Irish Times reviewers cast a critical eye over a batch of paperbacks that include Jonathn Franzen's The Corrections and Frank Ronan's hOme
The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen. Fourth Estate £7.99
Franzen's frenetic character- driven domestic saga takes on the Lamberts, a dysfunctional middle-class US family at war within itself, and none too crazy about life either. Franzen relies heavily on the specific trials of each of the clan members in order to keep his narrative afloat. From the moment disappointed Enid and husband Alfred wander into view at the airport where their unloving son Chip waits, it is obvious that few demands will be made on our sympathies. The story concerns the increasingly interesting Enid's struggle to unite her three unhappy adult children for one final family Christmas, while Alfred - who has never learnt to live, never mind love - slides out of life. At 653 pages, The Corrections, is heavily episodic, overly long and neither particularly skilful or original, as many US writers, Updike included, have explored similar material. Still, it is often very, very funny and hugely readable thanks to the sustained tone of comic horror. - Eileen Battersby
Lost Highway, Peter Guralnick. Canongate £12.99
Rock music has had relatively skimpy quality literary coverage - no fault of Peter Guralnick though. This American critic has lovingly chronicled its story from the Mississippi Delta to Graceland. There is probably no better writer on American roots music and certainly his acclaimed trilogy, of which this is the second instalment, manages to be both authoritative and entertaining. (His classic analysis of southern soul, Sweet Soul Music, was republished by Canongate in an equally handsome edition a few months ago and Feel Like Going Home follows next spring.) Lost Highway is in four sections. Within that structure are 3,000-4,000 word essays on the likes of country icon Hank Snow, rockabilly legend Charlie Feathers, blues master Howlin' Wolf and, of course, Elvis, the subject of Guralnick's definitive two-volume biography. Although written in 1979, time has served Lost Highway well. The author has updated the discography; an update on his subjects would have been equally useful. - Joe Breen
Fences and Windows, Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate, Naomi Klein. Flamingo £8.99
Seattle changed the world - the 50,000 protesters at the World Trade Organisation meeting in November 1999 were attending the coming-out party of a global movement. Naomi Klein, whose No Logo captured the zeitgeist of the times, was thrust centre-stage and asked to explain this fluid network of activists and their aims. In this collectionof some of her writing and speeches made since then, she makes connections between Argentina's crisis, laws protecting drug companies' patents, refugees created by World Bank-financed dam projects, train crashes in Britain and the privatisation of African water supplies - and argues that those labelled anti-globalisation are the true internationalists. But this is more than a list of causes or a litany of injustices. Klein offers hope ("windows to democracy") - celebrating the Zapatistas, housing-rights activists in Toronto and social centres in Italy - but also points out the post-September 11th opportunism of governments and big business. Klein believes that history is being made, that the world is at the beginning of a revolution - and reading these powerful dispatches from the front lines makes one hope she is right. - Sarah Marriott
Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere, Jan Morris. Faber £7.99
Jan Morris has taken on a nearly impossible task: to account for the particular quality and charm of Trieste. If anyone could do it, she might well be the one: a vastly talented and experienced travel writer, with a real feeling for history and its legacies. Trieste had been the chief port of the Austro-Hungarian empire; its subsequent relegation to the status of a backwater following the first World War has given it a peculiarly timeless quality that is much easier to experience than describe. Her particular take on Trieste in this evocatively illustrated book is a rather melancholy one, as her title indicates: she sees the city, in its peculiar statelessness, its isolation and its long decline after a brief flowering, as essentially "hallucinatory", an almost non-existent place where the transience of life and earthly dreams becomes particularly evident. I wouldn't see the city in such existentialist terms myself, finding it much more positively therapeutic and less gloomy than Morris seems to suggest, but she does convey with great empathy its special atmosphere and is very informative about its history. A labour of love, and, apparently, to be her last book. - Terence Killeen
hOme, Frank Ronan. Sceptre £6.99
If you are born into a cabbage- eating commune, given the name of Coorg and raised as the new Messiah until you're six years old, only to be informed that - oops - there's been a mistake and rock star Marc Bolan (aka Merlin), is miles ahead of you in the saving-the-world stakes, can your life get much worse? Actually it can. You can be kidnapped by your Irish granny, spirited off to New Ross, of all places, and introduced to the devilish temptations of Catholicism and confectionery. Such is the life of the diminutive hero of Frank Ronan's sixth novel. The quirkiness of the writing creates a bubbly surface which bristles with sassy satire; hOme is a clever send-up of out-there extremism of both the new age and the old age varieties. But there is a poignancy at the heart of the story which lifts it out of the category of instant entertainment and into the realm of memorability. Far harder to categorise than it is to enjoy, hOme is a delightful piece of well-written whimsy.
Arminta Wallace