It’s Superman! by Tom De Haven (Ballantine).
Others have written prose versions of the Superman story, but none have been as imaginative as Tom De Haven, an author who’s been widely praised for his Derby Dugan trilogy, which portrays 20th century America through the history of a comic strip. Here he presents Clark Kent’s early years growing up as an earnest, brooding kid in Depression-era Kansas, in a narrative laced with revealing period details and a social authenticity missing from former versions of the Man of Steel. Kent goes on to become a second-rate reporter in New York City, and a national hero who’s forever out of place, struggling with his double identities while he woos a surprisingly promiscuous Lois Lane. That’s just icing on the cake, however. The real attraction here is De Haven’s prose style — a rocketing, stripped-down take on old pulp novels that’s as graceful as it is exciting. The plot, a series of intertwined stories, moves with the speed of a comic book, but not so fast that De Haven doesn’t have time to throw in telling satire and lots of genuine warmth for his characters. This is literature tuned to a fine frequency, by an author confident in his handling of amazingly energetic prose. Plus, Superman fights fascist robots. What more can you ask?
1491 by Charles C. Mann (Vintage).
Over the years, beliefs about whom and what was in the New World before white people showed up have been all over the map. Until fairly recently, the accepted model was that the Western Hemisphere was sparsely populated by largely primitive people who arrived by traveling across what is now the Bering Strait around 12,000 BCE. In this widely acclaimed, award-winning book, Mann delivers a recap of the past few decades’ discoveries about the pre-Columbian world, which for some reason have been under-reported. It’s a whole new picture, and Mann presents it in a way that turns what could have been a dry book into a page-turner. Revelations are too plentiful to adequately summarize in this space, but here are a few main points of difference with previously accepted wisdom: Native people started coming here by boat along the Pacific coast 20 to 30 thousand years ago. There were far more — probably tens of millions more — inhabitants. They lived in larger communities, which were organized in various sophisticated ways. Around 90 percent of them were wiped out by European-borne diseases, leaving behind mere traces of their formerly flourishing societies and giving post-Columbus explorers the impression of sparsely populated continents. Most intriguing, Mann reports that many anthropologists now believe that rather than “living in harmony” with nature’s status quo, native peoples radically changed the landscape for their own purposes. This is vividly written, first-rate history.
Mission To America by Walter Kirn (Anchor).
The Aboriginal Fulfilled Apostles, a Montana religious cult based on matriarchy, health food and mysticism, is petering out. To recruit new members, they send two of the faithful out into the real world, or what they call Terrestria. The result is a blistering satire of present-day America, as the holy pair encounter methamphetamine, a promiscuous 15-year-old Wiccan, and a woman whose previous incarnation is viewable on a porn Web site. Once they become resident counsel to an Ayn Rand-loving billionaire, things settle down a bit, and the satire wears thin. All in all, however, Kirn’s novel is worth looking over, preferably in a library or used bookstore.
National Book Award Notes: Last week, finalists were named for the National Book Awards. The U.S. literary establishment groaned and moaned that heavyweights like Cormac McCarthy, Alice McDermott and Thomas Pynchon (snooze) weren’t included. I say thank God someone in charge is paying attention to the wealth of new writers and approaches to writing being produced in this country. CL has reviewed two of the finalists for the fiction award, Ken Kalfus’ A Disorder Peculiar to the Country and Dana Spiotta’s Eat the Document. Here are links to those reviews:
This article appears in Oct 18-24, 2006.
