Not one parent at the show could open Tiger, Tiger to even begin page one because it’s so menacing, so terrifying and so creepy …. or so it seemed by the look of it.  The fact that the author, Margaux Fragoso, lived to tell the story would seem astonishing enough;  that she writes in a beautiful, gripping narrative voice with the most astounding insights opens our ears (and, incredibly, our hearts) to otherwise unspeakable matters.

I can say that once you do open the book and you do begin reading, it’s impossible to put down. And boy, is it needed. Fragoso refuses to be either victim or avenger. What she learned about herself and human nature keeps us appalled and instructed every step of the way. From the start, her choices in life are so unexpected and in a way so thrilling that … well, again, you hafta see for yourself. The wait may be excruciating, because Tiger, Tiger is going to simmer (and not on the back burner) at Farrar, Straus & Giroux until its March publication.

(BTW, thank you, Autumn, at From The TBR Pile, a blog for readers that’s turned up a good handful of other books named Tiger, Tiger [or Tyger, Tyger in goblin speak] that you can find here. And extra thanks of course to poet William Blake who started it all.)

*About the Trade Show

NCIBA stands for Northern California Independent Booksellers Association, and this group, like a dozen other bookseller organizations across the country, sets up a mini-convention every Fall so that bookstore buyers can be sure they’ve got their inventory ready before crazed gift-givers stampede the store.

This year, Publishers Weekly reports, attendance was down at these regional trade shows all over the country as independent bookstores continue to close. And yet despite eBook readers like the Kindle and iPad stealing storekeepers’ sales by offering so much text space you could fit over a thousand books on a single unit, a new light is dawning. First, customers who love the experience of holding and reading a physical book are buying them in stacks (gosh, it turns out that actual books make better gifts than empty space on a reading device). Second, Google is late but still may launch its own eBook inventory in December, and went it does, Google Editions will be offered exclusively through independent bookstores.

This could be a huge boost  and maybe a saving one for indies. Of course Amazon loyalists will resist it, but because the treasure trove of Google Editions is said to be even more massive than Amazon’s and could be faster and more easy to negotiate through indie websites, Google Editions could wipe out the unfair competitive advantage that book vendors from Amazon to chain stores have been using to drive indies out of business.

Equally important, again, is the fact that so many readers are finding that they miss the tactile environment of “real” books and don’t enjoy the impersonal robot look of eBook readers after all. Finally bloggers and Tweeters are discussing what we’re not told about the Kindle experience — the dull screen, sanitized text, lack of page numbers and phony Victorian drawings of authors (Poe, Dickinson, Joyce) who end up looking more funereal than literary. Remember, if you’re a supporter of independent bookstores, November and December are the make-or-break months, plus it’s so much fun to buy personal gifts for everyone on our lists, including kids, in a single bookstore.

DRIB (Don’t Read if Busy)

I hope when Tiger, Tiger is released that Farrar’s publicity department will raise an issue that’s hit the headlines this week and caused a Facebook/Twitter boycott of Amazon regarding a title called The Pedophile’s Guide to Love and Pleasure: A Child Lover’s Code of Conduct by Philip R. Greaves.

Here’s a book that provides a real service to child molesters by showing how to get around those pesky laws protecting minors and how to stand proud about not using condoms with children, how to make the whole experience kindly and fun for everyone,  and much much more.

If you ever needed proof that nobody’s home at Amazon, here it is: The company routinely bars pornography and other sexually explicit or offensive titles, yet Amazon, caught sleeping at the switch when this pro-pedophile book got listed on Kindle –  tried to hide behind First Amendment issues as messages of outrage came pouring.

Anderson Cooper of CNN does a good job covering the issue and finding out just how icky and dangerous The Pedophile’s Guide can be by interviewing everyone’s favorite therapist, Dr. Phil McGraw, who makes enormous sense about the difference between free speech and exploitation. Cooper also explores with New Yorker legal correspondent Jeffrey Toobin why “no court in the country” would ever force Amazon to remove the book, and why that’s a good thing (it’s up to you, Amazon, not the courts) in this important video.

This week enough people protested to shame Amazon into removing the book, thank heaven, but the point to make here is that Fragoso’s insight about pedophiles’ sense of entitlement in Tiger, Tiger is mirrored in The Pedophile’s Guide and useful for society to know.

Welcome Back, Laura H

Not so scary but equally mesmerizing is another hot-as-a-firecracker work of nonfiction, Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand (Random), which, as lush and addictive as her first blockbuster, Seabiscuit, comes out right on time for the holidays.

And what a book it is. Unbroken takes off like a shot as we watch a manic boy, born to be a juvenile delinquent in the 1920s, named Louis Zamperini running away from cops and storekeepers so fast that instead of going to prison, he’s discovered by track-and-field coaches and wins his way into competing as the youngest distance runner at the Berlin Olympics of 1936.

