Familiar authors, uproars fill fall’s literary landscape

You’ve got to hand it to the Fox News Network. In its attempt to give as much publicity as possible to Al Franken and his new book, “Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right,” Roger Ailes and company have exposed a truth often disregarded in contemporary culture -- that writing matters still.

Even now, it moves us, stirs us, causes controversy; even now, it makes us argue and debate. Although the network has dropped its lawsuit against Franken for his use of the Fox trademarked phrase “fair and balanced,” the best part of this feud is that it has put a book on the front page, and in so doing, brought us back in touch with the power of the written word.

This fall, controversy is everywhere on the literary landscape, from Fox and Franken to Martin Amis, who has been a lightning rod since the outset of his career. In 1995, his novel “The Information” met with an uproar that quickly became personal as he was attacked for changing agents and even having undergone elaborate (and expensive) dental work.

Amis’ new novel, “Yellow Dog” -- his first in five years -- is not due out in the U.S. until November, but it’s already causing a stir in England, triggered in part by novelist Tibor Fischer, whose scathing review in the Daily Telegraph may have been a ploy to draw attention to his own forthcoming book, “Voyage to the End of the Room.” Here in America, most authors don’t consider writing such a blood sport, but two who always have are Michael Moore and Gore Vidal.

In October, Moore follows up on his bestselling “Stupid White Men” with “Dude, Where’s My Country?,” an uncompromising screed against the Bush administration, while Vidal’s “Inventing a Nation” looks at three other presidents -- George Washington, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson -- in terms of both their influence in framing American democracy and the ways our national experiment has gone awry. “Certainly,” he concludes, “the inventors of our nation would be astonished at what we have done to their handiwork, their reputations as well.”

Vidal is just one of a number of major writers to publish new work this fall. In “Where I Was From,” Joan Didion uses the story of her family -- from pioneer days to the present -- as a filter through which to examine the history of California, and by extension, of American ideals. Gabriel Garcia Marquez looks back at his life in “Living to Tell the Tale,” the first in a projected trilogy of memoirs, which takes the author from birth into his 20s, and concludes with his proposal to the woman who would become his wife.

Maxine Hong Kingston’s “The Fifth Book of Peace” is a project we might say has been in progress for more than a decade; it grew out of her manuscript for the novel “The Fourth Book of Peace,” the only copy of which was destroyed during the 1991 firestorm in the Oakland hills. Twelve years later, Kingston has pulled the fragments of that story (which dealt with the Vietnam War) into a saga of death and loss and reinvention, merging fact and fiction, truth and imagination, until the lines between them are irrevocably blurred.

Speaking of books that have long been in the works, John Updike’s “The Early Stories, 1953-1975” gathers 103 pieces of short fiction from the first half of the author’s career, while Stephen King returns to his “Dark Tower” series after nearly 20 years, with “Wolves of the Calla,” the fifth volume in the projected septet. And in October, Toni Morrison will publish “Love,” her first novel since 1998, which recounts the influence of a dead man on the women who were once part of his life.

Morrison may be the most iconic author to have a new novel this fall, but “Love” is just the tip of the fictional iceberg. Everywhere you turn, there are novels that demand attention, that stretch our appreciation of the form.

The most interesting of these may be Jonathan Lethem’s “The Fortress of Solitude,” set in Brooklyn in the 1970s and revolving around a white kid, Dylan, and a black kid, Mingus, whose friendship encompasses everything from punk rock to comic books. “Still Holding” is the final volume of Bruce Wagner’s “cellphone trilogy.” (The first two are “I’m Losing You” and “I’ll Let You Go.”) Here, Wagner continues his inquiry into the dark heart of Hollywood, focusing on a trio of interlocking stories that unfold in the aftermath of Sept. 11. J. Robert Lennon’s fourth novel, “Mailman,” redefines the whole idea of “going postal,” evoking the inner life of a small-town letter carrier named Albert Lippincott as he slowly unravels in the wake of a misdelivered piece of mail.

