Year: 2005

No other living American writer can drop us into the wild, wild West or a Texas countryside like Rick Bass. Writing with empathy and great humility, he makes characters we can touch; we meet them in Montana valleys or while trespassing on a Texas ranch. His newest effort, The Diezmo, combines those qualities with gorgeous desert-landscape love scenes. The Diezmo also feels darker than Bass’s previous efforts; it’s a re-creation of a murderous history along the Texas-Mexico border that conjures Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses.

Before there was David Sedaris, Sarah Vowell, or even, for crying out loud, Dave Barry, there was Fran Lebowitz, a caustic, chain-smoking New Yorker who came on like a cross between Oscar Wilde and Dorothy Parker. In the seventies, Lebowitz was nothing less than a Manhattan celebrity; her Social Studies and Metropolitan Life were best sellers, and she was frequently a hugely entertaining talk show guest. God knows what happened, but the woman clammed up and disappeared. Until we got wind of this rare surfacing, we’d assumed Lebowitz had fallen off the planet. We’re more than a little curious to hear what she’s been up to, and what she thinks of the world she seems to have left behind. And also whether she’ll light up on stage at the Fitz. 651-290-1221, www.fitzgeraldtheater.org

Year after year, this lecture series brings in some of literature’s heaviest hitters, and yet somehow maintains a surprisingly low profile. Isabel Allende, May’s featured author, is a former journalist and the niece of slain Chilean President Salvador Allende, who was overthrown in a CIA-assisted coup in 1973. Since her first novel, 1985’s The House of Spirits, Allende has garnered international acclaim for a dozen books that are distinguished by their powerful female characters, connections across generations, and rich historical detail. Her latest, a novel on the legend of Zorro, is due this month. Adath Jeshurun Congregation, 10500 Hillside Lane, Minnetonka; 952-847-8637

A new Ann Beattie book is no longer the event it once was, which is something of a shame. She’s been kicking out such consistently accomplished fiction for so long now that it’s become easy to take her for granted. When she first made her name with a series of New Yorker stories in the seventies, Beattie was most often compared to older writers of frigid urban realism like the Johns Cheever and Updike, or her contemporary, Raymond Carver. Nearly thirty years later those comparisons are still in the ballpark; Beattie’s mastered an economy of style and a terse, emotional shorthand that often masks her versatility. She has an uncanny feel for the way real people talk, and her subtle descriptions of the idiosyncrasies, neuroses, and frequent sense of disconnection that bedevil her characters are as timely as ever.

While Jonathan Safran Foer just made New York Press’s “50 Most Loathsome New Yorkers” list, Ms. Krauss would likely beg to differ; she married him. What does this have to do with Krauss’s The History of Love, published just a month after Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close? Quite a bit, it turns out, when you look between the covers. The following aptly describes both books: A very old Holocaust survivor who has spent his postwar life in tortured isolation trades chapters with a very clever young person who is on a journey across New York City to uncover a mystery. In both books, the journeyer’s mythically wonderful father has died young. Both books indulge in Internet-age visual play, with graphics and page layout trickery to enhance the story. Both have a distant and mournful mother whose children wander recklessly in a world proven unpredictable and cruel, as well as a man who, grief-stricken into silence, is reduced to yes-and-no gestures to communicate with a child. The similarities continue — Call it the single-mindedness of marriage, or something else, but Krauss is darn lucky she writes as well as her husband. Her book is completely engrossing, beautifully told, and, despite the above (not to mention its generic snooze of a title), quite original.

The entire apartment, which can’t be more than fifteen feet by fifteen, is visible from the front door: the makeshift sofa, the kitchen, the workshop, the “bedroom.” In fact, Dick Donovan’s apartment, where he’s lived since August, more closely resembles a fort. “On the second morning I lived here,” he recalls, “I fried eggs from bed and ate them in bed. And I thought either I am in heaven or I am in danger.” Indeed, the bed abuts a tiny gas stove. He’s mounted a tall window screen between the two, which acts as a grease shield and also keeps his blankets from catching fire.

