Salon Books | Turkey shoot


	Don't take our word for it! Read these for yourself at barnesandnoble.com. A L S O+.T O D A Y Mystery round-up By Suzette Lalime Humor and history dominate our eclectic selection of 1998's best crime fiction Breakfast on Pluto Reviewed by Daniel Reitz Shortlisted for the 1998 Booker Prize, McCabe's new novel is partly about Ireland's troubles and partly about cross-dressing and the search for love T A B L E+T A L K Hate Shakespeare for no good reason? Share your irrational book prejudices in Table Talk's Books area B O O K C A S E A new service for book lovers R E C E N T L Y Remembering William Gaddis, neglected master By Carter Scholz (12/18/98) Coffee-table books for holiday giving -- and grabbing (12/16/98) Love Undetectable By Andrew Sullivan (11/30/98) Uncle Andrew's cabin By Peter Kurth (11/30/98) From he-man to holy man By Elaine Showalter (11/12/98) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Browse the Books feature archive - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -		____T U R K E Y S H O O T With visions of paper-shredders dancing in their heads, our critics pick the worst, and most overrated, books of 1998. Earlier this week, we announced the winners of the third annual Salon Book Awards -- our 10 favorite books of 1998. But as even Santa knows, you can't have a who's-been-nice list without a who's-been-naughty list, too. So without further ado, here's the second annual Salon Turkey Shoot, a roundup of what some of our contributors thought were this year's least successful books. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Dennis Drabelle WORST: "The Best Little Boy in the World Grows Up" by Andrew Tobias (Random House). The title ends too soon -- "And Becomes an A-Gay Snot" would round it out accurately. Andrew Tobias' follow-up memoir is so name-droppingly smug that it sends you back to its predecessor, "The Best Little Boy in the World," published in 1976 under the pseudonym John Reid, to see if you misremembered that sometimes affecting story of growing up gay in a homo-hostile world. And in fact, you did: In light of the new book, the earlier one's tendencies toward self-satisfaction become all the more noticeable. What a blunder -- to write a book so bad that it snakes back and infects a predecessor that had been edging its way toward minor-classic status. BUY IT FROM barnesandnoble.com MOST OVERRATED: "The Professor and the Madman" by Simon Winchester (HarperCollins). You call this a book? Though entertaining, it's an article-length idea teased out to volume size: Loony American kills Brit, gets sent to booby hatch, becomes useful soul by supplying word-use citations to dictionary-makers, gets crazier with age and cuts off his johnson. That's about all there is to it, but the padding starts with the verbose subtitle ("A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary"), continues through a preface, jumps to a postscript, an author's note, acknowledgments, suggestions for further reading -- and the text itself is larded with excerpts from the dictionary and several whole-page drawings. At 242 pages, this item is vastly overweight. BUY IT FROM barnesandnoble.com Dennis Drabelle is working on a memoir about the 1950s and the birth pangs of American youth culture. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Stephanie Zacharek WORST: Geoff Dyer's "Out of Sheer Rage" (North Point) may not be the very worst book of the year, but it's easily one of the most disappointing. Dyer's 1996 novel "But Beautiful" is one of the loveliest books about jazz ever written. "Out of Sheer Rage" -- which was supposed to be a serious study of D.H. Lawrence but ended up as Dyer's masturbatory rumination about his own writer's block -- hasn't a smidgen of lyricism: It's more like one long, sustained whine. Dyer apparently feels compelled to put words -- any words -- to paper. And here, he puts out lots. And lots. And lots. Wonder if he went back and counted them, just for kicks. BUY IT FROM barnesandnoble.com MOST OVERRATED: In Howard Norman's "The Museum Guard" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), a young Jewish woman becomes obsessed with a woman in a painting and feels she must leave her home in Halifax for Amsterdam so she can become the woman in the painting -- all this as Hitler begins exterminating Jews throughout Europe. She's lucky enough to have some good friends who eagerly help her act on her plan. Later, they realize their mistake: oops! Praised by critics for its graceful prose and unplumbable emotional depth, "The Museum Guard" tries to cover some very big subjects indeed: the horrors of the Holocaust, the meaning of identity and some other stuff. If it only had a brain. BUY IT FROM barnesandnoble.com Stephanie Zacharek lives in Boston. She is a frequent contributor to Salon. