Monday's Reviews Today: Baker's Strong Debut & French on Naipul
-- Publishers Weekly, 9/5/2008 7:39:00 AM
Tiffany Baker's "exuberant" debut, The Little Giant of Aberdeen County, follows an oversized teen named Truly growing up in a bleak upsate New York town. Blending, as our critic notes, elements of John Irving, Anne Tyler and Margaret Atwood's writing this family drama has "all the earmarks of a hit" and deserves to "race up the bestseller lists." In Patrick French's V.S. Naipul biography, The World Is What It Is, the focus is on the women who occupied, and haunted, the author's life. It's their stories that will keep readers "glued to the pages of this disturbing biography."
The Little Giant of Aberdeen County
Tiffany Baker. Grand Central, $24.99 (352p) ISBN 978-0-446-19420-4
Baker’s bangup debut mixes the exuberant eccentricities of John Irving’s Garp, Anne Tyler’s relationship savvy and the plangent voice of Margaret Atwood. In an upstate New York backwater, Truly, massive from birth, has a bleak existence with her depressed father and her china-doll–like sister, Serena Jane. Truly grows at an astonishing rate—her girth the result of a pituitary gland problem—and after her father dies when Truly is 12, Truly is sloughed off to the Dyersons, a hapless farming family. Her outsize kindness surfaces as she befriends the Dyersons’ outcast daughter, Amelia, and later leaves her beloved Dyerson farm to take care of Serena Jane’s husband and son after Serena Jane leaves them. Haunting the margins of Truly’s story is that of Tabitha Dyerson, a rumored witch who generations ago married into the Morgan family and whose secrets afford a breathtaking role reversal for Truly. It’s got all the earmarks of a hit—infectious and lovable narrator, a dash of magic, an impressive sweep and a heartrending but not treacly family drama. It’ll be a shame if this doesn’t race up the bestseller lists. (Jan.)
The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V.S. Naipaul
Patrick French. Knopf, $30 (576p) ISBN 978-1-4000-4405-4
V.S. Naipaul’s biographer aims not “to sit in judgment of the Nobel laureate, but to expose the subject with ruthless clarity to the calm eye of the reader.” In this he succeeds admirably. Descendant of poor Brahmins, born in 1932 in Trinidad and educated in Oxford, Naipaul is haunted by matters of race, colonialism and sex. He is, says award-winning author French (Younghusband), both the racist (against those darker than he) and the victim of racial prejudice, tendencies that come through in his novels and in his treatment of friends and lovers. Haunting this biography are Naipaul’s women. His wife, Pat, supported him, overlooked his affairs and his visits with prostitutes, and subordinated herself to his genius; Naipaul gave equally little to Margaret, his mistress. Naipaul and his books may be the subject of this work, but it is these and the other women whom he depended on and took for granted—from his editor to his mother—whose stories will keep that “calm eye of the reader” glued to the pages of this disturbing biography. 16 pages of photos. (Nov. 7)
