Pastries, Hey Nostradamus, and More

PASTRIES: A NOVEL OF DESSERTS AND DISCOVERIES
(St. Martin's, $24.95)

The owner of a small Seattle bakery learns a giant chain is plopping down in her neighborhood. A WTO-like trade group is coming to town for a big conference. The bakery owner's ex-boyfriend is a leader of the trade-conference protests. That's the familiar premise for the fourth novel (after Darjeeling) by local author Bharti Kirchner. Sunya, the baker, has seemingly lost her touch in the kitchen. At the same time, her mother, who raised Sunya after her father abandoned them just days after her birth, is engaged to a man that Sunya doesn't like. He wants her to sell her bakery to the chain. She wants to fight. Hearing of a bakery in Kyoto, Japan, where a Buddhist master teaches students to heal themselves through baking, she eventually decides to go learn from him.

It takes most of the book to set the plot and get Sunya to Kyoto. After that, a mere 50 pages or so resolve all the threads of the story. The author of several cookbooks, Kirchner renders the daily routine of a bakery in a deliciously meandering fashion. In its best passages, Pastries offers Sunya Cake, a closely guarded recipe; various workplace dramas; and loving descriptions of the bakery's early morning rush of coffee and creativity. Kirchner's initial pace of development is just like that of fine bakingif hurried, it's ruined. Then it feels like a mad sprint to retrieve something burning from the oven.

The familiar settings can be fun to readvisualizing the scene, weather, traffic, and so forth. Pastries seems a good book to pass on to friends who've moved away from Seattle and are feeling nostalgic. But certain dissonant details can intrude upon its enjoyable tale: Would there really be ducklings at Green Lake in November? Yet the book isn't so shallow as to make all its endings happy. We learn that Sunya's name, given to her by her father, means both emptiness and great potentialand Pastries preserves some of both those qualities. There's a sweetness to the bakery's singular desserts; while in the end, Kirchner's characters receive their just desserts. JOANNE GARRETT

Bharti Kirchner will read at Elliott Bay Books (101 S. Main St., 206-624-6600), 7:30 p.m. Wed., July 9.

I wonder if in 100 yearshell, make that 10there won't be operas and ballets and symphonies about Columbine. Pop culture is already fast out of the blocks with a wave of Columbine art (Michael Moore's Oscar-winning documentary; Gus Van Sant's forthcoming Cannes-prize-winning Elephant), and Canadian zeitgeist chronicler Douglas Coupland's new book falls somewhere in the middle between crass appropriation and thoughtful examination of the subject.

Narrated by four characters during four distinct periods, Nostradamus begins in 1988 Vancouver, B.C., where high-school senior Cheryl finds herself cowering in the school cafeteria when the shooting starts. Her serene voice comes from the great beyond, like William Holden's in Sunset Blvd., so we know she'll be killedCoupland isn't interested in the shooters' motives or conventional drama. Instead, once Cheryl is buried and we jump forward to 1999, the continued, constrictive grief of her boyfriend, Jason, emerges as Coupland's real subject. In other words, why do bad things happen to good people, especially people of faith? Cheryl was a believer, while Jason's faith has imploded, to the dismay of his evangelical father, Reg, who takes up the fourth and final section of Nostradamus.

It's the same essential dilemma faced by Job in the Old Testament: Cheryl is good, yet she dies unfairly. Jason acts heroically during the shooting, but he's stigmatized by his community and rejected by his father. Later, the third narrator, Heather, will love Jason and bring him some succor, yet she's made to suffer, too. Unfortunately, Coupland is no theologian like C.J. Jung (Answer to Job), nor is he even a decent novelist. Though he raises a few interesting ideas, Coupland is incapable of developing them, and his characters remain even sketchierlike the letters, computer diaries, and e-mails that make up the fabric of this lazy, shoddy book. Eleven years after Generation X, Coupland is still composing by cultural collage and scrapbook imagerylike the other scribblers whom his scribbling characters notice at Starbucks, like Coupland himself, one suspects, scribbling into his iBook in some posh North Van coffeehouse.

He's still got an eye for telling details, as when contractor Jason deplores his yuppie clients "with their double-door refrigerators with non-magnetic surfaces to discourage the use of fridge magnets." Coupland started out in art school, and I'd happily read his writings on design and how it impinges upon our culture. He'd be fine with the occasional New York Times Magazine piece (nothing over 500 words, please). But close the laptop and leave God and Columbine to the real artists and writers. BRIAN MILLER

Douglas Coupland will read at University Book Store (4326 University Way N.E., 206-634-3400), 7 p.m. Thurs., July 10.

Travel memoirs can be both captivating and burdensome. For the armchair adventurer, a great travelogue can be transporting, even while the travelogist is annoyingly self-centered. In Land, Rupert Isaacson nobly avoids this trap by concentrating on what he sees, not how he sees it. He delivers a worthwhile account of the few remaining nomadic Bushmen in southern Africa and their ongoing struggle to reclaim ancestral lands from a still race-obsessed political establishment.