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Carlin Romano WORST: Hagiography by definition appears after the death of a saint, but it rarely arrives just as the sainthood is called into question. From the very first pages of "Remembering Mr. Shawn's New Yorker" by Ved Mehta (Overlook) -- in which the longtime Shawn disciple announces that a friend who read the book in manuscript urged him not to refer to his subject as "Mr. Shawn" -- this was a uniquely odd performance: a willful insistence on writing the traditional version of the story of the legendary New Yorker editor, come hell, high water or Lillian Ross. The friend described it as "an unabashed work of veneration." Mr. Shawn, one suspects, would not have stood for it. BUY IT FROM barnesandnoble.com MOST OVERRATED: Nonfiction books get a critical premium when bound in high moral purpose. Edward Ball's "Slaves in the Family" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), winner of the National Book Award for nonfiction, outdistanced all contenders on that score this year, which gives it my nod in this category. Ball's exploration of his slave-owning ancestors and document-laden tracking of descendants of their thousands of slaves edifies the reader and plainly quenched the author's existential thirst. The shaping of the story itself, however, hardly rises to narrative art, and a strain of sanctimony appears too often, despite the author's best efforts. Get started on your Mother Teresa bio. BUY IT FROM barnesandnoble.com Carlin Romano, literary critic of the Philadelphia Inquirer, teaches philosophy at Bennington College. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Brigette Frase WORST: J.G. Ballard, who has a weakness for lunatics with Really Big Ideas, outdid himself in "Cocaine Nights" (Counterpoint). Charles Prentice goes to a chichi country club in exclusive Estrella del Mar to investigate five arson murders for which his brother Frank is being framed. Charles, as dim and clueless as Inspector Clouseau (minus the idiotic charm -- he has the personality of a limp handshake) forgets all about his brother when he falls under the spell of the "charismatic" tennis pro and civic booster Bobby Crawford, who stages orgies, rapes, fires, robberies and assaults. Frank's lover forgives Bobby for trying to strangle her because "it's all in a good cause. He wants to bring people back to life." Nothing like a little "transgressive behavior" to foster community spirit. What a shame that Ballard and his characters are unblemished by any sense of humor. With a nip here and a tuck there, this could have been a really funny novel. BUY IT FROM barnesandnoble.com MOST OVERRATED: I started reading Joyce Carol Oates novels in graduate school, which is peculiar right there. When I needed a break from theoretical semantics, phonemic algorithms or even "The Brothers Karamazov," I'd wander in the U. of Chicago stacks, looking for current fiction. And everywhere I turned, I ran into Joyce Carol Oates. So that's what I read for fun. Over a number of years, her novels managed to depress me softly with her (lurid, yet smoothly crooned) song. Is that all there is? I wondered. Nothing has changed. "Man Crazy" (Dutton) is as competent, as well-written and as utterly unnecessary a book as I've read in some time. Poor teenage Ingrid, with her Vietnam-freaked daddy, her alcoholic slutty mommy, looking for love in all the wrong places. Daddy kills Mommy's boyfriend and Ingrid runs away, ending up with a loony motorcycle cult guy who calls her "Dog-girl" and makes her swallow a still-beating human heart. Ingrid is a composite newspaper clipping of a Troubled Teen suddenly forced into a horror-porn flick. What's wrong with Joyce Carol, anyway? She knows how to write a book, or maybe that's the problem. She doodles them off instead of working them. I loved her Gothic stuff, "Bellefleur," for example. Maybe she should have followed her bliss into Anne Rice country. BUY IT FROM barnesandnoble.com Brigette Frase is a book critic living in Minneapolis. N E X T+P A G E+\| Suzanne Somers, Tom Wolfe and more! - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Become a Salon member. Click here.