BOOKS

The latest literary news from throughout Oregon

There may be better comic books on your shelf each week, but there is no better graphic novel, unfolding in monthly installments, than Jason Aaron's Scalped.

I understand the aversion to the term "graphic novel," the suspicion that comics fans are trying a little too hard to label the sequential storytelling that has overflowed its normal boundaries. But Aaron has approached the first 23 issues of Scalped with the novelist's sensibility, slowly developing a storyline -- and a cast of characters Cormac McCarthy would love -- which requires that readers used to the immediate and insipid gratifications of mainstream titles recognize they are in it for the long haul.

Let me offer one example: In the opening chapter of Scalped, we are introduced to the major protagonists on the Prairie Rose Indian Reservation in South Dakota. Dashiell Bad Horse is the prodigal son who fled the Rez at 13 and has returned to take over as chief of security for the new Crazy Horse Casino.

When 17 Iraqis were killed in Baghdad in a 2007 incident involving Blackwater USA, an international outcry focused on the shadowy, unregulated world of private security contractors in Iraq.

When five men, four of them Americans, were kidnapped while working for the Crescent Security Group in 2006, there was no international outcry. The case attracted little attention, even after videos of the captured men surfaced. When it reached its sad conclusion this spring, after the mutilated bodies of the men were found and identified, it was back-page news.

Philip Gourevitch

Philip Gourevitch, the editor of the Paris Review, will discuss "The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. III." This edition features interviews with John Cheever, Isak Dinesen, Ralph Ellison, Georges Simenon, and Evelyn Waugh, among others.

7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Powell's City of Books, 1005 W. Burnside St.

In case you missed the news last week: Portland's iconic bookstore at West Burnside and 10th Avenue could be headed for an architectural makeover that would make the funky landmark more prominent than ever.

Read all about it.

An entertaining read, from Mark Evanier via Tom Spurgeon, on the old Cherokee Book Shop on Hollywood Boulevard.

In '65, I was thirteen years old and an occasional patron of Cherokee Book Shop. It was a business which claimed (probably rightly) to have been the first store in the world to sell old comic books to true collectors.

Time and again in The Little Book, the reader's eyes begin their barrel roll, appalled or made dizzy by the plot twists. Selden Edwards devoted 33 years "to layer and refine the manuscript," the dust jacket tells us, and the layers of leaden coincidence make Winston Groom's Forrest Gump look subtle in comparison.

But what Edwards refined during all those years he was obsessed with this tale of a man who wakes one morning in 1897 Vienna, 50 years before his birth, is an amiable style that seduces the reader almost as efficiently as Edwards' hero, Wheeler Burden, seduces ...

His grandmother.

That's right. His grandmother. Again, I say, "almost."

What Edwards has in mind here is an endless time loop, one that not only sweeps Wheeler Burden back to the Fin-de-Siecle Vienna of Sigmund Freud, Gustav Mahler and the anti-Semitism that would culminate in the Third Reich, but transports his father there as well. What's more, by novel's end, the characters are -- thanks to the journal that conveniently falls into the right hands -- aware of the tricks time is playing on them, moving them back and forth between the centuries, leaving them uncertain as to where the best part of their lives is truly rooted, and how to conduct themselves so that the future, or their place in it, is not destroyed.

You never know how someone defines success. You rarely get an raw and honest look at their demons. You have no idea if anyone else understands the loneliness you occasionally feel as you try to keep your eyes focused on the silent road ahead and not the siren chorus in the rear-view mirror.

And that's why it's such a relief when John Ed Bradley arrives with a book like It Never Rains in Tiger Stadium.

Thank God I read the book before stumbling upon the Esquire review, which insists Bradley "has written a love poem to football, to his coach (Charlie Mac) to his daddy, to the LSU Tigers, to his teammates, to the idea of being a member of a team ... (and) makes you love all of these things, too."

Rarely has a cover blurb so blithely missed the mark. If this is a "love poem," T.S. Eliot's J. Alfred Prufrock is a love song. It is not love that is etherised upon Bradley's table, but loss and regret.

I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.

Betty MacDonald's first book had perfect timing.

In 1945, World War II had just ended and folks sick of international politics, bloody battles and scrimping at home were aching for a reason to laugh. So when MacDonald's wry, rueful take on the rustic life of chicken farming in the rural hinterlands of the Olympic Peninsula showed up on bookstore shelves, it was snapped up quicker than a hen goes after cracked corn.

"The Egg and I" sold 1 million copies in less than a year; Hollywood spit out a movie version starring Claudette Colbert and Fred MacMurray in 1947, which was followed by the first comedy series on TV from 1951-52 and the Ma and Pa Kettle movies, starring Marjorie Main and Percy Kilbride as the infamously lazy neighbors.

George H.W. Bush was wrong: Portland isn't Little Beirut. In its early aspirations, at least, it was Little Athens, or maybe Little Boston -- a frontier town obsessed, in its defining boom years, with its lack of historical context and determined to get some culture, even if it had to borrow it from the ancients.

A.E. Doyle was just the man to do the borrowing. "There is not much new that is good that is not in some way based on something old that is good," he wrote from Greece during a life-altering grand tour of Europe in 1906.

As Philip Niles puts it in his illuminating new history, "Beauty of the City: A.E. Doyle, Portland's Architect," Doyle and his city grew up together. The city's most important architect of the early 20th century, Doyle was born in 1877 in Santa Cruz, Calif., but was a Portlander from at least the age of 5.

Even for those of us born long after John F. Kennedy's assassination, the images from that day are as familiar as memory.

In "November 22, 1963," his genre-defying fourth novel, Adam Braver peers beyond the screen of public experience to glimpse the private heartbreak suffered by a wide cast of real-life characters -- as disparate as a motorcycle policeman, a medical photographer and Jacqueline Kennedy -- all of whom are personally connected to the events of Nov. 22, 1963.

Jackie stands out as the novel's most compelling character, and Braver's vision is sharpest and most lyrical when focused on her. He simultaneously brings us close to her and maintains a sense of her mystique, crafting a layered portrait of a woman who is at once "a pure form of sophistication" and "a pure form of tragedy."