Two I Loved; A Third Defeated Me

I was entranced by Rules of Civility -- a richly detailed picture of New York City in the late Thirties and one young woman's journey through the various levels of its society. If F. Scott Fitzgerald and Edith Wharton had a love child . . .

It was a page-turner for me.

As was Bewilderment. I was deeply moved by Powers' The Overstory and found a good bit of the same magic at work here. A widower, hoping to keep his emotionally troubled nine-year-old son off the psychoactive drugs recommended by school and the medical establishment, allows the boy to participate in an experiment of neuro feedback. The boy will be trained on recorded patterns from his mother-a fierce environmentalist and animal advocate. And it appears to be working . . . What a premise! Another page turner!

Empire, though, just didn't grab me. Mr. Vidal's a terrific writer and the political goings on after the Spanish-American War (leading to our nation's imperialistic longings) are, no doubt, useful to understand how we got in the mess we're in today. But the book is almost 500 pages long and many of those pages a veritable welter of proper names. I bailed before page 50. I'm still intrigued by the story and may return to it but not for a while.