In “What Ever: A Living Novel,” L.A. performance artist Heather Woodbury subverts the very structure of the novel, offering a panoramic portrait of several interconnected characters in the format of a play script, with the action emerging entirely out of conversation and monologue. Jhumpa Lahiri is back with her first novel, “The Namesake,” which picks up where her Pulitzer Prize-winning collection “Interpreter of Maladies” left off in excavating the experience of Indian immigrants trying to make their way as Americans; David Guterson, meanwhile, traces the edgy territory of revelation with “Our Lady of the Forest,” in which a 16-year-old runaway who lives in a tent in the woods is visited by the Virgin Mary.

Finally, Edgardo Vega Yunque’s “No Matter How Much You Promise to Cook or Pay the Rent You Blew It Cauze Bill Bailey Ain’t Never Coming Home Again” -- besides having the longest title of any of this fall’s novels -- follows the journey of a half-Puerto Rican/half-Irish woman as she tries to get to know her father, an embittered former jazz pianist hiding out from his past with a new family in Manhattan’s East Village.

When it comes to nonfiction, the season’s most anticipated title is probably Mariane Pearl’s “A Mighty Heart,” a memoir, co-written with Sarah Crichton, of her husband Daniel, the Wall Street Journal reporter murdered in Pakistan in 2002. Yet in this category too we’re faced with a panoply of choices, from Amy Tan’s “The Opposite of Fate,” a collection of occasional writings that she calls “a book of musings,” to James McCourt’s “Queer Street: The Rise and Fall of an American Culture, 1947-1985,” an elegant and extravagantly researched history of gay New York.

In “School of Dreams,” Southern California journalist Edward Humes spends a year at Cerritos’ Whitney High School, one of America’s most highly rated public schools, to trace the pressures of contemporary education and what it takes to get ahead. David von Drehle’s “Triangle: The Fire That Changed America” chronicles the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist fire, in which 146 workers died in a locked Lower Manhattan sweatshop, a tragedy that led to sweeping labor and fire-safety reforms.

New York is also the subject of Colson Whitehead’s “The Colossus of New York,” a series of 13 brief meditations on topics as diverse as Central Park and the subway, all unified by the author’s profound and playful understanding of how the city works. With “The Healing Art: A Doctor’s Black Bag of Poetry,” poet and physician Rafael Campo explores the links between verse and healing, moving between narrative and samples of his favorite poems.

What “The Healing Art” aspires to is a recognition of something Campo calls a “biocultural” model of illness, in which it’s as important to treat the soul as the body, and poetry becomes an incantatory force. Such an idea also resides at the heart of “Phoebe 2002,” a 600-page collaboration by poets Jeffery Conway, Lynn Crosbie and David Trinidad that melds poetry, criticism, correspondence and even e-mail to deconstruct the 1950 film “All About Eve.” In the authors’ view, “All About Eve” marks a turning point in American culture, a Dantean metaphor of ambition and compromise, but in the end, their work also suggests that we must often look to the past to find a lens through which to see ourselves.

The same is true of many of this fall’s reclamation projects, from “The Gay Talese Reader,” which collects 14 of the New Journalism avatar’s most innovative pieces (including “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” and “The Silent Season of a Hero,” a deftly nuanced portrait of Joe DiMaggio in retirement) to “The Tenants” and “Dubin’s Lives,” the latest installments in Farrar Straus & Giroux’s effort to reissue the complete works of Bernard Malamud.

Of all these re-issues, however, none is sharper than “A Study in Scarlet,” Arthur Conan Doyle’s first Sherlock Holmes mystery, a brief and brutal novel that traces “the scarlet thread of murder running through the colourless skein of life.” Doyle’s book may date from 1887, but reading it again, you can’t help being struck by the vitality of its language, the pure pleasure of its storytelling -- in short, the power of the written word.