Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream, by Barbara Ehrenreich

237 pages

Metropolitan Books
$3.95 from Thriftbooks.com

Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed was a runaway hit when it landed in bookstores in 2001. The book, an investigation of the plight of the working poor, boosted her reputation and sparked new conversation about the economic shackles that hinder advancement among America's minimum wage workers, but it also prompted a backlash from one frustrated white collar worker:

"Try investigating people like me who didn't have babies in high school, who made good grades. . . who instead of getting promoted or paid fairly must regress to working for $7/hour, having their student loans in perpetual deferment, living at home with their parents, and generally exist in debt which they feel they may never get out of."

The writer's response was 2005's Bait and Switch. Using undercover tactics to examine the lives of unemployed and underemployed white collar mid-managers, Ehrenreich made her escape from the academic ivory tower, reverted to her maiden name, and slipped into the crowds as an out-of-work PR rep searching for employment in Atlanta, GA. She began where we all do: molding the details of her past into self-aggrandizing resume bullets, hitting up the electronic job boards, and taking on the world of opportunities with high self-esteem and high expectations for landing the dream job. The book tracks her arc of frustration, disappointment, and desperation, and illustrates a glimpse of sleazy entrepreneurs who prey on the unemployed: job coaches, exclusive networking circles, employee investment pyramids, and proselytizing church-run support groups.

It was a good idea to expand upon the success of Nickel and Dimed with a study of unemployed white-collar workers, but Ehrenreich's approach to job seeking is faulted from the beginning. People who've struggled to find employment--myself included--can nod in appreciation at the author's effort to draft and perfect a resume, the frustration in not receiving a response when employers decline an application, and the stress over bills, family, and future. But I felt Ehrenreich's hunt was riddled with tactical errors, and didn't reflect the approaches and challenges of the white collar unemployed. Instead of casting for a network of support, she entered the search as a consumer of job search support services: contracting expensive job coaches, flying across the country to attend seminars, and expending valuable time on support networks grounded in a mission of religious witnessing. Twenty minutes' worth of internet research would have eliminated these bodies from most job-seekers' circle of resources, and I wondered if this book were more of an expose of the sham "experts" and professional coaches who promise access to dream jobs. That reminds me: I'd like to give a shoutout to Jobfox. Thank you for your unsolicited criticism of my resume, and your $400 offer to rewrite it for me.

But back to the book. I was somewhat disappointed that Ehrenreich chose to make these parasites the focus of her book, and not the real challenges facing white collar workers. One reason Nickel and Dimed was so successful was because it exposed the reader audience to the very real problems of blue collar undercompensation, challenges in organizing and lack of benefits. The white collar unemployed face their own difficulties, but getting sucked into dopey job search support schemes isn't usually one of them. It was strange to me that the author made these schemes the focus of her book.

There were other very important points covered in this story. One that resonated most with me was Ehrenreich's comment on the strange, silent responses to most job inquiries--of pouring heart and soul into cover letters and hearing nothing. "The feeling is one of complete invisibility and futility: you pound on the door, you yell and scream, but the door remains sealed shut in your face," she writes. It's a feeling of exasperation that dogs her right up to the end of her 10 month search for employment. "I am overwhelmed by a sense of futility. If this were my real life and actual livelihood were at stake, I would be climbing the walls. But even in my artificial situation as a journalist-slash-job seeker, I cannot help feeling the rejection. All my life . . . I've found myself in one strange situation after another, and always managed to succeed or at least survive. Am I not plucky, resourceful, even a wee bit charismatic? The answer, coming in the form of nothing at all--no responses, no nibbles, no interest of any kind--apparently is not."

But herein Ehrenreich states the central problem of this book: her real life and livelihood did not actually depend on the outcome of her search. Ehrenreich didn't find herself socially alienated in the dead hours of the workday, isolated by poverty and stressed over dwindling funds, fretting that her lack of engagement and lack of pay kept her from moving on with her life. Desperation, depression and fear are critical elements missing from this account, and I think that's why any real assessment of the lifestyles of the unemployed needs to start with the narrative accounts of the chronically unemployed.

That said, Ehrenreich is still a very smart writer, expert at rendering details and encounters with sardonic wit and wry cynicism. Despite my problems with her approach to the subject matter, I still had a lot of fun with the book. And if you enjoyed Nickel and Dimed, you're likely to appreciate this one, at least for some of its mental imagery, if not for its thorough examination of the subject.

