BIBLIOFILE
Grover Cleveland: A Study in Character
by Alyn Brodsky
(St. Martin's Press, 496 pages, $35)

Published a few weeks before the debacle that was Election 2000, Alyn Brodsky's Grover Cleveland is one of those inconspicuous works of history--ignored by critics, overlooked by the book-buying public--that will quietly expire on the bargain shelf a few months from now. That's a shame, because this is the best book no one is reading about the American presidency. Brodsky's biography of the only chief executive to serve two nonconsecutive terms is both a cry in the wilderness and a fable for our times.

Like Al Gore in 2000, Cleveland won the popular vote for re-election in 1888 but lost the Electoral College to Benjamin Harrison, the grandson of a former president. Instead of despairing for his political future, Cleveland welcomed the break and returned to defeat Harrison four years later. Brodsky is up-front about his admiration for his subject: Cleveland, he argues, was the best president between Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt (and the only Democrat elected to the White House between James Buchanan and Woodrow Wilson). He is equally frank in his withering disdain for later presidents: "To compare Grover Cleveland with our four most deplorable post-Harding Presidents--Nixon, Reagan, Bush, and Clinton--is to contrast a paradigm of virtue with the quintessence of duplicity." Brodsky details how Cleveland acted in the public interest no matter how politically unpopular, whereas modern presidents have not only betrayed the public's trust but have done so knowingly and willingly.

Brodsky's relentlessly witty, disparaging comparisons of Cleveland's integrity with most other presidents' perfidy might seem obsessive if they weren't so hilarious--and true. Matt Buckingham

A Trip to the Stars
by Nicholas Christopher
(Scribner, 500 pages, $14)

Nicholas Christopher
reads at Twenty-third Avenue Books, 1015 NW 23rd Ave., 224-6203. 7:30 pm Wednesday, March 14. Free.

Leaving the Manhattan planetarium, 10-year-old and thrice-orphaned Loren takes the hand of a person he thinks is Alma, the 21-year-old aunt currently caring for him. It isn't until too late that Loren realizes he's holding the hand of a stranger, and the mistake is no accident: He's forced into a waiting car and whisked away.

A Trip to the Stars is the story of the 15 years that pass before Loren and Alma meet again, told in chapters that alternate between their disparate experiences. Loren definitely gets the better deal. He discovers that his real name is Enzo, and he's been kidnapped by an indulgent uncle who owns a former hotel outside Las Vegas packed with eccentric geniuses and art. As Enzo, he studies Diogenes and loses his virginity to an aspiring vampire. Meanwhile, Alma is so riddled with guilt that she anagrammatically scrambles her name to "Mala" to emphasize her "bad"-ness. She endures a tour of Vietnam and a vicious car accident.

Christopher spreads this fantastical story across a 500-page canvas, cramming it with such elements as ESP-inducing spider bites, secret NASA missions to the moon's dark side, searches for Atlantis, shape-shifting shamans, and more. Enzo and Mala, unfortunately, are the least interesting characters in their own stories, and the second half of the novel devolves into trite melodrama more the stuff of kitchen-sink realism than magical realism. By the time Loren/Enzo and Alma/Mala are reunited, their once-promising stories have grown stale, leaving the reader feeling the same as on any overlong trip: bored, tired and eager to return to reality. Dan DeWeese

John Henry Days
by Colson Whitehead
(Doubleday, 400 pages, $24.95)

Sophomore slump? Not a bit of it. In Colson Whitehead's follow-up to his critically acclaimed debut novel, The Intuitionist, he provides more of the complex storylines and unique, but very genuine, characters that got him mad props the first time around. But with John Henry Days, Whitehead leavens his inventive narrative with a more accessible sense of humor along with an intricate succession of stories within stories, unfolding with the intimacy of memory.

The main character of John Henry Days is the hapless J. Sutter, a "junketeer" journalist who writes those short, bloodless "news" pieces you see in travel magazines, whose job it is to show up at publicity events for the freebies and booze. For his latest assignment, Sutter travels to a small town in West Virginia to cover the First Annual John Henry Days festival.

Radiating outward, and backward in time, Whitehead traces the evolution of the John Henry ballad from the first man to ever put the legend to music to the hacks of Tin Pan Alley, desperate for a successful song. Then there's John Henry himself, facing down an impossible mountain with new technology breathing down his neck, ready to render him obsolete. Simultaneously, Sutter, too, soon finds himself engaged in a battle that will require Henry-like sacrifice.

John Henry Days thoroughly explores the themes of obsession, ambition, inevitability, and the pervasiveness of racism, with a dazzling command of language and imagery. Colson Whitehead is a novelist of tremendous powers of observation and wit. In terms of new fiction, this is as good as it gets. Jemiah Jefferson