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CRAWLING AT NIGHT
by Nani Power (Atlantic Monthly Press, $24)
ITO'S A SUSHI chef, "a master of the chiseled shape, shokunin. To you and me: some sushi chef." Ito's still new to New York from Japan; his English is poor to nonexistent. His love of traditional Japanese poetry and literature, his mastery of the art of sushi (which he watches his customers defile with too much soy sauce as they babble jocularly, shallowly, appallingly)—these are nothing in his adopted land, where yuppie women on the other side of the sushi bar call him "cute." His life is one of awkwardness, profound aloneness, aching memory: "So much space, so many people, when you are one, he thinks. In this country one wears loneliness like a coat." Mariane's a waitress at the sushi restaurant, a full-blown alcoholic, a barfly. She drinks sake surreptitiously on her shifts and deludes herself that the baby she gave up years before is still waiting to be reclaimed, perfect, small, hers. She lives for her hazy, drunken daydreams and the drinking that makes them hazy; she brings men home from bars if they pay the bill; "She sinks to the old white tile floor, her face a heavy chunk of dough conforming to and retaining the pattern of the grout . . . waking later to the crackle of a stream of urine, resounding in the bowl by her head on the white tile, arching from a young, hungover boy with his eyes closed, groaning softly." Crawling at Night is their sad story, along with the sad stories of several others; it is a paean to the calm wretchedness of isolation, of lost love, of desperation and sorrow. Crawling at Night is elegant and true, a reporting of ruined lives filled with pathetic and horrific scenes that are silken in their fluidity, poetic in their unflinchingness.
Bethany Jean Clement
Nani Power reads from her novel at Elliott Bay Book Co., 101 S. Main, 624-6600. 8 p.m. Thurs., June 7.
THE VIRGIN OF BENNINGTON
by Kathleen Norris (Riverhead Books, $24.95)
KATHLEEN NORRIS NEEDS someone to talk to. She has stories to tell the world, if only the world would listen. It was hard to be a wide-eyed Midwestern girl in an East Coast liberal arts college—the only girl at Bennington who didn't indulge in drugs or fuck strangers. People didn't understand her because she was a poet. They called her the "Virgin of Bennington," a title she defied by having affairs with one of her girlfriends and, later, a married professor. When Norris quit school and moved to Manhattan, she landed a plum position as an assistant to Elizabeth Kray at the Academy of American Poets, in the center of the literary world, where she met a lot of famous people. She even got to hang out at some of these celebrities' loft parties and do drugs with them. This changed her life, and she was compelled to write a book about it. The Virgin of Bennington is the journal of a frustrated grown-up teenager—a gross display of Norris mourning her past isolation, name-dropping like a fiend, and canonizing herself as the Outsider on the Inside. The book's purpose switches erratically between a vehicle for self-aggrandizement and a eulogy for Kray, Norris' mentor. Unfortunately, because the story itself isn't interesting, the dense, clinical style in which it's written only adds insult to the reader's injury. It's clear that the book is something that Norris needed badly to get off her chest, and you feel for her when you read it, but the fact is that her personal struggle to adulthood wasn't especially remarkable.
Meg van Huygen
GUINNESS BOOK OF WORLD RECORDS 2001
edited by Tim Footman (Bantam Books, $7 paperback)
MOST OF US remember the photos from our first encounter with the Guinness Book of World Records: the man covered in a coat of bees; the guy with the lengthy (and quite dirty) fingernails; the oldest living Siamese twins; the tallest man; the shortest woman. Freaks, in other words—all of them examples of otherness and sideshow sensationalism. One had to feel sorry for those whose biological (or psychological) makeup relegated them to a blurb in a book of firsts and onlys. But that's why we pored over this text in the first place, for its uncommon compilation of experiences as compared with our not-so-extraordinary lives. Now here's the latest edition of the book we all hoped one day we would improve by adding our own fantastic talents. Ironically, it's small and in paperback. Containing easy-to-browse category lists and plenty of those blurry newsprint photos, this version finds the inanimate object as hallowed as the amazing physique or the bewildering human feat. Skipping past the longest boat, the biggest death toll by an earthquake, and the animal world, the superhuman stuff still thrills with its random, mind-boggling attempts by folks to make their mark on the world. Arulanantham Suresh Joachim of Sri Lanka, for example, balanced on one foot for 76 hours and 40 minutes. Huzzah! And in the "youngest" category, the youngest married couple on record was a Bangladeshi husband and wife whose ages together add up to a year and two months (it was an arranged marriage to settle a land dispute). Go figure! And in the picture that rivals Mr. Bees, Kevin Thackwell of Stoke-on-Trent, England, gets his moment of glory for being the person able to clip the most clothespins to his face and neck (116! Ouch!). It's a lovely image, worth a cringe or two, and it pretty much sums up the simultaneous futility and nobility of attempting to be uncommon in a pretty darn common world.
