I’m right in the middle of On Beauty and this pops up, courtesy of Moorish Girl.

MoorishGirl: Rahman to Journalists: White Teeth Is Fiction!

Maybe this is just a ripple from the Frey media cannonball, and I can’t be bothered with Rahman’s complaint — that Smith’s book “doesn’t reflect his anger at ‘being alienated from British society.’” It’s fiction after all.

I doubt any academics will step forward to dispute the veracity of On Beauty‘s depiction of Cambridge for fear of being pegged as one of the more unlikeable characters.

A minor bout with insomnia finally afforded me some time to flip through the New Yorker Anniversary Issue. Amidst an article about Bush’s Starbucks-swilling speechwriter Daniel Gerson I noticed an advertisement for a new thriller by Daniel Silva.

I’m not sure why my eyes scanned it – maybe I needed a break from the thought of Bush uttering “Christian men and women became blind to the clearest commands of their faith and added hypocracy to injustice” at a former slave trading station in Senegal and trying to square that statement with “Brownie, you’re doin’ a heckuva job!”

Regardless, a conspicuous oval on the book’s cover came to my attention.

A great read guaranteed! I attempted to research the guarantee on Penguin’s website, but there’s nary a word. Obviously it’s not something they want to publicize beyond the customers who would pick up Prince of Fire. A websearch uncovered the details: if you don’t like the book, and you return it by the date on the cover, you get your money back.

I’m not sure what I dislike most about this promotion. Maybe it’s the choice of book. Just as I would scan past this ad 99% of the time, I walk past the twirling thriller rack in the supermarket at about the same clip. I suspect that avid fans of thrillers do exactly the opposite. Essentially you’re baiting a customer to buy your book instead of the one next to it; you’re making the product wag it’s tail rather than letting it sell on its merits. Why not use your marketing muscle to introduce a new author or support a book that’s got broad appeal but isn’t living up to sales expectations.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe Penguin is doing just that and Mr. Silva has written his breakout novel and I’m being turned away by the flames on the cover. So, I’m going to hunt down the book. And try it out. I don’t particuarly care for spy books, but I’m prepared to be open minded. I’m also prepared to take Penguin up on their offer. To be continued.

You go away for a while and people discover that memoirs, like memory, aren’t reliable and that it’s not guns that hurt people, but the people in charge of the people wielding guns that hurt people. In the hope of maintaining some continuity despite a yawning break, I’ll pick up where I left off two months ago – religious fringe groups gone wrong.

The Aboriginal Fulfilled Apostles are a much more inclusive faith than the polygamous Mormon sect from Under the Banner of Heaven. Mason La Verle describes his faith on page two of Mission to America:

We approved, that’s the main thing. We approved abundantly. We approved of the Prince of Flocks, whom others call Christ, and of our God of Gods, the All-in-One, but we also approved of a host of other divinities, majestic and humble, familiar and obscure, from tricky Old Coyote, the Hopi spirit, to dainty Lady Vegitalis, a garden sylph of cloudy origins.

This relative religious egalitarianism should alert the reader that the Aboriginal Fulfilled Apostles aren’t real. And yet, when I wasn’t cachinating in public at Walter Kirn’s new novel, I was awed by the author’s synthesis of two hundred years of American religious extremism. From the healthy diets of Christian Science (Mary Baker Eddy provides an epigram) to Amish isolation, Kirn creates a creditable matriarchal faith that hums with authenticity. Which, come to think of it, isn’t all that hard to do in the modern world. But fiction, especially satire, is slippery; an overdrawn character or a veneered scenario can shove an otherwise stable tale off track. As in his bildungsroman, Thumbsucker, and his saga of the modern corporate road warrior, Up in The Air, Kirn displays an admirable capacity to find humor in the contradictions and foibles of American culture without ever losing his affection for his characters.

At the outset of Mission, the AFA have run into a serious problem: the family line has thinned out to levels of incestuousness — about 400 residents at last count. They are in danger of a “biological sunset.” To complicate things, the Seeress, longtime leader of the AFA, is drifting towards her own personal eventide. Mason and his partner Elder Elias Stark are chosen to head out from their remote Montana home to find some new women to help replenish the flock. On the road to an unnamed, Aspenish ski town in Colorado, Elder Stark promptly drops any vestiges of healthy living, prefering to relish the broad variety of junk food and liquor available outside the AFA compound. They fall for the wrong women. They find out that their religion is falling apart. As I said, it’s amazing what happens when you’re gone.

Mission to America was a great salve after finishing Under the Banner of Heaven. It reinforced my faith that fiction is the closest ally to truth.