(Two quickies from the thousands of absorbing details Hillenbrand unearths: 1) German fans were so entranced with American sprinter Jesse Owens that as soon as stepped off the train in Berlin, scissors-wielding crowds surged forward  “and began snipping off bits of his clothing” with such fervor that a near-naked “Owens leapt back onto the train.” 2) When not racing, the incorrigible Louis Z. went around Berlin stealing “souvenirs,” including a Nazi flag that was seductively hanging in front of Hitler’s very Reich Chancellery. Two guards caught him, but he talked his way out and was even given the flag to take home.)

Although terrified of airplanes, Louis Z becomes a turret gunner on the WWII bomber Green Hornet but is shot down in the Pacific with two other airmen, and they all slowly starve on a disintegrating raft until Japanese planes spot them in the middle of a million miles of ocean and begin strafing just as Louis dives under the raft where — ta da! — sharks have been waiting for just this moment. And that’s just the end of the Prologue.

Other writers might better describe how it feels to be a speck in an indifferent and watery wasteland, but that giant existential loneliness really hits home, thanks to Hillenbrand’s incredible research and edge-of-your-seat storytelling. Sure to be another dense and luscious bestseller and a great gift for non-sailors, just as her last book Seabiscuit was beloved by non-horselovers.

This is the story of a self-publisher who did everything “wrong” to publish a charming and humorous gem that I’m recommending to everyone.

The big lesson I had to learn (again) is that “professionals” in the book business like yours truly can easily lose their trust in the reader and their eye for creativity. Instead of enhancing the publishing process, too often we pros get in the way of very good, very original and often even memorable books.

In my own defense may I say that 99 times out of 100, the self-publishing author needs guidance from a wizened (I used to think that meant wise; now in my declining years I see it’s right on the money) veteran of industry standards and procedures.

Too Shy to Paginate

The author in question is Niko Mayer, a member of the book group I facilitate at Book Passage in Corte Madera, Calif. When Niko asked me to endorse a collection of travel stories that she had written and illustrated, I felt a certain dread creep in.

1. First, there was the title: “Travelin’ Light Is Not for Me: Worries Weigh a Lot.”

Well, it’s a bit wordy and hard to follow, I thought, not to mention a little precious.  A customer may read it several times and still not know what the book is about.

I told Niko a good rule of thumb about titles: If the reader has to look inside the book to understand the title, you’re not there yet. But if the title is catchy, and intriguing enough to lure the reader into the book  — to make us curious, to make us open the book to learn more — you’ve nailed it.

Uh-huh… said Niko.

2. Then came the illustrations (see below)

Hm. All the drawings were like this: Spirited and earnest, certainly, but amateurish and dated, too, I felt — reminiscent (to me) of ladies’ teas in the ‘50s. Again, a preciosity crept in that made the art a bit self-conscious.

I told Niko a rule of thumb about illustrations: If they distract readers to the point of making us lose our focus or enjoyment of the story, you’re not there yet. But if they enhance the text and add a personality all their own, like a bonus, it’s worth every extra penny to include them.

Hm, said Niko.

3. Then came the typeface (see below).

Okay, this had to be some kind of faux handwriting font with one of those cute names (I thought maybe “Postcard Crimp”) that I guessed was supposed to resemble pages in a person’s travel journal. That’s fine for a while, but soon I found myself squinting at paragraphs that looked a bit like a rough draft, as though jotted down without a thought. Considering typos and occasions where the type runs into illustrations, the reading of the text could be simpler, cleaner.

I told Niko a rule of thumb about content: When the typeface calls attention to itself, it steps in front of the writing (literally in this case) and confuses the author’s meaning. That’s not fair to the reader.

The typeface, said Niko,  is called “Handwriting Dakota.” Not “Postcard Crimp.”

4. Other things I puzzled over: Why was there no Table of Contents, no page numbers?

Niko said later the template that her printer (Blurb.com) used for self-published books didn’t leave room on the page for art and pagination, so the latter had to go. As to a Table of Contents, the idea hadn’t occurred to her.

I got the feeling that the author was too shy to paginate: Niko thought of “Travelin’ Light…” as a coffee table book or bathroom read that you could flip open anywhere and simply start browsing. Who would take it seriously enough to remember a specific page?

The Lesson Begins

5. The dread increased as I turned to the text, which I worried would not redeem difficulties in the design. Then for the next hour I heard somebody chuckling happily, and realized that it was me.

Niko, it turns out, has a gift for dry, wry humor that sneaks up on you on nearly every page. She and her husband Steve (what a patient man! I thought at first. Then: What a lucky man!) have traveled the world together (she sometimes solo),  and have had many misadventures that are both entertaining and amusing.

