Read This: American Music & American Taliban

Next week (Tuesday, June 22), I’ll be hosting an evening of “All-American” fiction at the Center for Fiction, with four authors who’ve each recently published an American novel. I’ll be telling you a little bit about the quartet between now and then…

I’ve been friends with Pearl Abraham for a while, and her new novel, American Taliban, actually quotes from my version of the Tao Te Ching on the very first page. But I’d be recommending it to you anyway; it’s a captivating look at how a young, “clean-cut” teenager like John Walker Lindh (but not simply a novelization of Lindh) could gradually become attracted to a philosophy and a way of life so radically opposed to his upbringing.

I’m also looking forward to seeing Jane Mendelsohn for the first time since I interviewed her in 1997; her new novel, American Music, starts with a wounded soldier and a physical therapist in a veteran’s hospital, but quickly expands into a series of interlocking flashbacks which impinge upon the central couple’s lives—even though they have no idea how these other people are connected to them, if at all, and the ongoing experience of these “memories” brings no little amount of trauma. Their conversations about the other stories may well echo your own responses; you may see the final shape of the arc just ahead of them. Either way, once you start, you are likely to see their story through to its end.

15 June 2010 | read this |