NEW BOOKS PLUCKED FROM THE PUBLISHING FRINGES

[July 11th, 2001] the faithful narrative of a pastor's disappearance
by Benjamin Anastas
(Farrar Straus and Giroux, 277 pages, $24)

The disappearance of Reverend Thomas Mosher, the handsome black minister of a small-town New England church, evokes a range of reactions from his congregation. His admirers may feel lost and his critics secretly relieved, but the congregation member most troubled by his absence is Bethany Caruso, a human-resources administrator, wife, mother of two and, in her free time, the good Reverend's lover.

Bethany's daughter precociously questions her mother's behavior, à la Pearl in The Scarlet Letter. Hawthorne's dour tale of a minister and his lover isn't the only thing Anastas riffs on in The Faithful Narrative of a Pastor's Disappearance, his second novel. Plumbing the moral vicissitudes of New England life is a time-honored theme of American literature, from Hawthorne to Edith Wharton to Stephen King to Rick Moody, so Anastas' characters and locales have a certain familiarity.

But the novel quickly becomes too familiar--the satirical value of jokes about the crassness of Disney animation or having 2.3 kids was depleted long ago--and Anastas doesn't have anything new for this standard cast of New Englanders to say. While Moody has a knack for emotional insight and King knows how to spin plot points into sales dollars, Anastas lacks either of these strengths. He instead seems intent on maintaining a disdain for his own characters, as if he is afraid to get too close to them.

Reverend Mosher, supposedly enigmatic enough to be the absent center of the novel, appears just as fantastically mundane as everyone else, and the congregation's members, as if sensing this, make only half-hearted attempts to find him. It's just not that important to them, so nor is it to us. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem important to Anastas, either.
Dan DeWeese

was this man a genius? talks with andy kaufman
by Julie Hecht
(Random House, 170 pages, $23.95)

Andy Kaufman was a performance artist-comedian who broke through the fourth wall so often it was hard to tell when he was "on" or "off" (there's even speculation that his death was faked as another one of his jokes). The life of this unknowable American curio has already generated a film (Foreman's Man on the Moon) and two books that try to explain Kaufman and his warped sense of humor (Bob Zmuda's Andy Kaufman Revealed! and Bill Zehme's Lost in the Funhouse). The newest book in the Kaufman saga doesn't bother trying to explicate or understand the comedian's skewed sensibilities--and it's a better book for it.

In 1978, author Julie Hecht was trying to get a story on Kaufman for Harper's magazine, but it took her over a year just to get him to sit down and answer her questions. Even then, she had to have many meetings with Kaufman and his collaborator Zmuda, trying to get them relaxed enough to be honest. The book, then, is an often humorous record of that year and those encounters. We see the comedian's wicked sense of humor and compassion through Hecht's eyes, which, for the die-hard Kaufman connoisseur, makes her account seem less adulterated than those of Zehme and Zmuda, who strove more to pin down Kaufman on paper (as if such a thing were possible).

If the book has a flaw, it's that, at 170 pages, it's too quickly digestible. But for a fast study, it nicely encapsulates Kaufman and his wild appeal, and does a better job of humanizing him than any previous attempt to set his life on the page. Damon Houx

listening to the page: adventures in reading and writing
by Alan Cheuse
(Columbia University Press, 290 pages, $24.95)
There is a particular type of person who likes to read books about books. Not the academic, who reads (and writes and discusses) books about what is in books, but the true bibliophile, who loves books themselves--the heft and feel of them, or the chocolatelike scent of old paperbacks. Such bibliolaters love the idea of books, the everyday magic of the written word, which allows one person, privately, to think another's thoughts.

Alan Cheuse, book commentator for NPR's All Things Considered, seems to be a bit of both, loving books and what's in them. His passion for literature is evident in Listening to the Page, which begins promisingly enough with a spirited piece on learning to read, in which Cheuse meanders agreeably through the history of Western culture. But what the book's subtitle refers to as "adventures in reading and writing" turns out to be a group of loosely connected scholarly papers.

Cheuse's personal approach and engaging prose may make these essays more palatable to the layman than your standard comp-lit text, but the book is clearly academic in substance if not in style. It presumes in the reader a close familiarity with the works of writers from Alejo Carpentier to Elizabeth Tallent, or at least an English major's knowledge of recent trends in literary criticism. If chapter titles like "Mario Vargas Llosa and Conversation in the Cathedral: The Question of Naturalism" make your heart leap with the desire to revise your dissertation, you should enjoy this broad tour of modern literature. But the summer afternoon, curl-up-on-the-couch bibliophile is probably better off re-reading Anne Fadiman's delectable Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader. Myrlin A. Hermes