The Godfather of Kathmandu, by John Burdett

Random House
295 pages
$8.48 at Powells.com

If you're not familiar with John Burdett's work, get up from your computer, like now, and pick up Bangkok 8 at the library. I won't ruin the surprise in this fourth installment of the series. Readers already acquainted with the previous three books will be enthralled by this latest chapter.

To boil this complicated plot down to its bare essentials isn't as important as stating that Burdett does awesome, awesome things with the mystery genre, Theraveda and Tibetan Buddhism, and the Bangkok's backstreet underworld. It's not enough for mystery books to present just another interesting murder or theft for their audiences. Writers need to bring something new to the table to keep the genre interesting, and John Burdett's foray into the Bangkok underground does exactly that. This is something really wondrous.

Sonchai Jitpleecheep, a half-western, half-Thai, all-Buddhist detective is our guide and ambassador as he narrates assignments in Thailand's capital. Only a few of these are related to solving crimes. Among the priorities competing with his detective work are assisting his mother with her brothel and facilitating a $40 million heroin deal for his boss, Police Chief Vikorn. He manages these deftly, and from a detached perspective; Sonchai's first obedience is to karma and merit.

Kathmandu's plot largely circles a Tibetan mystic's scheme to sell a massive shipment of heroin to Sonchai's boss and finance an invasion of China, and a bizarre pharmaphiliac Grand Dame's involvement in the gory death of an American movie director. The story plays out in stoic, noir tones grounded in the Buddhist perspective: reincarnation, protector deities, karma, and grudge. Sonchai's half-caste ability to tread the line between West and Thai makes him our ambassador in this world: There's more to this life than what you can imagine, farang, but come with me. I'll be your guide. A B&N reviewer remarked that the Bangkok series are as much about crime fiction as they are about spiritual education. Burdett describes his subjects and environment with an ease that contrasts starkly with travel book descriptions. This is his home and comfort zone.

I could dwell on the plot, but I'd like to skip ahead to one of the most interesting bits, a theme that pops up repeatedly throughout the book: Om Mani Padme Hum. A guide in Bhutan told me this translates to "Hail to the Jewel of the Sacred Lotus," but the translation lacks the interpretation and context that gives it relevance to practitioners. Mantras are repeated phrases whose utterances are capable of effecting spiritual transformation. Over the phone, Sonchai's mystic shares with him a potent and dangerous mantra to sharpen his mind. "He doesn't mess around," Sonchai's disfigured lover Tara later warns him. "What you call psychosis, for him is a path to health." Later, Sonchai is haunted by visions of a blade wheel that tears him apart, of hell, and of a dark stupa with a base composed of the souls of poisoned karma.

It's heavy imagery, but the content is accessible to any reader. And as far as I know, it's also new territory in popular fiction. Burdett has lifted a stone to reveal the dark and loamy underside to the sky; but we readers are the creatures under the rock, exposed now to a strange and dangerous cosmology.

PostScript: I had the chance to correspond with the author about his writing and this new book. Click here to read the complete interview.

The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama, by David Remnick

Alfred A. Knopf, 2010
656 pages
Buy it (used) for $6.96 at Bookbyte

Obama's 2004 to 2008 rise from barely-known state senator to President-elect stunned Americans and the world. At the time, few (not counting the extremist "birther" contingency) asked where the man had come from, and what life lessons gave him the competency to ride the swelling wave of popularity behind his campaign--almost effortlessly, it seemed. What made him tick? How did he function, and what secret thoughts ran through that calm manner, those caterpillar-like eyebrows?

Presidencies are better understood in retrospect, but few leaders' characters have been as hard to pin down as Barack Obama's. David Remnick's authoritative biography of the 44th president avoids amplifying partisan perspectives by reserving judgment, and delves deep into Obama's history and his many transformations: the child, the scholar, the Chicago transplant, and the candidate. It starts well before Obama's birth in Hawaii, with the stories of his Kenyan and Kansan grandfathers: Hussein Onyango Obama, a village elder and cook for British colonialist forces; and Stanley Armour Dunham, who as a boy discovered his mother's suicide, and later served in European theater of WWII. There is no shortage of research or detail, and the result is an objective, dispassionate inventory of Obama's entire known history, illustrated with accounts from relatives, friends, allies and enemies, former teachers, students, and anyone who had the slightest contact with Obama at any stage in his life. The narrative is as even-tempered as the president himself.

