to a “Rashomon”-like splitting of perspectives.
“The Book of Other People” was edited by the gifted young British novelist Zadie Smith, and its contributors include well-known writers like Jonathan Safran Foer, Jonathan Lethem, Dave Eggers and Nick Hornby. The two most haunting stories in the volume — “Lélé” by Edwidge Danticat and “Donal Webster” by Colm Toibin — unfold, like elaborate origami flowers, into complex portraits with the emotional density and historical depth of field of a novel.
Each of these stories takes a pivotal moment in the lives of its protagonists and uses that moment to illuminate an entire life. They depict middle-aged people, damaged by misfortune and eager to protect themselves from further emotional hurt.
In “Donal Webster” the anniversary of a death goads an Irish émigré teacher into a contemplation of abandonment suffered as a child and the rupture of a longtime romance.
In “Lélé” a small-town Haitian woman, who knows that the child she is carrying has a serious birth defect, leaves the baby’s father, convinced that had she never ventured into the adult world of relationships, she might have remained exempt from the worst losses and woes of life.
In this story Ms. Danticat — the author of the powerful novel “The Dew Breaker” — does a magical job of conjuring up the town of Léogâne, a humid river town, where flood waters are threatening people’s homes, and the frogs have been mysteriously dying, a town where the light is bright and dazzling, and where the narrator, Lélé’s brother, tends his vetiver and almond trees.
In this story Ms. Danticat — the author of the powerful novel “The Dew Breaker” — does a magical job of conjuring up the town of Léogâne, a humid river town, where flood waters are threatening people’s homes, and the frogs have been mysteriously dying, a town where the light is bright and dazzling, and where the narrator, Lélé’s brother, tends his vetiver and almond trees.
A similarly visceral sense of place can be found in Mr. Lethem’s “Perkus Tooth”: “To live in Manhattan,” he writes, “is to be persistently amazed at the worlds squirreled inside one another, like those lines of television cable and fresh water and steam heat and outgoing sewage and telephone wire and whatever else which cohabit in the same intestinal holes that pavement-demolishing workmen periodically wrench open to the daylight and to our passing, disturbed glances. We only pretend to live on something as orderly as a grid.”
The title character of Mr. Lethem’s story is a true eccentric, an autodidact and sometime writer who lives in a “bohemian grotto” on the Upper East Side, and who passes his time smoking pot, wolfing down Jackson Hole burgers and prattling away about obscure Werner Herzog films and reruns of the old television show “Columbo.”
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