But the delight here lies in Niko’s approach, her insistence on traveling on her own terms. “I expect everything to go wrong, and I do everything I can to insure it doesn’t,” she writes. This means preparing and packing for the worst – “tsunamis, strikes, and poison gas in subway tunnels” — as well as more ordinary problems (dengue fever, malaria), though she does have her limits.

On a trip to Africa, “I stopped short of carrying my own blood plasma supply,” though much to her regret. Waking up with a swollen black tongue is the subject of the second  chapter (they’re not numbered) called “Open Wide and Say ‘EeeeeuuuuuWWWW,” a title I most certainly would have discouraged but begrudgingly found charming, especially after the origin is discovered.

In any case, having realized long ago “how much I loathed being uncomfortable” away from the comforts of home, “I tried to take my home with me,” she writes. This makes her the most resourceful packer in modern times. If Steve is right that Niko has a “four-degree comfort range,” it follows that she’s always going to be “too cold or too hot” wherever she goes, so she takes pains to “pack for two seasons to protect against misery.”

Early on, we surrender to her logic. Stuck in the back of a hotel with a limited view, Niko places on the window sill a special thermometer “made for sailors that calculates the wind-chill factor along with the temperature.” She refers to it as a “tiny” device while Steve calls it as a “portable weather station,” but the point is, phoning the doorman to ask about the weather would never work for Niko. “The doorman is from Austria, not California,” she tells Steve. “How would he know what I consider cold?”

Two Kinds of People

Niko realized years ago, that she and Steve represent two kinds of people in the world: “Luggage-intensive” travelers like Niko, pictured on the cover with six pieces of luggage, a stack of books, umbrella, goldfish bowl and electric fan; and “carry-on” travelers like Steve, who never seem to bring more than a few small bags.

“The carry-on people believe that they are efficient, and yet they are the ones slowing down the boarding procedures,” Niko writes. “They don’t trust the airlines to deliver the bags. They believe the overloaded group is slowing them down waiting for lost luggage. But notice who they borrow from when they need toe spacers.”

Ah, toe spacers. It’s fascinating to see how many unusual items (well, for you and me)  turn out to be necessities for Niko. She provides a full-page list at the front of the book that appears to be suggestions to consider if you have space (2^nd skin and moeskin, baking soda, DIY medicine book, bactine”) but turn out to be essentials that Niko takes on every trip.

Here is just a part of it:

Water purification tabs

Vitabath

Inhaler

Humidifier

Curl Shampoo

Curl Conditioner

No-Curl Shampoo

No-Curl Conditioner

Hair Gel

Laundry Soap

Tuna

Arnica

Inflatable Hangers

So while many people are awed by travel – by the fact that airplanes actually fly, for example – “for me, the most amazing invention is the expandable rolling suitcases,” Niko writes. She packs many of them because, despite taking classes like “108 Outfits in a Carry-on Bag,” she can’t reduce her clothes to a dreary all-black wardrobe (“I looked like I expected a death in the Royal Family”); mix-and-match apparel (“so shapeless that no necklace could rescue it”); or a dress-up-or-down basic outfit (“I remain unseduced by the novelty of scarves”).

The author seems to thrive on adventure, but she does note that “Steve is allergic to luxury, while I’m allergic to risk.” That only means that when he wants to leave the safety of a group in Nepal, she spends all night “catastrophizing (at which I excel),” to good purpose.

While the “excursion provider” insists that sherpas will be bringing not only a cook but two cabin boys, Niko isn’t so sure (“What about oxygen tanks?”). And it’s not danger she’s worried about so much as a certain phonying-up of authenticity: A guide who asks passers-by for directions. An exhausting trek up a mountain that seems remote until a taxi wanders by. A promise that “You carry nothing. You lack for nothing” that really means no food or water for 20 miles.

Like many of us, Niko and Steve want to see the real, un-touristy places of the world, but are there such things left these days?  The author might not  have meant for this to happen, but often “Travelin’ Light…” reads like a cautionary tale, to warn us that no matter what our interests may be in the remote, the untouched, the wild, or the pristine, some kind of business is already thriving to service (or is it exploit?) our needs.

Of course, Niko has the wit and good humor to make all this funny. If the chances are pretty high wherever one goes of hiring charlatans or fanatics who are busy putting up a sign that says something like “Sunrise Travel,” a better way to read it would be “Surprise Travel” and let catastrophizing claim the day.

Learning My Lesson

All of this to say that gradually I grew to love every aspect of this book, including the title, which states exactly what the author wants us to know before we buy it. The illustrations that at first seemed so dated and pinched now look adorable and revealing. Even the typeface with it’s don’t-I-look-authentic look appears, to me, so charmingly close to being real handwriting that I would hate to see a cleaner, more easy-to-read and, yes, sophisticated font.