Before you dig in, be warned that this is also a tome that challenges the light reader. Just try finding a review that doesn't describe this work as "exhaustively researched." The information contained within is rich and rewarding, if you can objectively appreciate Obama's story and suspend your opinion of his work and ethics. It's a chore to read, but a nice change for those of us who hear the President's voice filtered through the perspective of Dreams of My Father and The Audacity of Hope. Writing in the Washington Post, Gwen Ifill describes how Remnick's investigation strips the gloss from Obama's own memoir: where Obama was able to wax introspectively about the lost connection to his father and Africa, Remnick traces the old man's decline following the return to Kenya: his slip into alcoholism, womanizing, abuse, and political irrelevance. Also present are the strained ties between Obama and his mother, the subtle classism and racism at the prestigious Punahou School. Much has been made of Obama's murky racial identity--black, but without the cultural stamp that marks many African Americans raised in the continental United States. Remnick examines the period of Obama's cultural awakening: his connections to people who challenged him in Hawaii, to the social cliques at universities in California and Massachusetts, and how he navigated the challenges to define himself.

There are some really interesting bits in this book. I was struck repeatedly at Obama's faith in his greater destiny. Here was a man without any great birthright of money or prestige. Leaving Harvard Law School (and the President of the Harvard Law Review, to boot), he could have walked into any number of firms and made a fortune. Instead he shunned the path to riches, deliberately entered the frustrating arena of community organizing, in a strange town where he was completely unknown, to earn under $30,000. He led an austere and ascetic life, and gained respect within prestigious circles for his intellect and ability to critically listen, but eschewed security and countless opportunity for the right opportunity. Remnick gives the impression that from early on, Obama knew he was destined for politics, but only when the time was right. One of my favorite moments in the biography is when Obama walks away from an offer to chair the Joyce Foundation, a non-profit that distributed $50 million a year in grants.

"It was a sweet job—around a million a year, two country-club memberships, and I thought, Here it is, finally the day that all our hard work would pay off," said Dan Shomon, who imagined working as Obama's chief aide at the foundation. "Barack could have given out money to all kinds of good, progressive groups. He went into the interview, though, and his hands were shaking for fear that he would get the job. He knew that if he got it, that was it—he would be out of the game, out of politics."

Time and again, Obama rejected opportunities that would've made him a rich, comfortable, and respected man. Reading the book, my hunch is that he walked away from tasks he felt were beneath his intellectual curiosity. He wanted to work on behalf of the public good, but to do that work in a capacity that matched a cocksure faith in his ability.

The Bridge leads right up to Obama's election to the Presidency, an ascendancy without parallel in US history. In 2000, he was beaten black and blue in the race for US Representative against former Black Panther Bobby Rush. Four years later, he was giving the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention, and four years past that he emerged as the dark horse upset in the democratic primary and winner of the general election. Remnick's account of this history is dense, but clear and easy to follow, and turns often to the themes of self-confidence, intelligence, and the sheer luck of circumstance.

Should You Read I Am Legend, by Richard Matheson?

No, you should not.

Tor Books (this edition, including 10 additional short stories)
317 pages
From $5.98 on Amazon

Behold the terrors of the near future--1976! Hootchie lady vampires in skimpy dresses wander the streets, and the last man on earth barricades himself at home with a supply of good scotch, pipe tobacco, and Rachmaninov records. The horror!

I'm not the first person who thought they could trace the roots of zombie fiction back to Richard Matheson's 1954 story of Robert Neville, a California factory foreman reflecting on a world overrun by the undead. Though they swarm and surround his house, Matheson's antagonists aren't zombies; they're vampires craving after human blood, converted from the living by an airborne pathogen. Robert Neville, the steely-eyed survivor holed-up at home, is the world's last living man. Reader, beware: the manuscript bears no further resemblance to the eponymous 2007 film starring Will Smith.

This was the first time I'd read anything by Matheson, though I had very high hopes. I'm a pretty big buff of writers of the 50's and 60's: Vonnegut and Joseph Heller were producing some of their best material around this period, and the sci-fi world saw Pierre Boulle's Planet of the Apes and John Wyndham's The Midwich Cuckoos (later filmed as Invasion of the Body Snatchers). Matheson might not have a household name, but he's left an indelible legacy of creepy tales that continue to surface in television and film. In addition to writing The (Incredible) Shrinking Man and What Dreams May Come, Matheson was a contributing writer on some creative juggernauts; eight of his short stories were adapted for the Twilight Zone, including the famous episode "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet." Stephen King raves about Matheson in his 1981 non-fiction Danse Macabre, an online AMC FilmCritic interview with Frank Darabont, and in his introduction to Legend's 2006 re-release. Blogger critics have praised this book in particular as mesmerizing and timeless.

