Nonfiction Chronicle

By MEGAN BUSKEY

THE BOOK OF WILLIAM
How Shakespeare’s First Folio Conquered the World. By Paul Collins. Bloomsbury, $25.

Could you imagine a world without “Macbeth” or “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”? If the answer is no, direct your thanks to John Heminge and Henry Condell, Elizabethan theater producers who assembled a posthumous compilation of the work of their friend and peer William Shakespeare after he died in 1616. Without their foresight, Shakespeare might have been remembered as “just another industrious quill-scratcher,” Collins writes in this lively and entertaining history of one of the most important books in English literature. Part antiquarian-book primer, part chronicle of literary curiosities, “The Book of William” is divided into five acts, each evoking a significant place and time in the First Folio’s colorful history. Collins’s diverse cast of characters includes an overconfident Alexander Pope, editor of a hack job of a 1725 Shakespeare collection intended to supplant the Folio in reputation; Henry Clay Folger, the oil baron behind the world’s largest collection of First Folios, which now resides at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington; and Mitsuo Nitta of Tokyo, First Folio dealer par excellence. Weaved throughout are accounts of Collins’s amusing efforts to examine a handful of the 230 First Folios known to exist; he writes of the mixture of horror and delight he felt on discovering that “some Jacobean brat” had doodled in a Folio’s margins. By the end, the reader is inclined to agree with Collins’s assertion that “books bear a tangible presence alongside their ineffable quality of thought: they have a body and a soul.”

LIES MY MOTHER NEVER TOLD ME
A Memoir.
By Kaylie Jones.
Morrow/HarperCollins, $25.99.

Joan Crawford, meet Gloria Jones. Like Mommie Dearest, Gloria Jones takes her problems with alcohol out on her children. In this memoir, Kaylie Jones, the only daughter of Gloria and the novelist James Jones, recalls a lifetime at the mercy of her occasionally charming but usually drunken mother. Harrowing stuff, to say the least: when 8-year-old Kaylie confronts Gloria about forgetting to pick her up from school, her mother replies, “God, you’re so neurotic!” If there is one constant in the daughter’s relationship with her mother, it is that “fighting back was like throwing oil on fire.” It’s no surprise that as Kaylie Jones’s turbulent young adulthood commences — presaged by the death of her father when she is 16 — she too turns to alcohol to calm the storm within. Years of wanton partying eventually lead Jones, by now a published novelist, to hit rock bottom. With the help of a friend, she makes a successful bid for sobriety. As admirable as this is, Jones’s journey — which includes a stable marriage, a daughter of her own and a transformative passion for tae kwon do — never seems to move beyond a simplistic narrative of addiction and recovery. Couple this with her penchant for name-dropping and irrelevant boasts (she mentions, for instance, that her toddler scores “off the chart” on a verbal development test), and one gets the feeling that her confessional treatment doesn’t quite add up to the whole truth.

HORTON FOOTE - America’s Storyteller.
By Wilborn Hampton.
Free Press, $28.

The subtle family dramas of the playwright Horton Foote, who died in March at the age of 92, earned him comparisons to Faulkner and Chekhov. Foote, too, was a provincial at heart: “No matter where I am or go, I carry this world around with me,” he wrote of small-town Texas, where he was born and raised. Foote’s love for theater drew him away from the land of his upbringing and propelled him toward the bright lights of California’s playhouses and then New York’s. A well-received improv exercise at a New York theater led the young Foote to pick up a pen, and shortly thereafter he abandoned his acting ambitions to concentrate on writing. The rest of Foote’s career followed this recipe of circumstance, inspiration and hard work, and to good effect: along with writing canonical plays like “The Trip to Bountiful,” he won the Pulitzer Prize for drama (for “The Young Man From Atlanta”) and two Academy Awards (for the screenplays of “To Kill a Mockingbird” and “Tender Mercies”). Hampton, who has written many theater reviews for The New York Times over the past two decades, recounts Foote’s life story dutifully. But he shrugs off the psychological extrapolations that can make biographies so absorbing; instead, he fills out the narrative with mundane details that lack resonance. Similarly disappointing is that he portrays America’s dynamic screenwriting culture in only the barest of sketches, despite the marvel that Foote managed to find himself constantly at the center of it. Hampton writes with obvious fondness and admiration for his subject, but he struggles to inspire the same feelings in the reader who is not already a devotee.

THE ESSAYS OF LEONARD MICHAELS
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26.

Michaels is primarily known for his terse and unsettling short stories, but he also had a long career as a professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. His academic experiences course through this posthumous compilation of nonfiction (he died at 70 in 2003), surfacing not only in his tales of graduate school, where he “would read and slash with great enthusiasm and hope for the value to register,” but also in the volume’s critical pieces, which don’t blush at mentioning Wittgenstein and Foucault. Thankfully, the book has little of academia’s abstruseness and detachment; rather, it showcases Michaels’s timing, wit and instinctively good prose. Whatever the subject matter — and the essays here range from Edward Hopper to the Rita Hayworth vehicle “Gilda” to Yiddish, his first language — Michaels channels the full force of his intellectual and narrative abilities into a voice that is at once sensitive and unyielding. While he is in grad school at Berkeley, a dispute over a security deposit with a couple also from New York inexplicably turns to blows — such is “critical intercourse among East Coast intelligentsia” — leaving the girl’s fingernails “mooned” in Michaels’s blood. His sarcasm and darkness are deployed in moderation, and this collection — edited by his widow, Katharine Ogden Michaels — steams forward largely on his urgent desire to understand what he can of the world. “The impulse toward truth is built into our existence just as the shape of our eyes is built into our genes,” he writes, “and the truth, like murder, wants out.”

Megan Buskey is a freelance writer living in New York.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/04/books/review/Buskey-t.html?ref=books