So now it’s my turn to be wrong. It’s wrong to force old formats and constraints onto self-published books. It’s wrong even for trusted old fogies like myself to forget that once authors are freed from  “professional” standards, they are answerable only to themselves. Sometimes their gut instinct can free us all from the limited expectations of an industry that’s gotten too streamlined and arrogant.

The fact is that “Travelin’ Light … “ is a good book because of all that’s “wrong” with it, for one reason because the author trusts the reader to give the book a chance, and we do.

Maybe it’s not exactly an impulse buy, but I bet it will go far on that other trusted industry phenomenon, word of mouth. Niko wrote it in a spirit of playfulness that you can see in the photograph of the two of them straddling the Equator.

Whenever I’ve given it to people without saying a thing about it, the reaction has been universal: “What an unexpected delight! We loved it! Especially the time Niko and Steve are nearly shot by a firing squad on page — oh wait, why are there no page numbers…”

“Kidnapped by Radical Feminists”

Finally I was so delighted and surprised by a chapter in which Niko signs up for a trip to Greece, led by a Belgian Jungian spiritualist/feminist/psychoanalyst and seeker,  that I immediately bought First Serial Rights to get ahead of the crowd of magazine editors (okay, I paid a dollar) and hereby offer it to you in its entirety below.

Niko says she was attracted to this special tour for women because the guide promised to “illuminate the psychological aspects of mythology” right at the sites of the Earth Goddess, Gaia; the God of Healing, Asklepios; the Oracle of Delphi itself, and many others.

It’s an understatement to say that Niko’s fears come true in a most comical way as she watches some (not all) members of the group bring out the panpipes, the drums, the runes, the chanting and dancing while the guide “spoke in Capital Letters” about how “the Journey has something to Teach” us all.

Suffice it to say that every historic site they visit is a holy, peaceful, historic sanctuary “until we arrived.” There is even one person – perhaps the product of too much therapy, radical feminism, New Age spirituality and folk music –  “who kept her ‘Inner Child’ (a doll) in a backpack,” bringing it out to hold in front of her “to witness this marvelous feminist solidarity.” This is just one example of Niko’s incisive but never mordant observations.

Go here for a pdf of “Kidnapped by Radical Feminists.”

1. How To Say ‘Up Yours’: Alice Hoffman

Well, if I were Alice Hoffman, I’d go bonkers myself over the way modern critics not only give away too much plot in the novels they review (and the movies, plays, etc.) but seem determined to spoil the ending.

Hoffman is in the news because she Twittered out her anger in 27 different Tweets about a mixed-to-negative Boston Globe review by Roberta Silman of her new book, “The Story Sisters” (Shaye Areheart/Crown; 325 pages; $25).

Granted, Hoffman got a bit carried away by calling Silman a “moron” and insisting that “any idiot can be a critic” (hey!), and she got a bit vindictive by giving out Silman’s private email and phone number so that readers can “tell her what u think of snarky critics.”

Hoffman has apologized for responding “strongly” in the “heat of the moment” and says she’s “sorry if I offended anyone,” which is the usual code for “my publisher won’t let me say ‘up yours.’ ”

But  I think we should listen to Hoffman’s more important and far-reaching statement — one that is true of way too many reviews these days — about being “dismayed” because  the review “gave away the plot of the novel.”

Two Reviewers Give It Away

Which many reviews today often do. Silman refers to “the secret that is the linchpin of the book” and then appears to disclose it. She describes key plot points in Part Two, which is way too far in the book to follow the heart of the novel’s story. She tells us how the book ends by naming the “only” character who “is given a chance to grow,” by revealing the two estranged characters whom we’re hoping will bond but find “no resolution,” and divulging the hero-turned-drug addict who’s institutionalized but “does bear a child and reform,” yet “never really matures.”

No wonder Hoffman went off her feed. I bet she was already smarting from a similar debacle at the Washington Post, where critic Wendy Smith not only follows the development of a key character far too long and with too much detail, she  then drops the bomb that the character is “responsible for a death that estranges her from the family, but a series of poignant scenes shows her tentative attempts to reconnect.” Smith spoils the end of the book by telling us about “this radiant finale” in which a wedding in Paris provides the sisters with “a tender opportunity to reconcile.”

Let me just say, too, that it doesn’t matter if any of these salient details are provided at the beginning of the book. It is the reviewer’s charge never to even seem to give the book away, to step in front of the material, to plant a seed in the reader’s mind (she does “reform”) that will one day spoil a fresh reading of the text. (More about this next week.)