I had so many problems reading this book, I don't know where to begin the autopsy. Robert Neville's machismo overpowers his pragmatism, fear, and isolation in every instance of character development, and the book clunks awkwardly and aimlessly at one hyperactive speed until it runs out of avenues to explore, then resolves through implosion. Pseudo-science takes up a large portion of the story, and the author's need to bring logic to the plague detracts from the flow. The book barely sustains itself through seriously wide plot holes. Woven throughout this mess are strands of profound sexism and vague racism.

I don't understand why Matheson turns so much of the book over to the hero's search to understand the pathogen that en-vampires the world. Maybe readers in the 1953 were more entranced by the distinctions between germ, bacteria, and virus? I couldn't care less. Through careful hours poring over works in an abandoned library, Neville discovers the germ responsible for reanimating the dead and infecting blood-lust in the living. That same germ causes susceptibility to sunlight and garlic, and creates a subcutaneous, bullet-proof membrane in the infected, which is why vampires are impervious to the bullets from Neville Roberts' gun.

But where did Neville get this gun? Perhaps from the same stock where he loots his cigars, wine, lamb chops, and steaks--three years after the rest of the world has died off. Writing in the first person, Neville alludes to a generator in his garage, but never explains how he has running water, or how the tobacco never goes stale.

I can't bother going into how this book resolves; the end is just too tedious and stupid. There are a few standout elements that merit some attention: Neville's character is a pretty stark portrait of paranoia and rage in an otherwise very silly universe; and the brief appearance of a dying dog late in the book inspires empathy for the character's isolation and loneliness. Squidoo.com praised this work for the internal tension, writing that "Neville's fight is as much against himself as against the vampires."

Still unaddressed are I Am Legend's uncomfortable undercurrents of racism and sexism. In one episode of inebriated ranting, Neville equates the vampire search for life-sustaining blood with African Americans' struggle for civil rights. I'm sure I wasn't the only reader to do a double-take when the protagonist drunkenly asks himself, "Sure, sure, but would you let your sister marry one?" Mikhail Lyubansky wrote a lengthy piece on this topic for Psychology Today, but I think he gives Matheson more credit than he deserves for being clever, and less than he deserves for being obnoxious.

The sexism is way more of a problem, both in severity and frequency. When a female survivor appears one day, Neville kidnaps her and later that night contemplates raping her. "Prey," a later story which follows I Am Legend, overtly sexualizes the physical struggle of a single woman battling an African doll called "He Who Hunts":

She cried out as the knife was jabbed beneath the door, its sharp point sticking into one of her toes. She shuffled back, shifting her grip on the knob. Her robe hung open. She could feel a trickle of blood between her breasts. Her legs felt numb with pain. She closed her eyes.

Wow! Anyone got a cigarette?

I thought this book was gross, and maybe a poor introduction to an otherwise great author's substantial oeuvre. If you had another take on it or can suggest works that better represent this writer, please recommend them here!

The Great Perhaps, by Joe Meno

W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. 2009
414 pages
From $1.94 on eBay

Cloudy with a chance of ennui.

Two absent-minded professors--one a paleontologist chasing an elusive species of giant squid and the other an animal behaviorist lamenting the sexually-tinged murders of her research pigeons--become derailed and wonder whether they are really still in love. Jonathan suffers a rare form of epilepsy that causes him to seize at the sight of clouds, and Madeline suffers her husband's disorganization and the flirtations of her research staff. Their kids are frustrated individuals bookending the angst of teenage years: Amelia a senior in loathing with her upper-class suburb, building a pipe bomb in her bedroom; and Thisbe praying to God when she thinks no one is watching.

