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March 2000

Thing of the Past

Book reviews of Boy with Loaded Gun, Timeline

Boy with Loaded Gun*** By Lewis Nordan Algonquin Books, 2000 In Boy With Loaded Gun, Lewis Nordan, acclaimed and award-winning author of seven novels and several collections of short stories, shares the story of his life. As the explosive title of this memoir suggests, it is a life worth telling about. Lewis “Buddy” Nordan is an awkward child, a skinny kid with jug ears and an overbite, forever in trouble for talking and giggling too much, for cracking his knuckles or belching on demand. Having grown up in Itta Bena, a small town in the Mississippi Delta, Nordan’s burning desire to escape the sleepy, latently racist town becomes the overriding theme of his childhood and teenage years. The advent of television and mail-order catalogs provide him with the opportunity of making his first tentative contacts with the outside world. When, at age 15, he boards a Greyhound bus to Memphis, it is apparent that Itta Bena can no longer hold him. He becomes fascinated with beatniks — if only because they live in New York, read poetry, listen to jazz, hang out in coffeehouses and drink espresso. “I believed I could learn to drink coffee,” he says, adding, “with enough sugar and milk I could do it.” When his plan of becoming a beatnik fails, he opts for the Navy, college and an early marriage. Nordan laconically describes what eventually ensues as “pretty typical — the alcohol, the betrayal, the divorce.” Nordan chronicles his life, its loves and losses, its friendships and affairs. He never palliates anything, whether it is his alcoholism, his infidelities or the emotional detachment from his stepfather’s death. What makes Boy with Loaded Gun so exceptional is Nordan’s ability to recall, with blunt honesty and an unwavering sense of humor, the events that have stayed with him over the years, even if they seem incidental or random at first glance. He may not remember much about his step-father’s funeral, for example, yet he vividly recalls the evening before, when he pounded against the door of a closed barber shop, pleading to have his long hippie hair cut for the occasion. Boy with Loaded Gun is an unadorned memoir, poignant, moving and oftentimes hilarious, in which Nordan conveys his profound understanding of human weakness and life’s cruelties. The disclosive author once again proves to be a gifted storyteller, weaving together the lyrical with the comical. As he said in a recent interview: “I heard a rhythm and a song long before I had the words, and I’ve just been waiting to fill in the words.” In this, his latest work, rhythm and words appear to have finally found each other. Timeline ** by Michael Crichton Alfred A. Knopf, 1999 A group of people running around, trying not to be eaten by dinosaurs — oh wait, wrong book. In Timeline, it’s angry medieval knights who are doing the chasing and three Yale history graduate students who are doing the running. Sound familiar? Okay, so Michael Crichton’s books tend to be a bit predictable, but they’re also engrossingly entertaining. Timeline, like its forerunners, has made it into the top ten of best-seller lists, and one could venture to say that the action sequences aren’t the reason why. It’s that these passages are framed by a scenario that’s so credible, so well researched (the bibliography contains more than 80 books), that you’re left wondering whether the events and characters couldn’t be real. Three graduate students working on an archaeological dig in the Dordogne region of France are tele-transported back to the 14th century. They have 37 hours to locate, and return home with their professor, who had been transported earlier. Linguistic barriers are not the only problems with which the protagonists are confronted. The cultural differences, of which they had not been made aware by years of academic training, prove equally challenging. One of the most amusing passages, for example, is one in which one of the students unwittingly accepts a challenge to a joust. The description of the preparation for the joust and the actual jousting procedure is more fascinating than anything you might have learned in your high school European history class. ITC, the fictional company that invented the novel’s time machine, intends to use the technology to offer vacation packages that send travelers back in time to cultural events around the world. But are Americans really seeking authenticity? How much of our national identity is based on myths that can’t be verified? What if we were to find that Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address with a squeaky voice? Would we be disappointed to find George Washington cowered in the back of the boat, sea sick, during the crossing of the Delaware? Timeline offers a gripping introduction to quantum physics and life in France during the Hundred Years’ War. Indeed, after reading this novel, the concept of time travel doesn’t seem so farfetched. <<< Julia Fuchshuber

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