The Unfortunate Importance of Beauty, by Amanda Filipacchi (Norton). Barb Colby, a costume designer in Manhattan, is gorgeous, but finds her looks a hindrance: people respond to her face, not her spirit. After her best friend leaps to his death, confessing love for her in a suicide note, she constructs an elaborate disguise, including “a simple-but-convincing jiggling fat suit,” a frizzy gray wig, and crooked fake teeth. Meanwhile, another friend, a brilliant but plain musician, falls in love with a handsome cad, raising alarm among the members of their close-knit, artsy circle. A caper involving a murder plot ensues. Filipacchi works with clear themes, but her sure comic touch steers clear of didacticism; smart and sweet, the novel becomes a tribute to the pleasures of friendship.
Etta and Otto and Russell and James, by Emma Hooper (Simon & Schuster). “I’ve gone,” Etta writes to her husband, Otto, at the beginning of this fairy-tale-like novel. In her eighties and slowly losing her memory, she sets out on foot to the ocean, which she has never seen. “I will try to remember to come back,” she says. The novel follows Etta as she treks through the Canadian prairies (accompanied by a talking coyote) and Otto as he learns to live alone. Hooper’s language is spare and repetitive, at times to a fault, and her characters’ motives often remain elusive. But what emerges is a delicate hymn to the natural landscape and an elegy to a dwindling generation.
The B Side, by Ben Yagoda (Riverhead). In 1957, Frank Sinatra, lamenting the displacement of his beloved standards, dismissed rock and roll as being “sung, played and written for the most part by cretinous goons.” Yet, as Ben Yagoda writes in this spirited history of American popular music, the first golden age of songwriting was already over by the time anyone was rocking around the clock. Changes in music distribution and in public taste had unleashed, instead, “novelty numbers, lachrymose ballads, simplistic jingles, hillbilly hokum.” Pointing toward the renaissance of songwriting in the sixties, Yagoda argues that rock did not mark the end of the Great American Songbook but was, at its best, a spiritual heir and second coming.
Why Not Say What Happened, by Morris Dickstein (Liveright). This memoir by a noted literary critic and cultural historian charts his journey from Lower East Side yeshiva boy to cosmopolitan professor. Much of the book is a love ballad to his heady university years at Columbia, Cambridge, and Yale, chronicling a series of significant encounters with, among others, Lionel Trilling, F. R. Leavis, and Harold Bloom. Though an old-fashioned humanist like his mentors, Dickstein reveals himself to be in synch with his time. His enthusiasms are widely dispersed (movies and popular music no less than the Western canon), and he describes the emergence of radical culture in New York in the sixties with sympathy. Conjuring a lost age of intellect, Dickstein proves the most cheerful of elegists.