Character portrayal is the premise and boundary of Joe Meno's 2009 novel, The Great Perhaps. I got turned on to Meno's writing when I snagged The Boy Detective Fails at Moe's Books in Berkeley, California last year. The author has an indisputably brilliant style of incorporating the fantastic and absurd into serious dilemma, and The Great Perhaps follows this tradition with imaginative fireworks. Kneaded smoothly into the tale of malaise and anxiety are transcripts of sci-fi radio cliffhangers, alphabetically-sectioned chapters, declassified government telegrams, and illustrations of elephants, ears, and the above-mentioned seizure-inducing clouds. Investigating the roots of Jonathan's wishy-washiness, Meno stares into the regretful life history of the professor's father, once a child in a WWII internment camp for German-Americans, now an infirm man in a nursing home who reduces his own speech word by word, day by day, willing himself to disappear.

And there's more. The novel takes place in beginning days of GW Bush's Gulf War, in the final days of the 2004 election, setting a tone of wistfulness. There's good reason to feel concerned and down and even ashamed, and if you can identify with that then you know exactly how each of the characters in this book feels.

Meno quotes the Times on his author site when he says the book is about "the pros and cons of cowardice," but I just don't get it. I'm going to step out of my reviewer shoes and admit some low-browedness when I say I enjoyed reading this book very much, but felt lost in the emotional tides in this story. I love Meno's writing style, the crispness of his sentences and the truly sparkling imagery; few writers alive could create parallels between "the giant squid, a creature who, like Jonathan, favored the solitude of darkness to the unsafe spectacle of clouds above." But by the end of this read I couldn't determine whether his characters were any better or worse off than before, whether anyone had grown, whether anyone had changed, and so what was the point of this exercise?

Looking around, I got the sense that some critics might also have been fed up with the circus-spectacular parade of chimeras and nostalgia embedded in character tension and history. Eryn Loeb, writing in the LA Times, even said she thought Meno relied on gimmicks and seemed unable to tell the difference between them and genuine emotion. I wouldn't go nearly that far in criticizing the shallow faults of this book. I really enjoy Meno's ideas and his writing, and I'd gladly pick up his other novels, even if I wasn't head-over-heels with this one.

The Living Dead 2, Edited by John Joseph Adams

Night Shade Books, 2010
496 pages
$11.89 at Barnes&Noble

Read it and creep....

This book is shockingly good. At times, I to stop reading and check the cheesy cover to make sure I was still working on the same title. The dense collection of 44 different short stories from 49 contemporary writers and collaborators presents countless variations on the theme of the Living Dead. They go by many names: walkers, moaners, smirkers, the dead, zombies and "the z-word," and they appear as figures of vengeance, divine wrath, bioterrorism, alien invasion and comedy.

The sheer diversity of vision gathered here is one of the most encouraging qualities I've ever seen in an anthology. Adams's collection satisfies my childhood nostalgia for reading ghost stories under the blankets with a flashlight, and the tales come from both career writers and new voices, male and female, giving hope to the idea that creative ideas and solid storytelling still exist. Established contributors include Robert Kirkman (The Walking Dead graphic novel and AMC television series), Carrie Ryan (The Forest of Hands and Teeth), and Max Brooks (World War Z: the granddaddy of pop-zombie resurgence). Newcomers include recent MFA graduates from University of Iowa, aspiring novelists, and even one contribution from Kyra M. Schon, the actress who played Karen Cooper, the zombie in the basement of George Romero's original Night of the Living Dead.

My favorite stories in this collection play with and distort the reanimated bogeyman-concept until it's barely recognizable. In David Moody's "Who We Used To Be," an unexplained event causes instantaneous global death and persistent consciousness and motor control, and a family of three struggles to keep their home cool and their neighbors out to stave off inevitable decomposition. David J. Schow's "Where the Heart Was" describes a betrayed husband returning again and again to attack his cheating wife and best friend. And Gary Braunbeck's "We Now Pause for Station Identification" describes zombies malingering around their favorite haunts, morphing into plant life, and converting the world into an alien habitat.

Andrew Gilstrap, writing in PopMatters, put it well when he said the contributors in this anthology knew where zombie fiction has been, and...take the genre in new directions entirely. Stories focus on sentient zombies, the newly infected wrestling with their consciences, organized armies of the undead, brain-eaters in addiction-recovery therapy, and zombies who find religion. The writing is consistently, startlingly good without--for the most part--employing gratuitous gore and violence.

Disappointments in this anthology are few and far between. Editor John Joseph Adams doesn't necessarily recommend you read the collection straight through, but you may want to skip past "Zombie Gigalo," a story on par with Palahniuk's "Guts" for gross-out factor but far beneath his storytelling craft. "He Said, Laughing" feels like it was lifted word-for-word from Scorcese's Apocolypse Now (but with zombies, get it?), and "When the Zombies Win," is a short, dull, one-dimensional portrayal of a post-human earth that reaches more for tone than narrative. For a concise tale-by-tale review of the entire collection, check out John Denardo's excellent piece in SF Signal.