The Fall of Lit Crit

I have a theory that the standards of literary criticism have fallen in direct proportion to the “democratization” of publishing and blogging on the Internet. Stands to reason, no? Those first customer reviews on Amazon years ago weren’t (and for the most part still aren’t) notable for their professionalism, heaven knows. But  boy, did they have energy (still do) and how ebulliently they make themselves heard. Read four or five of ‘em and you glean enough about the book to know if it’s for you.  At the same time, these charged-up contributors feel they are part of a reading family and would never spoil the fun of others by giving away key aspects of a book. So you can scroll through customer reviews on just about any website without having to keep one eye closed, which I find myself doing with so-called professional criticism of everything from books to movies to theater.

2. Blogging for Revenge: Alain de Botton

In this case I have to say as a reader, what in heck was the New York Times Book Review thinking of last Sunday when a wretched piece of bad writing showed up disguised as a book review of “The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work” by Alain de Botton (Pantheon; 327 pages; $26)?

You’d think a book with a straightforward title like that would be easy to describe, but no. I read the full-page review by Caleb Crain three times and I still didn’t know what it was about. Crain accuses de Botton of mockery, condescension, mean-spiritedness, superficial judgment and spite, but he never tells us the “initial goal” of the book, except to say the author “has already lost track of (it)” by Chapter 3.

Of course if I were advising de Botton, I would have tied him to a chair before allowing him to write a vitriolic message to Crain for all on the Internet to see. This part especially is regrettable: “I will hate you till the day I die and wish you nothing but ill will in every career move you make. I will be watching with interest and schadenfreude.”

But I would have spread out the red carpet for de Botton to say this: “I genuinely hope that you will find yourself on the receiving end of such a daft review some time very soon — so that you can grow up and start to take some responsibility for your work as a reviewer.”

Responsible Reviewing

Exactly. While embittered authors are hardly the first person the world attends when it comes to instruction about responsible book reviewing, hysterical former critics at least are louder, so tune in next week when we explore the dreaded but often amusing hilarities of lousy critical writing that junks up the litosphere so much these days.

And no, I haven’t read either of the book’s in question. I want to review the reviews, and ponder  why literary criticism, even at its most blunt and hurried form, as in a newspaper or blog (as opposed to a lengthy New Yorker piece or later academic journal) can be useful, relevant and valued by your everyday reader.

More next week.

P.S. and DRIB (don’t read if busy):

An example of responsible critical writing would be Sukhdev Sandhu’s coherent and engrossing review in The Daily Telegraph from England.

There we discover that de Botton is not just a “British essayist” as NYTBR reviewer Crain dismissively puts it (for crying out loud! readers will remember him as author of the elegant and delectably humorous “How Proust Can Change Your Life” and “The Consolations of Philosophy”! It’s the responsibility of the reviewer to point this out).

Nor is the book simply an extended essay.  De Botton “has set out,” as Sandhu puts it, “to write ‘a hymn to the intelligence, peculiarity, beauty and horror of the modern workplace and, not least, its extraordinary claim to be able to provide us, alongside love, with the principal source of life’s meaning.’ ” A hymn! One needn’t have read de Botton to adjust expectations and even thrill a little bit at the possibility of changing our lens on an often drab subject.

Sandhu — who, by the way, can be negatively critical about the book under review — also shows us that de Botton writes far more comprehensively and compassionately than Crane ever lets on, ranging in subject interest, for example, from accountants and rocket scientists to electricity installers, career counselors, entrepreneurs and many others from many different countries.

Sandhu not only “gets” de Botton as a critic is supposed to do – mostly his humor! the NYTBR critic repeatedly misses de Botton’s penchant for the wry, dry subtle aside!  — he backs up most of his assertions with evidence, meaning quotes from the book that are more than thoughtful, in de Botton’s way: they are intriguing, chewy, and re-readable.

Sandhu writes, “Of an outstandingly successful but abrasive and self-regarding industrialist, de Botton observes: ‘a certain kind of intelligence may at heart be nothing more or less than a superior capacity for dissatisfaction.’ ”

(Although Hoffman has deleted her tweets, I’ve used various blog sources for the quotes including Edward Campion 6/28 and Galley Cat.)

Somewhere in the midst of discovering tiny Bellevue Literary Press and its incredible launch of an original trade paperback called “Tinkers” (191 pages; $14.95),  I decided to take a look at the book to make sure it was worthy of a whole column (or, as it turns out, two). 

Paul Harding

Wouldn’t you know, this first novel by Paul Harding has so much originality and fresh writing that I could not believe — well, first, that the author is still in his 40s (see left; surely his mind’s age is about 142); and second, that the intricate and animated construction of the novel becomes a character in its own right.

My only regret is that as much as I admire Bellevue Press for its literary standards, I wish the cover copy for “Tinkers” weren’t so dreary. 

