Books

Dennis Leary recently joked that by now every household in America owns a copy of Jonathan Franzen’s gargantuan Freedom (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $28), but nobody’s actually read it.
Ironically, this came amid a plea for every household in America to purchase Leary’s new book Suck On This Year (Viking Adult, $18), a collection of 140-character Tweets skewering just about everyone and everything. It’s not so much a feud as it is proof that the act of reading has come to mean very different things for each and every reader. In the age of tablet computers and microblogging, picking up a hardcover book is a fairly quaint manipulation of one’s personal time. And this is precisely why literature is still one of the most powerful gifts you can give.
Freedom is a case in point. At 576 pages, the novel is a commitment to almost four decades in the life of a liberal middle-class Minnesota family. Franzen’s periodic allusions to War and Peace are not coincidental, as Freedom reads like a Russian epic set in the deeply convoluted contemporary America. And his depiction is startlingly vivid. Through his many characters, we see the rise and fall of progressive idealism, gentrification, young love, mid-life anguish and compromise, lost dreams, reactionary neo-conservatism, and are constantly forced to consider what freedom means in a society and family that has started to tailspin. All this and the prose is light and breezy. For certain readers, this may be the only gift you need buy them.
 On the “truthier” side of the bookrack, you’ll find another analysis of our contemporary moment, written with the urgency of the coming apocalypse in an effort to document humanity before it vanishes. Earth (Grand Central Publishing, $27.99) by Jon Stewart is an expansion of the faux-textbook formula first used in America: The Book but with a plea not toward good citizenship but rather genetic reconstitution at the hands of our future extraterrestrial overlords.

Which brings us to William Gibson and his new sci-fi novel Zero History (Putnam, $26.95). The third book in the Bigend trilogy, Gibson’s dystopian vision cuts ever deeper with a mind-bending Inception-style trip into the dealings of a multinational military fashionista tycoon in a post-crash economy. Matt Taibbi’s new book Griftopia (Spiegel and Grau, $26) might provide the perfect historical background for Gibson’s speculation. The Rolling Stone editor uses the 2008 financial crisis as the springboard for an analysis of the “grifter class” of high-power financial looters that have grown up on a diet of Ayn Rand and increasingly funneled capital upward through times of crisis.
Merry Christmas, right? Well one local author may have the antidote to all this doom and gloom. Radical Homemakers by Shannon Hayes is a rallying cry and how-to guide for average people to reclaim domesticity and basic sustainable homemaking skills as a viable, healthful alternative to the grind and greed of paid labor. This isn’t some back-to-the-land utopia; it’s instruction on ways to simplify one’s life in the name of closer communities and greater personal agency.
The character in Joshua Ferris’ new novel The Unnamed (Reagan Arthur, $13.99) also walks away from a conventional domestic life, but it’s something he can’t entirely control. He has a condition that compels him to literally walk away, and keep on walking to the point of exhaustion. The novel beautifully chronicles his attempt to hold it all together despite this peculiar affliction.

Aimee Bender deals with a similarly surreal affliction in The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake (Doubleday, $25.95). Her protagonist has the ability to literally taste the emotions of whoever prepared the food she eats. The novel is a coming-of-age fable, with all the complications of adolescence filtered through these uncommonly emotional experiences with food.
However, the great coming-of-age book this year has come from rocker Patti Smith of all people. Just Kids (Ecco, $16) is a memoir chronicling Smith’s friendship with the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. It starts in the late ’60s when the two were just trying to survive in New York City, through their mutual rise to artistic prominence and fame, eventually culminating in Mapplethorpe’s death from AIDS in 1989.
Finally, here are two novels, like Freedom, that might confound the ADD generation, but will provide the anachronistic pleasure of prolonged absorption. David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet (Random House, $26) takes the author’s command of pastiche and intertextual storytelling into the realm of historical fiction to tell the story of a young Dutch official charged with cleaning up the trading culture of the imperial enclave on a 19th-century Japanese island. Stories open into stories into stories. As do the interlocking narratives in Nicole Krauss’ Great House (Norton, $24.95). At the heart of each is a writing desk that first belonged to a Hungarian Jew forced to abandon his home as the Nazis closed in. In the following decades, the desk and its attendant stories occupy an attic in England and the possession of a Chilean poet, eventually ending up with a young writer in New York.
--Josh Potter