There’s a genuine artfulness to Donovan’s space. Not only is he a charcoal artist, a master Etch-A-Sketcher, and a collector of found art, but he built nearly every structure in the apartment by hand, including his platform bed, the clothes rail above it, and a swivel counter in the kitchen. He did this without making a single cut to the wood he retrieved from alleys and trash bins. All of his work is unique, some might even say Seussian. “I always deviate from my plans,” he explains. When not running deliveries for Leaning Tower of Pizza, he’s taking classes in carpentry. Donovan recently acquired a fixer-upper houseboat that’s anchored on the Mississippi. “It’s all I can think about now,” he says. “I’ve been building forts since I was a kid, starting with cushions and evolving into elaborate snow forts. That’s my fort on the river.”

The aspects of the apartment Donovan didn’t build, he modified. The small refrigerator is mod-podged with old sewing patterns, as are patches above the door and fireplace. Yes, this tiny nook has a fireplace, in which he has placed a plug-in pile of fake logs. Some of the walls are framed with wooden yardsticks; all are painted, at least partly, ochre yellow, Donovan’s favorite color for walls. Sticking with the warm palette, his curtains are orange. His sofa is covered with a red blanket. “I like sunset colors,” he says. “Mellow tones. I find them relaxing.”

A computer used to hang over the bed from chains, but as winter dragged on and his “life force drained,” he had to take it down. “The thought that it might fall on me was giving me insomnia,” says Donovan, who holds a psychology degree from the University of Minnesota. “Maybe this summer, I’ll put it back up.” Most of his other electronics are old and formerly discarded. They include a four-track recorder that “may work,” a turntable from a grade-school AV department, and a microwave that he says weighs as much as two air conditioners. “It’s so preposterous—it must have come from the Chernobyl cafeteria.” His most prized appliance by far is a screw gun. “If I was stuck on a desert island and could have only one thing, it would be a screw gun.” After a pause, he adds, “and a lot of batteries.”—Jennifer Vogel

One day each spring, thousands of partygoers descend on St. Paul’s West Side to celebrate Cinco de Mayo. On the other 364 days, the parade route along Cesar Chavez Street—including the business district branded and marketed as District del Sol—is something of an urban hamlet. Geographically protected by the Mississippi River from years of downtown development (and redevelopment), and isolated by steep bluffs and caves along its other borders, District del Sol has always marched to its own beat. The only connections to St. Paul proper, it seems, are a bridge and one of those odious Peanuts statues, although this version of Linus wears a cheeky sombrero.

District del Sol was the sticks back in 1874, when the city of St. Paul absorbed it. Lying south of downtown at a bend in the river, which somehow confuses everyone into calling it the “West Side,” it was thought too removed for residential and business development by downtown sophisticates. So immigrant communities started settling the cast-off river flats: first the Germans in the late 1800s, then Eastern Europeans and Russian Jews. By the 1920s, a wave of Chicano immigrants had settled the West Side; their influence remains most visible today.

Spanish-language medical clinics and tax services dot Cesar Chavez Street. A mosaic monument identifies the local playground as Parque Castillo (Castle Park). A few retailers are scattered throughout the district: a grocery with a portrait of the Virgin de Guadalupe in the entry; a boutique bursting with tiny white shoes and christening dresses; two Western wear shops with walls of cowboy hats in numerous shades of tan. Storefronts are plastered with signs advertising, in Spanish, everything from homes for sale to outdoor festivals. But the neighborhood’s biggest draw is its dozen Mexican restaurants and cantinas. Some, like Boca Chica, are well established and tastefully decorated in colors of the Aztec palette, while others seem pulled together with found furnishings, like the scrappy Mi Tierra.

According to the Ramsey County Historical Society, the oldest structures in Del Sol are “architecturally insignificant,” a status that likely stems from their ornament-free utility. Bright, hand-painted signs and murals bring a cheer to the kind of industrial structures that elsewhere meet bulldozers. Whereas the bright yellow and red logo of a global fast food joint might look garish among more manicured brownstones, in this neighborhood it appears almost drab alongside the jaunty, hand-lettered pink and green sign for Don Panchos Panaderia.

Similarly, the bleached housing complexes cropping up along Del Sol’s periphery counter the neighborhood’s tidy row houses. This clash of threadbare and new, modest and lively, defines the handmade texture of Del Sol. Strolling the sidewalks, your feet pick up dust and BK ketchup packets, while the sizzle of fresh carnitas and the sunshiny ring of mariachi music, piped outdoors from the swankier restaurants, fill the air.
—Christy DeSmith