“An old man lies dying,” it begins. “As time collapses into memory, he travels deep into his past where he is united with his father and relives the wonder and pain ….” Sounds like a dozen other books to me, and misses a certain playfulness on Harding’s part. In most deathbed scenes, the soul rises gracefully to heaven, but here the house (which the dying man once built himself)  — in fact everything in his universe — comes crashing down on him.

As walls crack and foundation gives way, George Crosby, a former teacher lying in his rented hospital bed, remembers teaching his grandkids how to staple insulation in place. “Now two or three lengths of it had come loose and lolled down like pink woolly tongues,” along with shattered windows, caved-in ceiling, and “electrical wires that looked like severed veins” to George.   

There is no respite. “The second floor fell on him, with its unfinished pine framing and dead-end plumbing and racks of old coats and boxes.” Now he sees right through a crippled roof as “the clouds halted, paused for an instant, and plummeted onto his head. The very blue of the sky followed…Next fell the stars, tinkling about him like the ornaments of heaven shaken loose. Finally, the black vastation itself came untacked and draped over the entire heap, covering George’s confused obliteration.”

A Seam to Slip Into

But we don’t have time to ponder this hallucination (or true experience?) because Harding suddenly skips back 70 years to introduce us to George’s father, Howard, the tinker of the title. 

Howard is first seen in the 1920s, driving his mule-drawn wagon with its “heavy chest of drawers, each fitted with a recessed brass ring, pulled open with a hooked forefinger, that contained brushes and wood oil, tooth powder and nylon stockings, shaving soap and straight-edge razors.” 

His job is plodding and practical, but Howard is something of a dreamer. In the fall, as his mule, Prince Edward, pulls the cart along the back roads of rural Maine, Howard’s eye is affixed not on the tin buckets, boot strings, nails or child-sized coffins he’s sold but on the “blazing maple leaves” on which all things, for that moment, rest.

Maybe this is a story of how people live in nature, we think, and it is, but there’s much more to it than that. During the winter, Howard visits an aging hermit who lives so deep in the snowbound forests that he has to walk for miles to meet the tinker. Howard watches him emerge from the whiteness like an existential dot  (see cover illustration below) and ponders the blurring of wilderness and humanity.

“No one could imagine how a man could survive one winter alone and exposed in the woods, never mind decades of them. Howard, instead of trying to explain the hermit’s existence in terms of hearth fires and trappers’ shacks, preferred the blank space the old man actually seemed to inhabit; he liked to think of some fold in the woods, some seam that only the hermit could sense and slip into, where the ice and snow, where the frozen forest itself, would accept him and he would no longer need fire or wool blankets, but instead flourish wreathed in snow, spun in frost, with limbs like cold wood and blood like frigid sap.”

The Opposite of Death

If Howard sees the hermit  woven almost literally into the landscape, it’s because his vision has been artfully occluded by nature. Suffering from a severe form of epilepsy, he has become acutely sensitive to the coming of a seizure — his “diet of lightning”: 

“The aura, the sparkle and tingle of an oncoming fit was not the lightning — it was the cooked air that the lightning pushed in front of itself.”

Howard doesn’t remember any of the seizures, but he knows that “his brain nearly fried in its skull pan” during it. It’s as though a door opened to “the star-gushing universe,” and sheer voltage “instantly burst the seams of his thin body.” 

Here, then, epilepsy becomes the lens by which Howard can see, more clearly than people who don’t have the disease, how the universe reclaims the body long before we die. For Howard, in the instant “when the bolt touched flesh…he became pure, unconscious energy. It was like the opposite of death, or a bit of the same thing death was, but from a different direction.”

The mention of death and its opposite provides an early clue to the novel’s huge design. “Tinkers” is  concerned with a meeting of humanity and matter that signals vast and (previously) unknowable change. Because they live in rural Maine, the characters already feel part of nature’s transformations. Time has little chronology until they notice it, and space is as infinite as emotion. 

The few Native Americans left, “as old as light and just as diffuse,” appear briefly as guides between natural and manmade worlds. An Indian emerges out of the forest to repair a birch bark and vanishes without sound or movement. Others are seen only “as silhouettes traced by the sun.” One legendary Native American, long gone, appears when fishermen see him “dart by the water deep beneath their boats, chasing salmon.” 

Reabsorbed Back

And so the young Howard wonders: Did the Indian leave quickly to return to the forest, or was he “reabsorbed back, not only into trunk and root, stone and leaf but into light and shadow and season and time itself.” 

This idea — that death is not an end but a gradual integration of life from one state to another — becomes the novel’s central preoccupation. And it’s not just life – all things are changing, consumed by each other, all of the time, as when Howard finds an old book in an attic: “The dust in the air was made up of the book I found,” he writes in a journal. “I breathed the book before I saw it; tasted the book before I read it.” 

