Oct. 5 (Bloomberg) -- On Dec. 30, 2003, writer John Gregory Dunne died of a heart attack while he and his wife, Joan Didion, were preparing dinner in their New York City apartment.
It was a month before their 40th wedding anniversary, and Didion was already grieving over their daughter, Quintana Roo, a 37-year-old newlywed who was lying in a coma at a nearby hospital. In ``The Year of Magical Thinking'' (Knopf, 228 pages, $23.95), Didion offers an aching chronicle of her thoughts and feelings, both rational and irrational, of the year following her husband's death.
As a hedge against self-pity, Didion begins by documenting every detail, from the drink in Dunne's hand when he died (a blended Scotch) to the science underlying cardiac arrest, hoping she can perform a kind of literary ``magic trick'' to ``bring him back.''
This has real consequences. Didion refuses, for example, to allow Dunne's organs to be harvested or to give away his shoes because: ``How could he come back if they took his organs, how could he come back if he had no shoes?''
Didion tries to distract herself by attending to her ailing daughter (who died in August 2005, after the book was finished), but quickly realizes it is futile.
``Grief was passive. Grief happened,'' she writes. ``Mourning, the act of dealing with grief, required attention.'' And so she began to write.
Didion, now 71, has been publishing novels and journalism for more than five decades but remains best known for her acerbic social criticism from the 1960s and 1970s. This book, her 13th, is equal to her earlier, influential work.
She provides an eloquent evocation of the symbiosis of a long marriage, where one is ``incapable of imagining the reality of life without the other.''
Mark Twain Bio
Ron Powers may well have been born to write a biography of Mark Twain. Like Twain a native of Hannibal, Missouri, Powers has written three previous books about the author, but none compare with his extraordinary new biography ``Mark Twain: A Life'' (Free Press, 736 pages, $35).
Resisting the temptation to psychoanalyze the writer, Powers instead focuses almost exclusively on the fantastic narrative of Twain's life. Born in 1835, Twain was a sick child who listened to stories at the knee of his family's slave, Uncle Dan'l, who inspired the voice of Jim in ``The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.'' He witnessed the Gold Rush, the Civil War and the capitalist frenzy of the Gilded Age, the title of a novel he co- wrote with Charles Dudley Warner.
Twain traveled the globe as ``America's Shakespeare'' and became, in Powers's words, the ``world's first rock star.'' Powers ties Twain's personal history to his books, illustrating how the author ``tirelessly inventoried his life to service his fiction (especially when the fiction was presented as nonfiction).''
By placing Twain in the context of history, and not just literature, Powers is able to position the writer as ``the representative man of his times.''
`Fever'
Like fellow Miami Herald products Carl Hiaasen and Edna Buchanan, Sean Rowe is taking his turn as a crime novelist.
His first thriller, ``Fever'' (Little, Brown, 263 pages, $19.95), features a rogues gallery of villains who plan to hijack a cruise ship en route from Miami to Havana, steal $30 million in smuggled drug money and blame it all on Cuban terrorists.
The anti-hero of this caper is Matt Shannon, an alcoholic former FBI agent and head of security for the targeted cruise line. Shannon is coerced into joining the scheme by his step- brother Jack Fontana, an ex-federal drug enforcement agent who has just served a prison sentence for a crime Shannon committed.
The rest of the crew includes a soldier of fortune, a Marxist airplane hijacker and a beautiful cello-playing nurse, though the characters aren't really the point.
Rowe's real skill is with plot. The plan to hijack the cruise ship is clever and plausible (keep this book out of the hands of al-Qaeda), and the aftermath of the attack corkscrews delightfully. But this noirish novel really distinguishes itself when it ventures into creepy territory such as cannibalism, crucifixion and genuinely shocking sex.
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