Short takes

May 23, 2010|Barbara Fisher, Globe Correspondent

AMERICAN SUBVERSIVE
By David Goodwillie
Scribner, 320 pp., $25

Aidan Cole by his own description is living an “alluring, glamorous and utterly vapid” life. He writes a New York City blog called Roorback .com and is media savvy and downtown smart. He moves from dinner parties in Boerum Hill to barhopping in Alphabet City dives to lounging on plush couches in parlors “lost in a haze of hipster nights.” By what seems like an accident, he finds himself caught up in radical politics. Paige Roderick, having lost her beloved brother to the war in Iraq, arrives at political action from counterculture dreams and idealism, having moved through “countless cycles of hope and disappointment.” In alternating chapters, these two tell their overlapping stories of progress from naiveté through disgust to desperation.

The action of the novel begins with a bomb exploding in the Barney’s building on Madison Avenue and is followed by a later bombing at a New York City news network. There is some suspense here, but it is the motivation of the characters that is most compelling — how Aidan and Paige (and an older ex-Weatherman) arrived at extreme political positions. They were “two kids from disparate backgrounds, sifting through the rubble of our culture for hints on how to live, how to survive, what to give in to, and what to fight for.” Goodwillie perfectly captures the hip disengaged life that could as easily slip into bourgeois success and satisfaction as into terrorist plotting.

TAKE GOOD CARE OF THE GARDEN AND THE DOGS:
Family, Friendships, and Faith in Small-Town Alaska
By Heather Lende
Algonquin, 304 pp., $22.95

Take a hike, Sarah Palin. Here is the real thing — good old-fashioned American values coming from small-town Alaska. In a cozy, chatty voice, Heather Lende tells stories of life in Haines, Alaska, where, as the title of her first book claims, “If You Lived Here, I’d Know Your Name.” In fact, she knows not only the names but also the stories of all her neighbors — the protective owner of the vicious dog that preys on her chickens, the men who hunt and cook bear with her husband, the women who can salmon, sing in the church choir, and survive or succumb to cancer, and the young man who carelessly runs her over with his truck and shatters her pelvis, as well as the volunteer fireman and ambulance crew who save her life.