So for inanimate objects, too, there is no such thing as beginning or end, only a constant remixing in which we humans are the lucky ones, Harding seems to say,  because we get to observe.

In the spring, for example, Howard, having stopped his wagon after a snowstorm, gives his mule Prince Edward a carrot and wades into a beautiful field of wildflowers:

“Howard closed his eyes and inhaled. He smelled cold water and cold, intrepid green. Those early flowers smelled like cold water. Their fragrance was not the still perfume of high summer; it was the mineral smell of cold, raw green.” It’s as though we can inhale the very passage of time.

From Infinity to Controlled Time

 “Tinkers” speaks just as eloquently to the fact that we are human, after all, locked into perceived ideas of time and space, trying to control both.  

It’s no coincidence that George, when he retires, turns into an expert tinkerer and repairer of ancient clocks, through which he ponders the phenomenon of controlled time. 

Hundreds of clocks, their inner workings spilled everywhere in the house (the same house that’s ready to collapse on him when his time is over), represent an amazing truth to George – that the power of time can be “tamed by the successive gears, from savage energy to civilized servant, to perform the most rarefied of tasks: namely…to mark precisely each of the 86,400 seconds in our earthly day, and furthermore, to do so for eight days at a time…” 

It takes eight days for a typical hand-wound clock to run out of time, eight days for George to die, and eight days for the time in Harding’s story to run out. Time in this ingenious novel is both clocked and mixed up by vignettes, journals, instruction manuals, observations, meditations and diaries. Tense can change with the next paragraph, as can first- and third- person voices. For a while, it’s hard to know how all the little stories are related to the one big story. 

But that’s the joy of any exquisite mosaic. The placement of each precious gem is so compelling, sometimes so breathtaking, sometimes even life-changing, that we’re content to wait until the grand picture emerges, at last. 

Personal Note

Since reading “Tinkers” I find myself thinking of its images and messages all the time. 

I’ll never go out on a boat again without seeing that Indian chasing salmon under the water. 

When people my age (60+) refer to their bodies as “betraying” them by growing old, I’ll think of the endless reabsorption that’s given new life by our bodies and returns new life when our bodies are born. (This doesn’t help alleviate anxiety about death; it just makes the process more interesting.)

And when someone refers to death as the end, I’ll think of “the opposite of death,” that process in nature that is ongoing and infinite, allowing human beings “fleeting glances”  that “the mystery is ours to ponder.”

I knew Wendy Lichtman was a good writer (Washington Post, New York Times), but I never thought she (or anybody) could pull off a book so inventive and winning as “Secrets, Lies & Algebra” (HarperTeen; 183 pages; $6.99 paperback).

It’s a great novel for young readers in the 6^th-8^th grades, but if you’re a math-phobic oldster like myself, it’s even better for mature(d) audiences.

The story takes off like a rocket and before you know it, principles of algebra and even a little non-Euclidean geometry (I never heard of it before but now find indispensable) fly into your brain as though destined to reside there.

We aren’t even aware it’s a teaching story about mathematics (except for the title) when the narrator, Tess, finds herself in the copy room at her middle school, where the first of two mysteries begins.

Tess has been given the key because she’s one of the few students the principal trusts to run 300 copies of the school newsletter and not “let anyone just stroll in.”

However, when Richard, one of the cooler boys in school, pops in and asks Tess if he can “borrow the machine for a second” – and he’s standing two inches behind her while whispering this – against her better judgment she allows him in.

It’s not that she has much choice. Tess may be good at math and dress okay, but Richard is “extremely good-looking” and a basketball star at that. Then there is the matter of how these two are ranked by everybody else, and this she describes as a mathematic formula.

“We’re spending a lot of time studying inequalities in algebra now,” she tells us, “which makes sense, since who you’re greater than (>) and who you’re less than (<) is kind of the point of eighth grade.”

That’s just humorously astute enough to make us agree with the following formula: Tess tells Richard to use the machine “because we both knew that Richard was > me (R>T).”

This is the first and simplest reference to mathematical symbols, and LIchtman is such a good teacher that it encourages us to anticipate more. Tess will bring up that > and < method of measuring later on, so we’ll get used to the way her mind operates, and gradually we’ll absorb more complicated formulae.

But not before Tess glances at the pages Richard is copying and realizes he’s got the test on the U.S. Constitution they’re both about to take in history class. Once she concludes Richard may be a thief and a cheat, despite his dazzling smile and straight (no braces) teeth, she realizes suddenly, “our inequality may have changed. Maybe now T>R.”

Lichtman could have let the theft of a history exam dominate this brief story, but she’s so adept at fiction at this level that she weaves in a delicious  murder mystery as well.