It's no wonder this collection was named Fangoria's book of the month. Check it out, read it, and enjoy the ads in the back for forthcoming titles The Loving Dead and Harrison Geillor's The Zombies of Lake Woebegotten. By the time you reach Sarah Langan's final story, "Are You Trying to Tell Me This is Heaven?" even the biggest anti-zombie killjoy will be screaming for braaaaaaaiiiiins.

Under the Dome, by Stephen King

Under the Dome opens on the town of Chester's Mill, a sleepy Maine country 'burb that could've been drawn from the margins of a Norman Rockwell painting. It's a crisp and beautiful day in late-October when the boundaries of an invisible force field--40,000 feet high, immeasurably deep, totally impenetrable, and beyond anyone's understanding--descend on the town's borders, dividing the residents from the outside world as neatly as it severs the body of a woodchuck shambling across a field.

There's confusion and chaos at first as the denizens discover the perimeter of their confinement: cars appear to collide with mid-air; people heading to the scene of the accident run face-first into the barrier; a woman taking flying lessons smacks into the edge of the dome and crashes to the earth in a pile of fiery shrapnel, the wreck of her plane leaving a mid-air streak of burning gasoline on the clear edge of the dome.

But the barrier and resulting isolation aren't the source of tension in this story: instead, it's the cruelty, psychopathy, and lust for power King thinks our friends and neighbors will practice when given free reign over the law and a mandate to keep things under control. "I'd say our prime concern--our prime responsibility to the town--is maintaining order for the duration of this crisis," says Big Jim Rennie, Chester's Mill's born-again second selectman and the real nemesis of this book. Adds Assistant Police Chief Peter Randolph, in one of the first of many notes of irony and foreshadowing, "Nobody's gonna get hurt, Big Jim. This is Chester's Mill. If it was New York City, things might be different."

And left to their own devices, maybe no one would've been hurt. But add to the town's sleepy population one migraine-suffering serial killer, one crystal meth factory headed by a well-armed Jesus-freak, and several rapists, and you have a neat recipe for a self-contained holocaust.

There's a lot of to like in this novel. Over the sprawling course of 1075 pages, as I got more immersed in the story and familiar with the geography (King graciously provides a detailed aerial map and cast of characters), I could feel the shrinking confines and deepening claustrophobia. Jedidiah Berry writing in the LA Times, agreed that with folks prevented from coming or going, the small town feels even smaller. When Jim Rennie makes his play for power, "for the good of the town," the people galvanize between sides, and the town cops emerge as a dark, malleable, and very violent force that grows beyond the supply of police uniforms. New recruits join the force from the high school ranks of jocks and thugs, don blue armbands and assault the opposition. Drama and discomfort metastasize until King reaches full-swing: the town is falling apart, good men and women are beaten and threatened with torture, the air grows thick with pollution and hot with greenhouse gasses, and ultimately the town literally erupts in flames. One excellent blogger complained that the novel was so character-driven, the apocalyptic ending felt incongruous with the set-up. But for my money, the Hiroshima-like three-page of narrative describing Chester's Mill in smoldering ruins was fair payoff for 900-and-something pages of meandering dialog and the skateboarder crowd's Scooby Doo-type detective work. It was also a very daring move for audiences that are accustomed to seeing the monster turn back at the very end.

But this book is also mired in the plot devices and literary stunts that used to make King's work feel so original, and now seem rehashed. Children have seizures and paranormal visions of the future. Ghosts of the recent dead come to help the living. There are aliens (though they make only a fleeting appearance), childhood bullies, and dogs that save the day. None of it feels quite as fleshed out as it ought to, but somehow we feel as though we've been down this road before. To speed through the lulls in this behemoth of a novel, King over-relies on 'ticking clocks': the town is going to run out of food any day now; the air temperature and pollution count inside the Dome are rising, and the air will turn poisonous; there's a town meeting scheduled for Thursday, when Big Jim Rennie will lynch the hero; the children keep seeing visions of mass destruction occurring Halloween, maybe even sooner! You expect there to be a slow progression from confusion to panic to mayhem over a period of weeks. In the world of Chester's Mill, this happens in less than 7 days.

