Yes, the plot sounds like a rehash of The Simpsons Movie, said James Parker in The New York Times. But cut Stephen King some slack. If the author of The Stand, The Shining, and It wants to drop a transparent dome over a typical American small town, you can bet that his version of the experiment will generate original results. His “genius” lies in his ability to push everyday reality toward gripping nightmare, and that’s precisely what he does here. The source of the dome is a mystery: Aliens and North Korea are among the possible perpetrators. The nightmare is how quickly a “tyrant-in-waiting” seizes on the population’s fears to transform the placid Maine community from quiet conformism into frightening atavism. “It takes him only four days to undo just about everything.” King’s 1,000-page novel has “terrific pace, whizzing from one cliffhanger to the next” as violence mounts and a would-be hero endures imprisonment and even threats of waterboarding, said Lewis Jones in the London Daily Telegraph. Though critics often get “sniffy” about the quality of King’s prose, he can even “turn a good simile.” Simply for his unparalleled ability to “channel our cultural fears,” said Benjamin Percy in Esquire, King may rank as the “most underrated literary novelist of our time.”
The Lacuna
by Barbara Kingsolver
(Harper, $27)
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Barbara Kingsolver’s ambitious new novel flaunts its greatest flaw in its title, said Mike Fischer in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. A lacuna is a gap or hole, and the lacuna here is a passive and naïve narrator who offers little insight into the pageant of 20th-century history that swirls all around him. “Improbably,” the quiet boy we first meet in Mexico at age 12 ends up moving into the home of artists Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera shortly before the Soviet revolutionary Leon Trotsky takes refuge with the couple. When the protagonist later becomes a popular American novelist, his stint as Trotsky’s secretary makes him a target of America’s Red Scare. Kingsolver handles this complicated story well, said Kai Maristed in the Los Angeles Times. The author of ThePoisonwood Bible is a “lavishly gifted writer,” and her first novel in nine years generates “page-turning tension” up through the moment that an assassin takes out Trotsky while the protagonist watches. Unfortunately, said Yvonne Zipp in The Christian Science Monitor, our constant companion “is so tightly buttoned down” that some of the novel’s color “drains away” as soon as his memoir leaves its fiery historical figures behind.
Ford County
by John Grisham
(Doubleday, $24)
Give John Grisham credit for trying something new, said Deirdre Donahue in USA Today. The king of Southern-fried legal thrillers “shows off his literary chops” in his first collection of short stories. Though the Mississippi setting is familiar and the characters in the book generally either practice law or are entangled by it, Grisham displays impressive range: “He can do wry, emotional, funny, serious.” Sometimes he does it all in one 40-page story, said Janet Maslin in The New York Times. Typical is “Fetching Raymond,” a sneaky effort that opens as “a fairly upbeat dysfunctional-family tale” before finally revealing that its amusingly contentious road trippers are on their way to visit a kinsman sitting on death row. Grisham’s novels “sometimes moralize,” but these spare yarns “don’t need to because they transform their agendas into pure, vigorous plot.” Wait a minute, said Laurie Muchnick in Bloomberg.com. Could I be the only reader who noticed that all these characters “feel like puppets rather than real people?” Whether Grisham’s telling us about a dull husband who’s re-energized by a blackjack habit, or an elderly black woman who befriends a young white man dying of AIDS, the stories seem to be nothing but premise. The opener, about three yokels on a maddeningly misguided Samaritan mission, “is the worst story in the book.” But “none of the others is much better.”
The Humbling
by Philip Roth
(Houghton Mifflin, $22)
If Philip Roth is serious about his declared intention of telling the ugly truth about old age, he sure “goes about it in a strange way,” said Aravind Adiga in the London Times. The protagonist of this slim new work, a 65-year-old actor who loses his artistic gift on the first page, is soon consoling himself by enjoying inventive and passionate sex with a lapsed lesbian who just happens to be 25 years his junior. Roth’s vibrant writing and his comically smutty bedroom scenes make The Humbling “the most entertaining depressing book” you could read this year. But, in truth, it’s not much of a novel. To his credit, the 76-year-old Roth proves fearless in exploring the worst nightmare of any artist—the withering of one’s defining talent. As bleak as life suddenly looks to the actor after a disastrous performance in a Kennedy Center Macbeth, things “only go downhill from there,” said Martin Rubin in the San Francisco Chronicle. Even his affair with the younger woman appears to the reader to be doomed from its outset. Still, nothing in The Humbling can overcome “the absurdity at its core,” said William Skidelsky in the London Observer. A 65-year-old in a threesome? A lesbian who can be “turned” by said 65-year-old? This is “an old man’s sexual fantasy dressed up in the garb of literature.” If Roth intends to write any more great novels, “he should be getting out of the house a bit more.”
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