When Tess gets home, she finds her mother in tears over the suicide of a friend named Nina, who apparently died of carbon monoxide poisoning when she sat in her car with the garage door closed and the motor running.

Nina’s husband, Rob, a sculptor who works with Tess’s mother at Art4Kids, where they both teach ceramics, does not seem all that broken up over Nina’s death. In fact he has blurted out things that made her mom suspect Rob of killing Nina and then placing her body in the car to make it look like suicide.

Against that backdrop of suspicion and plausibility, Tess again turns to algebra as a reliable, organic system for figuring out life’s toughest problems. When her mother is too upset to talk more about Nina’s death, Tess takes the little information she has and works up two nifty graphs to ponder the possibilities on paper. First, she considers the timing, because it’s important to know, if the cause of death was suicide, whether Nina took a long time or a short time dying.

It takes only a few sentences before Tess explains to us how graphs work and why new insights can be gained by studying life through a math lens.

For example, in the graph above: “If point A is alive and point D is dead,” Tess figures, “then Nina started at the top of the y-axis, wide-awake at (0,20). The garage door was closed, the motor was on, maybe she was even listening to music as she got dizzy and fell asleep. Little by little her breathing got slower until, at the coordinates of, say, (18,0), she was dead.”

On the other hand, there is this:

“But if Nina just took a whiff of the stuff and died, then the graph would clunk right own to the bottom of the y-axis, taking no time at all, like the graph we made [in class] of a book dropping.”

The illustrator (not Lichtman but a really with-it artist at Harper) is adept at combining the kind of doodles that a middle-school student might make (note the Xs for dead Nina’s eyes) with easy-to-understand math exercises. Not only is Tess’s humor brought to the page, we see exactly why algebra can apply to real life and be entertaining at the same time.

A big bonus to the book allows us to watch Tess’s gifted algebra teacher, Mrs. Salzman, pass on to students  (and now to us) her own fascination with such concepts as imaginary numbers, Venn diagrams and the difference between an axiom and a theorum.

(And how applicable is this: On “Masterpiece” theater the other night, the mathematical genius who comes home from China to find his brother murdered makes a sketch of the three principals involved – his brother, himself and his brother’s wife – using three interlocking circles that we followers of Tess know are Venn Diagrams! It’s just a passing image but thanks to Lichtman we know the guy’s on the right track.)

The other bonus is watching Tess’s parents and her two best friends reap the benefit of Tess’s “Math Whiz” mind (she gets an award for this) when she passes on her math-minded view of the world.

Of the thousands of math concepts I missed in school, for example, I never heard of DNE, which means that in some calculations, there is no answer – it Does Not Exist. This simple idea is not only a math lesson but a fact of life that has tremendous value before everybody in the book jumps to false conclusions about who murdered whom.

Pretty soon the language of mathematics grows less codified as Lichtman leads us numbers-avoidant readers from the simple to the complex, which is to say, easy to difficult. Eventually we stop translating the symbols because our newly educated eye absorbs their meaning quickly, almost effortlessly.

For example, what might have been an esoteric scribbling to the lay mind causes us to nod sagely when we realize that Tess is very close to figuring out who stole the history test.

(Her friend Sammy is signified by “s” to the fifth power because in her enthusiasm Sammy often overreacts, as in her many IM’s [instant messages to you, bub] when she answers, “Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes!”)

All of this is conveyed in the kind of teen-speak idiom that ordinarily drives a 64-year-old nuts (awesome, whatever, like, cool, weird, freaked and every variation of are you serious?). But here Lichtman sees beyond passing trends and need for conformity to the growing individualism of each of her characters.

Even the history teacher offers an unforgettable lesson in the Bill of Rights, although Tess recognizes that he’s something of a Mr. Malaprop when it comes to misusing everyday words – especially those taken from the world of mathematics. For example, he’ll say, “Class, this test is of infinite importance,” when everyone knows – well, Tess knows – that “infinite” means immeasurable, not just a lot.

The pages fly by as we hunger to know: Will Tess solve the two mysteries or will she get bogged down in extraneous solutions (the math equivalent of red herrings) because the boy she likes (not Richard) may have a crush on her? Or is it all one big DNE?

Note to readers: I thought it would be fun to take a break before my next mouthing off with #3 of “Three Things I’d Love to See,” coming up soon. It’s the holiday season, after all. If you are a parent or friend of a middle-schooler who’s about to take algebra (or has just started), “Secrets, Lies & Algebra” makes a great gift. I can’t wait to begin Wendy’s next entry in the adventures of Tess and her friends, “The Writing on the Wall” (Greenwillow/HarperTeen; 216 pages; $16.99 hardcover), where mysteries and algebra get more complicated, thank heaven.