Another issue is that Big Jim Rennie, though repugnant, is far from terrifying. "He's the worst kind of politician--selfish, too egocentric to realize he's way out of his league, and a coward underneath that bluff, can-do exterior of his," the town newspaper editor opines. But Rennie's not the sort of man who hacks up his wife and son with an ax, or eats missing children underneath sewer grates, or kidnaps and tortures bestselling authors in his home. Absent also is anything as creative as the terrifying fantasy-scape of Lisey's Story. Over his writing career, King has produced such a vivid menagerie of evil creatures that it's hard to take seriously this overweight, born-again blow-hard. King stated in an interview that he had cast Rennie in the literary mold of the Bush administration, micro-sized to scale for small-town America. Rennie is old, overweight, and has a bad heart. He purposely seeks the second selectman's seat on the town council, to avoid the scrutiny that come to the first selectman. Wonder who that sounds like? Even those of us who lived through the horror story of Cheney's eight years may have trouble seeing Rennie as the monster this story desperately needs to keep it moving at pace.

But it's unfair to judge each of King's novels against the success of earlier phases in his career. Under the Dome stands very well on its own two legs, and is an interesting piece of "What-If" fiction with the power to see this hypothetical all the way to its grim conclusion.

The Inner Circle, by T.C. Boyle

T.C. Boyle stumbles in this flaccid dramatization of Professor Alfred Kinsey and his sex research team.

I was pretty excited to get my hands on this book. A friend in New York was cleaning out her apartment, and I was about to hop a plane to San Francisco. Boyle is a master of contemporary American fiction, almost without equal, and his past explorations of historical fiction have produced some of the best writing of the last 20 years, including The Road to Wellville and World's End.

So my expectations were high when I cracked open The Inner Circle, Boyle's fictionalized imaginings of the research team under Alfred Kinsey, narrated in the voice of John Milk, the professor's first research assistant. Milk first meets Kinsey when he signs up for the professor's "Marriage Course" at the university, and later in the library stacks. The professor first conscripts our narrator to help with his gardening, then to assist him with sex research interviews and statistical analysis, and soon after as a reluctant partner in Kinsey's own "inner circle" of wife swapping and carnal adventure.

Perspective was the first flaw I found in this story. Milk tells his tale--a confession, really--from the secluded guest bedroom of his home, getting drunk and maudlin before a tape recorder just hours after Kinsey's funeral. It is years in the future from the events that make the focus of the book, but Milk continually jumps from the present to the distant past, forward again to the present, back once again to the more recent past, and back again to find the thread of the original story. Playing with time this way can sometimes imbue a book a greater sense of shape and dimension, but here it inspires confusion, a sense of fracture, and worst...boredom.

John Milk is another problem with the story, a virginal, idol-worshiping, lukewarm ninny who reminds this reader of a skittish dog. His courtship and early marriage to good-girl Iris are complicated by Professor Kinsey's (Prok's) demands for his time and attention, but Milk is too swept up in the research and infatuated with his boss to set personal boundaries. A Washington Post reviewer pointed to the significance of Milk's initials, JAM, as indicative of some sort of metaphor for the narrator's spineless and saccharine character. Too often in the book, I found it inspiring thoughts of "milquetoast," timid, weak, and unassuming. Describing the effects of a bourbon-drinking session, he apologizes to no one in particular: "it was a fifth and it got both of us pretty giddy, I'm afraid." Writing about his state following that session, he says, "I woke sometime in the night with a dry throat, a condition that often afflicts me when I've been drinking." Such mousy characters just don't drive great reads, or even entertaining reads.

Milk is swept up in the undercurrent of Prok's field research trips and casual sex, and it's no surprise where this is leading: marital tension, alienation, and more whining in front of the tape recorder.

I gave up on this read when I felt whatever payoff was coming at the book's end wasn't worth the tedium of the remaining 122 pages. Other reviewers have fawned over this book, quite intelligently, perhaps seeing something I didn't. Jennifer Reese at Entertainment Weekly lauds this book as tale of moral ambiguity, and Boyle's characterization of Kinsey as a creepy "grotesque" force within that spinning compass. My take was closer to Michiko Kakutani's at the New York Times, who aptly identifies the book's "monochromatic prose" and calls this story a "tired chronicle." As much work as Boyle has invested in bringing salacious detail and personal angst to the book, perhaps we live in a time where, when porn has become boring, none of us can be so easily titillated.