With summer upon us, publishers are offering a new round of fiction. Among the more interesting novels is "Hadrian's Walls" by Robert Draper (Knopf, 336 pages, $23). It concerns the Texas criminal system, centering on Shepherdsville, home of a state prison as well as much of the prison bureaucracy.
Protagonist Hadrian, at 15 murdered someone in self-defense. After 20 years in prison, he escaped. In this town where the jailers and the jailed are all one big dysfunctional family, Hadrian's friend Sonny, warden and head hancho of the system, talked the governor into pardoning him.
Calling Hadrian back to Shepherdsville, Sonny reveals that he wants his old friend to do him a little favor: eliminate the scoundrel who is threatening to privatize the prisons and deprive Sonny of his empire. Hadrian discovers ever deepening layers of Sonny's corruption and must decide between friendship and justice.
Draper alternates between past and present, depicting Hadrian's youthful love affair, his father and his time in the joint. Hadrian himself is something of the classic victim hero, too good to believe at times, and the book's ending is strangely soft. But the crooked Sonny is a virtuoso of intrigue, a J.R. figure you almost want to root for, and Shepherdsville's rivalries, gossip and rank corruption are masterfully conveyed.
Wow. Kurt Anderson's "Turn of the Century: A Novel" (Random House, $24.95) is one of the cleverest things I've read in ages. Its 677 pages of hyperkinetic pop cultural commentary, like a hefty box of candy, gave me a headache, but I couldn't stop eating. Tom Wolfe times 10 on Ecstasy.
The protagonists are married -- George, a producer of television docudramas, and Lizzie, owner of a software company -- but their story is less important than the milieus of technology, television and stock trading, which are painted in great detail. The omniscient narrator tosses out offhanded judgments about these worlds.
Samples: There are "two Hollywood types: Inscrutable Hard Ass and Merry Chatterer"; a group of Hollywood people at a party include "Seven Figure Scruffs" and "chubby sitcom creators"; at another gathering, one unfortunate contingent is casually dismissed as "nobodies" and that's all we hear of them.
Like Tom Wolfe, Anderson packs his book with information. Whole chapters are devoted to minutely described stock trading or to Lizzie and George's daily financial picture. There are some great moments of reflection about such things as the irrelevance of contemporary technology to human needs, but one somehow doesn't believe them.
The book systematically panders to hot topics, and by its snideness encourages readers to feel both hip and morally superior. I had the feeling by page 500 or so that I was at a party listening to a bright guy who couldn't stop trying to impress me. No question, though: "Turn of the Century" is rollicking, witty and full of nasty gossip.
Thomas Wiseman's "Genius Jack" (Marion Boyars Publishers, 442 pages, $29.95) portray's the career of a moviemaker. Jack Strawley, who has a talent for finding and relying on strong women, becomes an enfant terrible of the industry. Specializing in film noir, he wheels and deals as brutally as a gangster, beating up on actresses to force performances out of them and doing whatever he deems necessary to get the job done.
At 29, Jack achieves his triumph at Cannes, but his life grows increasingly sad -- plagued by alcohol, emphysema and his own cruelty. As he becomes a classic drunken, predatory egotist, his story becomes uncomfortably like a generic case study. Yet there is lore on almost every page for the flick addict, and movie buffs will enjoy this serious look at the harsh side of the world of filmmaking.
The narrator in John Berger's quirky new novel "King: A Street Story" (Pantheon Books, 185 pages, $20) is a talking dog who tells the stories of two old homeless people to whom he is devoted. King is a delightful dog and something of a philosopher. He visits a hermit crab for conversation, flirts with a squirrel and wonders about god. Mostly his story is about devotion -- his own to his poor masters and theirs to each other.
Interestingly, though, this is not a "heart-warming," sentimental tale. King's friends are in bad shape, yet he thinks of their happier past and their love. "King" delights in the power of the imagination to transform small enjoyments into a full life.
Julian Barnes' "England, England" (Alfred A. Knopf, 273 pages, $23) concerns an attempt to build a "replica" of England on the Isle of Wight. This massive project, funded by a media plutocrat, is directed in part by hard-driving executive Martha Cochrane. Barnes narrates Martha's life story realistically and touchingly when dealing with her childhood and her struggles with men.
Martha's hierarchy of desires lists truth, simplicity and love at the top and sex at the bottom. After she muscles her way into a dominant position in running the corporate "England England" she falls in love with the project's historian, but continues to struggle with love issues.
In setting up the replica of England, the team has the brilliant idea to dramatize what people "already know" about England and to make it all pleasant. By means of surveys, they determine the 50 items making up the quintessence of Britishness and then set about bringing it to life: the mythic Robin Hood, the Battle of Hastings as remembered by the man in the street, Nell Gwynn with appropriately large breasts but updated with family values -- in other words an "England" that is mostly folklore.
Unfortunately, while the Monty Pythonish island tale is occasionally funny, Barnes generally doesn't succeed with its over-the-top satire. Barnes' previous novels have shown a talent for saturnine, meditative comedy, and for pathos of the sort that we feel in Martha's story. Perhaps he should leave the goofy stuff alone and follow his strength.
"The Year 2000 Killers," by Wenda Wardell Morrone (St. Martin's Press, 342 pages, $23.95) is a Y2K disaster novel with not one but two "feisty" heroines, a cop and a computer entrepreneur. The book is marred by the cliches of at least three genres -- mystery, cop, and science-fiction disaster. The terrorists are of course Islamic. The cop's husband and partner are both murdered, leaving her to face the harsh world alone.
Morrone makes some attempt to humanize her characters, but they remain canned, television figures. The hero-rescuer is a sort of Crocodile Dundee on steroids, "dangerous," we are often reminded. He breaks through doors rather than merely opening them, even around the office. "More animal than man," he energetically sniffs people and makes complex inferences from their odors, although of course he is capable of stunning pure ratiocination, as well. This is a hoot of a book, but I'm afraid that I was laughing in the wrong places.
Speer Morgan's novel "The Freshour Cylinders" is a recipient of the 1999 American Book Award. It was his fifth novel and was published by MacMurray & Beck in October. Morgan is also the editor of the Missouri Review.